1.3. British English

It is a fascinating fact that a dialect born in the south-eastern corner of a multilingual offshore island, together with an accent spoken by a small minority in that island, has had such a successful world-wide perspective, the most salient reason for this is the economic power of the United States. From a historical point of view, it began with the economic and military might of an island off the coast of mainland Europe.

I n the time of Queen Elizabeth I, there were roughly five million speakers of English, mostly in England. When James VI of Scotland ascended the English throne, as James I, in 1603, he brought to the English court speakers of a strange tongue, Scots. Some people might have considered Scots a dialect of English but others might have called it a closely related language. Even then, looking beyond the frontiers of England, you could find other people speaking something like English. Still, as isthe case nowadays, the population of the British Isles was concentrated in the part we still call England, in fact in south-eastern England and with it the population of speakers of English. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, these restless native speakers had travelled far and wide, trading with, and frequently corning into possession of, parts of the world thousands and thousands of miles away.

British 'ownership' of other parts of the world often happened in a haphazard way, not so much because of any long standing national dream of world domination. The guiding forces were economic, to maintain trade routes. Strictly imperial ambitions appear to have been more of an afterthought or the personal obsessions of individuals. Historians may disagree, but, however it happened, by the mid-twentieth century, the figure of five million had become more like five hundred million. And these speakers were spread over all the world.

One might imagine that the decline of Britain as a world power — even granting that Britain is still an influential country - might have led to the swift adoption of American English as the world standard, to the exclusion of British English. But Britain is still the closest source of English for European countries, and its standard is still strongly established in the educational systems of its former colonial territories outside North America. For some countries, especially for those who are less enamoured of the USA, British English provides a more acceptable variety of the lingua franca. It is also accepted by most users of other standard varieties as an alternative standard. At the same time, British English itself is exposed to the influence of American English and the distance between the two varieties, already not so great, is diminishing with each successive decade.

In sum, as the British, and more specifically the English, look out from their particular part of a small island across to Australia and Canada and the USA and many other countries in between, they see 'their' language spoken far and wide in various forms and with various accents. These accents amuse and occasionally horrify them but nonetheless this variety of English has provided the British with reassurance that it is not really necessary for them to learn a foreign language. More than that, the British can cling to the irrational but unsurprising notion that the 'true' form of English is the one spoken in the island where it originated.

The idea of a correct way of speaking English suggests that there is a single standard for all to follow. From afar, it might indeed seem that educated people in Britain all speak one kind of English. Watching British films might lead you to add a few non-standard options, perhaps Cockney, Liverpudlian, Scottish or Irish (depending on the films you watch). In reality, the majority of the inhabitants of the British Isles speak what might be called non-standard English. This is particularly true when it comes to accent. The standard British accent taught all over the world is RP( Received Pronunciation) but speakers ofRP are a small minority in their own country. Nevertheless, RP is a widely understood accent, free of any regional association within England itself and spoken throughout the UK. It is the most exhaustively described accent in the English language and is still held up as the accent to aim at in many поп-English-speaking countries. Within the UK, it is popularly associated with the Royal Family, the BBC and those who were educated at private schools.

The success of RP is that it is an accent that everyone understands — even though they might not speak it. When the BBC World Service first tried to make its English more representative of the country at large and introduced different accents into its news broadcasts, there was a chorus of complaints from listeners in other countries, and the BBC went back to RP

If we take 'standard' to refer to grammar and vocabulary, and particularly to written English, not to pronunciation or accent, then the number of users of standard British English is quite large and may be said to include the majority of educated native speakers, whatever language they happen to speak.

In spoken English, the various regions of the British Isles not only have local accents but also local vocabulary and idiom. It is therefore not surprising that people from, say, Fife in Scotland or Cardiff in south Wales or Cornwall in south-western England, may sound very different from each other. Not only foreigners but also people from other parts of Britain may have difficulty in understanding some local speech. The reality of Britain is far from the stereotype of a country bursting with RP speakers. And even RP speakers may betray regional traces. Many people blend in to their accent enough of RP to sound educated and worthy of employment but not enough to be associated with the upper social class that RP traditionally represents.

Attitudes to accents change. The national accents - educated Welsh, Scots and Irish - have always been more socially acceptable in Britain, but since the 1980s the respectability of regional accents has grown considerably. As suggested above, many people even avoid a pure RP for fear of sounding snobbish or, if they are from outside England, 'loo English'. Many non-native speakers of English are more conservative in this regard, and as learners are unlikely to be judged 'posh' for speaking RP. When actually visiting the U K, they still need to be prepared for constant exposure to accents that arc not RP.

Immigration has made modern Britain a multilingual, multi-ethnic society, but it has always been so since English was first spoken there. Celtic languages, spoken in the British Isles before the arrival of the Germanic peoples who brought what was to become English, have continued to be spoken and survive in several areas. Welsh is enjoying a strong revival and there are even attempts being made to bring Cornish back to life. Moreover, Irish Gaelic (now known simply as Irish) is an official language of the Republic of Ireland. A small percentage of the population of Scotland speaks Scottish Gaelic (not to be confused with Scots, the Germanic language of the old Scottish court refejred to earlier) and another closely related Gaelic language, Manx, is spoken on the Isle of Man. But English is of course the main language of the British Isles and is spoken as first language by the vast majority of the population.