GlLLlAN BROWN

Walking and talking

Learning to walk seems to be the natural achievement of a basic human ability. Each individual walks in a personal manner, with characteristic strides, throwing out the feet, and moving head, shoulders, elbows and hands in a way that permits others to identlfy a friend at a considerable distance simply by the way he walks. Different styles of walking are characterised in various ways, as ‘striding’, ‘mincing’, ’slouching’, ‘limping’, or ‘shambling’, and it is readily acknowledged that some indi- viduals walk more elegantly, efficiently or untidily than others. As children develop this human ability over a period of months, beginning with a few stumbling unsure steps and gradually gaining in confidence and fluency, they learn gradually to adapt to the surrounding world, and cope with different types of terrain.

The process of learning to talk is equally ‘natural’. Again the child’s ability matures over an extended period of time. Initially babbling sounds are heard which belong to no particular language, but eventually there is a focus on those sounds heard in words spoken in the immediate family context. And here lies the first obvious difference from learning to walk. Since language is a largely social phenomenon, specialised for communi- cating with other people, the child learns words and phrases heard in the daily environment. What is learnt then is the local form of the language, which for the majority of children in Britain will be some form of urban or urbanised dialectical English. The social environment is crucial in determining the model of language available to the child. It is too often forgotten, however, that each individual is going to develop a competence in language in an individual manner. Each child quite soon begins to prefer particular words and phrases, partly no doubt because they relate to idio- syncratic interests or perhaps because the child is already developing an aesthetic sense which will differ to some degree from that of siblings and friends. Gradually there develops an idiosyncratic style of speech which on the one hand identifies the individual, just as an idiosyncratic gait does, and on the other identifies the speech community from which the speaker comes.

In a pre-literate society, a local form of language may be quite sufficient for most purposes in life (though it is interesting in this connection to consider how many speakers in pre-literate or only partially literate societies learn to speak one or more languages in addition to their mother-tongue).

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In a literate society, children may be called upon to learn a ’high’ version of the language spoken in the local community when school begins and they learn to read and write. Usually only one version of an established language is regularly used in writing. When written forms are first intro- duced into a language, each scribe may write the dialect which he speaks, a situation which is familiar from the diverse dialects represented in the manuscripts of medieval England. However, once printing is developed and mass production becomes possible, it is likely that a single dialect will emerge as the privileged form, and this becomes the ’standard’ or ‘high’ form which is regularly used in writing. The ‘high’ form which emerges as the standard will usually be selected because it is the language used by some powerful group in society - the Court, the Law, the Church or all of these. Initially there will be little linguistic difference between this dialect and the others which failed to achieve a stable written form. However, with the passing of time, significant differences begin to emerge. It is possible to write very long sentences, and to keep control of the form because you can look back over what you have written. Gradually it becomes normal to express complex conceptual relationships through complex syntax in written language, relationships which would be difficult to keep track of if they were expressed in transitory speech. The grammar of spoken language is typically much simpler - it is specialised for different purposes and for different functions.

The development of written language facilitates the development of philosophical thought - it would be far too strong to claim that it is necessary for this development, but for most ordinary mortals it is easier to follow complex argument if it is written down. Just as philosophical thought comes to a wider public and can be studied across distances and over centuries, so other areas of knowledge - history, economics and the physical sciences - are developed in the context of the written language, and this very development changes the nature of the language. Standard English today differs from local dialects not only in permitting the ex- pression of complex relationships in familiar written forms, but also in the astonishing wealth of vocabulary which has accrued to it through its intellectual and imperial history. Dialects, we should remember, are essentially local to particular parts of a particular country, and specialised for talking about local and domestic life.

The Cox Report (1989) has recommended that all children should learn Standard English at school. Many would argue that learning a school subject - geography, chemistry, or English literature - entails learning the language in which that subject is expressed. Since subjects learnt at school have been codified and developed through written texts, and written texts

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are written in Standard English, it follows that children, to have any hope of mastering these subjects, must learn to read and to write Standard English.

It is easy to make the case for insisting on a command of the written language in education. It should also be noted that virtually all public writing in English is in Standard English - apart from cartoons, comic strips, graffiti and relatively few literary passages. A person in this country who cannot write in Standard English is, for many practical purposes in adult life, regarded as illiterate, and condemned to restricted opportunities in education and in employment.

What does it mean to write Standard English? It really means no more than to write normal written English, with complete sentences, conven- tional spelling, and conventional, even exiguous, punctuation. You are not obliged to use exotic vocabulary or complicated grammar. There are a few well-known shibboleths, words which are common in the spoken language like 'got', 'really' and 'nice', which writers sooner or later have to learn to avoid. For most children, the difficulty in learning to write lies not so much in learning to write Standard English, as in learning to construct an argument or a narrative paragraph: the problem is rhetorical rather than linguistic. These rhetorical skills are hard to learn because they are very far from being 'natural' - they are thoroughly conventional. I have compared the natural acquisition of talking with the natural acquisition of walking. Learning to construct an argument or a narrative paragraph, in contrast, requires at least as much practice and attention to conventional detail as learning to dance a recognisable foxtrot.

The Cox Report requires not only that children should learn to read and to write the standard form of the language, which can hardly be considered contentious by anyone concerned with the intellectual development of the child. It also requires that children should learn to speak Standard English (while humanely acknowledging that they may speak it with a local pro- nunciation). This is a requirement which is much harder to justify. We all know that written language is usually written in the standard form of the language. But for those who speak a dialect - and remember that they are the majority in this country - most spoken language in everyday life will be addressed to friends, family, and neighbours, most of whom speak the same dialect. Why, then, should children learn to speak Standard English? The traditional argument has always been rather shifty on this point, but essentially comes down to fearing that prejudiced social judgments may be made by potential employers, particularly by speakers of Standard English. My own feeling is that this argument is a good deal less potent than once it was, since if you present yourself with the elan of a Janet

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Street Porter or a Billy Connolly, judgments about delicacies of Standard English seem rather wide of the mark. It is true that few of us reveal such sparkling confidence, and many might welcome the possibility of turning to ‘the language of everybody and nobody’, but an instinct for social reform, or simply observing the range of speakers in public life nowadays who reveal occasional local usages, might lead us to suppose that the social argument is no longer convincing.

I believe that the strongest argument for being able to speak Standard English can be based on straightforward educational requirements like being able to talk about the subject you are studying, as well as being able to read and write about it. If you are learning biology, history of art, or mathematics, you learn the subject in the language of the subject, and to discuss what you are studying, you need to control the appropriate language of the subject.

It could be suggested that the social argument for learning to speak Standard English is strikingly enhanced now that we have entered the 1990s and the global village is becoming smaller. From the vantage point of any foreign speaker of English from anywhere in the world - and the estimated number of hundreds of millions of such speakers seems to grow almost from day to day - there is only one form of correct English: that is the Standard English which is so strikingly similar in the written form, whether it is produced in Britain, the United States of America or Australia by native speakers of English, or in the USSR, Denmark or Ghana by foreign speakers. For foreign users, spoken expressions like ’I don’t know nothing about that’ or ‘She’s a-goin’ up the park’ are simply wrong. Foreign speakers do not typically make finely adjusted social judgments: they may assume that the speaker who produces such extraordinary forms is ignorant and uneducated, or they simply fail to understand what the speaker is trying to say. They, after all, have invested in years of education in order to produce ’correct’ English. Young adult English speakers who are monolingual dialect speakers are not only going to be subject to snobbish judgments by fellow-countrymen, but also to similar judgments by a world of foreign speakers. And, far more significantly, they are going to be much more liable actually to be misunderstood by people who have learnt English as a foreign language. People who learn English in schools and colleges overseas are necessarily exposed to a much narrower range of English usage than that which an inhabitant of Britain will brush against from day to day. Unlike us, they only ever encounter the standard form of the language. A Janet Street Porter or a Billy Connolly may seem an exotic and attractive figure to people who have learnt English as a foreign language. They will hardly fail to admire their sheer vitality. However,

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even such attractive figures will remain absolutely incomprehensible unless they are prepared to talk to their foreign listeners in Standard English.

Cult.media figures may sanctify dialectical variants, but social reformers should note that these cult figures are usually perfectly capable of shifting gear into a form at least very close to Standard English should they be talking to someone who cannot understand them unless they do. This is precisely what the Cox Committee, as I understand it, is recommending. They are not proposing any sort of attack on dialectical speech - it will flourish in its own ambience, forging links between those who are members of a close speech community. But dialect speakers need, in addition, to be able to talk in the standard form when they meet people from other areas of Britain or from other countries. This need not imply a grandiose style. It is sufficient simply not to use words and expressions that are only locally understood. You can still express your individuality by your selection of forms in the standard language. On appropriate occasions and for particular purposes, it is sometimes a good thing to be able to march in step.