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clauses. Boyle has two passive forms (when polished; being endowed with), while Maxwell’s slightly shorter passage contains as many as nine (e.g. what might be called; if the crystal be made still hotter). Boyle also shows personal involvement by referring to himself both here and elsewhere in his treatise, whereas Maxwell avoids self-references. This striking movement away from an authorcentred approach is well documented from the seventeenth century onwards, for instance, in the research articles published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (Atkinson, 1996).
Generic focussing is typically accompanied by an increase in technical terminology in the various branches of science over the last couple of centuries. Present-day scientific prose shares general features such as technical taxonomies, lexical density and nominalisations. They are singled out by M. A. K. Halliday (1993: 71) as grammatical problems typical of scientific English. His list does not stop here; it also mentions interlocking definitions, syntactic ambiguity, and semantic discontinuity. Having started off with the classical models of the Renaissance and the simplicity advocated by the Royal Society, the functional elaboration of standard English has resulted in conventions in these fields that require science literacy – learning how to access these specialist genres not only in terms of content but also of the linguistic forms they typically assume in writing.
5.3.6 |
Pronunciation |
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The story of English pronunciation standards runs parallel to spelling and grammar in that, from early on, there is evidence of supralocal usages, or recommendations for such usages. Many early commentators typically focus on varieties rather than on any particular features of pronunciation. In The Arte of English Poesie, first published in 1589, George Puttenham advises prospective poets to follow ‘the vsuall speach of the Courte, and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx. myles, and not much aboue’ ([1589] 1968: 120). Puttenham’s ‘usual speech’ refers to both social and regional focussing, as he suggests that poets should imitate ‘the better brought-up sort’ in London and in the home counties. Their language and pronunciation, he argues, is widely understood throughout the country. John Hart, a phonetician and orthoepist writing twenty years before Puttenham, agrees with him on the ‘best speech’, which Hart, too, finds is spoken in and around London and at the royal court by the learned and literate (Danielsson, 1963: 31–4).
Valuable though the orthoepists’ accounts are, they do not tell us much about pronunciation differences in London and the home counties at the time. Although the present-day standard pronunciations of a large number of individual words may be traced to a variety of regional sources – probably reflecting dialect mixing in the capital region at any one time – the fact that focussing was taking place must have been of significance. The ideology of standardisation itself may have contributed to increased uniformity (Lass, 1999: 7). But there is also some evidence that the degree of focussing may not have remained at the same level in the
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following century. Mugglestone (2003: 14) exercises caution when interpreting some seventeenth-century pronunciation treatises:
Nevertheless, it should not be assumed that such statements indicate the existence of a ‘standard’ of speech, either in terms of process or ideology, which is akin to that described, and, more importantly, prescribed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Coles, for instance, writing in the late seventeenth century evidently feels constrained to defend his choice of the one variety of ‘proper’ pronunciation which he documents in his book, a situation inconceivable a century later.
Multiple centres of phonological norms continue to be a source of complaints in the eighteenth century. Thomas Sheridan (1719–88), an Irish-born actor and theatrical manager, laments the lack of uniformity in the preface to his General Dictionary of the English Language (1780): ‘There is a great diversity of pronunciation of the same words, not only in individuals, but in whole bodies of men. That there are some adopted by the universities; some prevail at the bar, and some in the senate-house’ (quoted in MacMahon, 1998: 383). The kind of variability that worried Sheridan included word-initial /h/-dropping, simplification of word-initial /wh/ to /w/ in words like while and whet, and unstressed syllables not being given their full, stressed values. To create uniformity and to ‘fix’ the language, Sheridan makes a strong appeal in favour of imitating the speech patterns of the court. Although the other leading London orthoepist of the time, John Walker, downplays the amount of variation in his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791), other dictionary compilers give evidence of a large number of variant pronunciations at the time (MacMahon, 1998: 382–4).
The term Received Pronunciation (RP) was first coined by the dialectologist Alexander Ellis (1869: 23), who in his On Early English Pronunciation defined it as the educated accent ‘of the metropolis, of the court, the pulpit, and the bar’. Ellis based his accent classification on social criteria, and singled out the various public domains of language use as the centres of focussing where the standard norms were set. Although he maintains that Received Pronunciation may be heard throughout the country, he adds that those who come from the provinces are likely to retain traces of their regional accents in their pronunciation. Geographical focussing is also therefore clearly in evidence: the educated pronunciation of London and the court takes precedence over other educated accents in the country.
It is only relatively recently that the norms of standard British (or rather English) English pronunciation were first systematically codified. Attempts were made to that effect in pronunciation dictionaries in the late eighteenth century by Walker (1791) and, in particular, Sheridan (1780). However, a more detailed codification did not become possible until the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) came into existence and began to be used by Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones and their fellow phoneticians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jones’ works ran into a large number of editions, An Outline of English Phonetics, first
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published in its entirety in 1918, into as many as nine. His English Pronouncing Dictionary came out in 1917 and underwent a series of revisions first by Jones himself, and later by A. C. Gimson and Susan Ramsaran (14th edition, 1977). Its sixteenth edition, prepared by Peter Roach and James Hartman, came out in 2003. The most comprehensive recent work in the field is John Wells’ Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (1990), which shows both RP and General American pronunciations.
By its very nature, pronunciation does not, however, easily lend itself to standardisation. Jones (1963: 13) himself points out in his Outline that he cannot offer a full and uniform description of RP. He primarily aims at describing the slower colloquial style, which he deems suitable for the use of foreign learners as well. The variation inherent in RP is similarly discussed by A. C. Gimson, whose Introduction to the Pronunciation of English was first published in 1962 (2nd edition, 1970). Gimson (1970: 88) distinguishes three varieties of RP: ‘conservative’, ‘general’, and ‘advanced’. According to Gimson, conservative RP is used by the older generation and certain professions, general RP is typified by the pronunciation adopted by the BBC, whereas advanced RP is mainly used by young people of some exclusive social groups and in certain professional circles.
In Alan Cruttenden’s revised version of Gimson (1994: 80), the chief RP varieties are labelled ‘general’, ‘refined’ and ‘regional’. Refined RP is used to refer to upper-class usage, with declining numbers of speakers, while the label regional RP is based on geographical rather than social variation. Cruttenden (1994: 80–1) defends his choice of label by saying that although regional RP may sound like a contradiction in terms, it reflects the fact that there is today a far greater tolerance of dialectal variation in all walks of life (the term ‘modified regional pronunciation’ is used by Gimson, 1970: 87). What looked like a heightening of focussing in the first half of the twentieth century, appears to have subsided and resulted in less focalised norms. This may be due to several factors, not least the fact that one of the main centres of pronunciation focussing, the BBC, no longer exercises as strict a pronunciation policy with regard to the use of RP as it used to. Moreover, with the widening range of English-speaking mass media in the last few decades, the position of the BBC as the major trendsetter is itself undergoing change.
As suggested by Wells’ pronunciation dictionary, which describes two varieties of standard English, English pronunciation standards differ significantly from grammar norms in that they are not global. Standard English grammar is compatible with a variety of accents both in Britain and globally. While about 12–15 per cent of the population of England are native speakers of standard English, perhaps 7–12 per cent speak it with some kind of regional accent. This means, as pointed out by Trudgill (1999b: 2–3), that only between 3 and 5 per cent of the population of England speak general, non-regional RP. According to some estimates, the figure is less than 3 per cent (Crystal, 1995: 365).
Other national pronunciation standards have arisen throughout the Englishspeaking world, including a focussed standard Scottish form of pronunciation,
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which has a long history (C. Jones, 1994). The former strong RP influence is also declining in more recent British-based varieties such as Australian, New Zealand and South African English. All of them have evolved a range of accents of their own from Cultivated to General and Broad. While the Cultivated or Conservative variety is still focussed on RP, the General – or Respectable, as the South African taxonomy has it – one is distinctly local. While the General varieties are not stigmatised, they may not be the obvious choice of accent, for instance, ‘for the more up-market sectors of the electronic media’ (Lass, 1990: 272–3; see also Trudgill & Hannah, 1994).
Because of a longer period of separation, the normative status of British pronunciation standards had begun to decline earlier in the United States. Voices started to be heard in favour of current American forms of pronunciation at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. ‘American pronunciations’ were promoted, among others, by the young lexicographer Noah Webster. But opposing views were also propagated, notably in the pronouncing dictionaries published by Joseph Worcester between 1830 and 1860. Where American pronunciations were different from British, Worcester preferred British forms, regarding them as ‘better’, ‘more accurate’ and ‘more harmonious and agreeable’ (Bronstein, 1990: 139). Throughout the nineteenth century, pronunciation focussing in the United States was divided between two centres: educated usage at home and in England.
Even today, there are fundamental differences between American and British English pronunciation standards. Although no longer looking to British models, American English has not developed a high degree of focussing. As there are a number of non-stigmatised regional accents used by educated speakers, Romaine (1998: 39) suggests that US English might be viewed as accentually pluricentric. Alternatively, it is possible to focus on the lack of distinctive dialect characteristics and speak about a mainstream accent associated with the levelled dialects of the northern midwest as standard. However, as shown by Dennis Preston’s studies in perceptual dialectology (e.g. 1996), ordinary people can rarely agree where the best American English is spoken. It is easier for them to reach agreement on where and by whom the worst US English is spoken (by e.g. Southerners, New Yorkers, African Americans, Asians, Mexican Americans).
Pronunciation dictionaries such as Wells (1990) resort to the label General American (GA) to refer to the pronunciation of US speakers with no noticeable eastern or southern accent. This widely used label might suggest a fair degree of supralocalisation and extensive codification. While the former is the case, the latter is not. One of the few detailed descriptions of ‘General American’ is John Kenyon & Thomas Knott’s A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English (1944, 1953), which was intended as the American counterpart to Daniel Jones’ RP dictionary. Kenyon & Knott based their description on the colloquial speech of cultivated speakers of American English. The work remains, according to Bronstein (1990: 146–7), to date ‘the only significantly comprehensive pronunciation lexicon for American English, despite the fact that linguistic/phonetic research over the past