Spoken English

A small article has appeared today on the BBC News and the BBC website. This article refers to ongoing changes in the way we pronounce certain words.

The British Library, as part of its ‘Evolving English’ exhibition has recently begun to record the ways in which Britons pronounce a number of common words. To do this they are asking as many people as possible to read aloud the opening paragraph of the Mr Men book, Mr Tickle. The socio-linguist at the British Library, Jonnie Robinson picked the passage because it's well known, easy to read and will probably be read with as "normal a voice as possible". He does not want people to put on a "posh" speaking voice. The purpose of the project is not to record the numbers of people pronouncing words ‘correctly’ or ‘incorrectly’, but to record variations in pronunciation.

Thus far, a number of basic variations have been found, and the BBC report highlighted seven words in common usage with at least two distinct variations in pronunciation. These words are says, ate, mischievous, garage, schedule and aitch. The traditional pronunciation of ‘says’ as sez (i.e. to rhyme with fez) is often now pronounced phonetically as it is spelled (i.e to rhyme with ways). Many people now pronounce ‘ate’ as it is spelled, as opposed to the traditional pronunciation ETT. Mischievous is increasingly acquiring an extra syllable and being pronounced miss-CHEEVY-us rather than the traditional MISS-chiv-us, although surprisingly the traditional northern variant miss-CHEEV-us was not mentioned in the report. The report went on to state that a significant number of people appear to stress the first syllable of ‘harass’ rather than the more traditional stressing of the second syllable, that ‘garage’ is increasingly being pronounced as ‘garridge’ and that the ‘ch’ in ‘schedule’ is increasingly being pronounced as a ‘k’. Further, the report also pointed out that the word ‘aitch’ that represents the letter ‘h’ is increasingly being pronounced ‘haitch’.

These are just the headline bits and pieces that the BBC decided to concentrate on, culminating in a ludicrous and unscientific ‘vox pop’.  Over the work as a whole the British Library has begun to map out variations in pronunciation that are determined to a great extent by age, with people under 35 being more likely than older people to use the ‘new’ pronunciations.

The reasons for many of the changes in pronunciation are not necessarily clear, although early analysis has come up with some putative suggestions. The ‘aitch’ issue, which seems to lead to the most controversy (another word with at least two basic pronunciation variants) may relate to an over-compensation by young people following repeated instructions to schoolchildren over the years not to drop their ‘aitches’. This would certainly tie in with other changes in pronunciation regarding the use if the letter ‘h’ over the past century or so. We routinely now pronounce the originally silent ‘h’ in words derived from French, such as hospital, hotel and herb (although these 'h's are generally 'dropped' by many working-class speakers) . In the nineteenth century these words were generally pronounced as ospital, otel, and erb. [The French equivalents of two of these words are hôpital and hôtel, the circumflex accent demonstrating that once they included an ‘s’ after the ‘o’. This indicates that the original French words were hospital and hostel. One notes that the ‘dropping of the ‘h’ at the beginning of a word actually predates (in Norman French) pronouncing the ‘h’] One also note that there may be an element of class fear in the over use of the pronounced ‘h’ in the UK that means that as well as pronouncing the ‘h’ when it is present many people feel the need to add it to the beginning of the word that represents the letter almost to stress that they pronounce their aitches. In a country where class is less determined by speech, such as the USA, the ‘h’ tends to remain silent in hotel and herb (though not in hospital) and the letter ‘h’ is almost universally pronounced ‘aitch’.

Early analysis also suggests that the replacement of the ‘ch’ with a ‘k’ in the pronunciation of ‘schedule’ is probably due in large part to the influence of American films on British speakers, as that is the general American pronunciation. No suggestions have yet been made as to why ‘garage’ has begun to transmute into ‘garridge’, although it must be noted that ‘garridge’ has been a northern working-class pronunciation for over fifty years, and is entirely in line with the pronunciation of another borrowed French word ‘village’, which is almost universally in English pronounced as ‘ villidge’.

The overall British Library study into the changes in pronunciation will almost certainly prove to be fascinating. Sadly, the BBC television report treated the whole thing as a humorous story.  It is anything but. Changes in pronunciation of common words, just as changes in regional and local dialects and accents tell us something about cultural shifts within our own country. During the first World War, many English prisoners of war in Germany were interviewed and recorded on phonograph records. As part of their interviews they gave their place of birth and place of domicile. Their accents were in general much more ‘rural’ than those of their counterparts today, suggesting an urbanisation of the language in general. They also used as ‘normal’ speech dialect terms that have since been completely lost or remain only in small numbers amongst older speakers. This suggests that local and regional dialects are becoming more homogenised, possibly reflecting an increased level of geographical mobility (at least within the UK) and the growth of mass media that tend to narrow the range of spoken voices as one needs to be understood by persons further away than one’s own next-door neighbour.

Further, at all times in history, new words have developed or at least new meanings for existing words, and one of the key linguistic stories of the 20^th Century has been the development and passing of successive youth argots, and the speech patterns of specific social groups. Two words illustrate this concept of changing meaning very well. They are ‘gay’ and ‘wicked’. In the 1930s ‘gay’ retained its traditional meaning of light-hearted or cheerful. Through the 1940s and 1950s it fell out of favour as a word at all and almost became archaic. Its resurrection took place during the 1960s and 1970s as a slang word for ‘homosexual, becoming by the 1990s a standard accepted word both as a noun and an adjective for homosexual. This standard meaning remains, but, perhaps due to a cultural element of homophobia in the UK, it has recently acquired a further slang meaning, roughly akin to ‘bad’. A strong word for bad was, and to some extent still is, ‘wicked’. However, for twenty years it has also had exactly the opposite meaning. Coming from pop culture ‘wicked’ as ‘very good’ has become more or less mainstream, at least for most people under the age of sixty. There are other examples, such as the American use of the word ‘good’ as a synonym for ‘well’, as in “I am good, thank you”, and the growth of a number of abbreviations, shorthand words, and smileys in written conversational English.

Many pedants seem to get very hot under the collar about the changes in our language, and to some extent I can sympathise. To lose our regional and local dialects is perhaps a little sad, but, for a small island nation we have a rich variation in accent, to the point that it is still possible to identify the place of birth of a working-class person by their accent to within about seven miles. Clearly as geographical mobility increases this becomes less accurate, although it needs to be born in mind that almost 80 per cent of the British population still die within five miles of their place of birth.   

There may even be some concern at the transmutation of the meanings of words or the loss of some words and replacement by others, yet this must be seen in context. Of all the major European languages English has far and away the largest vocabulary (ignoring the portmanteau words of Dutch and German) so it is not going to collapse on itself any time soon.

Going back to the original point, the BBC report into pronunciation, much as I personally get a bit fed up with the addition of the superfluous ‘aitch’, it needs to be born in mind that the very robustness that makes English a brilliant world-wide Lingua Franca is its capacity to continually change. There is no equivalent in the UK to l'Académie Française, seeking continually to maintain the purity of the language. We will beg, borrow or steal anyone’s words if they fit the bill or fit into our Weltanschauung. And if we feel the need to change the way we pronounce words then we will do that as well. In the end it is the tool we use for communicating and we will do it as we see fit. My only concern is that specific pronunciations may act to diminish our capacity to communicate if they are not understood by the speaker’s audience, and, lets be fair, to pronounce aitch as haitch does make someone sound just a bit silly.

Finally, I was very disappointed in the BBC for not considering the televised piece on pronunciation as anything other than trivial. We really need an in-depth, analytical television programme, of the sort that only the BBC could possibly do, perhaps in association with the Open University, looking at English as it is spoken and written in the UK.

Why 1931?

I have commented a number of times on the current cuts being put in place by the coalition government as ‘taking us back to 1931’, with the implication that the economy could contract so much that we would go beyond recession into a full-blown long-term depression. Let me take a little time to explain what I mean by such a remark, and offer a warning to the coalition government and its European partners on the dangers of fetishising sovereign debt and systemic deficits. The actions of the UK and other governments in the early 1930s led to a depression that was only ended by the outbreak of global conflict.

One of the first comparisons we can draw between economic interventions taken by the UK government in 1931 and 2010 is that each can be seen as reacting to global economic crises in the preceding two or three years. The second comparison is that in both 1931 and in 2010 the economic austerity measures have been taken by coalition governments purporting to act in the national interest with a clear implication that it is the only possible strategy. The third comparison is the centrality of the role of the United States of America in the creation of the initial economic crisis whilst ironically the United States appears more open to alternative remedies than do the UK and the countries of Western Europe [Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Obama administration’s attempts to maintain public spending].

As well as a number of comparisons between 1931 and 2010 there are significant differences. The global financial world of 1929 to1931 was both more dependent on the American economy than that of 2007 to 2010, and complicated, at least from a European perspective by the consequences of the First World War. The economies of France, the UK, Germany, and to a lesser extent, the USA, were distorted by the impact of heavy German reparations to the allies in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles, and the huge amount of debt built up by the European countries simply through paying for the war. The destabilising effect of this distorted economy had varying impacts in different countries. One of the major impacts on the UK was a year on year decline in economic output in the years immediately following the First World War, amounting to a decline of almost 25% by as early as 1921. The cost of the war to the UK both in terms of collateral losses and the divestment of foreign investments was catastrophic; leading to a 20% loss in foreign investments by 1918. The upshot was an increasing dependence throughout the 1920s on exports, but traditional markets for coal, steel and textiles had been lost. Attempts to shore up the economy by production in new technologies such as electrical goods and motor vehicles for the domestic market were successful to a point but foreign imports in these goods grew throughout the 1920s. British agriculture was also in terminal decline with around 80% of food being imported by 1930.

A slow economic recovery had begun in 1921, but the restoration of the £ sterling to the Gold Standard in 1925 brought this to a shuddering halt as the price of what remained of British exports rocketed due to the fixed Gold Standard Exchange Rate of £1 sterling : $4.86 US. To offset the high exchange rate the exporters cut workers wages precipitating the General Strike of 1926, and an ongoing unemployment rate of around 1million concentrated primarily in the industrial areas of Scotland and the North of England throughout the 1920s. Then came October 1929 and the Wall Street Crash; a real ‘game-changer’. The Wall Street Crash was provoked by the aggressive overselling of listed stocks on credit to a far wider range of people than could legitimately afford them. When the credit became due it was unaffordable and people attempted to sell their stocks; but of course there were no buyers. The ensuing American economic collapse shook the world: World trade contracted, prices fell and governments faced financial crisis as the supply of American credit dried up. Many countries adopted an emergency response to the crisis by erecting trade barriers and tariffs, which worsened the crisis by further hindering global trade. In the UK the effects on the industrial heartlands were devastating. Demand for British products collapsed, unemployment rose to 2/5 million by 1930, government Tax Revenues fell and benefits costs rose. In some parts of Scotland and North East England as many as 30% of men of working age became unemployed.

Since May 1929 a Labour Government had been in place, wedded like all parties to the pre-Keynsian notion of balanced budgets come what may.  All party consensus in the July 1931 May Report into the Public Finances recommended public sector wage cuts and large cuts to benefits and other public spending to avoid a deficit. This was accepted by Philip Snowden, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but threatened to split the Labour Party. [The only ministerial opposition, however, came from Oswald Mosley who proposed the nationalisation of the banks and increased pensions to boost spending. After being turned down Mosley resigned from the Government and the Labour Party and went on eventually to found the British Union of Fascists.] The split in the Labour ranks and the resulting deadlock led to the resignation of the government and the forming of the National Government un Ramsey MacDonald; comprising some senior Labour members but primarily a Conservative government with a Labour leader. [MacDonald and his coterie were expelled from Labour for this action].

In an effort to balance the budget and restore confidence in the pound, on the 10 September 1931 the national government issued an emergency budget, which immediately instituted a round of draconian cuts in public spending and wages. Public sector wages and unemployment pay were cut by 10%, and income tax was raised from 22.5% to 25%. The pay cuts did not go down well however and resulted in a Mutiny in the Royal Navy.

These measures were deflationary and merely reduced purchasing power in the economy, worsening the situation, and by the end of 1931 unemployment had reached nearly 3 million. The measures were also unsuccessful at defending the gold standard, which the National Government had ostensibly been created to defend.

The effects were felt worst in Scotland, Wales and Northern England. The north was the home to most of Britain's traditional heavy industries such as coal mining in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, shipbuilding on Tyneside, steel in Sheffield and textiles in Lancashire which were heavily export orientated. The north bore the brunt of the depression, and the '30s were the most difficult time in living memory for people in these areas. Millions of unemployed and their families were left destitute, and queuing at soup kitchens became a way of life. A government report in the mid-1930s estimated that around 25% of the UK's population existed on a subsistence diet, often with signs of child malnutrition such as scurvy, rickets and tuberculosis.

From 1936 onwards, the National Government followed a policy of mass rearmament in the face of the rise of Nazi Germany. This provided an economic stimulus that helped end the depression. By 1937 unemployment had fallen to 1.5 million, from where it fell even further. The mobilisation of manpower following the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 reduced unemployment considerably.

Clearly only so many parallels can be drawn from that time to this. For the toxic stock dealings leading to the Wall Street Crash in 1929 substitute the toxic sub-prime mortgage dealings of 2007 and 2008. For the collapse of credit between 1929 and 1931 substitute the credit crunch of 2008 to 2009. For the balanced budget fetishism of 1931 substitute the obsession with deficit reduction in 2010. For tuberculosis and malnutrition and the Second World War substitute …………????