Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

6.4 Varieties of English
Unit 6 Language and place
Section 2 Language variation

Marked contrasts in attitude towards varieties of English are partly a consequence of the history of the language. Virtually all languages involve hierarchies between regional varieties, but the detail differs from language to language. Variation is created by, and then remains left over from, historical, social and political changes in the society; and different amounts of prestige (as well as unequal distribution of social benefits that accompany such prestige) attach to the respective varieties.

6.4.1 History: British Isles

Throughout their history, the British Isles have been host to many different languages, including Gaelic, Welsh, Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Norman French, Punjabi, Chinese and so on. The number of languages in regular use (as well as the number of users of each language) has been reduced at different times by military conquest and by legal and educational suppression, as well as by the emerging prestige of one language or variety as compared with others.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English spelling was regularized and aspects of the grammar were codified, bringing the issue of language standardization openly into critical debate. The continuing complexity of relations between varieties of English in modern times bears the marks of this history, even though present users of the language are generally familiar only with contrasts between current varieties, not with the history that brought them into being or determined their relative status (for further discussion, see Crystal, 2005).

6.4.2 History and geography: the English-speaking world

In the English-using world beyond Britain, variation within American English, Indian English, Nigerian English and Jamaican English - to take only a few instances - correlates not only with regional differences (and, in cases of bilingualism, with the first languages of the speakers); it also relates to social and educational inequalities between metropolitan and outlying regions, and between industrialized urban classes and rural classes. In many of these societies, the presence of English at all results from an imperial history that imposed English on the indigenous population. However, processes of decolonization have led to language changes that give new prestige to regional varieties, and in doing so encourage new, national standard varieties (such as American English or Indian English) that are nevertheless divergent from British English.

The legitimacy of these emergent ’standard’ varieties is not universally recognized. In many countries, in fact, continuing tensions surround the use of English, which is widely viewed as being at a crossroads. The language has residual (and controversial) status as a left-over, imposed language favoured by those associated with the earlier colonial period, and at the same time has actively expanding prestige, as an increasingly global language of access to business and to information and communication technologies. Within many countries, nevertheless, and despite continuing conflicts over linguistic and cultural values, English functions as a crucial marker of class and as an agent of social mobility.

6.4.3 Received pronunciation

In terms of pronunciation, the major phase of standardization in English comes much later than it does in spelling, grammar or punctuation. It is only during the nineteenth century - mainly through the influence of English public school education, and the role of an army-officer corps - that one accent emerges as a non-regional prestige form: Received Pronunciation. This accent, which is itself undergoing changes (taking on increasingly negative connotations in the changing social and class structure of British society), is most closely connected with the dialect of English spoken in south-east England (’Educated Southern British English’), itself undergoing changes in contact with another, emergent variety: so-called Estuary English. Standardization in speech has in this respect followed the pattern established by earlier standardization of the written system, influenced as that was by the location of the royal court, and of the main political, legal and commercial institutions.