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.