English as an international language

For every person who speaks Standard English, there must be a hundred who do not, and another hundred who speak other varieties as well as the standard. Where is their story told? (David Crystal)

No one man’s English is all English. (James Murray)

English and Englishes

Standard varieties – American English, Australian English, British English, Canadian English, New Zealand English, South African English;• A pluricentric language

Dialects of same language• Non-standard varieties – patterns of usage

Inner Circle vs Outer Circle (Kachru) Regiolects Sociolects Expanding Circle

• A multilingual history.• Diversity of speakers, diversity of forms they use.

Before English: The Pre-history of English

• Wave of migrations – 5th and 6th century – across the channel to the British Isles

• Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Frisians – Anglo-Saxons– Different dialects

• Native Celtic population– Celtic language– Latin

• Contact with people on the other side of the channel and the North Sea through trade

• Germanic• Proto-Germanic circa 200 BC• Indo-European – languages of Europe, Asia, Asia Minor

Sanskrit

Greek

Latin Old Church Slavonic

house damah domos

domus

domu

new navah neos novus novu

three trayah treis tres triye

brother

bhrata phrater

frater bratru

Sounds, forms, syntactic patterns – subject to evolutionary change – preserve the integrity of the system. Vocabulary – freer system more open to change

The division of Proto-Germanic: Fundamental three-way division of the Germanic speech community: North Germanic (Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian), East Germanic (Gothic – now extinct), West Germanic (German, Dutch, Frisian and English).

West Germanic peoples: Denmark, more northerly and North Sea coastal areas of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium

West GermanicOld High German (700 AD), Old Saxon (800 AD), Old English (700 AD), Old

Frisian (13th century copies of 11th century texts)Old English – Germanic language that developed in British isles out of dialects

brought by Anglo-Saxons in 5th and 6th centuries AD

Old English

PhonologyAn original n or m is lost between a vowel and f, þ, or s:

Old Saxon

Old English

Old High German

Gothic

five fif fif fimf fimf

journey sið siþ sind sinþs (time)

us us us unsih unsis

Old Frisian and Old English have a e or æ (the latter representing a vowel similar to that in modern English there) where Old Saxon (usually), Old High German, and Old Norse have a and Gothic has e; the vowel in such words in Proto-Germanic is closest to æ

Grammar – personal pronounsJust one form for accusative and dative 1st person singular and one form for

accusative and dative 2nd person singular

Old Frisian

Old English

Old Saxon

Old High German

Old Norse

Gothic

1st

person mi me mi acc

. dat.

acc.

dat.

acc.

dat.

mih

mir mik

mer

mik

Mis

2nd

person thi þe thi dih dir þik þer þu

k þus

Vocabulary – borrowing from Celtic:Gothic noun reiks ‘ruler’, and both there and in other Germanic languages as

the adjective ‘powerful’ (OldNorse rikr, OldHighGerman rihhi, OldSaxon riki, OldFrisian rike, OldEnglish rice (modern English ‘rich’) - borrowed from an early Celtic form *rigs

Borrowing believed to have happened some centuries before the beginning of the Christian era as the Germanic peoples were expanding from their original homeland and encountering the Celts on their way

Assumed that it indicates something of the nature of Celtic political organization, relative to that of the Germanic speakers, at the time the borrowing occurred

Word that appears in modern Englishas iron (Gothic eisarn, etc.) – corresponding forms in Celtic: Old Irish iarn and Welsh haearn

Transmission of iron-working capabilities from one people to another at an early date

Vocabulary – borrowing from Latin (through trade, war):Latin word caupo (peddler, shopkeeper, innkeeper) – basis for Germanic words

meaning merchant (Old Norse kaupmaðr, Old High German koufo, koufman, Old English cypa, ceapmann), to trade, buy and/or sell (Gothic kaupon, Old Norse kaupa, Old High German koufen, coufon, Old Saxon kopon, Old Frisian kapia, Old English ceapian, cypan)

Modern English word wine - Latin vinum – found across the whole spread of Germanic languages: Gothic wein, Old Norse vin, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old English win.

Pervasiveness of the term suggests an earlier rather than a later dateBy the time Anglo-Saxons encountered Romanized Celts in present-day

England, they had been in contact with Roman civilization, Latin culture for over 500 years:

Moððe word fræt. Me þæt þuhte wrætlicu wyrd, þa ic þæt wundor gefrægn,þæt se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes,þeof in þystro, þrymfæstne cwide ond þæs strangan staþol. Stælgiest ne wæs Wihte þy gleawra, þe he þam wordum swealg.

(A moth devoured the words. That seemed to me a strange happening, when I heard of that wonder, that the worm, a thief in the darkness,swallowed up a man’s speech, the glorious utterance and its firm support. The thievish visitor was not at all the wiser for swallowingthose words.)“Book-Moth Riddle”, Exeter Book

Transition from orality to literacy in the use of the vernacular in Anglo-Saxon England is present.

Attempts by Anglo-Saxon scribes to reproduce their spoken language in the form of writing – underlies many linguistic features and developments in OE.

Old English is the term denoting the form of the English language used in England for approximately seven centuries (c 450 -1150 AD).

In this period, language was far from stable. OE term used to cover a wide range of linguistic usages. Linguistic characteristics of OE and external factors such as political, social, and cultural, influenced its development. Five historical watersheds with far-reaching linguistic ramifications:

1) Invasion of Britain by Germanic peoples (Anglo-Saxons) in mid-fifth century, ensuing dialectal diversity;

2) Christianization of Anglo-Saxons in 597 – made Roman alphabet available;3) Reign of King Alfred, West Saxon kingdom (871-899) – OE recognized as

language of prestige and status;4) Benedictine reform (second half of 10th century) – led indirectly to

establishment of OE ‘literary language’;5) Norman Conquest (1066) – steered development of OE to Middle English;The migration myth:Anglo-Saxons arrive in England in 449 in response to King Vortigern’s invitation

to settle there. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – collection of annals set up during King Alfred’s reign and kept up for 200 years. Bede’s 8th century Latin Ecclesiastical History of the English People:

“Those people came from three nations of Germany: from the Old Saxons, from the Angles, and from the Jutes. From the Jutes came the inhabitants of Kent and the Wihtwara, that is, the race which now dwells in the Isle of Wight, and that race in Wessex which is still called the race of the Jutes. From the Old Saxons came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons. From the land of the Angles, which has lain waste between the Jutes and the Saxons ever since, came the East Anglians, the Middle Anglians, the Mercians, and all of the Northumbrians”. (The Peterborough Chronicle)

Dialectal distinctiveness can be linked to geographical areas: Main dialects of Old English: Kentish, West Saxon, and Anglian (Northumbrian and Mercian).

597 Augustine and his followers begin conversion of Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. Recorded in Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and in Bede. Bede’s account: In a Roman market-place Pope Gregory encountered slave-boys from Britain and was inspired to send missionaries:“Again he asked what the race from which they came was called. The reply was that they were called English. He said: That is appropriate, because they have a matchless appearance and likewise it is fitting that they should be joint-heirs with the angels in heaven. Then he inquired further, saying: What is the name of the province from which the boys were brought? Then the reply came that they were called Deiri. He said: Deiri is an appropriate term, [deiraeruiti ‘removed from anger’]; they shall be removed from God’s anger and called to Christ’s mercy. He asked moreover what their king was called; the reply came that he was called Ælle. And then he punned on the name, saying: Alleluia, it is fitting that praise of God our Creator should be sung in those places”.

One of most profound effects is the development of an Old English script based on the Roman alphabet. Before only runic ‘alphabet’ was based on earlier Germanic futhark. Futhorc – runes used by the Anglo-Saxons (central Mercia, Kent, Northumbria) since 4th or early 5th century until 11th century. E.g. Ruthwell cross – The Dream of the Rood, Exeter Book riddles, the Rune Poem, Cynewulf’s signature on four poems (Fates of the Apostles, Elene, Christ II, Juliana)

Sounds in OE for which Roman alphabet had no letters – represented by letters drawn from various sources:• þ (capital Þ), known as thorn, was borrowed from the runic alphabet to

denote the dental fricatives (both voiced and voiceless)• ð (capital Ð), known as eth, also used to denote dental fricatives, may have

been derived from Irish writing• æ (capital Æ),used to denote/æ/,was derived from Latin ae • w was represented by the runic letter wynn

• Usual form of g was Irish ʒ (yogh) but by 12th century the different sounds represented by this letter were distinguished through the introduction of the continental caroline form g for /g/ and /ʤ/, as in god (good) and secgan (say),

• ʒ for other sounds, including /j/; e.g. dæʒ ‘day’, ʒær ‘year’ • No j, v; q, x, z very rarely used• Writing system close to phonemic representation• Dialectal differences between scribes from different regions reflected in their

writingKing Alfred – champion of the vernacular• Goals: education, to make England the center of intellectual achievement• Means: translating Latin texts into the vernacular“ Therefore it seems better to me, if it seems so to you, that we also translate

certain books, those which are most necessary for all men to know, into the language which we can all understand, and bring to pass, as we very easily can with God’s help, if we have peace, that all the free-born young people now in England, among those who have the means to apply themselves to it, are set to learning, whilst they are not competent for any other employment, until the time when they know how to read English writing well. Those whom one wishes to teach further and bring to a higher office may then be taught further in the Latin language”. (Preface to Pastoral Care (Pope Gregory, late 6th century)).

Forðy me ðync ð betre, gif iow swæ ðyncð, ðæt we eac sumæ bec, ða ðe niedbeðearfosta sien eallum monnum to wiotonne, ðæt we ða on ðæt geðiode wenden ðe we ealle gecnawan mægen, ond gedon swæ we swiðe eaðe magon mid Godes fultume, gif we ða stilnesse habbað, ðætte eall sio gioguð ðe nu is on Angelcynne friora monna, ðara ðe ða speda hæbben ðæt hie ðæm befeolan mægen, sien to liornunga oðfæste, ða hwile ðe hie to nanre oðerre note ne mægen, oð ðone first ðe hie wel cunnen Englisc gewrit arædan: lære mon siððan furður on Lædengeðiode ða ðe mon furðor læran wille ond to hieran hade don wille.

• OE inflectional systemNominative case: sio gioguð ‘the young people’ where the demonstrative

pronoun sio is feminine singular agreeing with the noun; it also appears in the plural pronouns we and hie

Accusative case: sumæ bec...niedbeðearfosta (certain books...most necessary); sumæ and niedbeðearfosta are feminine plural adjectives (inflected strong since they do not follow a demonstrative pronoun, possessive, or article) and agreeing with the plural noun bec; feminine plural pronoun form ða used twice in agreement with bec, first as part of a relative pronoun ða ðe ‘which’ and, second, as a demonstrative pronoun meaning ‘them’.

Accusative case: direct object in ða stilnesse ‘peace’, where the demonstrative pronoun and noun are feminine singular; also used after some prepositions: on ðæt geðiode ‘into the language’, where the demonstrative pronoun and noun are neuter singular, to liornunga ‘to learning’, where the noun is feminine singular, and oð ðone first ‘until the time’, where the demonstrative pronoun and noun are masculine singular.

Genitive case: found in Godes ‘God’s’, where the noun is masculine singular, friora monna ‘of free-born men’, where the adjective and noun are masculine plural, and ðara ‘of those’, a demonstrative pronoun agreeing with friora monna.

Dative case: found in eallum monnum ‘for all men’, where the adjective and noun are masculine plural, me ‘to me’, a first person singular personal pronoun, iow ‘to you’, a second person plural personal pronoun, and ðæm ‘to that’, a neuter singular demonstrative pronoun; also used after some prepositions: mid...fultume ‘with...help’, where the noun is masculine singular, on Angelcynne ‘in England’, where the noun is neuter singular, to nanre oðerre note ‘for no other employment’, where the adjectives and noun are feminine singular, and to hieran hade ‘to a higher office’, where the comparative adjective (inflected weak as all comparatives are) and noun are masculine singular.• OE inflectional system – Verb formsIn ðyncð ‘it seems’ the –ð inflection denotes the third person present singular of

the verb whose infinitive form is ðyncan ‘to seem’, and in habbað ‘we have’, the –að denotes the present plural of the verb whose infinitive is habban ‘to have’; both express statements, are in the indicative mood

OE also makes frequent use of the subjunctive mood, either to express doubt or unreality or within subordinate clauses; habban also occurs in the present subjunctive plural form æbben ‘[they] may have’; the verb magan ‘to be able’ occurs in its present indicative plural form magon ‘[we] are able’ and also three times (once in the first person, twice in the third person) in its subjunctive plural form mægen ‘[we]/[they] may be able’)

Both the infinitive (for example gecnawan, befeolan, arædan, læran, and don) and the inflected infinitive (to wiotonne) occur in the passage.• OE syntax: Freedom in word orderAlthough in main clauses OE commonly used Subject-Verb-Object word order,

use of inflections also allowed much more flexibility Word order of the first sentence particularly complex: in OE subordinate

clauses it was common for the verb to be placed at the end of the clause, but here the accumulation of subordinate clauses, combined with the recapitulation of ðæt we eac sumæ bec ‘that we also certain books’ as ðæt we ða ‘that we them’, leads to very convoluted syntax; in part at least this may be attributed to the attempt to apply Latin syntactic constructions to a linguistic structure not suited to them.

The vitality of the vernacular in Alfred’s reign had a lasting impact on the use and development of the language: its association with the court and with intellectual endeavour gave it an authority and prestige which enabled its acceptance as a literary language in its own right.

The Benedictine reform and the regularizing of OEInfluence of historical circumstances on the transition from ‘early West Saxon’

to ‘late West Saxon’.In the second half of 10th century, monastic reform in England and renewed

interest for production of texts in vernacular for didactic purposes appeared.Considerable attention paid to form which vernacular should take – school of

Bishop Æthelwold at Winchester.Concerted effort made to establish a standard literary language whose

conventions were to be observed as consistently as possible.

Term standard here denotes not common usage but a preferred usage which seems to have been systematically disseminated.

The literary language to which it applies developed from the West Saxon dialect.

Ælfric – importance of consistent grammatical system – wrote own grammarProcess of grammatical revision; e.g. Preface to translation of Genesis – precise

grammatical usage can affect meaning in important ways“Often the holy trinity is revealed in this book, just as it is in the words which

God said: Let us make man in our image. When he said let us make, the trinity is betokened; when he said in our likeness the true unity is revealed: he did not say in the plural ‘in our likenesses’, but in the singular in our likeness”

There is distinction between dative singular inflection –e and dative plural inflection –um.Norman Conquest: OE, a language in transition

OE works continued to be used in the late twelfth and even early thirteenth centuries, but fairly extensive rewriting and adaptation into Early Middle English was clearly necessary.

By the time glossators such as the Worcester scribe known as the Tremulous Hand (because of his distinctive shaky handwriting) were at work in the thirteenth century, it is evident that increasing unfamiliarity with OE had made it virtually incomprehensible without the provision of glosses or explanatory translations accompanying the text.

Middle English

• “par excellence the dialectal phase of English” (Strang)• Dialectal differences represented in writingAnglian dialect area in OE period fell into two distinct regions: Northumbrian to

the north of the River Humber and Mercian to the south. In the Middle English period, old Mercian area shows considerable dialectal differentiation, especially between its western and eastern parts (Scandinavian settlement in east before Conquest). Eastern Mercian dialects display impact of intense contact with Norse. Easternmost part of East Midland area (East Anglia) had been made an autonomous kingdom when Britain was carved up among Angles, Saxons, and Jutes – together with its geographical isolation, may have helped to ensure that its dialect diverged from language of other parts of East Midlands.

A wilde der is, ðat is ful of fele wiles,Fox is hire to name, for hire qweðsipe Husebondes hire haten, for hire harm-dedes.Đe coc and te capun Ge feccheð ofte in ðe tun,And te gander and te gos,Bi ðe necke and bi ðe nos,Haleð is to hire hole.

“There is a wild animal that is full of many tricks. Her name is “fox”. Farmers hate her for her wickedness, because of her harmful deeds. She often fetches the cock and the capon from the farmyard, and the gander and the goose, by the neck and by the beak, carries them to her hole”.

Southern and south-west Midland can be distinguished from other Midland dialects in Middle English through form of ending used in present plural of verbs. In central and east Midlands - singular and plural forms of nominative 3rd person pronoun tended to be indistinguishable. OE form for they hie became ‘he’ in these areas in Middle English.

-en ending (haten ‘(they) hate’) may therefore have been adopted as a means of clarifying whether a verb and its subject were in the singular or the plural. It seems to have come from the –en which was the ending of the present tense plural subjunctive in OE.

At the same time, the southern and south-west Midland plural ending -(e)ð derives from OE indicative plural –að.

Increasing diversification in EnglishChester monk Ranulph Higden c.1327 Polychronicon in Latin; John Trevisa’s

translation 1387:Englischemen, þey hadde from the bygynnynge þre manere speche, norþerne, sowþerne, and middel speche in þe myddel of þe lond, as þey come of þre manere peple of Germania, noþeles by comyxtioun and mellynge firste wiþ Danes and afterward wiþ Normans, in meny þe contray longage is apayred, and som vseþ straunge wlafferynge, chiterynge, harrynge, and garrynge grisbayting.“Englishmen, though they had from the beginning three kinds of speech northern, southern, and Midland speech, in the middle of the country as they came from three kinds of people from Germany, nonetheless through commingling and mixing first with Danes and later with Normans, in many the language of the country is corrupted, and some use strange stammering, chattering, snarling, and grating gnashing of the teeth”.Trevisa:

Al þe longage of þe Norþhumbres, and specialliche at Zork, is so scharp, slitting, and frotynge and vnschape, þat we souþerne men may þat longage vnneþe vnderstonde.

“All the language of the Northumbrians, and especially at York, is so sharp, harsh, and grating, and formless that we southern men can hardly understand that language”.From Cursor Mundi:

In sotherin Englis was it draun,And turnd it haue I till our aun Langage o northrin lede,Þat can nan oiþer Englis rede.“It [the author’s source material] was composed in southern English, and I have

turned it into our own language of northern people, who cannot read any other English”.

After middle of 14th century, surge in volume of writing in English - both in composition of new works (including those of Chaucer) and in copying of English

texts. Number of documents written in English, however, remains small until second quarter of 15th century.

1362 often cited as key date in expansion of use of English: this is when the Statute of Pleading decreed that court proceedings (into which a very large ratio of people in the Middle Ages were at some time drawn) were to be conducted in English, instead of French. But records of legal proceedings were still kept in French – English was not used for this purpose until 17th century. The Statute gave English a validation that it had previously lacked, and this in turn may have stimulated use of English in other spheres, in writing as well as in speech. The Statute also nullified an important reason for acquiring, or maintaining, competence in spoken French, hastening its passage to status of foreign language, at least in spoken medium.

...this bok ys in Englis drawe,Of fele maters that ar unknawe To lewed men that er unconna[n]d,That can no Latyn undurstand:To mak hemself frust to knowe And from synne and vanites hem

drawe,And for to stere hem to ryght

drede,Whan this tretes here or rede,That prik here concience wythinne,Ande of that drede may a ful

bygyng Thoru confort of joyes of hevene

sere,That men may afterward rede here.Thys bok, as hit self bereth wyttenesse, In seven partes divised isse.

composedmanyuneducated; ignorantTo make them know themselves

firstwithdraw themselvesproper fearwhen(they)That (it) may prick theirAnd from that a fool can begin to

fearvariousdivided

Copied in 15th century, probably in south of England. Bereth “bears”, with its -eth ending for 3rd person singular present tense is typical of a southern text, as are plural pronouns hem and here for “them” and “their” (although they were soon to be displaced by northern, Norse-influenced forms them and their). frust “first” with rounded vowel (derived from OE fyrst, with metathesis of vowel and r), is more restricted, typical of south-west and West Midlands. Unconna[n]d “unknowing” has present participle ending –and characteristic of northern texts (-ing was standard in the south by this date): probably retained to preserve rhyme with understand. The task of copying a piece of Middle English writing was likely to confront a scribe with a variety of the language different from his own. The end result of the copying process could be a text which represented the diversity of English in microcosm.

London English

This is the area where various dialects converged. Originally, it was a dialect of East Saxons, who controlled the area after 5th century invasions. By the middle of 13th century, the English of London and its vicinity evolving through contact with speakers from areas both adjacent to city and further away.

Proclamation of 1258 – a document which is exceptional since it was issued in English; it affirms that Henry III (r. 1216-72) agrees to abide by what his councillors: þæt beoþ ichosen þurʒ us and þurʒ þæt loandes folk on vre kuneriche, habbeþ idon and shullen don in þe worþnesse of Gode and on vre treowþe. “Who are chosen through us and through the people of the country in our kingdom, have done and shall do to the glory of God and in loyalty to us.”

Document further states that if anyone contravenes Henry’s wishes, we willen and hoaten þæt alle vre treowe heom healden deadliche ifoan “we wish and command that all our loyal subjects should account them deadly foes”.

Switch from conciliatory to imperious complemented by morphological variation: southern -eþ ending in 3rd person plural present tense of verbs (beoþ, habbeþ) changes to Midland -en of willen and hoaten.

Features typical of Essex coexist with others and text can vary between forms derived from different dialects.

In 14th century, language of London changed further – texts copied there between 1330 and 1380 reflect features contributed by immigrants from the East Midlands, including East Anglia. Subsequent immigration into London from central Midlands led to appearance of, for example, forms ben and arn for present plural of to be, as well as olde for “old”, which replaced earlier southern elde.

Chaucer’s languageIn his early poetry occasionally exploits northern morphology. From The Book of

the Duchess: northern –es ending for 3rd person singular present tense appears in rhyming position (falles) – a departure from Chaucer’s usual -eþ ending:

...I wol yive hym al that falles giveTo a chamber ,and al hys halles is appropriate toI wol do peynte with pure gold. have paintedTowards end of 14th century, New Testament had been translated into English

twice, after Oxford theologian John Wyclif called for Scripture to be made accessible to all. In early 15th century, a concordance to the translations, collectively known as the Wycliffe Bible, was produced.

If a man haue mynde oonly of oo word or two of sum long text of þe Newe Lawe and haþ forʒetyn [forgotten] al þe remenaunt, or ellis if he can seie bi herte such an hool text but he haþ forʒeten in what stede [place] it is writen, þis concordaunce wole lede him bi þe fewe wordis þat ben cofrid [contained] in his mynde vnto þe ful text, and shewe him in what book and in what chapitre [chapter] he shal fynde þo textis which him list [he wishes] to haue.

The trouble was that the same word could have different phonological manifestations (as in kirke and chirche). It could also vary orthographically (thyng and theef, for example, could be spelled with an initial th or an initial þ). Or the same meaning could appear under analternative lexical guises – Latin borrowing accesse might be represented elsewhere by English loan-translation nyʒcomynge, literally “near-coming”.

Standardization – ‘AB’ languageVariety of English found in manuscript containing Ancrene Wisse (whence A)

and MS Bodley 34 in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (whenceB); Bodley manuscript includes copies of Sawles Warde “The Guardian of the Soul” and Hali Meiðhad “Holy Virginity”, which share many of the stylistic features of Ancrene Wisse and appear, like it, to have been composed for a female audience. South-west Midland area in which manuscripts seem to have been produced- stronghold of English literary tradition in early Middle English period; OE material was still being copied there. Idea of writing in a standardized form of English may have come from an awareness of the dialectal and orthographical regularity of much Old English literature. Most widely attested example of a standardized variety of English from 14th century is central Midland region (which was providing London English with so many features at around the same time).

Central Midlands StandardWycliffite beliefLacked the barrier of incomprehensibility to many with which northern and

southern dialects were charged. Wyclif’s beliefs were condemned by the Church as heretical, and the Wycliffites were persecuted especially viciously in the reign of Henry V (1414-22). Fate of the dialect is ultimate obsolescence. It is 15th-century variety of English which evolved in the offices of royal administration at Westminster. Up to 1417, the Signet Office, which produced the personal correspondence of the king, issued its documents in French; but after 1417 the language of the king’s missives changed to English. The Office of the Privy Seal also began to use English for certain purposes in Henry VI’s reign. Copied in the Chancery – the office of the chancellor where administrative items sent from all over the kingdom were also enrolled. Language written in this office displays certain distinctive usages: not, but, gaf, and such(e), for example (Chaucer’s equivalents are, respectively, nat, bot, yaf, and swich(e)), and forms beginning with th- (or þ-) for ‘their’ and ‘them’. Chancery Standard – familiarized throughout the country because material from the Chancery was disseminated to every region. Gradually this language came to be emulated, apparently because of the authority with which the Chancery was regarded. The Chancery was responsible for the rise of a standardized form of English to which people in all parts of England increasingly conformed. In 15th century, spread of Chancery usages depended on the kind of writing being undertaken. Writers and copyists of verse often chose to imitate not the language of administrative documents, but the phonological and stylistic characteristics of individuals considered authoritative within the literary sphere, especially Chaucer and his contemporary John Gower. Eagerness to follow model, but model varied:

Royal warrant, 1438The king commandeth the keper of his priue seal to make suffisant warrant to

þe Chaunceller of England that he by letters patentʒ yeue licence vnto such lordes as shal be atte tretee of peas at Caleys &c to haue stuff with þeim of gold siluer coyned & in plate & al oþer þinges such as is behoueful to euch of þeim after þair estat: & þat þe same keper of our priue seal make hervpon such seueralx warrentes As þe clerc of þe counseil can declare him after þe kinges entent / And also þat þe said keper of our priue seal / make a warrant to þe Tresorer of England

& to þe Chamberlains to paie Robert whitingham such wages for þe viage of Caleys abouesaid for a quarter of a yere as so apperteineþ to a Squier to take.

Form of the adjective seueralx, which has been given an -x because it is modifying a plural noun, follows French usage. So does the phrase þe said, which appears to be modelled on the specifying adjective ledit. The old form for 3rd

person singular present tense, as in commandeth, remains (and would do, at least in formal registers, into 17th century). Assimilated form atte (combining ‘at’ and ‘the’). But the language – although archaic to us – is comprehensible throughout. Yet, it dates from a time nearer to the OE period than to our own. This suggests the relative stability of written English between the 15th and the 21st centuries and the great pace of its development between OE and the end of Middle English.Paston family letters, north-east Norfolk, 1448

As touchyng Roger Foke Gloys shall telle yow all &c Qwhan Wymdham seyd þat Jamys xuld dy I seyd to hym þat I soposyd þat he xuld repent hym jf he schlow hym ordede to hym any bodyly harm and he seyd nay he xuld never repent hym ner have a ferdyng wurth of harm þow he kelyd ʒw and hym bothe. (Qwhan: when; xuld: should; schlow: slew,killed; ferdyng: farthing; þow: though; ʒw: you).

Similarity of 15th-century writing to our typical standard written English depends on whether its scribe (or author) has been exposed to the language of the Chancery; whether he has decided to emulate its forms; which forms he has decided to emulate (since not all features of Chancery language passed into the modern standard variety); if none of these, what his own dialect was. Development of English, and the expansion of its functions in late Middle English period attributed to Henry V by contemporaries. Memorandum recording the Brewers Guild of London 1422 decision to adopt English as the language of their accounts and proceedings (translated from Latin).

...our mother-tongue, to wit the English tongue, hath in modern days begun to be honorably enlarged and adorned, for that our most excellent lord, King Henry V, hath in his letters missive and divers affairs touching his own person, more willingly chosen to declare the secrets of his will, and for the better understanding of his people, hath with a diligent mind procured the common idiom (setting aside others) to be commended by the exercise of writing.

Henry’s decision to use English in his correspondence seems to have been dictated by a perception that French was a mark of the people who were his military and political enemies. English could be a symbol of the independence of Henry’s people: at the Council of Constance in 1417, the official English notary Thomas Polton seemed to speak for his king when he asserted that the autonomy of England was manifest in its language, “the chief and surest proof of being a nation”.

From Middle English to Modern English

Languages evolve like living organisms do: through natural selection – form interacts over time in complex ways with environmental function. The changing forms of a particular language through time are the result of their interaction with

that languages functions – language change derives from functional considerations.

Richard Mulcaster (Elizabethan schoolteacher)...our tung doth serue to so manie vses, bycause it is conuersant with so manie

peple, and so well acquainted with so manie matters, in so sundrie kindes of dealing. Now all this varietie of matter, and diuersitie of trade, make both matter for our speche, & mean to enlarge it. For he that is so practised, will vtter that, which he practiseth in his naturall tung, and if the strangenesse of the matter do so require, he that is to vtter, rather then he will stik in his vtterance, will vse the foren term, by waie of premunition, that the cuntrie peple do call it so, and by that mean make a foren word, an English denison. (premunition: premonition; denison: denizen,naturalized inhabitant).

“manie vses of our tung” – elaboration in sociolinguistic termsIn many societies, particular languages or varieties of the same language are

used with particular functions – if a particular language or language-variety has a number of functions we can consider it to be elaborated.Elaboration of usage is one of four stages in process of standardization.

1) First, particular variety or language selected for overtly prestigious use, either consciously or unconsciously

2) Next, codified through enforcement of norms (e.g. by an Academy, or through education)

3) Then elaborated in function4) Finally, accepted by the community as an elite usage

• Selection, codification and acceptance. Standard varieties of language tend to relate to other varieties clinically rather

than discretely: there is no clear cut-off point between a standard variety and other varieties of the same language. Standardization itself – an ongoing process - distinction between standard and non-standard forms tends to change over time and no single stage in the process of standardization of any living language is ever complete. In transition from Middle to modern English – standardized variety based on usages current in London. London English itself changing as a result of dynamic processes of immigration - hard to pin down any precise set of forms which characterizes it. Between late 14th and 16th centuries, English began increasingly to take on more functions – these changes in function had a major effect on the form of English: so major that the boundary between these two linguistic epochs becomes fuzzy. • Caxton’s prologue to the Eneydos And certaynly our langage now vsed varyeth ferre from that whiche was vsed

and spoken whan I was borne / For we englysshe men/ ben borne vnder the domynacyon of the mone. Whiche is neuer stedfaste / but euer wauerynge / wexynge one season /and waneth & dyscreaseth another season / And that comyn englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from another. In so moche that in my dayes happened that certayn marchauntes were in a shippe in tamyse for to haue sayled ouer the see into Zelande / and for lacke of wynde thei taryed atte forlond [west Kent] and wente to lande for to refreshe them And one of theym named sheffelde a mercer cam in to an hows and axed for mete. And specyally he axyd after eggys And the good wyf answerde. That she coude speke no frenshe.

• Caxton’s prologue to the Eneydos And the marchaunt was angry. For he also coude speke no frenshe. But wold

haue hadde egges/ and she vnderstode hym not / And thenne at laste another sayd that he wolde haue eyren / then the good wyf sayd that she vnderstod hym wel /Loo what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte. Egges or eyren / certaynly it is harde to playse euery man / bycause of dyuersite & chaunge of langage. For in these dayes euery man that is in ony reputacyon in his countre. Wyll vtter his commynycacyon and maters in suche maners & termes / that fewe men shall vnderstonde theym / And som honest and grete clerkes haue ben wyth me and desired me to wryte the moste curyous termes that I coude fynde / And thus bytwene playn rude / & curyous I stande abashed.

Egges and eyren – illustrates diatopic (through-space) variation in the lexicon. Different forms have a different distribution in Middle English: kirk ‘church’ and stern ‘star’ appear in Northern Middle English but not in the south; and bigouth ‘began’ appears in Older Scots but not in Middle English, where the forms gan and can were preferred.

Vocabulary of English varied diatopically during the late Middle Ages not only in forms but also in the meaning of forms. Chaucer observed something of this variation in his representation o fNorthern dialect in the Canterbury Tales when, in The Reeve’s Tale he made his young Northern students Aleyn and John use the word hope with its Northern meaning ‘think’, rather than with its Southern meaning ‘hope, wish for’. Oure maunciple, I hope he wil be deed is a dialectal joke, depending on the conflict between the Northern meaning ‘I think our manciple will die’ and the Southern meaning ‘I hope our manciple will die’.

Caxton draws attention to the connection between language and social standing – usage of euery man that is in ony reputacyon. He indicates that for many contemporaries such reputacyon or status correlates with a particular form of commynycacyon which valued heightened expression above clarity. Caxton distinguishes playn, rude, and curyous [termes] - distinguishes registers characterized by different kinds of vocabulary. He follows the ancient distinction between middle, low, and high styles respectively; the terminology derives from the classical world, but it was still understood in the Middle Ages.

Curyous termes – aureate diction, a kind of usage found in much English writing of the 15th century. The term aureate applied to stylistic choice (designating or characteristic of a highly ornamental literary style or diction seems to have been invented by the poet John Lydgate (c1370-1449/1450), probably the best-known practitioner of this mode of writing. Lydgate desired to enrich vernacular poetic vocabulary to refourme the rudenesse of my stile by transferring Latin nouns and adjectives from the liturgy, from major medieval Latin writers, and from the Vulgate Bible into English.

Red[e] rose, flouryng withowtyn spyne thornFonteyn of fulnesse, as beryl corrent clere, clear

running waterSome drope of thi graceful dewe to us propyne; give

drink Thu light without nebule, shynyng in thi spere, cloud,

sphere

Medicyne to myscheu[e]s, pucelle withoute pere, misfortunes, virgin

Aureate diction was not the only kind of curyous writing available – The Boke of St Albans (1486) met the desire of the socially ambitious to develop aristocratic modes of expression. (Burnley) motive for compiling lists of such gentill termys was social aspiration: knowledge of language proper to the concerns of a gentleman was equated with the possession of gentility itself – to be heard to speak like a gentleman was half-way to being taken for one - at a time when poetic art was preoccupied with lexical splendor, it is not surprising to find the ancient association between eloquence and cultural refinement taking the form of a fascination with out-of-the-way terminology.

The Boke of St Albans – set ofcollective nouns a Cherme of Goldefynches, a Superfluyte of Nunnys, a Malepertnes of pedleres, a Rage of Maydenys, a blush of boyes, a Sculke both of freris and of foxis. Extensive vocabulary for hawking and hunting: terms for the flight of hawks range from beke ‘beckoning to game’ through nomme ‘taken game and lost again’ and retriue ‘rouse game a second time’ to souce ‘rising’ and toll ‘summons’.

Evidence for the range of registers which were available in the vernacular during the late medieval and early modern periods is limited – many groups in society – most women and practically all laborers – were illiterate, and this means that we have no direct access to their language.

Why this perceived need to augment the vernacular?Earlier generations – solution was easy: use French - but this option was no

longer available, and the marking of social standing required new linguistic strategies. (Burnley) Loss of French had by this time finally removed the traditional linguistic distinction between the gentil and the peasant, and no upper-class standard English had yet emerged to fill its role, so the linguistic situation itself had contributed to this new solution to the problem of maintaining linguistic differentiation between the rulers and the ruled. Perhaps the most salient grammatical distinctions are between Older Scots and contemporary Southern English. Late 15th century – major divergence between these varieties, most obviously indicated by the adoption of a new name for Older Scots – originally known as Inglis to Scottish writers, the variety is called Scottis from the late 15th

century – a term which had been used up until that date for Gaelic. Compare the Southern and Scots paradigms for verbal inflection. In Southern

English during 15th and early 16th centuries – present indicative tense:I kepe, thou kepest, he/she/it kepeth, we/ye/they kepe

In Older Scots – two paradigms for present indicative. If the subject of the clause is a personal pronoun and comes immediately before or after the verb:

I keip, thou keipis, he/scho/it keipis, we/ʒe/thai keip Otherwise the –is form is used for all persons. This system of grammatical

concord is known as the Northern Personal Pronoun Rule –found in Northern Middle English texts as well, but over time it withdrew towards the increasingly permanent Scottish/English border as prestigious southern forms pushed north in England during the modern period. Grammatical distinctions also relate to register during the late Middle and early modern periods. -S type endings for 3rd person

present singular (as in he keipis) were already available in Southern Middle English in informal situations. A similar informal/formal distinction detectable in earlier texts – use or omission of adjectival –e in southern texts – e.g. Chaucerian verse distinguished between strong and weak singular adjectives, e.g. the man is old (strong) beside the olde man (weak since it follows the definite article). Register differences are most clearly demonstrated grammatically in syntactic choices. Since antiquity, rhetorical theory had demanded that high style was associated with complex syntax, and there is evidence for such continuing patterns of usage in 15th and early 16th century English writing.

In 1418 the mayor, sheriffs, alderman, and communality of London wrote formally to King Henry V, assuring him of their loyal appreciation of his reports of his fighting in France. A copy of the letter survives in the Guildhall Letter Book of the period:

Of alle erthely Princes our most dred soueraign Liege lord and noblest kynge, we recomaunde vs vnto your soueraign highnesse and riall power, in as meke wyse and lowely maner as any symple officers and pouuere lieges best may or can ymagine and diuise vnto her most graciouse and most soueraign kyng, Thankyng with all our soules your most soueraign excellence and noble grace of the right gentell, right graciouse, and right confortable lettres, which ye late liked to send vs fro your toun of Pount-de-Larche, which lettres wiþ al lowenesse and reuerence we haue mekly resceyued, and vnderstonde bi which lettres, amonges al other blessed spede and graciouse tithinges in hem conteyned, for which we thanke hyly, and euer shulle, the lord almighty, ware we most inwardly conforted and reioysed, whan we herde þe soueraign helthe and parfit prosperite of your most excellent and graciouse persoune, which we beseche god of hys grete grace and noble pite euer to kepe and manteyne.

The passage (constituting about half the complete letter) consists of a single sentence in which an opening commendation is followed by a lengthy subordinate clause introduced by the single (capitalized) present participle Thankyng.

High style vs ‘pleyn’ styleSir Thomas Malory:And anone it was fayre light day, for in the begynnyng of January the

mornynges be soone light. And whan the Frenchmen and Bretons were within a leage of the bridge, they perceyved on the other syde of the bridge Sir Thomas Percy and his company; and he lykewise perceyved the Frenchmen, and rode as fast as he might to get the advantage of the bridge...

Plain style vs rude (i.e. low) styleColloquial Vulgaria or schoolbooks which were designed as sources for

translation from English into Latin – consisted of collections of everyday sentencesFrom Magdalen College School, Oxford, c1500Yesterdaye, I departyde asyde prively oute of the feldys from my felows and

went be myselfe into a manys orcherde wher I dyde not only ete rype apples my bely full, but I toke away as many as I coulde bere.

Early Modern English

Renaissance English – 1500-1700;Very considerable structural and systemic change;Phonology—where we see some of the most significant developments of the

period;English was gradually standardizing but this does not equate to complete

uniformity and does not reduce the importance or utility of dialect variation.Sound system of English - the dramatic changes which take place in its long

vowels during this period;Considerable contemporaneous grammatical and lexical change;Throughout the early modern period, English is becoming more familiar to the

modern eye, as spelling (especially in public domains of usage) becomes more regular, encouraged by the commercial pressures accompanying the introduction and spread of printing. Nevertheless, the increasing stabilization does not mean that orthographic practice became completely uniform: much in fact depended on whether the intended audience for a document was more public or more private and intimate.• Letter of Queen Elizabeth I to King James VI of Scotland written in 1591:My deare brother, As ther is naught that bredes more for-thinking repentance

and agrived thoughtes than good turnes to harme the giuers ayde, so hathe no bonde euer tied more honorable mynds, than the shewes of any acquittal by grateful acknwelegement in plain actions; for wordes be leues and dides the fruites.

This reveals a number of typical features of Renaissance orthography, such as continued use of u and v as positional variants (euer, leves). Considerable variation in the use of single final -e, which was no longer pronounced at this time (deare, good), as well as in the use of i and y (ayde, plain). In contrast to bredes we can also see the form dides (‘deeds’) for earlier (and co-existing) dedes. Variation here may also provide evidence for the progress of the Great Vowel Shift which, as we shall see, raised /e:/ to /i:/ in words of exactly this kind.

The whole long vowel system is radically reshaped between about 1450 and 1750 in what has come to be known as the Great Vowel Shift. This is probably the major phonological factor which distinguishes Middle English from modern English. These changes are also particularly controversial, and there is a very considerable literature on the so-called ‘Great Vowel Shift’ and the changes surrounding it. The increasing standardization of spelling can impede systematic evidence of on-going change. Careful analysis of corpora can, however, sometimes provide phonological evidence, simply by providing sufficient data for us to observe patterns which might not emerge from isolated examples. The originally northern third person singular verb ending -(e)s spread conclusively to the south during the early modern English period to give she walks, he writes. There is an ostensibly odd, opposing development whereby some Scots writers at this time adopted the otherwise declining southern -(e)th (e.g. she helpeth), retaining it right into the seventeenth century. A closer examination of the corpus data shows that many of the verbs with -(e)th in fact have a stem ending in a sibilant sound, like ariseth, causeth, increaseth, produceth. If we examine the evidence more closely, it seems that both -(e)s and -(e)th were earlier available not only as simple consonants (being pronounced [s] or [Ɵ] respectively), but also as syllabic forms

with a vowel before the consonant—probably as [əs] and [əƟ]. These syllabic forms would be more appropriate after a sibilant sound like [s] or [z]. As it happens, the [s] ending had earlier lost its alternative syllabic -es form, while -(e)th remained available in both full and contracted forms, that is as both [əs] and [əƟ]. This might therefore be used to explain the otherwise unaccountable preference of Scots writers in our period for -(e)th on verbs which possess these stem-final sibilants.

Orthographic practice during this period was moving towards standardization, but it was by no means static. Departures from typical spellings—just as in Queen Elizabeth’s dides for dedes—may also alert historical phonologists to ongoing change. Occasional spellings from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries indicate the progressive loss or at least reduction and instability of /r/ before a consonant. In the letters contained in the fifteenth-century Cely Papers we find forms such as monyng (‘morning’), passel (‘parcel’), and the inverse spelling marster (‘master’) which shows r where it would never have been pronounced. These therefore suggest that /r/ in such contexts was becoming so weak or prone to loss that spellers no longer quite knew where to put it.

Valuable contemporary evidence from the so-called orthoepists, early grammarians and commentators on language. This period is the first to possess evidence from writers who, from a variety of perspectives (and levels of aptitude), sought to describe and record the language of the time. First-hand descriptions of the English of the period. The Great Vowel Shift (henceforth GVS) is not, of course, the only phonological change to take place between 1500 and 1700. Admittedly, there is not much action in the consonant system at the time, although /r/, except before a vowel, is (as the spelling evidence already discussed suggests) becoming more vulnerable, with considerable consequences for neighboring vowels. For example, John Hart in his Orthographie of 1569 gives transcriptions indicating that ‘breaking’ or diphthongization before /r/ is already an option by the mid-sixteenth century.

/h/ is also progressively dropping in some varieties; but apart from that, the consonant system, even at the start of our period, is very much as it is today. There are more developments in the short vowel system – not all these changes operated identically in all dialects. Generally, Middle English short /e o/ in bed, lot lowered to /ɛ ɒ/ by the end of the seventeenth century, while short /ʊ/ split to give /ʊ/ in put, as opposed to /ʌ/ in cut. There are also changes in diphthongs. Early in our period, some of the Middle English diphthongs, such as the /ɔu/ of grow, sow and the /ai/ of rain were monophthongizing. At the same time a new subtype of diphthong was created shortly after the end of our period, when the progressive loss of postvocalic /r/ led to the innovation of the centring diphthongs in here, there, sure (now, in turn, often monophthongized again). However, the most significant change, or changes, in early modern English involve the long vowels. In most accents of English today, the great majority of words with short vowels had identical, or at least strongly similar, short vowels in late Middle English. There has been a general lowering of the high and mid short vowels, with a degree of centralization for the high ones, but the short vowel system has scarcely changed, apart from the innovation of /ʊ/ versus /ʌ/. The case of the long vowels, however, is much more complex, and the classic, textbook statement of the facts is that

virtually all words in present-day English which have a long vowel, and which existed in the language in late Middle English, now have a different long vowel.

Middle English Modern Englishtime /ti:m/ /taɪm/green /gre:n/ /gri:n/break /bre:k/ /breɪk/Name /na:mə/ /neɪm/day /dai/ /deɪ/loud /lu:d/ /laʊd/boot /bo:t/ /bu:t/boat /bɔ:t/ /boʊt/law /lau/ /lɔ:/

The only vowels in the Middle English system which seem to have disappeared altogether, merging with the reflexes of /e:/, are /ɛ:/ and /a:/ as in Middle English beat and face (although a long low unrounded vowel, usually now back /ɑ:/, has subsequently re-emerged in words such as father, bra, calm, part in many varieties. The vital fact is that the Middle English vowels and their closest articulatory equivalents in modern English appear in almost entirely different sets of lexical items. There have been wholesale distributional changes so that, although the same vowels may persist, they can now be found in entirely different sets of words.

While words like time, eye, five had /i:/ in Middle English, this same high front long monophthong is now found in green, serene, queen, while the time, eye, five cases now have the diphthong /aɪ/, earlier found in Middle English day, plain. Similarly, whereas Middle English /o:/ is found in boot, food, root and /u:/ in loud, out, down, the boot, food, root cases now have /u:/, and the loud, out, down ones, the diphthong /aʊ/. This is not, however, a random and unpredictable series of substitutions. Instead it can be summarized in a diagram. • name /a:/• break /ɛ:/

• green /e:/• time /i:/ to /aI/

• boat /ɔ:/• boot /o:/

• loud /u:/ to /aʊ/

The impression is of each vowel progressively shifting up one step, from low to low-mid, low-mid to high-mid, high-mid to high. However, the majority of originally low-mid front vowels eventually shifted two steps, to high—hence modern English has /i:/ deriving from two different sets of Middle English words, namely sea, leave (which had Middle English /ɛ:/ and which raised by two steps) as well as in green, queen (which had Middle English /e:/, and only raised by a single step). Likewise, Middle English /a:/ in name underwent a double raising, to / ɛ :/ and then /e:/. All these second-step raisings are typically regarded as later developments which took place after the Great Vowel Shift ‘proper’.

16th, also 17th century; Tudor era also represents the time before prescriptive grammars. How grammatical changes spread quite unmonitored in the language community, often replacing other, earlier, or more local features as they did so. Different linguistic choices where choice was available. Different people and groups of people could hence become leaders of linguistic change, promoting new

forms, picking up on-going changes, or avoiding traditional forms such as the second-person pronoun thou (an important shift in Tudor English).

Two important processes of change in Tudor English: • One that affected the third-person singular verbal ending (e.g. he knoweth,

which was gradually displaced by he knows), and • One that introduced the auxiliary do into English (so that structures such as

they know not were gradually displaced by they do not know)Other processes of change as, for instance, in the Early Modern English

pronoun system (including the disappearance of the pronoun thou). Processes that led to the generalization of the originally northern -(e)s ending in verbs throughout the country. Its diffusion was, at the beginning of the period, by no means a foregone conclusion: • -(e)s was not used by William Caxton, the first English printer;• nor was it used by William Tyndale in his Bible translations in the 1520s and

1530s;• Tyndale’s usage was followed by the 1611 King James Bible; both write, for

instance, ‘he that commeth after me’, not ‘he that comes after me’;• But Shakespeare already preferred -s, as is evident in the title of his play

All’s Well That Ends Well, which dates back to 1603–4;Clear dialect boundary between the north and the south in Late Middle English

based on the third-person singular indicative endings. North of a line running between Chester in the north-west of England to the Wash in Lincolnshire in the east, the ending -(e)s was used, whereas to the south of this line, the dominant form was -(e)th (typically spelled, with a thorn, as -(e)þ).

Zero form? One reason why the zero form did not spread may be that it was also used to

signal the subjunctive mood (as in ‘they insist that he go’ i.e. ‘should go’), which continued to be in common use throughout Renaissance English. Use of -(e)s was negligible at the national level in the period 1500–1570; it occurs in a mere 3 per cent of the cases. Southern -(e)th which was the dominant form in most kinds of writing from the Tyndale Bible to sermons and trial records. Nevertheless, -(e)s continued to spread, and in 1570–1640 it had already achieved a mean frequency of 20 per cent of all the third-person singular present-tense endings over a selection of genres (diaries, histories, official and private letters, sermons, and trials). There were notable differences between genres in the use of third-person endings. A comparison of diaries, histories, and private and official letters reveals that it was in fact only private letters that had any instances of -(e)s to speak of between 1500 and 1570. Typically, it occurred in the letters of northern writers. Alternation between -(e)s and -(e)th, as in use of -s with make and -th with say and have. General pattern in the data - a few verbs, notably do, have, and say, which take the incoming -s ending later than others. As a result when, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, most other verbs have more than 90 per cent of -(e)s according to the evidence of the corpus, do still takes it in only half of the cases, and have in merely one third. Such patterns are common in language change. A change usually spreads gradually to all relevant contexts, but it can also have word-specific restrictions and can thereby proceed, just as in the case of -(e)s, by means of a process known as lexical diffusion.

In the period 1570–1640 the overall use of -(e)s with verbs other than do and have soars to some 80 per cent in private letters, and comes to about one third of the instances in trials and official letters. Pattern of spread from the private, informal end of the genre spectrum. Southern -(e)th form which, becoming associated with more formal registers, soon gained a distinctly ‘literary’ status in general use.

Sermon against ‘usurie’ (or excessive gains made by lending money) by the ‘silver-tongued’ preacher Henry Smith illustrates a typical context for -(e)th around 1600:

Now, al the Commandements of God are fulfilled by loue, which Christ noteth when hee

draweth all the Commandements to one Commandement, which is, Loue God aboue all

things, and thy neighbour as thy selfe: as if hee should say, hee which loueth GOD, will

keepe all the Commaundements which respect God, and he which loueth his neighbour

will keepe all the Commaundements which respect his neighbor. Throughout the sixteenth century, women are shown to be consistently more

frequent users of the incoming -(e)s form in the south than men, suggesting perhaps that women were more apt to adopt forms that were in the process of being generalized throughout Tudor England. In fact women turned out to be the leaders in seven out of ten Early Modern English changes which were studied by means of the CEEC corpus. We also know from present-day English that women are usually in the vanguard of linguistic change, especially of those changes that are in the process of spreading to supralocal usage. The relevance of the verb-final consonant to the choice of suffix also emerges in the southern English data. The incoming -(e)s form was favored by verbs ending in a stop, and in particular by the presence of a final /t/ (e.g. lasts) and /d/ (leads). In contrast, and just as in the Older Scots corpus, -eth tended to be retained in verbs ending in a vowel and, as noted above, particularly, in verbs ending in a sibilant or sibilant-final affricate: compasseth, causeth, diminisheth, catcheth, and changeth. After a sibilant the suffix always preserves its vowel, thereby forming an additional syllable.

A means of adding an extra syllable to a verb is, of course, a very useful device in maintaining a metrical pattern in drama and poetry. The alternation between the two suffixes in the following extract from Act V of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew can, for instance, be explained by metrical considerations. The suffix -eth in oweth is accorded a syllabic status, while a non-syllabic reading is given to -s in owes:

Such dutie as the subiect owes the PrinceEuen such a woman oweth to her husband The spellings -es and -eth in medieval texts suggest that both these third-person

endings once contained a vowel before the final consonant. Vowel deletion of this kind is not restricted to third-person verbal endings but it can also be found in the plural and possessive -(e)s endings of nouns, as well as in the past tense and past participle -ed forms of verbs. Previous research suggests that plural and possessive nouns were the first to lose the /ə/ vowel in these positions, and this took place in

all words except for those ending in sibilants. This deletion process started in the fourteenth century and was gradually completed over the course of the sixteenth. The process was slower with the past-tense and past participle forms of verbs in which the suffix -ed was retained as a separate syllable in many formal styles of usage until the end of the seventeenth century. It still of course continues to be retained in adjectival forms such as learned, as in a learned monograph, a learned society.

A process of sociodialectal narrowing in the use of thou use during the seventeenth century: in comedies and fiction, for example, thou is commonly put in the mouths of servants and country people. To some extent, thou also continues to be used by social superiors addressing their inferiors. In seventeenth-century trials, for instance, the judge could still take recourse to thou when trying to extract information from a recalcitrant witness. The example below records part of Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys’s interrogation of the baker John Dunne in the trial of Lady Alice Lisle in 1685.

Note that apart from the formulaic prithee, the judge begins by using you: L. C. J. Now prithee tell me truly, where came Carpenter unto you? I must know the Truth of that; remember that I gave you fair Warning, do not tell me a Lye, for I will be sure to treasure up every Lye that thou tellest me, and thou may’st be certain it will not be for thy Advantage: I would not terrify thee to make thee say anything but the Truth: but assure thy self I never met with a lying, sneaking, canting Fellow, but I always treasur’d up Vengeance for him: and therefore look to it, that thou dost not prevaricate with me, for to be sure thou wilt come to the worst of it in the end?

Dunne. My Lord, I will tell the Truth as near as I can. This passage suggests that in a highly status-marked situation such as a public

trial, where forms of address are derived from social identity, thou co-occurs with terms of abuse, threats, and other negative associations—here specifically Lord Chief Justice Jeffrey’s accusations of lying.

Private spheres of usageIn the seventeenth century thou can be found in letters exchanged by spouses,

and parents may use it when addressing their young children. But in these cases, too, mixed usage prevails, with you clearly as the usual form, and thou often appearing in formulaic use at the beginning and end of the letter. In the following extract from a letter written in 1621 by Thomas Knyvett to his wife, you appears when he is discussing the choice of cloth patterns, but thou is used in the more intimate (if rather conventional) closing of the letter. Even there you intervenes in the last sentence:

I haue been to look for stufe for yr bedde and haue sent downe paternes for you to choose which you like best. Thay are the neerest to the patourne that wee can finde. If you lack anything accept [except] my company you are to blame not to lett me knowe of it, for my selfe being only yours the rest doe followe. Thus in hast Intreating the to be merry and the more merry to think thou hast him in thy armes that had rather be with you then in any place vnder heaven; and so I rest

Thy dear loving husband for everTho: Knyvett

As you came to be used in the singular as well as in the plural, the traditional number contrast was lost in the second-person pronoun system in supra-local uses of English. As a result, as in Modern English, it is not always clear whether you refers to one or more people. Different varieties of English have remedied the situation by introducing plural forms such as youse, you all, or you guys. In the eighteenth century, the distinction was often made by using singular you with singular is (in the present tense) and was (in the past tense); in the plural you appeared with the corresponding are and were. This practice was, however, soon condemned as a solecism—ungrammatical and improper—by the prescriptive grammarians of the period. One of the significant issues that has been debated in the history of periphrastic do is whether it arose in literary or colloquial contexts. Those who argue for its literary origins suggest that it grew out of the causative function. Conversely, those who are in favor of colloquial origins refer instead to the influence of language contact or semantic weakening of the lexical verb do. Causative do occurred frequently in official Court correspondence in the early fifteenth century. But it could also occur in private letters as something of a politeness marker, to indicate that the writer did not necessarily expect the recipient to carry out the request him- or herself, as in the following illustration from Margaret Paston’s letter to her husband John in c1453: ‘Also I pray yow þat ye woll do bey a loff of gode sugowr’.

Periphrastic do clearly gains momentum in the sixteenth century, and interestingly affirmative statements (its least typical context today) also seem to have played a significant role in the process. In effect, it looks as though do had the makings of being generalized to all sentence types in Tudor English, had not something interfered with its progress in affirmative statements. Earlier research suggests that in the sixteenth century the rise of do was being led by interrogatives followed by negative declaratives, and, at a somewhat slower pace, by the use of do in affirmative declaratives such as ‘I did mislike the Queenes Mariage’ from Sir Nicholas Throckmorton’s confession of treason in 1554. However, the fact that affirmative statements are much more common in communication than negative statements, and especially questions, in fact serves to make affirmative do numerically the most frequent kind of periphrastic do in texts.

The development clearly falls into two phases: the use of affirmative do first increases between the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, after which there is a dramatic decline in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Evidence suggests that affirmative do was used very frequently in the first two decades before 1600, but that its use plummeted during the first decade of the seventeenth century. Do did not recover from this drop but continued to be used at this much more moderate level in the following decades. In the north, use of the periphrasis was less frequent than it was in London at this time. Nevertheless, while an upward trend continued in the north (and also especially in East Anglia) for some time after 1600, in London, and at Court this pattern of usage came to an abrupt end. A similar but more modest drop was found with negative do. Why should this drop have occurred in the capital after 1600? One would have expected do to continue to rise as it did in East Anglia.

One motive might have been contact with Scots in the capital following the arrival of King James and the Scottish court in London after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. The timing would match the date of change, and the new ruler and his officers must have enjoyed high prestige in the metropolis at the time. This contact hypothesis is attractive but more work is, of course, called for to confirm it. Many scholars argue that the appearance of do in affirmative declaratives in the sixteenth century was not so much to do with syntax—that is, with introducing an auxiliary to all sentence types. Instead they suggest that the influence of textual and stylistic factors which operate in response to certain structural features (constraints) in the clause could have been more important. These are related to structural complexity and ease of information flow. An adverbial separating the subject from the verb, for instance, makes the clause harder for the reader to parse. Inserting do into a context like this can facilitate it.

Contacts and Conflicts: Latin, Norse, and French

For much of its history the English language in England (and elsewhere) has been in a state of coexistence, or competition, or even conflict with one or more other languages, and it is these tensions and connections which have shaped the language quite as much as any factors internal to English itself. Other languages current in England in the Middle Ages and their impact on English.

Multilingual – and multicultural – medieval England“At the present time, there are five languages in Britain, just as the divine law is

written in five books, all devoted to seeking out and setting forth one and the same kind of wisdom, namely the knowledge of sublime truth and of true sublimity. These are the English, British, Irish, Pictish, as well as the Latin languages; through the study of thes criptures, Latin is in general use among them all” – Bede (8th century)

Pictish – northern Scotland, British – Welsh, Irish – language of the Scotti 946 grant of land by King Eadred (reigned 946-55) to his subject Wulfric: in it

Eadred is said to hold the government Angulsaxna cum Norþhymbris/paganorum cum Brettonibus ‘of the Anglo–Saxons with the Northumbrians, and of the pagans with the Britons’, while his predecessor Edmund (reigned 940-46) is described asking Angulsaxna & Norþhymbra/paganorum Brettonumque ‘of the Anglo-Saxons and Northumbrians, of the pagans and the Britons’.

Pagans means Scandinavians, and so peoples speaking three different languages are recognized here: the Scandinavians speak Norse, the Britons speak Celtic, and the Anglo-Saxons (of whom the Northumbrians had come to form a part) speak Old English.

Jocelin of Brakelond on Abbot Samson (early 13th century)“He was eloquent both in French and Latin, having regard rather to the sense of

what he had to say than to ornaments of speech. He read English perfectly, and used to preach in English to the people, but in the speech of Norfolk, where he was born and bred, and to this end he ordered a pulpit to be set up in the church for the benefit of his hearers and as an ornament to the church”

A trilingual culture exemplified within a single person

Celtic – strictly speaking, Brittonic Celtic or British – was the language of those peoples who occupied the country before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons; likely to have remained a spoken language in parts of England through much of the Anglo-Saxon period, before it became confined to those areas which are (from an Anglocentric perspective) peripheral: Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria, and Scotland.

Latin – spoken and read right through the medieval period, beginning with the arrival of missionaries from Rome in 597.

Old Norse – language of Scandinavian settlers who entered the country in the Viking Age, and settled especially in the north and east of England.

French – language of Norman conquerors who arrived in 1066, although in time it came to be spoken more widely by the upper and middle classes.

In terms of language contact and the history of English, these languages – in particular Latin, French, and Norse – are ‘source’ languages or ‘donor’ languages.

Celtic – little impact on English.Fewer than a dozen words were borrowed from Celtic into English in the Anglo-

Saxon period, such as brocc (badger) and torr (rock).Britons were the subordinate people in Anglo-Saxon England - ones who learned

the language of their conquerors (OE) and who gave up their own language.OE word for ‘Briton’ wealh also came to mean ‘slave’ (it survives in modern

English as the first element of walnut, as the surname Waugh, and, in the plural, as the place-name Wales).

BUT great quantity of place-names in England which are of Celtic origin, especially river-names (such as Derwent, Ouse, and Lune).

History of Latin in England – history of a primarily written language.Not to say that Latin was not spoken – it was, often exclusively in some

environments – but simply that it was always a learned second language. Language of learning, and of the church. But there was almost no one speaking or reading Latin in England who did not also possess English(or sometimes French) as their first language.

Old Norse – only spoken in England, never written. Geographically widespread and surprisingly long-lived - first language of a substantial immigrant community. Settled Norse speakers in England from 870s onwards, following Viking wars of the time of King Alfred and establishment of so-called Danelaw (area to the north and east of old Roman road known as Watling Street – actual term dates from 11th

century). England settled by both Danes and Norwegians and perhaps even a few Swedes; as the Scandinavian languages at this point were hardly differentiated from one another – a unitary language, Norse.

Norse continued to be spoken in north of England into 11th century, and possibly into 12th in some places. In early 11th century status of Norse in England received a high-level fillip through accession of Danish King Cnut and his sons (ruled over England 1016-42).

Consequence of Norman Conquest - new rulers spoke a different language from their subjects. Originally the Normans had been Scandinavians (Norman comes from Northman) who had been granted a territory in northern France in early 10th

century. These early Normans spoke Old Norse but by early 11th century they had given up Old Norse and had adopted French - spoken by their subjects and neighbors.

French as it came to be spoken in England often termed Anglo-Norman –designation based as much on political factors as on linguistic ones. Little value in accounts which depict two distinct speech-communities, English and French, running on non-convergent parallel lines for a number of centuries.

In first decades after 1066 those who spoke French were the Norman invaders, but not many generations were required before the situation had become very different. From middle of 12th century at the latest, most members of the aristocracy were bilingual – what is more their mother tongue is likely to have been English; there can have been very few, if any, monolingual French speakers by that point.

By 13th century – educational treatises which provide instruction in French, and it seems from the target audiences that not only was French having to be learned by the aristocracy, it was also coming to be learned by members of the middle classes. One consequence of this opening-up of French to those outside aristocracy is that the language began to be used in increasingly varied contexts – French became less restricted in usage precisely as it ceased to be anyone’s mother tongue in England – instead it became a generalized language of culture. Result of contemporary currency of French as an international language outside England.

Language contact: “Linguistic change is initiated by speakers, not by languages” – James Milroy

Languages do not exist apart from their users, and any study of language contact must be emphatically social in approach.

Processes of contact, their linguistic consequences.Nature of social contact, together with configurations of speech-communities,

has governing effect on type of linguistic impact that will occur. Contact between languages - between users of languages involves bilingualism – either individual (monolingual society at least in part made up of bilingual speakers) or societal (bilingual society made up of monolingual speakers).

Viking Age England – bilingual society dominantly made up of monolingual speakers of different languages (high degree of mutual intelligibility).

Post-1066 England – individual bilingualism (no form of mutual intelligibility).Who was bilingual, and what form their bilingualism took, changed over time.Once their early monolingual period had come to an end, Norman aristocracy

who spoke French as their first language and who learned English as their second. But soon French became the learned second language, after which it also began to be learned by those below the level of the aristocracy. It is important to stress that French speakers in England always formed a minority; the majority of the population were monolingual, and the language they spoke was English. All those who knew Latin also spoke at least one other language, sometimes two (French and English). Another form of language contact: between an individual and a written text in a foreign/second language. In the medieval period even written texts had a dominantly oral life: literature was social, texts were read out loud, and private silent reading had barely begun. Latin is the language of conversation and debate in many ecclesiastical and scholarly environments.

How do these various circumstances of bilingual contact – individual and/or societal – work out in terms of their effect on English? How exactly do elements -

words, sounds, even syntactical constructions - from one language come to be transferred into another language? Languages in contact do not exist apart from their users, so there must be specific, observable means by which linguistic transfer occurs.

How do these various circumstances of bilingual contact – individual and/or societal – work out in terms of their effect on English?

How exactly do elements - words, sounds, even syntactical constructions - from one language come to be transferred into another language?

Languages in contact do not exist apart from their users, so there must be specific, observable means by which linguistic transfer occurs.

Borrowing (English to Serbian: modem, kul, fensi) vs interference (French to English: bourjeois). Distinction turns on the status of the person(s) who act(s) as the bridge between languages. Borrowing – primary agent speaker of recipient language. Interference – primary agent speaker of source language. To move from level of idiosyncratic usage to general usage, innovation has to be widely accepted in speech community.

Stability as a constitutional property of language.Some domains more stable, e.g. phonology, some less stable, e.g. vocabulary.A language in contact with another tends to maintain its more stable domains. If

recipient language speaker is agent – tends to preserve phonology of own language, accept new vocabulary items from source language. If source language speaker is agent – tends to preserve own language phonology, thus imposing it on recipient language.

Word transferred through borrowing likely to be nativized to recipient language in terms of its phonological shape or pronunciation. Word transferred through interference likely to preserve phonology of source language, and introduce that to recipient language.

Lexical transfer (transfer of words from source language to recipient language) is the most common result of language contact. Bound morphemes may also be transferred, as may individual sounds, or word-orders and sentence structures, or(at the written level) letter forms and spelling conventions. All the subsystems of language can be affected through contact, and in the history of English’s contact with other languages in the medieval period, all of them were.

Estimates place the size of the Old English lexicon at c 50-60,000 words, that of Middle English at 100-125,000 , that of modern English at over half a million. This expansion has occurred overwhelmingly through the transfer of words from source languages, rather than through the formation of new words out of native resources. As much as 70 percent of the modern English lexicon is comprised of loanwords, the comparable figure for the Old English lexicon is probably less than 5 percent.

Loanwords proper vs loan- translations, semantic loans:Loanword - may arise either through borrowing or interference, but it involves

the incorporation of a lexical item from the source language into the lexicon of the recipient language; the item may undergo phonological and morphological adaptation in the process. Representative loanwords in Old English are munuc ‘monk’, from Latin monachus, lið ‘fleet, from Old Norse lið), and prut ‘proud’, from Old French prud. In a loan-translation or calque, the elements of the lexical item in

the source language are translated into corresponding elements in the recipient language so that the form of the source item is not actually transferred. Old English examples are wellwillende literally ‘well-wishing’, ‘benevolent’ from Latin benevolens, anhorn literally ‘one-horn’ ‘unicorn’, from Latin unicornis, and (as a partial loan-translation) liðsmann ‘fleet-man, ‘sailor,follower’, from Old Norse liðsmaðr.

In a semantic loan the form of a lexical item in the recipient language remains the same, but its meaning is replaced by the meaning of an item from the source language. Examples are Old English synn (original meaning ‘crime,fault’ now ‘religious transgression’ from Latin peccatum) or modern English dream where the present meaning derives from Old Norse draumr, but the form derives from the cognate Old English dream ‘(soundsof)joy’; the Old English word for dream was swefn, which has since disappeared from the lexicon.

Chronological stratification of loanwords is broadly defined in English. Broad strata correlate with time when source language was spoken. Stratification based on phonological grounds – depending on which sound-changes in the source and recipient languages the words have or have not participated in. Latin loans in Old English – conventionally subdivided into early, popular loans (arising through oral contact, up to c 600), and later, learned ones (arising through Christianization and books). Some treatments further subdivide early, popular loans into pre-and post-migration loans. There were also later book-based loans in the Middle English period. Norse loans – more difficult to stratify.

Broad distinction between those which appear to have entered English through borrowing (10th and 11th centuries) and those which have entered through interference following language death (11th and 12th centuries):

The two processes may have been occurring contemporaneously in different parts of the country. Leaving aside a few early loans in Old English, French loans in Middle English are traditionally subdivided into two groups: an earlier group from Norman French dialect, and a later group from central French. The distinction reflects the shift in power and influence from Normandy to Paris and the Ile de France from 13th century onwards.

Not all parts of speech are equally represented as loanwords. Nouns and adjectives are by far the most frequently transferred word-classes, followed by verbs and adverbs, and far ahead of grammar words such as conjunctions and pronouns.

What about the sociolinguistics of usage?

Nu scylun hergan hefænricæs uard,

metudæs mæctiend his modgidanc,uerc uuldurfadur sue he

uundragihuæs,eci dryctin,or astelidæ.Heær ist scop aelda barnum heben til hrofe, haleg scepen;tha middungeard moncynnæs uard,eci dryctin,æfter tiadæ

firum foldu,frea allmectig.-Cædmon

“Now we must praise the Guardian of the heavenly kingdom, the might of the Ordainer and his minds intent, the work of the Father of glory, as He, the eternal Lord, established the beginning of every wonder. He, the holy Maker, first made heaven as a

roof for the children of men. Then the Guardian of mankind, the eternal Lord, afterwards adorned the middle-

earth for the people of earth, the almighty Lord”.

A heavy influence from Latin ecclesiastical culture is present, as well as calques, semantic loans, semantic changes. Words for God: uard ‘Guardian’, line 1), metud ‘Ordainer’, line 2, uuldurfadur ‘Father of glory’, line 3, dryctin ‘Lord’, lines 4 and 8, scepen ‘Maker’, line 6, and frea ‘Lord, line 9, allmectig ‘almighty’, line 9 loan-translation of omnipotens. A hundred years earlier, none of these meant God. Contact with the church created a demand for new vocabulary - met by native words changing their meaning or by calquing.

Inscription on an early 11th century grave-marker from the Old Minster, Winchester, which apparently commemorates a Scandinavian of the time of Cnut: HER LIĐ GVNNI: EORLES FEOLAGA, means either ‘Here lies Gunni, Eorl’s Companion’ or ‘Here lies Gunni, the earl’s companion’ (2nd more likely to be correct). Gunni - Old Norse personal name – language contact often results in expansion of onomasticon. FEOLAGA – loanword from Old Norse - felagi ‘companion, comrade, trading partner’; survives in modern English as fellow. EORL – likely to show influence from Old Norse in its meaning – semantic loan; native OE word eorl –used in poetry with a general meaning of ‘man, warrior, hero’; cognate Old Norse word jarl - term of rank; this Norse meaning grafted onto English form – English word came to mean ‘earl’ and ousted earlier English term of rank ealdormann (survives as alderman).

Syntax: phrase HER LID ‘Here lies’ – not found anywhere else in Anglo-Saxon inscriptions – possible that it shows influence of Latin on Old English hic iacet ‘here lies’ (not found in inscriptions), comparable hic requiescit ‘here rests’ (found). Written in OE using Roman alphabet; shows one loanword from Old Norse, one semantic loan, and one personal name; and it probably reveals Latin influence on its syntax and phrasing. Peterborough Chronicle – maintained into the 12th century. First Continuation (covering 1122 to 1131) and Second or Final Continuation (1132 to 54). Passage quoted comes from entry for 1135, death of Henry I and accession of Stephen:

God man he was and micel æie wes of him: durste nan man misdon wið oðer on his time. Pais he makede men and dær. Wua sua bare his byrthen gold and sylure, durste nan man sei to him naht bute god. Enmang þis was his nefe cumen to Engleland, Stephne de Blais; and com to Lundene; and te lundenisce folc him underfeng and senden æfter þe ærce-biscop Willelm Curbuil; and halechede him to kinge on Midewintre Dæi. On þis kinges time wes al unfrið and yfel and ræflac, for agenes him risen sona þa rice men þe wæron swikes, alre fyrst Balduin de Reduers; and held Execestre agenes him and te king it besæt, and siððan Balduin acordede. Þa tocan þa oðre and helden her castles agenes him.

“He was a good man and there was great fear of him; no-one dared act wrongly against another in his time. He made peace for both men and animals. Whoever carried a gold and silver burden, no-one dared say to him anything but good. At this time his nephew, Stephen de Blois, had come to England, and he came to London, and the people of London received him and sent for the archbishop,

William Curbeil; and he consecrated him as king on Midwinter Day. In this king’s time everything was unpeace and evil and plunder, for those powerful men who were traitors immediately rose against him, first of all Baldwin de Redvers; and he held Exeter against him and the king besieged it, and afterwards Baldwin submitted. Then the others occupied and held their castles against him”.

It demonstrates demise of OE inflectional system and transition to relatively uninflected state of Middle English. Loanwords come from both Norse and French. It is not surprising to find Norse influence in text written in Peterborough – within the Scandinavian-settled region of the Danelaw. Only Norse loan - tocan ‘(they) occupied, (they) took’. Important and significant word as it is a central item of vocabulary, and it ousted native OE term niman. Language also shows some English words holding their own against Norse loans which had entered the language by this time: e.g., 3rd person plural possessive personal pronoun still OE-derived her, rather than Norse-derived their. French loanwords – castles, pais, acordede ‘submitted’. Construction of personal names – Stephne de Blais and Balduin de Reduers. French influence goes beyond merely lexical - pais interesting for phonological reasons: following Germanic Consonant Shift only a tiny number of words in OE began with [p] – introduction of Romance (French or Latin) words reintroduced [p].

Orthographically – language in transition - Anglo-Saxon spelling conventions still present: sc not yet replaced by sh in ærcebiscop but now accompanied by Romance (specifically French) conventions: u used for medial [v] in sylure ‘silver’, digraph th used in byrthen ‘burden’ alongside older Anglo-Saxon letters þ and ð in þis ‘this’ and unfrið ‘unpeace’.

Not every loanword recorded in medieval texts succeeded in establishing itself and became in anyway a continuing, let alone a permanent part of the language. Linguistic change occurs through thousands or millions of individual human choices, and so it is in this sense preeminently evitable. Similarly, there were many developments which were only local or regional, and never became established more generally across the country.

Did late OE and early Middle English writers deliberately exclude or include Norse and French loans precisely because they were conscious that they were loans?

The Ormulum – composed in the late 12th century by a certain Orm (who named it after himself) – intended as a preaching tool – to be read out loud to lay audiences.

Probably composed somewhere not far in time and space from Continuations of Peterborough Chronicle. Language marked by very heavy Norse influence: many Norse loanwords found recorded there for the first time; Orm’s third-person plural personal pronouns are the new, Norse-derived one. Unlike Peterborough Chronicle, Ormulum contains very few loanwords from French (fewer than a dozen). Reason cannot be lack of exposure to French influence: French orthographic practices prominent in Orm’s spelling system- Ormulum may be first extant English manuscript to use French-derived sh for earlier sc, and wh for earlier hw.

Orm’s non-use of French-derived vocabulary looks deliberate – recognized to be loanwords. Inclusion of French-derived orthography but exclusion of French-

derived vocabulary, may indicate a sociolinguistic situation in which literate readers were familiar with French spelling, but illiterate listeners were ignorant of French words. Did language contact play a role in loss of inflectional endings? Contact between speakers of English and speakers of Norse suggested as having been crucial. English and Norse – mutually intelligible languages -however, while cognate English and Norse words were generally similar, or even identical,in their basic form, they often differed with respect to inflexional endings: compare OE giest and Old Norse gestr ‘guest’, guma and gumi ‘man’, scipu and skip ‘ships’. Repeated contact on daily or even domestic basis between speakers of the two languages - inflectional differences became eroded or ignored – played no role (or were even a hindrance) in effective communication. Most inflections probably non-functional in Norse-English communication – they decayed, and alternative methods of expressing grammatical relationships came to be more prominent – above all – method of relatively fixed word-order. First point in support – English inflections decayed earlier in north and east of England than in south and west – precisely in those parts of the country where Scandinavian settlement led to contact situations. Second – similar inflectional decay occurred in Norse language in England.

First point of qualification – gradual decay of inflections and tendency towards analysis, i.e. towards a relatively fixed word-order, were already present in OE as a result of fixing of stress on first syllable in Germanic period; whole process certainly not initiated by contact with Norse speakers, only encouraged or accelerated. Second – probably misleading to label this contact-induced loss of inflections as creolization or the development of a new mother tongue out of a pragmatic contact language. Syllable in Germanic period; whole process certainly not initiated by contact with Norse speakers, only encouraged or accelerated.

Australia, New Zealand and South Africa

These three countries have been grouped together for a number of reasons:• First of all, they are the only large areas in the southern hemisphere in which

English is spoken as a native language. • This itself is related to the relatively large-scale settlement of all three by

English speaking Europeans at roughly the same time (Australia from 1788, South Africa essentially from 1820, New Zealand officially from 1840).

• All three were, for a considerable period of time, British colonies and hence open to British institutions (government, administration, courts, military, education and religion) as well as the use of English as an official language.

Australia

When the first European settlers reached Port Jackson (present day Sydney) in New South Wales in 1788 the continent was inhabited by the native or Aboriginal peoples.

Since these peoples were linguistically divided and technologically far less advanced than the European newcomers, they had relatively little impact on further developments, including language. Today the Aboriginal population numbers about 0.25 million in a total of about 19 million.

Initially Australia served as a British penal colony and was populated chiefly by transported convicts.

With the economic development of the country (wool, minerals) the number of voluntary immigrants increased, and it boomed after the discovery of gold in 1851.

The convict settlers were chiefly Irish (30 per cent) and southern English. The latter had the strongest influence on the nature of AusE. Because of their largely urban origins the English they used contained relatively few rural, farming terms and perhaps a greater number of words considered to be less refined in polished English society.

The pronunciation which has developed, while distinctly Australian, has a clearly urban southern English bias; and although it is often compared to Cockney, the similarities are only partial.

Today the vast majority of the population speaks English; and over 80 per cent of them have it as their native language. Aboriginal languages are in wide use only in Western Australia and the Northern Territory; in the late twentieth century Aboriginal languages were used there by perhaps as much as a quarter of the population.

Non-British immigration has been significant since the Second World War. The long practiced ‘white Australia’ policy, which discouraged non-European, even non-British immigration (except for New Zealanders) has yielded to more liberal policies: by the 1970s a third of the immigrants were Asians and only a half were Europeans.

Regardless of the presence of numerous immigrant languages the primacy of English has never been called into question; the influence of both immigrant and Aboriginal languages has been limited to providing loan words.

AusE is most easily recognized by its pronunciation. The intonation seems to operate within a narrower range of pitch, and the tempo often strikes non-Australians as noticeably slow. Except for the generally slower pronunciations of rural speech, there is no systematic regional variation in AusE, but there are significant social differences.

Frequently AusE pronunciation is classed in three categories. The first is referred to as Cultivated and resembles RP relatively closely; it may, in fact, include speakers whose pronunciation is ‘near-RP’. It is spoken by proportionately few people (in one investigation of adolescent speakers approximately 11 percent. Nevertheless, it is the type of pronunciation given in the Macquarie Dictionary.

The second type is called General, spoken by the majority (55 percent); its sound patterns are clearly Australian, but not so extreme as what is known as Broad (34 percent;), which realizes its vowels more slowly than General. In the light of Australia’s early history, in which two groups stood in direct opposition to each other, namely the convicts and the officer class which supervised them, the following remark seems fitting:“In sum, Australian English developed in the context of two dialects – each of the bearing a certain amount of prestige. Cultivated Australian is, and continues to be, the variety which carries overt prestige. It is the one associated with females, private elite schools, gentility and an English heritage. Broad Australian carries covert prestige and is associated with males, the uneducated, commonness and republicanism The new dialect is ‘General’ which retains the national identity associated with Broad but which avoids the nonstandardisms in pronunciation, morphology and syntax associate with uneducated speech wherever English is spoken”. (Horvath)

Today teenage speakers tend to cluster in the area of General, perhaps being pushed there to distinguish themselves from the large number of immigrants who have adopted Broad.

In addition to the remark made above on the narrower range of pitch in AusE, one further comment is appropriate. This is the use of what is called the High Rising Tone (sometimes also called Australian Question Intonation), which involves the use of rising contours for statements. It is part of the turn-taking mechanism, and it is used chiefly in narrative and descriptive texts. It is apparently a low prestige usage, favored more by young people; it is also more common among females than among males and may be observed increasingly often, especially among young women, in other national varieties of English.

There are only a few significant differences in the realization of AusE consonants when compared with RP and also with GenAm. Among these is the tendency to flap and voice intervocalic /t/ before an unstressed syllable in Broad and General, though rarely in Cultivated. T-flapping is very similar to the same phenomenon in GenAm. This necessarily means that there is an absence of the glottal stop [ʔ], which many urban varieties of BrE have in the same environment (e.g. butter is [bʌɾə] rather than [bʌʔə]. Unlike GenAm, but like RP, AusE is non-rhotic. As in Cockney there is also a certain amount of H-dropping (’ouse for house). However, Horvath’s Sydney investigation turned up relatively little of this. In addition, the sound quality of /l/ is even darker than a normal velarized [l]; it is, rather, pharyngealized [lɒ] in all positions. Furthermore, there seems to be widespread vocalization of /l/, which leads to a new set of diphthongs (NZE is similar). In the following the vowel system of General/Broad AusE is presented schematically in comparison with an unshifted RP point of departure.

One of the main differences, noted by various observers, is a general raising of the simple vowels. A counter-clockwise lowering and retraction of the first element in the diphthongs which move towards a high front second element, and a clockwise lowering and fronting of the first element of the diphthongs which move towards a high back second element are further changes. To some extent AusE represents a continuation of the Great Vowel Shift, which began in the late Middle English period and which is continuing in the same sense in London English (Cockney).

• bit → bɨt /ɪ/ → raised /ɪ/• foot → foot /ʊ/ → raised /ʊ/• bet → bit /ɛ/ → raised /ɛ/• bat → bet /æ/ → raised /æ/

• cut → cut /ʌ/ → raised /ʌ/• box → box /ɒ/ → raised /ɒ/• Diacritic = raised˔

Beyond such differences in the phonetic realization of the vowels, it is notable that far fewer unstressed vowels are realized as /ɪ/ in AusE than in RP. This means that the distinction maintained in RP between <-es> and <-ers> (as in boxes /ɪz/ and boxers /əz/ or humid /ɪd/ and humoured /əd/) is usually not made.

Indeed, it may be possible to say that there is a certain centralization of /ɪ/ which brings it closer to /ə/, but also sometimes to fronted [ʉ] as well.• fleas → fleas /i:/ → /əɪ/• who → who /u:/ → /əʊ/• bird → bird /ɜ:/ → raised /ɜ:/• face → fice /eɪ/ → /ʌɪ/

• goat → goat /əʊ/ → /ʌʊ/• out → at /aʊ/ → /æo/• I’ll → oil /aɪ/ → /ɒɪ/ • start → start /ɑ:/ → /a:/

In morphology AusE reveals a preference for several processes of word formation which are less frequent in English at large. One of these is the relatively greater use of reduplication, especially in designations for Australian flora and fauna borrowed from Aboriginal languages (bandy-bandy, a kind of snake, gang-gang, a kind of cockatoo) proper names (Banka Banka, Ki Ki, Kurri Kurri) and terms from Aboriginal life including pidgin/creole terms (mia-mia ‘hut’, kai kai

‘food’). In addition the endings {-ee/-y/-ie} /i/ (broomy, Aussie, Tassie, Brizzie, surfy) and {-o} [ʌʊ] (bottlo, smoko) occur more often in AusE than in other varieties.

AusE shares all but a small portion of its vocabulary with StE; however this small, Australian element is important for giving AusE its own distinctive flavour. Indeed, next to pronunciation it is the distinctively Australian words which give this variety its specialcharacter.

Rhyming slang, though hardly of frequent use, is often regarded as especially typical of AusE, e.g. sceptic tanks ‘Yanks’. In addition, there are a number of Australian words which originate in English dialects and therefore are not a part of StE everywhere, e.g. bonzer ‘terrific’, chook(ie) ‘chicken’, cobber ‘mate’, crook ‘ill’, dinkum ‘genuine’, larrikin ‘rowdy’, swag ‘bundle’, tucker ‘food’

Many borrowings come from Aboriginal languages, of which some 40 words are still current in AusE and include: billabong (‘dried out river’), boomerang, budgerigar, dingo, gin ‘Aboriginal woman’, koala (an animal), kookaburra (a bird), mallee (a tree, scrub), nulla-nulla ‘Aboriginal club’, wallaby ‘small kangaroo’, wallaroo ‘mountain kangaroo’, wombat ‘burrowing marsupial’, woomera (‘throwing stick, boomerang’).

There are a variety of words for Aboriginal hut: gunya (Port Jackson), mia-mia (Victoria), humpy (Queensland), wurley (South Australia).

Other words are general StE, but may be applied somewhat differently in AusE. For example, early settlement gave AusE station for a farm (from earlier prison station). • Paddocks are fields. • A mob of sheep is a flock or herd. • Muster for rounding up cattle is explained as due to the military

arrangement of the convict settlements, as are superintendent of the station and huts of the men.

• Squatter, initially someone with small holdings but later large ones, took on a connotation of wealth.

Further terms from this period include outback, overlanders ‘cattle drivers’, stockman ‘man in charge of livestock’, jackaroo ‘apprentice on a station’ , but also cocky ‘small farmer’.

Mate/mateship grew into its present legendary egalitarian male friendship and interdependence, first in the workplace and then more generally. Today an egalitarian mateyness contributes to the immediate use of first names, often abbreviated or given the Australian diminutive in {-o} as in Stevo from Stephen.

Borrowing was not only from Aboriginal languages and dialects, but also from both standard BrE and standard AmE.

The former gives us railway (AmE railroad), goods train (AmE freight train), guard’s van (AmE caboose), but AmE cowcatcher (not needed in Britain).

Australians have semi-trailers or semis not BrE articulated lorries; and AusE has truck, not lorry; station wagon, not estate car.

In the political arena we find states and interstate; federalists and state-righters; Senate, House of Representatives – all AmE in source, but each state upper house is called a Legislative Council and the lower, a Legislative Assembly (Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia) or House of Assemby (Southern Australia, Tasmania) – all more BrE.

Store has the AmE meaning; other AmE borrowings include older block ‘area of land for settlement etc.’, township, bush ‘the countryside as opposed to town’ and more recently french fries, cookies and movies.

The language situation in New Zealand resembles that in Australia in many ways. Virtually everyone can speak English, and most have it as their native language. The large minority of Maoris, the native Polynesian people of New

Zealand, are rapidly losing their native tongue. At the end of the 1970s only about 20 per cent of them, which is approximately 3 percent of the population of the country, were still fluent in it, and few of these speakers were younger people. The decision in 1987 to give Maorithe status of official language is unlikely to change anything. The historical development of New Zealand is closely related to that of Australia. Before British sovereignty over the territory was officially proclaimed in 1840 there were already some 2,000 English speaking people there. They had come, mostly via Australia, to establish whaling stations or to work as Christian missionaries to the Maoris. After 1840 European settlement was more closely regulated (but with no transported convicts and no penal stations) and grew gradually in the following decades, drawing on immigration chiefly from Great Britain and Australia. It was these people, Australians and many English immigrants with a London bias to their speech, who determined the linguistic character of New Zealand. The English which the present day New Zealand population of almost 4 million (including approximately 15 per cent Maoris and 6 per cent other Polynesians) speaks is very much like AusE, suggesting a single dialect area with two major varieties. Indeed, it has sometimes been said that, linguistically speaking, New Zealand is to Australia as Canada is to the United States. The differences within each of the pairs are small, but for the smaller partner psychologically vital. The pronunciation and the vocabulary of NZE is noticeably different for non-New Zealanders, but the grammar is fully standard, differing from other standard varieties only in preference for use of some forms: “The differences between NZE and other varieties are to be found in matters of degree rather than in categorical distinctions, but NZE is not just the same as BrE or AmE: it is a distinct variety, in grammar as well as in lexis and pronunciation.”

For all practical purposes New Zealanders sound like Australians, at least to outsiders; of course, ‘to New Zealanders the Australian accent seems quite different’

There seems to be little or no regional difference in pronunciation despite the fact that New Zealanders feel there is (but see remarks below on Otago and Southland).

Social or class differences do, however, show up, though less than in Britain. It may also be the case that RP is still more a model in New Zealand than in Australia; certainly it is favoured in ‘serious’ broadcasting and the news.

Investigations of attitudes show associations of RP with ambition, education, reliability, intelligence, higher income and occupational prestige, but association of NZE accents with friendliness and a sense of humour. While RP has high overt prestige, North American accents show the overall highest covert prestige.

In contrast to AusE: ‘A true New Zealand standard is still evolving’ (Bayard 1990: 67). Note, too, that correction in the direction of the prestige sometimes results in such hypercorrect forms as /eɪ/ for /aɪ/ in such words as I or like.

The explication and figures presented above for AusE, apply to NZE as well. The shifts shown there include such items as the growing merger of /e/ and /eə/, which compounded with the raising of /æ/ to /e/ led to the following misunderstanding.

A visiting American phoning a colleague at his house got one of the man’s children on the line. The American heard, much to his astonishment, ‘He’s dead’ rather than the intended ‘Here’s Dad’

While much of NZE pronunciation is the same as in AusE, including the even more frequent use of the high rising tone, a few points are arguably different and merit pointing out.

One of these is the greater retraction and centralization of /ɪ/ in NZE, a point which non-New Zealanders have often commented on. Hence the vowel of kit becomes [1] or even a stressed schwa [ə]. This explains the surprise of an

American hearing Flight 846 at Wellington Airport announced as follows: ‘Flight ite four sucks’

There is also a very noticeable tendency to vocalize /l/ in NZE. The result has had a far reaching effect on the vowel system because it has created a number of new diphthongs.

This occurs more commonly after front than after back vowels and often involves neutralization (i.e. otherwise different vowels are no longer distinguished when followed by /l/), e.g. bill = bull, fool = full and kill = cull, or, even more extreme, pool = pull = pill = pall, all of which might be rendered as pooh.

A related phenomenon is the neutralization of the /e/–/æ/ opposition in words like helicopter, help, Wellington, which then sound like hallicopter, halp and Wallington.

The centring diphthongs /ɪə/ and /εə/ are merging (beer = bear) for more and more young people, as in AusE and SAE as well.

On the other hand, young people show signs of increasing use of the glottal stop in words with final /t/.

The vocabulary of NZE has been influenced by new flora, fauna, topography, institutions and the presence of a non-English speaking people. In addition, it shares many items with AusE that differ from other national varieties of English.

Like AusE there is relativelylittle regionally different vocabulary, but note ‘a certain type of large, smooth sausage’, which in Auckland is called polony, in Christchurch saveloy, in Southland Belgium, Belgium roll/sausage (AusE uses polony and saveloy, Adelaide fritz, Brisbane and Sydney, devon) (Burridge and Mulder 1998: 4).

What distinguishes NZE most from AusE is the existence in NZE of a sizeable number of borrowings from Maori. Examples include the following: hoot ‘money’, kiwi ‘a kind of (flightless) bird, the NZ symbol’, ngaio ‘a kind of tree’, Pakeha ‘white New Zealander’, wahine ‘woman’, whare ‘small house, hut’, yacker ‘work’.

The fact that /a/ as in whare /wari/ can become /ɒ/ in NZE led one schoolboy to make the following spelling mistake: ‘Dad thought Mum looked tired so he hired a whore for the holidays’.

The vocabulary of NZE has been influenced by new flora, fauna, topography, institutions and the presence of a non-English speaking people. In addition, it shares many items with AusE that differ from other national varieties of English.

Like AusE there is relativelylittle regionally different vocabulary, but note ‘a certain type of large, smooth sausage’, which in Auckland is called polony, in Christchurch saveloy, in Southland Belgium, Belgium roll/sausage (AusE uses polony and saveloy, Adelaide fritz, Brisbane and Sydney, devon).

What distinguishes NZE most from AusE is the existence in NZE of a sizeable number of borrowings from Maori. Examples include the following: hoot ‘money’, kiwi ‘a kind of (flightless) bird, the NZ symbol’, ngaio ‘a kind of tree’, Pakeha ‘white New Zealander’, wahine ‘woman’, whare ‘small house, hut’, yacker ‘work’.

The fact that /a/ as in whare /wari/ can become /ɒ/ in NZE led one schoolboy to make the following spelling mistake: ‘Dad thought Mum looked tired so he hired a whore for the holidays’.

English in North America

English is spoken as a native language in two major spheres in America. The larger one covers the United States and English speaking Canada; the other, lesser, sphere is the Caribbean area, centering on Jamaica, the Lesser Antilles and Guyana. There are a few peripheral areas, the creole speaking sections along the

Atlantic coast of Central America and the Gullah area of South Carolina and Georgia.

The largest single English speaking area in the world is that formed by the United States and Canada. Approximately 85 per cent of the 275 million Americans and almost two thirds of the Canadian population of about 31 million had English as their native language in 2000. This is a sum total of approximately a quarter of a billion speakers. Many, but by no means all, of the inhabitants of Canada and the United States who do not have English as their first language, nevertheless use it in a multitude of different situations. The United States does not have an official language despite efforts by the ‘English Only’ movement; however, some 23 states have passed laws making it their official language. In Canada both English and French are official languages. The next most widely used languages are Spanish and French. Significant numbers of Spanish speaking residents, many of whom are recent immigrants (both legal and undocumented), live in Miami (especially from Cuba) and New York (especially from Puerto Rico), as well as in neighbourhood pockets in many large American cities (generally from Mexico and Central America). Others live in communities whose Spanish language traditions go back hundreds of years (chiefly Chicano communities of the southwest). French is the majority language of Quebec (almost 6 million native speakers with an English speaking minority of approximately 600,000). Ontario and New Brunswick also have sizeable francophone minorities; relatively few French speakers live in the remaining provinces and territories. In the United States the only concentrations of French are in New England, close to French Canada and in Louisiana, where speakers are divided into those of the standard metropolitan variety (descendants of the original French settlers), of Cajun French (descendants of the Acadians, expelled from what was then renamed Nova Scotia) and speakers of Creole French (mostly descendants of slaves).

Canada and the United States have large numbers of speakers of other mother tongues. Few of them, however, have settled in such a way that their languages have also been able to serve as community languages. Nevertheless, there are rural communities in both countries in which immigrant languages have been maintained over several generations (e.g. the German speaking Amish of Pennsylvania and the Russian speaking Doukhobors of Saskatchewan), and there are urban communities such as the numerous Chinatowns and Little Italy’s, where languages besides English, French and Spanish are maintained.

Non-immigrant and non-colonial languages are still in daily use in some Native American environments. Perhaps 0.5 million of the 2 million American Indians and Alaska Natives in the United States can speak their traditional languages. In Canada approximately 62 per cent of the more than 0.5 million Native Canadians and Inuits (Eskimos) now have English as their native tongue (and 5 per cent have French); less than 200,000 speak their native languages.

Despite the large number of non-English native speakers (over one half in New Mexico, over one third in Hawaii, California, Arizona and Texas and over one quarter in New York), there are few places in the United States and Canada where it is not possible to communicate in English. Despite highly developed French–English bilingualism, there are some 4.25 million monolingual French speakers in Canada. Language retention for English in Canada is given as 111.4 per cent, which means that English is spreading at the cost of other languages; for Canadian French the rate is 95.9 per cent; for all other languages, just over half (54.9 per cent). In the United States several non-English speaking groups are expanding noticeably, above all Spanish and Chinese; but the retention rate for native born children is generally not much higher than 50 per cent in the first American born generation.

Canadian English

CanE is solidly part of the American variety of English. Yet there are important features of CanE which distinguish it as an independent sub-variety of AmE. What is distinctly Canadian about Canadian English is not its unique features (of which there are a handful) but its combination of tendencies that are uniquely distributed’. Not the least of the factors contributing to the independence of CanE are the attitudes of anglophone Canadians, which strongly support a separate linguistic identity.

The effect of attitudes on language behaviour is revealed in a study in which Canadians with relatively more positive views of the United States and of Americans are also more likely to have syllable reduction in words like the following: • Mirror (= mere), warren (= warn), or lion (= line). They also have fewer high diphthongs in words such as about or like (Canadian

Raising) and are more likely to voice the /t/ in words like party, butter or sister. Finally, they use more American morphological and lexical forms.

Pro-British attitudes correlate well with a preservation of vowel distinctions before an /r/, such as spear it vs spirit, Mary vs merry vs marry, furry vs hurry and oral vs aural as well as distinct vowels in cot vs caught.

Pro-Canadian attitudes mean relatively more leveling of the vowel distinctions just mentioned, more loss of /j/ in words like tune, dew, or new (also true of speakers with positive attitudes towards the United States).

A number of surveys have been conducted to register preferences with regard to the pronunciation of various individual words (tomato with /eɪ/ or /ɑ/, either with /i/ or /aɪ/, lever with /e/ or /i/ etc.), as well as spellings. Approximately 75 per cent say zed (BrE) instead of zee (AmE) as the name of the letter and just as many use chesterfield (specifically CanE) for sofa (AmE and BrE). Two thirds have an /l/ in almond (GenAm), but two thirds also say bath (BrE) the baby rather than bathe (AmE) it.

BrE spellings are strongly favored in Ontario; AmE ones in Alberta. Indeed, spelling may call forth relatively emotional reactions since it is a part of the language system which (like vocabulary use) people are especially conscious of, in contrast to many points of pronunciation. This means that using a BrE spelling rather than an AmE one can, on occasion, be something of a declaration of allegiance. As the preceding examples indicate, differences between CanE and US AmE are, aside from the rather superficial spelling distinctions, largely in the area of pronunciation and vocabulary. Grammar differences are virtually non-existent, at least on the level of StE.

Vocabulary provides for a considerable number of Canadianisms. As with many varieties of English outside the British Isles, designations for aspects of the topography and for flora and fauna make up many of these items. Examples are: sault ‘waterfall’, muskeg ‘a northern bog’, canals ‘fjords’ (topography), cat spruce ‘a kind of tree’, tamarack ‘a kind of larch’, kinnikinnick ‘plants used in a mixture of dried leaves, bark and tobacco for smoking in earlier times’ (flora); and kokanee ‘a kind of salmon’, siwash duck ‘a kind of duck’ (fauna). The use of the discourse marker eh? is also considered to be especially Canadian.

I’m walking down the street, eh? (Like this, see?) I had a few beers, en I was feeling priddy good, eh? (You know how it is.) When all of a sudden I saw this big guy, eh? (Ya see.) He musta weighed all of 220 pounds, eh? (Believe me.) I could see him from a long ways off en he was a real big guy, eh? (I’m not fooling.) I’m minding my own business, eh? (You can bet I was.)

The pronunciation of CanE (sometimes called General Canadian) applies to Canada from the Ottawa Valley (just west of the Quebec–Ontario border) to British

Columbia and is similar to GenAm. It shares the same consonant system, including the unstable contrast between the /hw/ of which and the /w/ of witch. Its vowel system is similar to that of the northern variety of GenAm, which means that the opposition between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ as in cot and caught has been lost (except by the Anglophiles mentioned above).

What shows up as the most typical Canadian feature of pronunciation is what is generally called ‘Canadian raising’. This refers to the realization of /aʊ/ and /aɪ/ with a higher and non-fronted first element [ʌu] and [ʌi] when followed by a voiceless consonant. Elsewhere the realization is [au] and [aɪ]. Hence each of the pairs bout [bʌut] – bowed [baud] and bite [bʌit] – bide [baɪd] have noticeably different allophones. While other varieties of English also have such realizations (e.g. Scotland, Northern Ireland, Tidewater Virginia), the phonetic environment described here is specifically Canadian.

One of the most interesting aspects of Canadian raising is its increasing loss (leveling to /aʊ/ and /aɪ/ in all phonetic environments) among young Canadians. This movement may be understood as part of a standardization process in which the tacit standard is GenAm and not General CanE. This movement has been documented most strongly among young females in Vancouver and Toronto and is indicative of a generally positive attitude towards things American, including vocabulary choice. However, an independent development among young Vancouver males, namely rounding of the first element of /aʊ/ before voiceless consonants as [ou], is working against this standardization and may be part of a process promoting a covert, non-standard local norm.

American English

The regional varieties of English in the United States consist of three general areas: Northern, of which CanE is a part, Midland and Southern. Each of these may be further differentiated into subregions. Grammar is of relatively little importance for these three areas; most of the dividing and subdividing is based on vocabulary and pronunciation, though the two may not lead to identical areas. However, the lexical distinctions are themselves most evident in the more old-fashioned, rural vocabulary.

Pronunciation differences, in contrast to lexis, are evident in everything a person says and less subject to conscious control. The Southern accents realize /aɪ/ as [aɪ] or [a], that is, with a weakened off-glide or no off-glide at all, especially before a voiced consonant, and /u/ and /ʊ/ are being increasingly fronted. Lack of rhoticity is typical of Eastern New England and New York City, but not the Inland North. It is also characteristic of Coastal Southern and Gulf Southern, even though younger white speakers are increasingly rhotic, while Mid Southern (also known as South Midland) has always been rhotic.

Northern does not have /j/ in words like due or new, nor does North Midland, but /j/ may occur throughout the South. The /ɑ/–/ɔ/ opposition is maintained in the South (with tendencies towards its loss in parts of Texas), but has been lost in the North Midland and is weakening in the North. ‘Canadian raising’ is a Northern form which, despite its name, is common in many American cities of the Inland North.

The Northern Cities Shift is a demonstration of changes within AmE pronunciation. It is taking place in the northern dialect area of the United States (including Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo) and affects the short vowels. This involves a chain-like movement in which realization of each of the phonemes indicated changes, but the distinctions within the system are maintained.• Ann → Ian /æ/ → /ɪ/• bit → bet /ɪ/ → /ε/

• bet → but /ε/ → /ʌ/• lunch → launch /ʌ/ → /ɔ/

• talk → tuck /ɔ/ → /ɑ/ • locks → lax /ɑ/ → /æ/

The pronunciation of the Northern Midland area more or less from Ohio westwards, has often been referred to as General American (GenAm). This label is a convenient fiction used to designate a huge area in which there are numerous local differences in pronunciation, but in which there are none of the more noticeable subregional divisions such as those along the eastern seaboard. Furthermore, the differences between North Midland and Inland North are relatively insignificant. Both areas are rhotic, are not likely to vocalize /l/, have /aɪ/ as [æɪ] or [aɪ], do not distinguish /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ (or increasingly do not) and no longer maintain the /j/ on-glide in the due words. Most significant of all for the selection of North Midland for the label GenAm is the fact that it is this type of accent more than any other which is used on the national broadcasting networks.

The most noticeable regional contrast is that between North and South. This division is, in addition to vocabulary and pronunciation differences, underscored to some extent at least by grammatical features. It seems that it is only in Southern varieties, including Black English Vernacular (or African American Vernacular English), that such admittedly non-standard features occur as perfective done (e.g. I done seen it), future gon (I’m gon [not goin’] tell you something) and several more far reaching types of multiple negation, such as a carry-over of negation across clauses (He’s not comin’, I don’t believe = ‘I believe he’s not coming’).

It is also in the South that an area is to be found with speech forms approaching the character of a traditional dialect (such as otherwise found only in Great Britain and Ireland, and possibly also in Newfoundland). The dialect which is meant is Appalachian English and the related Ozark English, which are found in the Southern Highlands. The English of these regions is characterized by a relatively high incidence of older forms which have generally passed out of other forms of AmE. Examples include syntactic phenomena such as a-prefixing on verbs (I’m a-fixin’ to carry her to town), morphological-phonological ones such as initial /h/ in hit ‘it’ and hain’t ‘ain’t’ and lexical ones such as afore ‘before’ or nary ‘not any’.

African American Vernacular English

It is the poorer, working and lower class African Americans, both in the rural South and the urban North, who speak the most distinctive forms of this dialect. It is often distinctly associated with the values of the vernacular culture including performance styles especially associated with black males in such genres as the dozens, toasting, ritual insults etc., but also chanted sermons.

One of the main debates which have raged in connection with AAVE concerns its origins. Some maintain that it derives from an earlier Plantation Creole, which itself ultimately derives from West African Pidgin English. This would mean that AAVE contains grammatical categories (especially of the verb phrase) which are basically different from English. The converse view is that AAVE derives from the English of the white slave owners and slave drivers, which ultimately derives from the English of Great Britain and Ireland. AAVE, so conceived, is only divergent from StE in its surface forms. It is, in addition, possible to take a position in between these two, maintaining that both have had influence on AAVE.

Since AAVE has its more immediate origins in the American South, pronunciation similarities between the two are hardly astonishing.

1) realization of /aɪ/ as [a] before voiced consonants (I like it sounds like Ah lock it);

2) convergence of /ɪ/ and /e/ + nasal (pin = pen);3) merger of /ɔɪ/ and /ɔ:/, especially before /l/ (boil = ball);

4) merger of /ɪ/ and /æ/ before /ŋk/ (think = thank);5) merger of /i(r)/ and /e(r)/ (cheering = chairing) and of /ʊ(r)/ and /ɔ(r)/

(sure = shore).

A number of grammatical features specific to BEV/AAVE have been pointed out. They include

1) stressed béen (sometimes given as bín) as a marker of the remote past (e.g. The woman béen married, which does not mean ‘The woman has béen married (but no longer is)’, as a StE speaker might assume, but indicates something which happened in the more distant past and whose results are in effect: ‘The woman has been married a long time’

2) non-finite be as a marker of habitual aspect, e.g. he be eating ‘he is always eating’; this stands in contrast to he eating ‘he is eating (right now)’;

3) perfective done (sometimes given as dən) for perfective or completive aspect as when an event has taken place and is over (even though its effects may still be in effect), e.g. they done washed the dishes ‘they have already washed the dishes’;

4) sequential be done, often as a future resultative marker, shows one of several possibilities of combining the aspectual markers just given, e.g. I’ll be done killed that motherfucker if he tries to lay a hand on my kid again ‘I’ll kill him if he should try to hurt my kid’.

5) no or infrequent third person singular present tense {-S} where the verb be appears as an inflected form we find I + am, but you, he/she/it, we, y’all, they + is

6) third person singular present tense {-S} used as a marker of narrative in contrast to unmarked non-narrative usage; this is viewed as a recent development

7) the past and the past participle are frequently identical, e.g. I ate ‘I ate’ or ‘I have eaten’; the two are distinguished when emphatic (I DID eat vs I HAVE ate) or when negated (I didn’t eat vs I ain’t/haven’t ate)

8) some young speakers form the simple past of a verb using had + lexical verb as in I had got sick ‘I got sick’)

9) relative clauses are seldom formed using who, which and whose; zero relative is preferred, even when the relative element is the subject of the relative clause, e.g. That’s the man [0/] come here the other day.

10) plural marker and demonstrative them is widely used (as elsewhere in non-standard English), e.g. them/dem boys; this includes what is known as the associative plural, a form of them added to a definite noun, e.g. Felicia nem (< and them) done gone ‘Felicia and the others have already gone;

11) negative concord (also known as multiple negation or pleonastic negation) allows not just one single negation, as in StE, but permits the negation to be copied onto all the further indefinite (so-called negative polarity items), even in cases where the negation is copied onto a subordinate clause as in He don’t think nothing gonna happen to nobody because of no arguments

12) question formation may occur without inversion both in indirect questions, e.g. They asked could she go to the show, and in direct questions (though less frequent), e.g. Who that is? Why she took that?;

13) double modals (as are frequently used in Southern AmE), e.g. I might could of (= have) gone.

Scotland and Ireland

The move from England to Scotland is one of the linguistically most distinct that can be made in the British Isles as far as English is concerned. StE itself is well established throughout Scotland in government, schools, the media, business etc. in the specifically Scottish variety of the standard, which is usually referred to as Scottish Standard English (SSE).

Yet in many areas of everyday life there is no denying that forms of English are used in Scotland which are often highly divergent from the English of neighbouring England. These forms are ultimately rooted in the rural dialects of the Scottish Lowlands, which differ distinctly from the dialects south of the Border: there is ‘a greater bundling of isoglosses at the border between England and Scotland . . . than for a considerable distance on either side of the border. (Note: an isogloss represents the boundary line between areas where two different phonetic, syntactic or lexical forms are in use.) The traditional rural dialects as well as their urban variations are collectively known as Scots.

Besides SSE and Scots one further non-immigrant language is spoken in Scotland. That is Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language related to both Welsh and Irish. At present only a small part of the population (no more than 1.5 per cent) speaks Gaelic; the Gaelic language areas are located in the more remote regions of the northwest and on some of the Hebrides. Since 40 per cent of Gaelic native speakers live today in urban (= English language) Scotland, their continued use of the language is questionable. Those who speak Gaelic are, in any case, bilingual and also speak English; their English is often influenced by their Celtic substratum.

There are several different types of Scots, each with a different status and prestige. The variety so often and so subjectively regarded as vulgar is urban working class Scots; considerably more positive are the often romanticized rural dialects; a third type is literary Scots (sometimes termed Lallans, ‘Lowlands’). This final variety is also sometimes pejoratively referred to as synthetic Scots because it represents an artificial effort to re-establish a form of Scots as the national language of Scotland and as a language for Scottish literature. Scots is commonly subdivided into four regional groupings. • Central Scots runs from West Angus and northeast Perthshire to Galloway

in the southwest and the River Tweed in the southeast. It contains both Glasgow and Edinburgh and includes over two thirds of the population of Scotland; it also includes the Scots areas of Ulster

• Southern Scots is found in Roxburgh, Selkirk and East Dumfriesshire.

• Northern Scots goes from East Angus and the Mearns to Caithness.• Island Scots is the variety in use on the Orkney and the Shetland Islands.

The Shetlands are further distinguished by the continued presence of numerous words which originated in Norn, the Scandinavian language once spoken in the Islands.

The historicity of Scots as the descendant of Old Northumbrian is clearly given, and Scots is consequently a cousin of the English of southeastern England, which was the basis of StE. Of course, Scots has been highly influenced by StE. Lallans, as a language with literary ambitions, has drawn heavily on the older Scots language for much of its vocabulary, but this is not a natural process and the words it has adopted have no real currency, for few will seriously use scrieve rather than write or leid rather than language. Scots has retained numerous dialect words such as chaft ‘jaw’, lass ‘girl’, ken ‘know’, or ilka ‘each, every’. The lack of a Scots standard is also reflected in the fact that there is sometimes a variety of local words for the same things, e.g. bairn, wean, littlin, geet (‘child’) or callant, loon, chiel (‘boy’), or yett, grind (‘garden gate’) without there being any generally recognized Scots word. More divergent, and hence more autonomous, are some of the grammatical forms. Among these note, for example, such non-standard morphology as the past and past participle forms of the verb bake, namely, beuk and baken or those of work, where both forms are wrocht (sometimes also spelled wrought). A few words also retain older plural forms: coo ‘cow’, plural kye ‘cows’ (see English kine), soo ‘pig’ (see StE sow), plural swine ‘pigs’, or ee ‘eye’, plural een ‘eyes’.

The second person pronoun often retains the singular–plural distinction either by using thou/du vs ye/yi/you or yiz/youse. Instead of StE relative whose one may find that his or that her. Furthermore, the demonstratives comprise a three way system: this/that/yon and here/there/yonder (for close, far and even further). Prepositions beginning with be in StE often begin with a- in Scots, so afore, ahind, aneath, aside, ayont and atween. The verb is negated by adding na(e) to the auxiliary, e.g. hasna(e), dinna(e). Furthermore, the auxiliaries are used differently; for example, shall is not present in Scots at all.

The syntax of Scots includes the possibility of an {-s} ending on the present tense verb for all person as a special narrative tense form, e.g. I comes, we says etc.

The pronunciation of Scots, finally, is also tremendously important in defining its autonomous character. Quite in contrast to the other varieties of English around the world, ‘Scots dialects . . . invariably have a lexical distribution of phonemes which cannot be predicted from RP or from a Scottish accent [i.e. SSE]’. E.g. the following words, all of which have the vowel /u/ in SSE, are realized with six different phonemes in the dialect of Angus: book /ʊ/, bull /ʌ/, foot /ɪ/, boot /ø/, lose /o/, loose /ʌʊ/.

Some of the more notable features of Scots pronunciation:• /x/ in daughter; in night it is [ç]• /kn-/ in knock, knee (especially Northern Scots)• /vr-/ in write, wrought/wrocht (especially Northern Scots); Island Scots: /xr-/• the convergence of /θ/ and /t/ to /t/ and of /ð/ and /d/ to /d/ in Island Scots (the

Shetlands)

• /uː/ in house, out, now; Southern Scots: /ʌu/ in word-final position• /ø/ or /y/ in moon, good, stool; Northern Scots: /iː/• /eː/ in home, go, bone; Northern Scots: /iː/• /hw-/ in what, when etc.; Northern Scots: /f-/

In Urban Scots many of the features listed are recessive, for example, /x/, /kn-/, or /vr-/. However, /hw/ is generally retained; furthermore, Scots remains firmly rhotic. Yet some younger speakers do merge /w/ and /hw/, and some also delete non-prevocalic /r/. Often pronunciations in which only certain lexical items retain a more traditional Scots pronunciation are found with only selected words while other words have an SSE realization. For example, the vowel /ɪ/ is found in the items bloody, does and used; /i/ in bread, dead and head; /u/ in about, around, brown, cow, etc; and /e/ in do, home, no etc.

StE in Scotland is virtually identical to StE anywhere else in the world. As elsewhere, SSE has its special national items of vocabulary. These may be general, such as outwith ‘outside’, pinkie ‘little finger’, or doubt ‘think, suspect’; they may be culturally specific, such as caber ‘a long and heavy wooden pole thrown in competitive sports, as at the Highland Games’ or haggis ‘sheep entrails prepared as a dish’; or they may be institutional, as with sheriff substitute ‘acting sheriff’ or landward ‘rural’.

Syntactically, SSE shows only minor distinctions vis-à-vis other types of StE. For instance, in colloquial usage, the modal verb system differs inasmuch as shall and ought are not present, must is marginal for obligation and may is rare.

SSE has its own distinct pronunciation as is the case with all national or regional varieties of English. Some of its features are similar to those of Scots: It maintains /x/, spelled <ch>, in some words such as loch or technical. • /hw/ and /w/ are distinct as in wheel and weal. • /l/ is dark [ɫ] in all environments for most speakers though it is clear• everywhere for some speakers in areas where Gaelic is spoken or was

earlier; it is also clear in the southwest (Dumfries and Galloway)This variation in the pronunciation of /l/ is rooted in the fact that SSE includes

two very different traditions. One of these is the Lowlands Scots background. The other tradition is that of Gaelic as a substratum. This means that the phonetic habits of Gaelic are carried over to English. The more immediate the influence of Gaelic, the more instances there will be of English influenced phonetically by Gaelic.

SSE is a rhotic accent, pronouncing /r/ wherever it is written. The articulation of the /r/ is sometimes rolled or trilled [r], sometimes flapped [ɾ], sometimes constricted [ɹ]; however, some speakers even have non-rhotic realizations. Whatever the case, SSE differs considerably from other rhotic accents because it preserves the /e/–/ɪ/–/ʌ/ distinction before /r/ in words like heard–bird–word, where in RP and GenAm these vowels have all merged to central /ə/. Moreover, Scottish English also distinguishes between /o/ and /ɔ/ before /r/ as in hoarse and horse.

The vowel system of SSE does not, on the other hand, maintain all the vowel contrasts of RP. Where the latter has /u/ in fool and /ʊ/ in full, SSE has undifferentiated /u/ in both and often central [ʉ] or even fronted [y]. Not quite as widespread is the loss of the

contrast between /ɒ/ and /ɔː/ (not vs nought) and the opposition between /æ/ and /aː/ (as in cat and cart) are missing as well, though even less frequently.

It has been suggested that these three stand in an implicational relationship, which means that whoever neutralizes /æ/–/aː/ also neutralizes the other two pairs. And whoever loses the opposition between /ɒ/ and /ɔ/ also loses that between /ʊ/ and /u/, but not necessarily the /æ/–/aː/ one.

Scottish English does not rely on vowel length differences as both RP and GenAm do. Length does not seem to be phonemic anywhere. However, there are interesting phonetic differences in length which have been formulated as Aitken’s Law. According to this all the vowels except /ɪ/ and /ʌ/ are long in morphemically final position (for example, at the end of a root such as brew, but also at the end of bimorphemic brew + ed). Vowels are also longer when followed by voiced fricatives, /v, d, z/ and /r/. Because of this, brewed contrasts phonetically with brood, which has a shortened vowel.

Ireland is divided both politically and linguistically and, interestingly enough, the linguistic and the political borders lie close together. Northern Ireland (the six counties of Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone is politically a part of the United Kingdom while the remaining 26 counties form the Republic of Ireland. Although Irish English (IrE), which is sometimes called Hiberno-English, shares a number of characteristics throughout the island, there are also a number of very noticeable differences.

The northern counties are characterized by the presence of Scots forms. These originated in the large scale settlement of the north by people from the Scottish Lowlands and the simultaneous displacement of many of the native Irish following Cromwell’s subjection of the island in the middle of the seventeenth century.

In what is now the Republic, a massive change from the Irish language (a Celtic language related to Welsh and Scottish Gaelic) began around the year 1800. The type of English which became established there stems from England and not Scotland and shows some signs of earlier settlement in the southeast by people from the west midlands of England.

Most characteristic of southern IrE, however, are the numerous features in it which reflect the influence of Irish as the substratum language. In a few areas in the west called Gaeltacht, Irish is still spoken; and Irish is the Republic’s official language (together with English, the second official language). The percentage of population who actually speak Irish is, however, very low (around two per cent).

The northern and eastern parts of the province are heavily Scots and Protestant; the variety of English spoken there is usually referred to as Ulster Scots or, sometimes, Scotch-Irish. Further to the south and west the form of English is called Mid-Ulster English, and its features increasingly resemble those of English in the South, with South Ulster English as a transitional accent.

Northern Ireland has a number of distinct speech areas. In the north and the east there is a band of Scots speech areas running from County Down through Antrim and Londonderry to Donegal. Notably different is the lack of dark [l]. Generally to the south of these areas comes Mid-Ulster English, which is also the variety spoken in Belfast. In the very south of Ulster there is what has been called South Ulster English, a ‘transitional dialect’ between Ulster English and Ulster Scots and southern Hiberno-English.

In general, it seems that Southern Irish English has more features in common regionally than it does differences; nevertheless, a speaker’s origin is usually localizable. Social distinctions are, in contrast, much clearer. At the top of the social pyramid there is an educated variety, sometimes termed the ‘Ascendancy accent’, which is relatively close to RP. However, this accent does not serve as a norm. Indeed, if there is a standard of pronunciation, it is likely to be based on that of Dublin. English in Dublin is, of course, far from uniform.

Bertz recognizes three levels: • Educated, which is reserved for more formal styles and used by people with

academic training; • General, which is found over a wide range of styles and is used by the more

highly trained (journalists, civil servants etc.); and finally, • Popular, which is again stylistically more restricted, namely, to informal

levels and which is typically heard among speakers with a more limited, elementary education.

Further distinctions in IrE are those which run along urban–rural lines. Filppula (1991) found that three typically IrE constructions (clefting, topicalization and the use of the subordinate clause conjunction and) were significantly more frequent among rural than among Dublin speakers. The explanations offered are: urban speakers are further from the Irish substratum; there were lower frequencies in rural Wicklow, which has long been English speaking, than in Kerry and Clare, where change has been more recent; furthermore, Dubliners have more contacts with the non-Irish English speaking outside world.

Wales and England

English in the British Isles

English is the primary language of both Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales) and Ireland (the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland). English is native to England and a major part of Scotland, from where it was transplanted to the other native English speaking areas in the British Isles and around the globe. It is perhaps because its origins are here that this variety, British English (BrE), is often regarded by English learners in many parts of the world as somehow the ‘best’ English.

The vast majority of the inhabitants of England and Wales speak English as their first language; yet there are considerable minorities who do not. This is perhaps most obvious in Wales, where around 20 per cent of the population speaks Welsh. In addition, there are large minorities in urban centres throughout Great Britain who immigrated from the Indian subcontinent or Cyprus and whose mother tongues are not English.

Wales

Wales is the only area in the British Isles where one of the original Celtic languages has been able to survive as the daily language of a large number of

people: just under one fifth use Welsh; of these about 70 per cent use it as their exclusive home language and a further 13 per cent use both it and English as their home languages. Although the future of Welsh is by no means assured, its use seems to have stabilized somewhat vis-à-vis English. There are Welsh language schools in the predominantly Welsh speaking areas in the north, and a fair amount of broadcasting is carried out in Welsh as well. Welsh English shares many of the linguistic features of southern England. What marks it off from the English of England is the effect of the Celtic substratum, which shows most obviously in its sing-song intonation, presumably influenced by Welsh.

In monolingual areas such as the southeast, the influence of Welsh is considerably weaker. Here, for example, monolingual English speakers generally have non-rhotic accents, while bilingual ones further to the west are more likely to have rhotic ones. Throughout Wales clear [l] is the rule, whether prevocalic or postvocalic. This, too, may be due to the substratum, but it is also typical of the English southwest. Welsh influenced English grammar (and vocabulary) is more likely to be heard in nonanglicized areas.

Non-standard Welsh English has additional forms for habitual aspect constructed with the uninflected auxiliary do (present) or did (past) plus the infinitive (He do go to the cinema every week) or with an inflected form of be plus an ing-form of the verb (He’s going to the cinema every week). The latter construction correlates well with the equivalent Welsh form while the do-form, which is predominant in the southeast, is an English construction apparently originally borrowed from the neighbouring English counties, but which is spreading into the be + V-ing area in the west.

Fronting for topicalization (Singing they were) is common in Welsh English and is a reflex of the substratum. The same is true of the practice of reporting indirect questions in the same word order as direct questions (I’m not sure is it true or not). Possession can be expressed by using a prepositional construction (There’s no luck with the rich, ‘they have no luck’). A further instance of influence from the substratum is the use of there in exclamations where GenE would have how (There’s young she looks!, ‘How young she looks!’). The use of an all-purpose tag question isn’t it?, finally, is reminiscent of the same construction in second language Englishes in Africa and Asia. Further non-standard grammatical features of Welsh English are no different from many of the widespread non-standard forms of England.

England

As one moves from area to area in England the variety of local forms in use can be impressively different. It may be difficult, for example, for Somerset and Yorkshire people to understand each other. Yet lack of mutual comprehension does not actually occur very frequently. The reasons for this lie in the fact that almost 90 percent of the population of Great Britain lives in the cities and towns and the speech forms of urban populations are less noticeably different from each other than those of traditional rural communities. Furthermore, speakers of the traditional dialects almost always have a command of GenE.

Within the cities there has been a great deal of levelling (koineization) to a common denominator of forms, and here the more common, overarching, public, media-oriented linguistic culture of General English has become dominant. This is not to say that there are no regional distinctions between the areas. Although there are, they are hardly as extreme as those between many of the traditional dialect areas. The major division within England is between the north and the midlands, on the one hand, and the south, on the other. The chief differences lie in several features of pronunciation.

In southern England, the vowel in such words as luck, butter, cousin or love is pronounced with a low central or fronted vowel /ʌ/ and is therefore distinctly different from that of pull, push, could or look, all of which have /ʊ/. In the north the two groups of words have an identical vowel, namely /ʊ/, so that look and luck are homophones.

A second distinction involves the distribution of /æ/ and /ɑː/. In such words as bath, after, pass, dance and sample the realization in the north is a phonemically short vowel as in GenAm though the quality of / æ / is nearer [a] in northern England. The south, in contrast, has a long vowel, either [aː] or [ɑː]. In a third group of words, namely quarry, swath, what, which have a /w/ preceding the vowel, the northern vowel is fronted [a] while the south has back /ɒ/.

A final distinction is the presence of the short low back vowel /ɒ/ preceding a voiceless fricative in words like moss, off, broth in the north. The south has a long vowel here, /ɔː/. (RP once had / ɔː/, and some older speakers still use it while younger ones use /ɒ/). Other important distinctions within the regional accents of England are the exclusive use of a clear [l] in the southwest and the presence of rhotic areas both in the southwest and in Lancashire in the north. Regional variation in vocabulary is infrequent outside the traditional dialects.

Grammatical variation within GenE is probably less a regional dimension, though this can be the case, than it is an educational one. Those who value education are likely to use StE habitually while those whose orientation lies elsewhere are more likely to use non-standard GenE, which shares a number of characteristics which transcend not only the regional boundaries of England, but its national borders as well and are to be found among native speakers of the language all over the English speaking world. These features include the following:

1) third person singular don’t (she don’t know);2) non-standard past and past participial forms (they come to see us yesterday;

you donea good job; have you went to see them yet?);

3) multiple negation (she don’t have none);4) widespread use of ain’t for be and the auxiliary have (I ain’t interested; he

ain’t comin’; we ain’t seen him);

5) never for (do) not (Did you take them sweets? No, I never); 6) various non-standard relative pronouns such as what or as (he was the man

what/a did it); or none at all as the subject of a restrictive relative clause (he was the ma did it);

7) the demonstrative determiner them (where did you get them new glasses?);

8) the reflexive pronouns hisself and theirselves (he hurt hisself playing football);

9) no plural form after numbers (she’s five foot five tall and weighs eight stone);10) not quite so widespread is the use of the ending {-s} for all persons in

the west of England (I likes it, you likes it, she likes it), but the lack of any {-s} in East Anglia (she like it).

In England there is one accent which is not connected with a specific locality though it is rather more southern than northern in its overall character. This is RP, which is short for Received Pronunciation, where ‘received’ originally meant ‘accepted’ in the sense of being the accent current in the ‘best’ social circles. This rather restricted reference is hardly appropriate in present day English society, for RP is not limited in such a strict way anymore. This is not to say that there are no social distinctions connected with it, for clearly there are. RP is closely associated with education itself as well as with the kind of higher social position and responsibility which is often associated with education. Despite the advantages of RP as a regionally neutral accent, it has not displaced the local accents of England. Estimates about the number of people who speak RP ‘natively’ (i.e. who learned it at home as children and not later in life) are usually set at three to five per cent of the population. As such, RP is clearly a minority accent. However, its speakers occupy positions of authority and visibility in English society (government and politics, cultural and educational life, business and industrial management) far out of proportion to their actual numbers. Until the Second World War, RP was also the exclusive accent of the BBC. Perhaps because of its one time dominance in broadcasting RP is sometimes referred to as BBC English, even though a wide range of English and non-English (Scottish, Irish, North American, Australian) accents can be heard daily on the BBC and other television channels and radio stations. Further designations for this accent include Public School Pronunciation, the King’s/Queen’s English and Oxford English. In linguistic treatments of the accent, ‘RP’ has become the usual label. The accent itself is neither changeless nor uniform, nor is there complete agreement about just what it is. With perhaps a few concessions to local pronunciation habits, it might be possible to extend the number of speakers to whom RP applies; within England this would include a total of perhaps ten per cent, but it would also include many of the most prestigious accents in countries like Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Such an extended accent is called near-RP by Wells and is somewhat vaguely defined to refer ‘to a group of accent types which are clearly “educated” and situated well away from the lower end of the socio-economic scale, while differing to some noticeable degree from what we recognize as RP’. Within RP itself there are several streams. There is Refined or U-RP (= Upper Class RP). Among the various characteristics which Wells cites for it the most likely diagnostic feature is a single tapped [ɾ] in intervocalic position, which is recessive in General RP.

The Refined variety has sub-varieties which Gimson once called Conservative and Advanced RP. Conservative RP counts as old-fashioned and will most likely be heard only among older speakers. It is characterized by a diphthongization of /æ/, something like [eæ]. Furthermore, /ɔː/ may still be realized as the centring diphthong [ɔə]. The centring diphthongs themselves end closer to [a] than to [ə]:

[ɪa], [εa] and [ʊa]. /əυ/ may be [oυ], and, finally, the vowel in words of the type moss, off and broth can be old-fashioned /ɔː/ rather than General /ɒ/.

Urban British English

Urban accents are related to the pronunciations of the regions in which they are situated with a sometimes high degree of koineization.

There are relatively few local lexical items. Non-standard grammatical features are often shared over a wide geographic range (nationally or even internationally) (= GenE).

Phonetic variables are particularly revealing as sociolinguistic indicators of class, gender and age.

Sociolinguistic indicators are most visible for pronunciations currently involved in change.

Phonetic realization correlates highly with speech style (word list style, reading style, interview style, casual conversation).

Stigmatized pronunciations are most subject to variation according to style since they are most closely monitored.

Sociolinguistic indicators are not absolute, but functions of the frequency of occurrence.

Pronunciation change comes either from above (the overt norm) via the middle class or from below (the covert norm) via the working class.

Middle class women are most often leaders in change towards the overt norm; working class men are most often the initiators of changes towards the covert norm.

Cockney

Traditionally, a Cockney is an inhabitant of London’s East End, but from the point of view of language Cockney or near-Cockney can be heard throughout the city. In general, it is a working class accent, and as such it has little or no overt prestige. Its covert prestige is, however, enormous. In the form of it which Wells describes under the label London English, it ‘is today the most influential source of phonological innovation in England and perhaps in the whole English-speaking world’.

The grammar of Cockney is basically of the non-standard vernacular type. Its vocabulary is equally unexceptional.

However, it is well known for its rhyming slang. This is not an exclusively Cockney feature, nor is it typical of the everyday speech of most Cockneys. But it does help to contribute to the image of Cockney as colourful. In rhyming slang a word is replaced by a pair of words, the second of which rhymes with the one replaced. For example, my wife may disappear in favour of my trouble and strife or, positively, my fork and knife. The new pair is often shortened so that someone may say Use your loaf instead of Use your loaf of bread; both mean the same: Use your head. The expression Let’s get down to brass tacks (‘Let’s get down to business’) is originally rhyming slang (brass tacks = the facts).

What is most distinctive about Cockney is its pronunciation; and what is significant about this is the fact that Cockney pronunciations have often indicated the way in which RP was eventually to develop. Among the consonants, Cockney is characterized by H-dropping. While the spelling <h> at the beginning of words such as hour and honor is never pronounced in any standard variety and while its pronunciation in some items is variable (hotel, herb, human) depending on the

region or the individual, there are no limits in Cockney on the words beginning with <h-> which may sometimes occur without /h/, e.g. ’ouse for house.

The voiceless stops /p, t, k/ are frequently more strongly aspirated than in RP or GenAm. They are affricates in some cases: [ts] (tea) or [kx] (call). Furthermore, in final position the same stops may have glottal coarticulation, i.e. a glottal stop just before the oral one, e.g. [εʔt] (hat). It is also possible for the glottal stop to replace /p, t, k/ completely. This could lead to a loss of the distinctions between whip, wit and wick, all as [wɪʔ]. In addition, intervocalic /t/ may be realized as tapped [ɾ] or as the glottal stop. The former is making inroads into RP; the latter is found in numerous urban dialects in Great Britain (but seldom in Ireland). The fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ are very frequently, but not exclusively pronounced as /f/ and /v/ respectively, i.e. three = free and mother rhymes with lover. One exception is that initial /ð/ is not realized as /v/; instead /d/ may be used (these = D’s). Following /t, d, n/ Cockney may have /u/ instead of /ju/ (tune = toon, dune = doon, news = noos). In the case of /t/ and /d/ there seems to be a switch in progress towards a following /j/ which is then palatalized, e.g. /t/ + /j/ → /tʃ/ (Tuesday = Chewsday). One last point about the consonants is the vocalization of /l/. Here words like milk may be pronounced with new diphthongs, e.g. [mɪʊk]. The same sort of thing is happening in Australia and New Zealand and in the American South. The traditional complex vowels (long vowels and diphthongs) of Cockney are noticeably different from their RP and GenAm equivalents. Those which are front or have a front second element in RP start at a progressively lower or more greatly backed position. Those which are back or have a back second element in RP start at a progressively lower or more fronted position. One of the consequences of these shifts in articulation is that RP light sounds virtually the same as Cockney late.

Estuary English (London regional English) is a koineized form of English that seems to be developing in London and its vicinity (the Thames Estuary and the lower Thames valley). It shares the less stigmatized features of Cockney and may be on its way to becoming competition to RP as the pronunciation norm in Britain, as evidenced by the spread of some of its features to cities far removed from the London area (e.g. Bristol, Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow). Like Cockney it shows:

• a move of /eɪ/ to [aɪ] and /aɪ/ to [ɑɪ], • L-vocalization, • the palatalization of initial /tj-/ and /dj-/, • the loss of /j/ in words like new etc., • Increasing replacement of /t/ by [ʔ]. It does not, for example, have H-dropping or the replacement of /θ, ð/ by /f, v/.

And in contrast to Cockney the realization of /r/ in Estuary English may be [ɰ] (i.e. a velar approximant) and /s/ may be rendered as /ʃ/ at the beginning of consonant clusters, e.g. in student, stop, obstruct.