Grammatical and Lexical Variance in English

Randolph Quirk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317890805
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

Written by one of Britain's most distinguished linguists, this book is concerned with the phenomenon of variance in English grammar and vocabulary across regional, social, stylistic and temporal space.

CHAPTER 1

Variance in English: the global context

Language variation and change¹ were much in vogue among scholars of the nineteenth century, and they were rewarded by dramatic strides in comparative philology on the one hand and in dialectology on the other. By contrast, in much of the twentieth century linguistic scholarship focused on monolithic, coherent ‘états de langue’, in whichever of diverse ways Saussurean metaphors came to trigger energies and imaginations. Such a focus was, moreover, consistent with lay perceptions about language, with national education systems and national broadcasting networks (not to mention increased ease of travel and labour mobility) fostering the belief that regional and social variation would decline as the standard forms of national languages increased their currency and prominence.

To a large extent, these lay perceptions have proved to be soundly based. Yet during the last third of the twentieth century, professional linguists turned their interests, perhaps more than ever before, to issues of language variation. One thinks – so far as English is concerned – of the studies in working-class city speech, for example, by William Labov and Peter Trudgill. The principled objectivity of scientific linguistics, furthermore, has fostered a widespread reaction against prescriptivism which has filtered through to the school classroom along with a consequent reluctance on the part of teachers to seem to be imposing an alien norm on the natural speech of their pupils.

An additional spur to fresh interest in language variation has proceeded from the assertion of linguistic nationalism in a wide range of post-imperial countries, whether those with relatively long-standing independence (such as the Spanish-speaking states of middle and southern America) or those that became independent more recently (such as the ‘Francophone’ and ‘Anglophone’ countries in much of Africa). Indeed, such issues as to whether French in Côte d’Ivoire should observe the standard of French in France, English in the Philippines the standard of English in the USA, English in India or Nigeria the standard of English in Britain became livelier than the conflict between Castillian and the Spanish current in Mexico City or Buenos Aires. The kinds of linguistic variation, ranging from ‘acrolectal’ forms used by the most educated, through ‘mesolectal’ forms, creolised forms, to the ‘basilectal’ and most pidginised forms of speech – along with the ways in which such variation differs from the ranges observable among native (perhaps typically, monolingual) speakers in Madrid, Paris, or London – are of absorbing interest as well as of great theoretical importance. And the bearing upon education and internal communication in such countries as the Philippines, India, Senegal, or Mozambique is of equal importance. Should governments encourage and promote local varieties of English, French, Portuguese to the point of institutionalising them for internal national purposes – and if so, how?

It is not surprising that, in consequence, interest in language varieties has extended far beyond university departments of linguistics: to the international, influential, and extraordinarily catholic readership of The Economist, for example. In the context of discussing the extent to which English has become the world’s chief link language, an article in 1988 proceeded to comment breezily on variation within it:

Sorry, Esperanto. It was a brave notion to invent a universal language, and the world some day may have one – Mandarin? Martian? Microcircuitous? – but for the time being it makes do with English. Which English, and for what time being? Some sensible teachers of English fear that the time will not be long if some other teachers are not more rigorous about the English they teach.

These others draw their attitudes from the anything-goes 1960s. Forget Oxford English, it was argued. If kids talk Geordie or Jamaican, or their American parallels, at home, teach them to express themselves in the dialect they know. That argument spread with the arrival in Britain of Asians, in America of Hispanics, whose home life was not conducted in any kind of English. Should they be taught standard English, or that of the neighbourhood where they had settled? The British at the time were abandoning the belief, which Americans had never held, that there was only one correct accent. If accents could vary, why not accept every variety of English?

The weakness of such arguments was cruelly exposed in Britain in the 1980s: to rap in Rastafarian may be a liberating skill, but it is not one that many employers want to hire. Few teachers today would argue that there is only one correct variety of English; some English has to be translated into American to avoid technical misunderstandings. But fewer still argue that simply anything goes. Nor do many West Indian or Hispanic parents thank those who do.

For ‘parents’ read ‘governments’, and you have the argument in its international form. Native teachers of English in, say, Japan normally aim to teach standard English, whether in its British or American variety. That is what Japanese employers expect. They are increasingly miffed when British or American teachers imported to guide them in this task express doubts whether it is worth attempting.

The imported teachers say there is a long-established variant of English used in India. If British or American English, why not Indian English or Japanese English? Why try to draw any line? In the homelands of English, jargon is rife, and not only among scientists and brasshats. Literary critics cheerfully write a dense deconstructionist gibberish. Are they using their native tongue any better than someone who says, ‘You is, ain’t you’? Some Indians use a courtly English almost forgotten in its own land; others will say ‘You are staying Colaba side, isn’t it?’ – to English ears an odd way of asking whether one lives in that part of Bombay, yet intelligible from one end of India to the other. Is English grammar supposed to kick out such phrases, while its databanks accession Haigspeak?

It is now clear that the answer, even from India, is yes. The English that such countries want is one that enables Indians to communicate not just with each other, but with the English-speaking world. Thank you for your tolerance, they say, but we’d prefer your standard English. (The Economist, 16 July 1988)

In this book (and especially in Chapters 3 and 4), we shall be looking at grammatical and lexical variance with the role of English in the world very much in mind, along with the issue of standards. As a prelude, it may be useful to recall one of the best-known statements of a standard for English. In The arte of English poesie (1589, reputedly by George Puttenham, who died in the following year), the creative writer is advised that one form of English is more highly regarded than all others. In consequence, one should follow ‘the usuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx. myles, and not much above’. No variety of English is ‘so courtly nor so current’.

That view dates from the time when Shakespeare was a young man and when English was not in global use but only ‘of small reatch, it stretcheth no further than this Hand of ours, naie not there over all’ (Richard Mulcaster in 1582). The language was in those years known almost exclusively to native speakers and there were perhaps as few as seven million of them.

The contrast with the position of English four hundred years later is extraordinary: now in daily use not by seven million people but by seven hundred million – and only half of them native speakers of the language. No longer ‘of small reatch’ but a language – the language – on which the sun does not set, whose users never sleep. For between 1600 and 1900, speakers of English pushed themselves into every part of the globe (more recently, to lunatic deserts far beyond the globe), so that at this present time, English is more widely spread, and is the chief language of more countries, than any other language is or ever has been.

But that is only part of the contrast between the 1580s and today – and not the most striking nor, in the present connection, the most relevant. In the 1580s almost no one who was not actually brought up speaking English ever bothered to learn it. Now English is in daily use among three or four hundred million people who were not brought up speaking it as their native language. Most of them live in countries requiring English for what we may broadly call ‘external’ purposes: contact with people in other countries, either through the spoken or the written word, for such purposes as trade and scientific advance. They are people for whom English remains a foreign language (though usually the chief foreign language) whether they live in a country with a highly developed tradition of English teaching, such as the Netherlands or Sweden, or in a country where English teaching is less well developed, such as Spain or Senegal. We refer to these countries as EFL countries, and it should be noted that their use of English is in no way confined to contacts with English-speaking countries: a Korean electronics manufacturer will use English in negotiating with a Brazilian firm in Rio.

But there are many millions of people who live in countries where English is equally not a native language but where English is in widespread use for what we may broadly call ‘internal’ purposes as well: in administration, in broadcasting, in education. Such countries range in size from India, struggling with the economic development of a huge and various population in a huge and various territory, to Singapore, tiny by contrast, but already economically thriving. By reason of the sharply different and much wider role of English in these countries, where the language is usually designated in the constitution as one of the ‘national’ languages, along with indigenous ones, it is inappropriate to regard English as merely a foreign language. The practice has grown up of referring to English in these circumstances as a ‘second’ language and to the countries concerned as ESL countries (but cf. Chapter 4). The great Indian university institution in Hyderabad, which specialises in training expert language teachers, interestingly proclaims this distinction in its official title: CIEFL – the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages. Not, we notice, English and other foreign languages. Hyderabad does not regard English as a ‘foreign’ language in India, though the proportion of the population making competent use of it is in fact far smaller than that in several advanced EFL countries such as the Netherlands.

Finally, in contrast with these EFL and ESL countries, we can complete a terminological triad by marking off those countries such as the UK, the US, or Australia, where English is a native language: the ENL countries. And, it may be remarked, English is a global language in each of these three categories: there are ENL, ESL, and EFL countries all round the world.

But the coming into existence of this threefold manifestation of English by no means completes the list of essential distinctions between the 1580s and the present. When there was only ENL and that for only seven million people, it was possible – as we have seen – to recommend a single model or standard. And in specifying it as he did, the author of The arte of English poesie went on to say that in this ‘we are already ruled by th’English Dictionaries and other bookes written by learned men’. Few today would suggest that there was a single standard of English in the world. There are few enough (not least among professional linguists) that would claim the existence of a single standard within any one of the ENL countries: plenty that would even deny both the possibility and the desirability of such a thing. Recent emphasis has been on multiple and variable standards (insofar as the use of the word ‘standard’ is ventured): different standards for different occasions for different people – and each as ‘correct’ as any other.

Small wonder that there should have been in recent years fresh talk of the diaspora of English into several mutually incomprehensible languages. The fate of Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire presents us with such distinct languages today as French, Spanish, Romanian, and Italian. With the growth of national separatism in the English-speaking countries, linguistically endorsed not least by the active encouragement of the anti-standard ethos I have just mentioned, many foresee a similar fissiparous future for English. Not long ago, much prominence was given to the belief expressed by R. W. Burchfield that in a century from now the languages of Britain and America would be as different as French is from Italian.

I do not share this view. We live in a very different world from that in which the Romance languages went their separate ways. We have easy, rapid, and ubiquitous communication, electronic and otherwise. We have increasing dependence on a common technology whose development is largely in the hands of multi-national corporations. Moreover, we have a strong world-wide will to preserve intercomprehensibility in English.

It so happens that when Burchfield made his prediction, I chanced to be reading a book by that great Oxford linguist Henry Sweet, who had made precisely the same prediction just a hundred years earlier: ‘in another century … England, America, and Australia will be speaking mutually unintelligible languages’. Sweet’s forecast (which, given the circumstances and received knowledge of his time, had a greater plausibility than Burchfield’s today) proved dramatically wrong because he overestimated the degree and rate of change.

We can err, likewise, if we unduly emphasise a difference between the present and the 1580s in respect of variation within English. Variety and variability were well acknowledged in Shakespeare’s time (and they are certainly well attested in Shakespeare’s own writing). In part, the problem has been the failure to make explicit which aspects of English were to be regarded as susceptible of standardisation. Gradually, it came to be felt that individual lexical items could be dubbed ‘standard’ as opposed to, say, dialectal (though Caxton’s hesitation between egges and eyren was to be paralleled for many a generation of printers); that there was a standard grammar (though writ and wrote could both for long be of it); that above all there was a standard spelling (though this admitted a wide range of variation until fairly recently and even now embraces such things as both judgment and judgement).

Always least liable to be categorised as standard or non-standard was pronunciation: reasonably enough, since standardisation was predominantly occasioned by the need to provide long, uniform print-runs of books and papers on which pronunciation had no necessary bearing. But with the advance of mass broadcasting in the 1920s, managers of the new medium were faced with the oral analogue of the issue that had confronted Caxton and others in the late sixteenth century. And an analogous decision was taken: there would be generalised use of a single accent, assumed to be admired by or at any rate acceptable to the greatest number of the most critical section of the public. In the US an educated ‘Midland’ (ie neither New England nor Southern) was selected which came to be referred to as ‘network English’: in the UK the minority voice of the public schools (‘RP’) was selected and this came to be referred to quite often as ‘BBC English’. In fact, in each case, it was something more: by having been thus selected for nationwide broadcasting, each was implicitly regarded in its respective domain (American or British) as the standard pronunciation. And this has of course caused a widespread and most unfortunate misconception that RP is a (or even the most salient) feature of Standard English.

But broadcasting did not merely thus dramatically extend the scope of potential standardisation: it also made overt that there was indeed more than one single standard of English. Of course, it had always been known that Americans spoke differently from the British (just as Yorkshiremen spoke differently from Cornishmen); but this knowledge did not of itself raise the question as to which – if any of these – was standard. Moreover, since in neither the US nor the UK was the selected accent that of anything like a majority of speakers (though more nearly so in the case of network American English), there was a further implication: the standard language is inevitably the prerogative of a rather special minority. This last aspect has of course had its own reverberations: in the US, a competitor for the rank of standard in accents has been New England (‘Harvard’), and this has been far more obviously a minority mode of speech than ‘network’. We shall come to other reverberations below.

Meanwhile, the early twentieth century also saw the rise of another development: the professional teaching of English world-wide to those for whom it was not a native language. I adopt this cumbersome periphrasis so as to embrace the peoples of both the EFL and the ESL countries as we now (but did not then) distinguish them. At first this was almost entirely (as it remains predominantly) a British activity. The accent that John Reith adopted as the voice of the BBC was the one already identified by Daniel Jones as the ‘Received Pronunciation’ appropriate to teach to non-native learners. Textbooks rapidly disseminated this standard, together with the congruently hieratic lexicon and grammar, on a world-wide basis. It remained unchallenged ...