English as an international language

For every person who speaks Standard English, there must be a hundred who do not, and
another hundred who speak other varieties as well as the standard. Where is their story told?
(David Crystal)
No one mans English is all English. (James Murray)

English and Englishes

Standard varieties American English, Australian English, British English, Canadian English,
New Zealand English, South African English;
A pluricentric language
Dialects of same language
Non-standard varieties patterns of usage
Inner Circle vs Outer Circle (Kachru)
Regiolects
Sociolects
Expanding Circle
A multilingual history.
Diversity of speakers, diversity of forms they use.

Before English:
The Pre-history of English

Wave of migrations 5th and 6th century across the channel to the British Isles
Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Frisians Anglo-Saxons
Different dialects
Native Celtic population
Celtic language
Latin
Contact with people on the other side of the channel and the North Sea through trade
Germanic
Proto-Germanic circa 200 BC
Indo-European languages of Europe, Asia, Asia Minor
Sanskrit

Greek

Latin

Old
Church
Slavonic

house

damah

domos

domus

domu

new

navah

neos

novus

novu

three

trayah

treis

tres

triye

brothe

bhrata

phrater

frater

bratru

r
Sounds, forms, syntactic patterns subject to evolutionary change preserve the integrity of
the system. Vocabulary freer system more open to change
The division of Proto-Germanic: Fundamental three-way division of the Germanic speech
community: North Germanic (Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian), East Germanic (Gothic now
extinct), West Germanic (German, Dutch, Frisian and English).
West Germanic peoples: Denmark, more northerly and North Sea coastal areas of Germany, the
Netherlands, Belgium
West Germanic
Old High German (700 AD), Old Saxon (800 AD), Old English (700 AD), Old Frisian (13 th
century copies of 11th century texts)
Old English Germanic language that developed in British isles out of dialects brought by
Anglo-Saxons in 5th and 6th centuries AD

Old English
Phonology
An original n or m is lost between a vowel and f, , or s:

Old
Old
Old High Gothic
Saxon Englis German
h
five

fif

fif

fimf

fimf

journ si
ey

si

sind

sins
(time)

us

us

unsih

unsis

us

Old Frisian and Old English have a e or (the latter representing a vowel similar to that in
modern English there) where Old Saxon (usually), Old High German, and Old Norse have a and
Gothic has e; the vowel in such words in Proto-Germanic is closest to
Grammar personal pronouns
Just one form for accusative and dative 1st person singular and one form for accusative and
dative 2nd person singular

1st person

Old Frisian Old English Old Saxon

Old
HighOld Norse
German

Gothic

mi

acc.

2nd person thi

me

mi

thi

dat.

acc.

dat.

acc.

dat.

mih mir

mik

mer

mik

Mis

ik

er

uk

us

dih

dir

Vocabulary borrowing from Celtic:

Gothic noun reiks ruler, and both there and in other Germanic languages as the adjective
powerful (OldNorse rikr, OldHighGerman rihhi, OldSaxon riki, OldFrisian rike, OldEnglish rice
(modern English rich) - borrowed from an early Celtic form *rigs
Borrowing believed to have happened some centuries before the beginning of the Christian
era as the Germanic peoples were expanding from their original homeland and encountering
the Celts on their way
Assumed that it indicates something of the nature of Celtic political organization, relative to
that of the Germanic speakers, at the time the borrowing occurred
Word that appears in modern Englishas iron (Gothic eisarn, etc.) corresponding forms in
Celtic: Old Irish iarn and Welsh haearn
Transmission of iron-working capabilities from one people to another at an early date
Vocabulary borrowing from Latin (through trade, war):
Latin word caupo (peddler, shopkeeper, innkeeper) basis for Germanic words meaning
merchant (Old Norse kaupmar, Old High German koufo, koufman, Old English cypa, ceapmann),
to trade, buy and/or sell (Gothic kaupon, Old Norse kaupa, Old High German koufen, coufon, Old
Saxon kopon, Old Frisian kapia, Old English ceapian, cypan)
Modern English word wine - Latin vinum found across the whole spread of Germanic
languages: Gothic wein, Old Norse vin, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, Old English
win.
Pervasiveness of the term suggests an earlier rather than a later date
By the time Anglo-Saxons encountered Romanized Celts in present-day England, they had
been in contact with Roman civilization, Latin culture for over 500 years:
Moe word frt. Me t uhte

when I heard of that wonder, that the

wrtlicu wyrd, a ic t wundor

worm, a thief in the darkness,

gefrgn,

swallowed up a mans speech, the

t se wyrm forswealg wera gied sumes,

glorious utterance and its firm

eof in ystro, rymfstne cwide

support. The thievish visitor was not at

ond s strangan staol. Stlgiest ne

all the wiser for swallowing

ws

those words.)

Wihte y gleawra, e he am wordum

Book-Moth Riddle, Exeter Book

swealg.
(A moth devoured the words. That
seemed to me a strange happening,
Transition from orality to literacy in the use of the vernacular in Anglo-Saxon England is
present.
Attempts by Anglo-Saxon scribes to reproduce their spoken language in the form of writing
underlies many linguistic features and developments in OE.
Old English is the term denoting the form of the English language used in England for
approximately seven centuries (c 450 -1150 AD).

In this period, language was far from stable. OE term used to cover a wide range of linguistic
usages. Linguistic characteristics of OE and external factors such as political, social, and
cultural, influenced its development. Five historical watersheds with far-reaching linguistic
ramifications:
1) Invasion of Britain by Germanic peoples (Anglo-Saxons) in mid-fifth century, ensuing
dialectal diversity;
2) Christianization of Anglo-Saxons in 597 made Roman alphabet available;
3) Reign of King Alfred, West Saxon kingdom (871-899) OE recognized as language of
prestige and status;
4) Benedictine reform (second half of 10th century) led indirectly to establishment of OE
literary language;
5) Norman Conquest (1066) steered development of OE to Middle English;
The migration myth:
Anglo-Saxons arrive in England in 449 in response to King Vortigerns invitation to settle
there. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle collection of annals set up during King Alfreds reign and kept
up for 200 years. Bedes 8th century Latin Ecclesiastical History of the English People:
Those people came from three nations of Germany: from the Old Saxons, from the Angles, and from
the Jutes. From the Jutes came the inhabitants of Kent and the Wihtwara, that is, the race which now
dwells in the Isle of Wight, and that race in Wessex which is still called the race of the Jutes. From the
Old Saxons came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons. From the land of the
Angles, which has lain waste between the Jutes and the Saxons ever since, came the East Anglians, the
Middle Anglians, the Mercians, and all of the Northumbrians. (The Peterborough Chronicle)
Dialectal distinctiveness can be linked to geographical areas: Main dialects of Old English:
Kentish, West Saxon, and Anglian (Northumbrian and Mercian).
597 Augustine and his followers begin conversion of Anglo-Saxons to Christianity. Recorded
in Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and in Bede. Bedes account: In a Roman market-place Pope Gregory
encountered slave-boys from Britain and was inspired to send missionaries:
Again he asked what the race from which they came was called. The reply was that they were called
English. He said: That is appropriate, because they have a matchless appearance and likewise it is fitting
that they should be joint-heirs with the angels in heaven. Then he inquired further, saying: What is the
name of the province from which the boys were brought? Then the reply came that they were called Deiri.
He said: Deiri is an appropriate term, [deiraeruiti removed from anger]; they shall be removed from
Gods anger and called to Christs mercy. He asked moreover what their king was called; the reply came
that he was called lle. And then he punned on the name, saying: Alleluia, it is fitting that praise of God
our Creator should be sung in those places.
One of most profound effects is the development of an Old English script based on the
Roman alphabet. Before only runic alphabet was based on earlier Germanic futhark. Futhorc
runes used by the Anglo-Saxons (central Mercia, Kent, Northumbria) since 4 th or early 5th
century until 11th century. E.g. Ruthwell cross The Dream of the Rood, Exeter Book riddles, the
Rune Poem, Cynewulfs signature on four poems (Fates of the Apostles, Elene, Christ II, Juliana)
Sounds in OE for which Roman alphabet had no letters represented by letters drawn from
various sources:

(capital ), known as thorn, was borrowed from the runic alphabet to denote the
dental fricatives (both voiced and voiceless)

(capital ), known as eth, also used to denote dental fricatives, may have been derived
from Irish writing

(capital ),used to denote//,was derived from Latin ae

w was represented by the runic letter wynn

Usual form of g was Irish (yogh) but by 12th century the different sounds represented
by this letter were distinguished through the introduction of the continental caroline
form g for /g/ and //, as in god (good) and secgan (say),

for other sounds, including /j/; e.g. d day, r year

No j, v; q, x, z very rarely used

Writing system close to phonemic representation

Dialectal differences between scribes from different regions reflected in their writing

King Alfred champion of the vernacular

Goals: education, to make England the center of intellectual achievement

Means: translating Latin texts into the vernacular

Therefore it seems better to me, if it seems so to you, that we also translate certain books, those which
are most necessary for all men to know, into the language which we can all understand, and bring to pass,
as we very easily can with Gods help, if we have peace, that all the free-born young people now in
England, among those who have the means to apply themselves to it, are set to learning, whilst they are
not competent for any other employment, until the time when they know how to read English writing
well. Those whom one wishes to teach further and bring to a higher office may then be taught further in
the Latin language. (Preface to Pastoral Care (Pope Gregory, late 6th century)).
Fory me ync betre, gif iow sw ync, t we eac sum bec, a e niedbeearfosta sien
eallum monnum to wiotonne, t we a on t geiode wenden e we ealle gecnawan mgen,
ond gedon sw we swie eae magon mid Godes fultume, gif we a stilnesse habba, tte eall
sio giogu e nu is on Angelcynne friora monna, ara e a speda hbben t hie m
befeolan mgen, sien to liornunga ofste, a hwile e hie to nanre oerre note ne mgen, o
one first e hie wel cunnen Englisc gewrit ardan: lre mon sian furur on Ldengeiode
a e mon furor lran wille ond to hieran hade don wille.

OE inflectional system

Nominative case: sio giogu the young people where the demonstrative pronoun sio is
feminine singular agreeing with the noun; it also appears in the plural pronouns we and hie
Accusative case: sum bec...niedbeearfosta (certain books...most necessary); sum and
niedbeearfosta are feminine plural adjectives (inflected strong since they do not follow a
demonstrative pronoun, possessive, or article) and agreeing with the plural noun bec; feminine
plural pronoun form a used twice in agreement with bec, first as part of a relative pronoun a
e which and, second, as a demonstrative pronoun meaning them.

Accusative case: direct object in a stilnesse peace, where the demonstrative pronoun and
noun are feminine singular; also used after some prepositions: on t geiode into the language,
where the demonstrative pronoun and noun are neuter singular, to liornunga to learning, where
the noun is feminine singular, and o one first until the time, where the demonstrative pronoun
and noun are masculine singular.
Genitive case: found in Godes Gods, where the noun is masculine singular, friora monna of
free-born men, where the adjective and noun are masculine plural, and ara of those, a
demonstrative pronoun agreeing with friora monna.
Dative case: found in eallum monnum for all men, where the adjective and noun are
masculine plural, me to me, a first person singular personal pronoun, iow to you, a second
person plural personal pronoun, and m to that, a neuter singular demonstrative pronoun;
also used after some prepositions: mid...fultume with...help, where the noun is masculine
singular, on Angelcynne in England, where the noun is neuter singular, to nanre oerre note for
no other employment, where the adjectives and noun are feminine singular, and to hieran hade
to a higher office, where the comparative adjective (inflected weak as all comparatives are) and
noun are masculine singular.

OE inflectional system Verb forms

In ync it seems the inflection denotes the third person present singular of the verb
whose infinitive form is yncan to seem, and in habba we have, the a denotes the present
plural of the verb whose infinitive is habban to have; both express statements, are in the
indicative mood
OE also makes frequent use of the subjunctive mood, either to express doubt or unreality or
within subordinate clauses; habban also occurs in the present subjunctive plural form bben
[they] may have; the verb magan to be able occurs in its present indicative plural form magon
[we] are able and also three times (once in the first person, twice in the third person) in its
subjunctive plural form mgen [we]/[they] may be able)
Both the infinitive (for example gecnawan, befeolan, ardan, lran, and don) and the inflected
infinitive (to wiotonne) occur in the passage.

OE syntax: Freedom in word order

Although in main clauses OE commonly used Subject-Verb-Object word order, use of

inflections also allowed much more flexibility
Word order of the first sentence particularly complex: in OE subordinate clauses it was
common for the verb to be placed at the end of the clause, but here the accumulation of
subordinate clauses, combined with the recapitulation of t we eac sum bec that we also
certain books as t we a that we them, leads to very convoluted syntax; in part at least this
may be attributed to the attempt to apply Latin syntactic constructions to a linguistic structure
not suited to them.
The vitality of the vernacular in Alfreds reign had a lasting impact on the use and
development of the language: its association with the court and with intellectual endeavour

gave it an authority and prestige which enabled its acceptance as a literary language in its own
right.
The Benedictine reform and the regularizing of OE
Influence of historical circumstances on the transition from early West Saxon to late West
Saxon.
In the second half of 10 th century, monastic reform in England and renewed interest for
production of texts in vernacular for didactic purposes appeared.
Considerable attention paid to form which vernacular should take school of Bishop
thelwold at Winchester.
Concerted effort made to establish a standard literary language whose conventions were to
be observed as consistently as possible.
Term standard here denotes not common usage but a preferred usage which seems to have
been systematically disseminated.
The literary language to which it applies developed from the West Saxon dialect.
lfric importance of consistent grammatical system wrote own grammar
Process of grammatical revision; e.g. Preface to translation of Genesis precise grammatical
usage can affect meaning in important ways
Often the holy trinity is revealed in this book, just as it is in the words which God said: Let us make
man in our image. When he said let us make, the trinity is betokened; when he said in our likeness the
true unity is revealed: he did not say in the plural in our likenesses, but in the singular in our likeness
There is distinction between dative singular inflection e and dative plural inflection um.
Norman Conquest: OE, a language in transition
OE works continued to be used in the late twelfth and even early thirteenth centuries, but
fairly extensive rewriting and adaptation into Early Middle English was clearly necessary.
By the time glossators such as the Worcester scribe known as the Tremulous Hand (because
of his distinctive shaky handwriting) were at work in the thirteenth century, it is evident that
increasing unfamiliarity with OE had made it virtually incomprehensible without the provision
of glosses or explanatory translations accompanying the text.

Middle English

par excellence the dialectal phase of English (Strang)

Dialectal differences represented in writing

Anglian dialect area in OE period fell into two distinct regions: Northumbrian to the north of
the River Humber and Mercian to the south. In the Middle English period, old Mercian area
shows considerable dialectal differentiation, especially between its western and eastern parts
(Scandinavian settlement in east before Conquest). Eastern Mercian dialects display impact of
intense contact with Norse. Easternmost part of East Midland area (East Anglia) had been made
an autonomous kingdom when Britain was carved up among Angles, Saxons, and Jutes

together with its geographical isolation, may have helped to ensure that its dialect diverged
from language of other parts of East Midlands.
A wilde der is, at is ful of fele wiles,
Fox is hire to name, for hire qwesipe
Husebondes hire haten, for hire harm-dedes.
e coc and te capun
Ge fecche ofte in e tun,
And te gander and te gos,
Bi e necke and bi e nos,
Hale is to hire hole.
There is a wild animal that is full of many tricks. Her name is fox. Farmers hate her for her
wickedness, because of her harmful deeds. She often fetches the cock and the capon from the farmyard, and
the gander and the goose, by the neck and by the beak, carries them to her hole.
Southern and south-west Midland can be distinguished from other Midland dialects in
Middle English through form of ending used in present plural of verbs. In central and east
Midlands - singular and plural forms of nominative 3 rd person pronoun tended to be
indistinguishable. OE form for they hie became he in these areas in Middle English.
-en ending (haten (they) hate) may therefore have been adopted as a means of clarifying
whether a verb and its subject were in the singular or the plural. It seems to have come from the
en which was the ending of the present tense plural subjunctive in OE.
At the same time, the southern and south-west Midland plural ending -(e) derives from OE
indicative plural a.
Increasing diversification in English
Chester monk Ranulph Higden c.1327 Polychronicon in Latin; John Trevisas translation 1387:
Englischemen, ey hadde from the bygynnynge re manere speche, norerne, sowerne, and
middel speche in e myddel of e lond, as ey come of re manere peple of Germania, noeles
by comyxtioun and mellynge firste wi Danes and afterward wi Normans, in meny e contray
longage is apayred, and som vse straunge wlafferynge, chiterynge, harrynge, and garrynge
grisbayting.
Englishmen, though they had from the beginning three kinds of speech northern, southern, and Midland
speech, in the middle of the country as they came from three kinds of people from Germany, nonetheless
through commingling and mixing first with Danes and later with Normans, in many the language of the
country is corrupted, and some use strange stammering, chattering, snarling, and grating gnashing of the
teeth.
Trevisa:
Al e longage of e Norhumbres, and specialliche at Zork, is so scharp, slitting, and
frotynge and vnschape, at we souerne men may at longage vnnee vnderstonde.

All the language of the Northumbrians, and especially at York, is so sharp, harsh, and grating, and
formless that we southern men can hardly understand that language.
From Cursor Mundi:
In sotherin Englis was it draun,
And turnd it haue I till our aun
Langage o northrin lede,
at can nan oier Englis rede.
It [the authors source material] was composed in southern English, and I have turned it into our
own language of northern people, who cannot read any other English.
After middle of 14th century, surge in volume of writing in English - both in composition of
new works (including those of Chaucer) and in copying of English texts. Number of documents
written in English, however, remains small until second quarter of 15th century.
1362 often cited as key date in expansion of use of English: this is when the Statute of
Pleading decreed that court proceedings (into which a very large ratio of people in the Middle
Ages were at some time drawn) were to be conducted in English, instead of French. But records
of legal proceedings were still kept in French English was not used for this purpose until 17 th
century. The Statute gave English a validation that it had previously lacked, and this in turn
may have stimulated use of English in other spheres, in writing as well as in speech. The Statute
also nullified an important reason for acquiring, or maintaining, competence in spoken French,
hastening its passage to status of foreign language, at least in spoken medium.
...this bok ys in Englis drawe,

composed

Of fele maters that ar unknawe

many

To lewed men that er unconna[n]d,

uneducated; ignorant

That can no Latyn undurstand:

To make them know themselves first

To mak hemself frust to knowe

withdraw themselves

And from synne and vanites hem drawe,

proper fear

And for to stere hem to ryght drede,

when(they)

Whan this tretes here or rede,

That (it) may prick their

That prik here concience wythinne,

And from that a fool can begin to fear

Ande of that drede may a ful bygyng

various

Thoru confort of joyes of hevene sere,

divided

That men may afterward rede here.

Thys bok, as hit self bereth wyttenesse,
In seven partes divised isse.
Copied in 15th century, probably in south of England. Bereth bears, with its -eth ending for
3rd person singular present tense is typical of a southern text, as are plural pronouns hem and
here for them and their (although they were soon to be displaced by northern, Norseinfluenced forms them and their). frust first with rounded vowel (derived from OE fyrst, with

metathesis of vowel and r), is more restricted, typical of south-west and West Midlands.
Unconna[n]d unknowing has present participle ending and characteristic of northern texts (ing was standard in the south by this date): probably retained to preserve rhyme with
understand. The task of copying a piece of Middle English writing was likely to confront a scribe
with a variety of the language different from his own. The end result of the copying process
could be a text which represented the diversity of English in microcosm.

London English
This is the area where various dialects converged. Originally, it was a dialect of East
Saxons, who controlled the area after 5th century invasions. By the middle of 13th century, the
English of London and its vicinity evolving through contact with speakers from areas both
adjacent to city and further away.
Proclamation of 1258 a document which is exceptional since it was issued in English; it
affirms that Henry III (r. 1216-72) agrees to abide by what his councillors: t beo ichosen
ur us and ur t loandes folk on vre kuneriche, habbe idon and shullen don in e
wornesse of Gode and on vre treowe. Who are chosen through us and through the people of the
country in our kingdom, have done and shall do to the glory of God and in loyalty to us.
Document further states that if anyone contravenes Henrys wishes, we willen and hoaten t
alle vre treowe heom healden deadliche ifoan we wish and command that all our loyal subjects
should account them deadly foes.
Switch from conciliatory to imperious complemented by morphological variation: southern
-e ending in 3rd person plural present tense of verbs (beo, habbe) changes to Midland -en of
willen and hoaten.
Features typical of Essex coexist with others and text can vary between forms derived from
different dialects.
In 14th century, language of London changed further texts copied there between 1330 and
1380 reflect features contributed by immigrants from the East Midlands, including East Anglia.
Subsequent immigration into London from central Midlands led to appearance of, for example,
forms ben and arn for present plural of to be, as well as olde for old, which replaced earlier
southern elde.
Chaucers language
In his early poetry occasionally exploits northern morphology. From The Book of the
Duchess: northern es ending for 3 rd person singular present tense appears in rhyming position
(falles) a departure from Chaucers usual -e ending:
...I wol yive hym al that falles

give

To a chamber ,and al hys halles

is appropriate to

I wol do peynte with pure gold.

have painted

Towards end of 14th century, New Testament had been translated into English twice, after
Oxford theologian John Wyclif called for Scripture to be made accessible to all. In early 15 th
century, a concordance to the translations, collectively known as the Wycliffe Bible, was
produced.
If a man haue mynde oonly of oo word or two of sum long text of e Newe Lawe and ha
foretyn [forgotten] al e remenaunt, or ellis if he can seie bi herte such an hool text but he ha
foreten in what stede [place] it is writen, is concordaunce wole lede him bi e fewe wordis at
ben cofrid [contained] in his mynde vnto e ful text, and shewe him in what book and in what
chapitre [chapter] he shal fynde o textis which him list [he wishes] to haue.
The trouble was that the same word could have different phonological manifestations (as in
kirke and chirche). It could also vary orthographically (thyng and theef, for example, could be
spelled with an initial th or an initial ). Or the same meaning could appear under analternative
lexical guises Latin borrowing accesse might be represented elsewhere by English loantranslation nycomynge, literally near-coming.
Standardization AB language
Variety of English found in manuscript containing Ancrene Wisse (whence A) and MS
Bodley 34 in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (whenceB); Bodley manuscript includes copies of
Sawles Warde The Guardian of the Soul and Hali Meihad Holy Virginity, which share many
of the stylistic features of Ancrene Wisse and appear, like it, to have been composed for a female
audience. South-west Midland area in which manuscripts seem to have been producedstronghold of English literary tradition in early Middle English period; OE material was still
being copied there. Idea of writing in a standardized form of English may have come from an
awareness of the dialectal and orthographical regularity of much Old English literature. Most
widely attested example of a standardized variety of English from 14 th century is central
Midland region (which was providing London English with so many features at around the
same time).
Central Midlands Standard
Wycliffite belief
Lacked the barrier of incomprehensibility to many with which northern and southern
dialects were charged. Wyclifs beliefs were condemned by the Church as heretical, and the
Wycliffites were persecuted especially viciously in the reign of Henry V (1414-22). Fate of the
dialect is ultimate obsolescence. It is 15th-century variety of English which evolved in the offices
of royal administration at Westminster. Up to 1417, the Signet Office, which produced the
personal correspondence of the king, issued its documents in French; but after 1417 the
language of the kings missives changed to English. The Office of the Privy Seal also began to
use English for certain purposes in Henry VIs reign. Copied in the Chancery the office of the
chancellor where administrative items sent from all over the kingdom were also enrolled.
Language written in this office displays certain distinctive usages: not, but, gaf, and such(e), for
example (Chaucers equivalents are, respectively, nat, bot, yaf, and swich(e)), and forms beginning

with th- (or -) for their and them. Chancery Standard familiarized throughout the country
because material from the Chancery was disseminated to every region. Gradually this language
came to be emulated, apparently because of the authority with which the Chancery was
regarded. The Chancery was responsible for the rise of a standardized form of English to which
people in all parts of England increasingly conformed. In 15 th century, spread of Chancery
usages depended on the kind of writing being undertaken. Writers and copyists of verse often
chose to imitate not the language of administrative documents, but the phonological and
stylistic characteristics of individuals considered authoritative within the literary sphere,
especially Chaucer and his contemporary John Gower. Eagerness to follow model, but model
varied:
Royal warrant, 1438
The king commandeth the keper of his priue seal to make suffisant warrant to e
Chaunceller of England that he by letters patent yeue licence vnto such lordes as shal be atte
tretee of peas at Caleys &c to haue stuff with eim of gold siluer coyned & in plate & al oer
inges such as is behoueful to euch of eim after air estat: & at e same keper of our priue
seal make hervpon such seueralx warrentes As e clerc of e counseil can declare him after e
kinges entent / And also at e said keper of our priue seal / make a warrant to e Tresorer of
England & to e Chamberlains to paie Robert whitingham such wages for e viage of Caleys
abouesaid for a quarter of a yere as so apperteine to a Squier to take.
Form of the adjective seueralx, which has been given an -x because it is modifying a plural
noun, follows French usage. So does the phrase e said, which appears to be modelled on the
specifying adjective ledit. The old form for 3rd person singular present tense, as in commandeth,
remains (and would do, at least in formal registers, into 17 th century). Assimilated form atte
(combining at and the). But the language although archaic to us is comprehensible
throughout. Yet, it dates from a time nearer to the OE period than to our own. This suggests the
relative stability of written English between the 15th and the 21st centuries and the great pace of
its development between OE and the end of Middle English.
Paston family letters, north-east Norfolk, 1448
As touchyng Roger Foke Gloys shall telle yow all &c Qwhan Wymdham seyd at Jamys xuld
dy I seyd to hym at I soposyd at he xuld repent hym jf he schlow hym ordede to hym any
bodyly harm and he seyd nay he xuld never repent hym ner have a ferdyng wurth of harm ow
he kelyd w and hym bothe. (Qwhan: when; xuld: should; schlow: slew,killed; ferdyng:
farthing; ow: though; w: you).
Similarity of 15th-century writing to our typical standard written English depends on
whether its scribe (or author) has been exposed to the language of the Chancery; whether he has
decided to emulate its forms; which forms he has decided to emulate (since not all features of
Chancery language passed into the modern standard variety); if none of these, what his own
dialect was. Development of English, and the expansion of its functions in late Middle English
period attributed to Henry V by contemporaries. Memorandum recording the Brewers Guild of

London 1422 decision to adopt English as the language of their accounts and proceedings
(translated from Latin).
...our mother-tongue, to wit the English tongue, hath in modern days begun to be honorably enlarged
and adorned, for that our most excellent lord, King Henry V, hath in his letters missive and divers affairs
touching his own person, more willingly chosen to declare the secrets of his will, and for the better
understanding of his people, hath with a diligent mind procured the common idiom (setting aside others)
to be commended by the exercise of writing.
Henrys decision to use English in his correspondence seems to have been dictated by a
perception that French was a mark of the people who were his military and political enemies.
English could be a symbol of the independence of Henrys people: at the Council of Constance
in 1417, the official English notary Thomas Polton seemed to speak for his king when he
asserted that the autonomy of England was manifest in its language, the chief and surest proof
of being a nation.

From Middle English to Modern English

Languages evolve like living organisms do: through natural selection form interacts over
time in complex ways with environmental function. The changing forms of a particular
language through time are the result of their interaction with that languages functions
language change derives from functional considerations.
Richard Mulcaster (Elizabethan schoolteacher)
...our tung doth serue to so manie vses, bycause it is conuersant with so manie peple, and so well
acquainted with so manie matters, in so sundrie kindes of dealing. Now all this varietie of matter, and
diuersitie of trade, make both matter for our speche, & mean to enlarge it. For he that is so practised, will
vtter that, which he practiseth in his naturall tung, and if the strangenesse of the matter do so require, he
that is to vtter, rather then he will stik in his vtterance, will vse the foren term, by waie of premunition,
that the cuntrie peple do call it so, and by that mean make a foren word, an English denison.
(premunition: premonition; denison: denizen,naturalized inhabitant).
manie vses of our tung elaboration in sociolinguistic terms
In many societies, particular languages or varieties of the same language are used with
particular functions if a particular language or language-variety has a number of functions we
can consider it to be elaborated.
Elaboration of usage is one of four stages in process of standardization.
1) First, particular variety or language

selected for overtly prestigious use, either

consciously or unconsciously
2) Next, codified through enforcement of norms (e.g. by an Academy, or through
education)
3) Then elaborated in function
4) Finally, accepted by the community as an elite usage

Selection, codification and acceptance.

Standard varieties of language tend to relate to other varieties clinically rather than
discretely: there is no clear cut-off point between a standard variety and other varieties of the
same language. Standardization itself an ongoing process - distinction between standard and
non-standard forms tends to change over time and no single stage in the process of
standardization of any living language is ever complete. In transition from Middle to modern
English standardized variety based on usages current in London. London English itself
changing as a result of dynamic processes of immigration - hard to pin down any precise set of
forms which characterizes it. Between late 14 th and 16th centuries, English began increasingly to
take on more functions these changes in function had a major effect on the form of English: so
major that the boundary between these two linguistic epochs becomes fuzzy.

Caxtons prologue to the Eneydos

And certaynly our langage now vsed varyeth ferre from that whiche was vsed and spoken whan I was
borne / For we englysshe men/ ben borne vnder the domynacyon of the mone. Whiche is neuer stedfaste /
but euer wauerynge / wexynge one season /and waneth & dyscreaseth another season / And that comyn
englysshe that is spoken in one shyre varyeth from another. In so moche that in my dayes happened that
certayn marchauntes were in a shippe in tamyse for to haue sayled ouer the see into Zelande / and for
lacke of wynde thei taryed atte forlond [west Kent] and wente to lande for to refreshe them And one of
theym named sheffelde a mercer cam in to an hows and axed for mete. And specyally he axyd after eggys
And the good wyf answerde. That she coude speke no frenshe.

Caxtons prologue to the Eneydos

And the marchaunt was angry. For he also coude speke no frenshe. But wold haue hadde egges/

and she vnderstode hym not / And thenne at laste another sayd that he wolde haue eyren / then the good
wyf sayd that she vnderstod hym wel /Loo what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte. Egges or eyren /
certaynly it is harde to playse euery man / bycause of dyuersite & chaunge of langage. For in these dayes
euery man that is in ony reputacyon in his countre. Wyll vtter his commynycacyon and maters in suche
maners & termes / that fewe men shall vnderstonde theym / And som honest and grete clerkes haue ben
wyth me and desired me to wryte the moste curyous termes that I coude fynde / And thus bytwene playn
rude / & curyous I stande abashed.
Egges and eyren illustrates diatopic (through-space) variation in the lexicon. Different forms
have a different distribution in Middle English: kirk church and stern star appear in Northern
Middle English but not in the south; and bigouth began appears in Older Scots but not in
Middle English, where the forms gan and can were preferred.
Vocabulary of English varied diatopically during the late Middle Ages not only in forms but
also in the meaning of forms. Chaucer observed something of this variation in his
representation o fNorthern dialect in the Canterbury Tales when, in The Reeves Tale he made
his young Northern students Aleyn and John use the word hope with its Northern meaning
think, rather than with its Southern meaning hope, wish for. Oure maunciple, I hope he wil be

deed is a dialectal joke, depending on the conflict between the Northern meaning I think our
manciple will die and the Southern meaning I hope our manciple will die.
Caxton draws attention to the connection between language and social standing usage of
euery man that is in ony reputacyon. He indicates that for many contemporaries such reputacyon or
status correlates with a particular form of commynycacyon which valued heightened expression
above clarity. Caxton distinguishes playn, rude, and curyous [termes] - distinguishes registers
characterized by different kinds of vocabulary. He follows the ancient distinction between
middle, low, and high styles respectively; the terminology derives from the classical world, but
it was still understood in the Middle Ages.
Curyous termes aureate diction, a kind of usage found in much English writing of the 15 th
century. The term aureate applied to stylistic choice (designating or characteristic of a highly
ornamental literary style or diction seems to have been invented by the poet John Lydgate
(c1370-1449/1450), probably the best-known practitioner of this mode of writing. Lydgate
desired to enrich vernacular poetic vocabulary to refourme the rudenesse of my stile by transferring
Latin nouns and adjectives from the liturgy, from major medieval Latin writers, and from the
Vulgate Bible into English.
Red[e] rose, flouryng withowtyn spyne

thorn

Fonteyn of fulnesse, as beryl corrent clere,

clear running water

Some drope of thi graceful dewe to us propyne;

give drink

Thu light without nebule, shynyng in thi spere,

cloud, sphere

Medicyne to myscheu[e]s, pucelle withoute pere,

misfortunes, virgin

Aureate diction was not the only kind of curyous writing available The Boke of St Albans
(1486) met the desire of the socially ambitious to develop aristocratic modes of expression.
(Burnley) motive for compiling lists of such gentill termys was social aspiration: knowledge of
language proper to the concerns of a gentleman was equated with the possession of gentility
itself to be heard to speak like a gentleman was half-way to being taken for one - at a time
when poetic art was preoccupied with lexical splendor, it is not surprising to find the ancient
association between eloquence and cultural refinement taking the form of a fascination with
out-of-the-way terminology.
The Boke of St Albans set ofcollective nouns a Cherme of Goldefynches, a Superfluyte of Nunnys,
a Malepertnes of pedleres, a Rage of Maydenys, a blush of boyes, a Sculke both of freris and of foxis.
Extensive vocabulary for hawking and hunting: terms for the flight of hawks range from beke
beckoning to game through nomme taken game and lost again and retriue rouse game a
second time to souce rising and toll summons.
Evidence for the range of registers which were available in the vernacular during the late
medieval and early modern periods is limited many groups in society most women and
practically all laborers were illiterate, and this means that we have no direct access to their
language.

Why this perceived need to augment the vernacular?

Earlier generations solution was easy: use French - but this option was no longer available,
and the marking of social standing required new linguistic strategies. (Burnley) Loss of French
had by this time finally removed the traditional linguistic distinction between the gentil and the
peasant, and no upper-class standard English had yet emerged to fill its role, so the linguistic
situation itself had contributed to this new solution to the problem of maintaining linguistic
differentiation between the rulers and the ruled. Perhaps the most salient grammatical
distinctions are between Older Scots and contemporary Southern English. Late 15 th century
major divergence between these varieties, most obviously indicated by the adoption of a new
name for Older Scots originally known as Inglis to Scottish writers, the variety is called Scottis
from the late 15th century a term which had been used up until that date for Gaelic.
Compare the Southern and Scots paradigms for verbal inflection. In Southern English during
th

15 and early 16th centuries present indicative tense:

I kepe, thou kepest, he/she/it kepeth, we/ye/they kepe
In Older Scots two paradigms for present indicative. If the subject of the clause is a
personal pronoun and comes immediately before or after the verb:
I keip, thou keipis, he/scho/it keipis, we/e/thai keip
Otherwise the is form is used for all persons. This system of grammatical concord is known
as the Northern Personal Pronoun Rule found in Northern Middle English texts as well, but
over time it withdrew towards the increasingly permanent Scottish/English border as
prestigious southern forms pushed north in England during the modern period. Grammatical
distinctions also relate to register during the late Middle and early modern periods. -S type
endings for 3rd person present singular (as in he keipis) were already available in Southern
Middle English in informal situations. A similar informal/formal distinction detectable in
earlier texts use or omission of adjectival e in southern texts e.g. Chaucerian verse
distinguished between strong and weak singular adjectives, e.g. the man is old (strong) beside the
olde man (weak since it follows the definite article). Register differences are most clearly
demonstrated grammatically in syntactic choices. Since antiquity, rhetorical theory had
demanded that high style was associated with complex syntax, and there is evidence for such
continuing patterns of usage in 15th and early 16th century English writing.
In 1418 the mayor, sheriffs, alderman, and communality of London wrote formally to King
Henry V, assuring him of their loyal appreciation of his reports of his fighting in France. A copy
of the letter survives in the Guildhall Letter Book of the period:
Of alle erthely Princes our most dred soueraign Liege lord and noblest kynge, we recomaunde vs vnto
your soueraign highnesse and riall power, in as meke wyse and lowely maner as any symple officers and
pouuere lieges best may or can ymagine and diuise vnto her most graciouse and most soueraign kyng,
Thankyng with all our soules your most soueraign excellence and noble grace of the right gentell, right
graciouse, and right confortable lettres, which ye late liked to send vs fro your toun of Pount-de-Larche,
which lettres wi al lowenesse and reuerence we haue mekly resceyued, and vnderstonde bi which lettres,

amonges al other blessed spede and graciouse tithinges in hem conteyned, for which we thanke hyly, and
euer shulle, the lord almighty, ware we most inwardly conforted and reioysed, whan we herde e soueraign
helthe and parfit prosperite of your most excellent and graciouse persoune, which we beseche god of hys
grete grace and noble pite euer to kepe and manteyne.
The passage (constituting about half the complete letter) consists of a single sentence in
which an opening commendation is followed by a lengthy subordinate clause introduced by the
single (capitalized) present participle Thankyng.
High style vs pleyn style
Sir Thomas Malory:
And anone it was fayre light day, for in the begynnyng of January the mornynges be soone
light. And whan the Frenchmen and Bretons were within a leage of the bridge, they perceyved
on the other syde of the bridge Sir Thomas Percy and his company; and he lykewise perceyved
the Frenchmen, and rode as fast as he might to get the advantage of the bridge...
Plain style vs rude (i.e. low) style
Colloquial Vulgaria or schoolbooks which were designed as sources for translation from
English into Latin consisted of collections of everyday sentences
From Magdalen College School, Oxford, c1500
Yesterdaye, I departyde asyde prively oute of the feldys from my felows and went be myselfe into a
manys orcherde wher I dyde not only ete rype apples my bely full, but I toke away as many as I coulde
bere.

Early Modern English

Renaissance English 1500-1700;
Very considerable structural and systemic change;
Phonologywhere we see some of the most significant developments of the period;
English was gradually standardizing but this does not equate to complete uniformity and
does not reduce the importance or utility of dialect variation.
Sound system of English - the dramatic changes which take place in its long vowels during
this period;
Considerable contemporaneous grammatical and lexical change;
Throughout the early modern period, English is becoming more familiar to the modern eye,
as spelling (especially in public domains of usage) becomes more regular, encouraged by the
commercial pressures accompanying the introduction and spread of printing. Nevertheless, the
increasing stabilization does not mean that orthographic practice became completely uniform:
much in fact depended on whether the intended audience for a document was more public or
more private and intimate.

Letter of Queen Elizabeth I to King James VI of Scotland written in 1591:

My deare brother, As ther is naught that bredes more for-thinking repentance and agrived thoughtes
than good turnes to harme the giuers ayde, so hathe no bonde euer tied more honorable mynds, than the
shewes of any acquittal by grateful acknwelegement in plain actions; for wordes be leues and dides the
fruites.
This reveals a number of typical features of Renaissance orthography, such as continued use
of u and v as positional variants (euer, leves). Considerable variation in the use of single final -e,
which was no longer pronounced at this time (deare, good), as well as in the use of i and y (ayde,
plain). In contrast to bredes we can also see the form dides (deeds) for earlier (and co-existing)
dedes. Variation here may also provide evidence for the progress of the Great Vowel Shift which,
as we shall see, raised /e:/ to /i:/ in words of exactly this kind.
The whole long vowel system is radically reshaped between about 1450 and 1750 in what has
come to be known as the Great Vowel Shift. This is probably the major phonological factor
which distinguishes Middle English from modern English. These changes are also particularly
controversial, and there is a very considerable literature on the so-called Great Vowel Shift and
the changes surrounding it. The increasing standardization of spelling can impede systematic
evidence of on-going change. Careful analysis of corpora can, however, sometimes provide
phonological evidence, simply by providing sufficient data for us to observe patterns which
might not emerge from isolated examples. The originally northern third person singular verb
ending -(e)s spread conclusively to the south during the early modern English period to give she
walks, he writes. There is an ostensibly odd, opposing development whereby some Scots writers
at this time adopted the otherwise declining southern -(e)th (e.g. she helpeth), retaining it right
into the seventeenth century. A closer examination of the corpus data shows that many of the
verbs with -(e)th in fact have a stem ending in a sibilant sound, like ariseth, causeth, increaseth,
produceth. If we examine the evidence more closely, it seems that both -(e)s and -(e)th were earlier
available not only as simple consonants (being pronounced [s] or [] respectively), but also as
syllabic forms with a vowel before the consonantprobably as [s] and []. These syllabic
forms would be more appropriate after a sibilant sound like [s] or [z]. As it happens, the [s]
ending had earlier lost its alternative syllabic -es form, while -(e)th remained available in both
full and contracted forms, that is as both [s] and []. This might therefore be used to explain
the otherwise unaccountable preference of Scots writers in our period for -(e)th on verbs which
possess these stem-final sibilants.
Orthographic practice during this period was moving towards standardization, but it was by
no means static. Departures from typical spellingsjust as in Queen Elizabeths dides for dedes
may also alert historical phonologists to ongoing change. Occasional spellings from the fifteenth
to seventeenth centuries indicate the progressive loss or at least reduction and instability of /r/
before a consonant. In the letters contained in the fifteenth-century Cely Papers we find forms
such as monyng (morning), passel (parcel), and the inverse spelling marster (master) which
shows r where it would never have been pronounced. These therefore suggest that /r/ in such

contexts was becoming so weak or prone to loss that spellers no longer quite knew where to put
it.
Valuable contemporary evidence from the so-called orthoepists, early grammarians and
commentators on language. This period is the first to possess evidence from writers who, from a
variety of perspectives (and levels of aptitude), sought to describe and record the language of
the time. First-hand descriptions of the English of the period. The Great Vowel Shift (henceforth
GVS) is not, of course, the only phonological change to take place between 1500 and 1700.
Admittedly, there is not much action in the consonant system at the time, although /r/, except
before a vowel, is (as the spelling evidence already discussed suggests) becoming more
vulnerable, with considerable consequences for neighboring vowels. For example, John Hart in
his Orthographie of 1569 gives transcriptions indicating that breaking or diphthongization
before /r/ is already an option by the mid-sixteenth century.
/h/ is also progressively dropping in some varieties; but apart from that, the consonant
system, even at the start of our period, is very much as it is today. There are more developments
in the short vowel system not all these changes operated identically in all dialects. Generally,
Middle English short /e o/ in bed, lot lowered to / / by the end of the seventeenth century,
while short // split to give // in put, as opposed to // in cut. There are also changes in
diphthongs. Early in our period, some of the Middle English diphthongs, such as the /u/ of
grow, sow and the /ai/ of rain were monophthongizing. At the same time a new subtype of
diphthong was created shortly after the end of our period, when the progressive loss of
postvocalic /r/ led to the innovation of the centring diphthongs in here, there, sure (now, in turn,
often monophthongized again). However, the most significant change, or changes, in early
modern English involve the long vowels. In most accents of English today, the great majority of
words with short vowels had identical, or at least strongly similar, short vowels in late Middle
English. There has been a general lowering of the high and mid short vowels, with a degree of
centralization for the high ones, but the short vowel system has scarcely changed, apart from the
innovation of // versus //. The case of the long vowels, however, is much more complex, and
the classic, textbook statement of the facts is that virtually all words in present-day English
which have a long vowel, and which existed in the language in late Middle English, now have a
different long vowel.
Middle English

Modern English

time

/ti:m/

/tam/

green

/gre:n/

/gri:n/

break

/bre:k/

/brek/

Name

/na:m/

/nem/

day

/dai/

/de/

loud

/lu:d/

/lad/

boot

/bo:t/

/bu:t/

boat

/b:t/

/bot/

law

/lau/

/l:/

The only vowels in the Middle English system which seem to have disappeared altogether,
merging with the reflexes of /e:/, are /:/ and /a:/ as in Middle English beat and face (although
a long low unrounded vowel, usually now back /:/, has subsequently re-emerged in words
such as father, bra, calm, part in many varieties. The vital fact is that the Middle English vowels
and their closest articulatory equivalents in modern English appear in almost entirely different
sets of lexical items. There have been wholesale distributional changes so that, although the
same vowels may persist, they can now be found in entirely different sets of words.
While words like time, eye, five had /i:/ in Middle English, this same high front long
monophthong is now found in green, serene, queen, while the time, eye, five cases now have the
diphthong /a/, earlier found in Middle English day, plain. Similarly, whereas Middle
English /o:/ is found in boot, food, root and /u:/ in loud, out, down, the boot, food, root cases now
have /u:/, and the loud, out, down ones, the diphthong /a/. This is not, however, a random and
unpredictable series of substitutions. Instead it can be summarized in a diagram.

name /a:/

green /e:/

break /:/

time /i:/ to /aI/

boat /:/

loud /u:/ to /a/

boot /o:/

The impression is of each vowel progressively shifting up one step, from low to low-mid,
low-mid to high-mid, high-mid to high. However, the majority of originally low-mid front
vowels eventually shifted two steps, to highhence modern English has /i:/ deriving from two
different sets of Middle English words, namely sea, leave (which had Middle English /:/ and
which raised by two steps) as well as in green, queen (which had Middle English /e:/, and only
raised by a single step). Likewise, Middle English /a:/ in name underwent a double raising, to /
:/ and then /e:/. All these second-step raisings are typically regarded as later developments
which took place after the Great Vowel Shift proper.
16th, also 17th century; Tudor era also represents the time before prescriptive grammars. How
grammatical changes spread quite unmonitored in the language community, often replacing
other, earlier, or more local features as they did so. Different linguistic choices where choice was
available. Different people and groups of people could hence become leaders of linguistic
change, promoting new forms, picking up on-going changes, or avoiding traditional forms such
as the second-person pronoun thou (an important shift in Tudor English).
Two important processes of change in Tudor English:

One that affected the third-person singular verbal ending (e.g. he knoweth, which was
gradually displaced by he knows), and

One that introduced the auxiliary do into English (so that structures such as they know
not were gradually displaced by they do not know)

Other processes of change as, for instance, in the Early Modern English pronoun system
(including the disappearance of the pronoun thou). Processes that led to the generalization of
the originally northern -(e)s ending in verbs throughout the country. Its diffusion was, at the
beginning of the period, by no means a foregone conclusion:

-(e)s was not used by William Caxton, the first English printer;
nor was it used by William Tyndale in his Bible translations in the 1520s and 1530s;
Tyndales usage was followed by the 1611 King James Bible; both write, for instance, he

that commeth after me, not he that comes after me;

But Shakespeare already preferred -s, as is evident in the title of his play Alls Well That
Ends Well, which dates back to 16034;

Clear dialect boundary between the north and the south in Late Middle English based on the
third-person singular indicative endings. North of a line running between Chester in the northwest of England to the Wash in Lincolnshire in the east, the ending -(e)s was used, whereas to
the south of this line, the dominant form was -(e)th (typically spelled, with a thorn, as -(e)).
Zero form?
One reason why the zero form did not spread may be that it was also used to signal the
subjunctive mood (as in they insist that he go i.e. should go), which continued to be in
common use throughout Renaissance English. Use of -(e)s was negligible at the national level in
the period 15001570; it occurs in a mere 3 per cent of the cases. Southern -(e)th which was the
dominant form in most kinds of writing from the Tyndale Bible to sermons and trial records.
Nevertheless, -(e)s continued to spread, and in 15701640 it had already achieved a mean
frequency of 20 per cent of all the third-person singular present-tense endings over a selection
of genres (diaries, histories, official and private letters, sermons, and trials). There were notable
differences between genres in the use of third-person endings. A comparison of diaries,
histories, and private and official letters reveals that it was in fact only private letters that had
any instances of -(e)s to speak of between 1500 and 1570. Typically, it occurred in the letters of
northern writers. Alternation between -(e)s and -(e)th, as in use of -s with make and -th with say
and have. General pattern in the data - a few verbs, notably do, have, and say, which take the
incoming -s ending later than others. As a result when, in the latter half of the seventeenth
century, most other verbs have more than 90 per cent of -(e)s according to the evidence of the
corpus, do still takes it in only half of the cases, and have in merely one third. Such patterns are
common in language change. A change usually spreads gradually to all relevant contexts, but it
can also have word-specific restrictions and can thereby proceed, just as in the case of -(e)s, by
means of a process known as lexical diffusion.
In the period 15701640 the overall use of -(e)s with verbs other than do and have soars to
some 80 per cent in private letters, and comes to about one third of the instances in trials and
official letters. Pattern of spread from the private, informal end of the genre spectrum. Southern
-(e)th form which, becoming associated with more formal registers, soon gained a distinctly
literary status in general use.

Sermon against usurie (or excessive gains made by lending money) by the silver-tongued
preacher Henry Smith illustrates a typical context for -(e)th around 1600:
Now, al the Commandements of God are fulfilled by loue, which Christ noteth when hee
draweth all the Commandements to one Commandement, which is, Loue God aboue all
things, and thy neighbour as thy selfe: as if hee should say, hee which loueth GOD, will
keepe all the Commaundements which respect God, and he which loueth his neighbour
will keepe all the Commaundements which respect his neighbor.
Throughout the sixteenth century, women are shown to be consistently more frequent users
of the incoming -(e)s form in the south than men, suggesting perhaps that women were more
apt to adopt forms that were in the process of being generalized throughout Tudor England. In
fact women turned out to be the leaders in seven out of ten Early Modern English changes
which were studied by means of the CEEC corpus. We also know from present-day English that
women are usually in the vanguard of linguistic change, especially of those changes that are in
the process of spreading to supralocal usage. The relevance of the verb-final consonant to the
choice of suffix also emerges in the southern English data. The incoming -(e)s form was favored
by verbs ending in a stop, and in particular by the presence of a final /t/ (e.g. lasts) and /d/
(leads). In contrast, and just as in the Older Scots corpus, -eth tended to be retained in verbs
ending in a vowel and, as noted above, particularly, in verbs ending in a sibilant or sibilant-final
affricate: compasseth, causeth, diminisheth, catcheth, and changeth. After a sibilant the suffix
always preserves its vowel, thereby forming an additional syllable.
A means of adding an extra syllable to a verb is, of course, a very useful device in
maintaining a metrical pattern in drama and poetry. The alternation between the two suffixes in
the following extract from Act V of Shakespeares The Taming of the Shrew can, for instance, be
explained by metrical considerations. The suffix -eth in oweth is accorded a syllabic status, while
a non-syllabic reading is given to -s in owes:
Such dutie as the subiect owes the Prince
Euen such a woman oweth to her husband
The spellings -es and -eth in medieval texts suggest that both these third-person endings
once contained a vowel before the final consonant. Vowel deletion of this kind is not restricted to
third-person verbal endings but it can also be found in the plural and possessive -(e)s endings of
nouns, as well as in the past tense and past participle -ed forms of verbs. Previous research
suggests that plural and possessive nouns were the first to lose the // vowel in these positions,
and this took place in all words except for those ending in sibilants. This deletion process
started in the fourteenth century and was gradually completed over the course of the sixteenth.
The process was slower with the past-tense and past participle forms of verbs in which the
suffix -ed was retained as a separate syllable in many formal styles of usage until the end of the
seventeenth century. It still of course continues to be retained in adjectival forms such as learned,
as in a learned monograph, a learned society.

A process of sociodialectal narrowing in the use of thou use during the seventeenth century:
in comedies and fiction, for example, thou is commonly put in the mouths of servants and
country people. To some extent, thou also continues to be used by social superiors addressing
their inferiors. In seventeenth-century trials, for instance, the judge could still take recourse to
thou when trying to extract information from a recalcitrant witness. The example below records
part of Lord Chief Justice Jeffreyss interrogation of the baker John Dunne in the trial of Lady
Alice Lisle in 1685.
Note that apart from the formulaic prithee, the judge begins by using you: L. C. J. Now
prithee tell me truly, where came Carpenter unto you? I must know the Truth of that; remember
that I gave you fair Warning, do not tell me a Lye, for I will be sure to treasure up every Lye that
thou tellest me, and thou mayst be certain it will not be for thy Advantage: I would not terrify
thee to make thee say anything but the Truth: but assure thy self I never met with a lying,
sneaking, canting Fellow, but I always treasurd up Vengeance for him: and therefore look to it,
that thou dost not prevaricate with me, for to be sure thou wilt come to the worst of it in the
end?
Dunne. My Lord, I will tell the Truth as near as I can.
This passage suggests that in a highly status-marked situation such as a public trial, where
forms of address are derived from social identity, thou co-occurs with terms of abuse, threats,
and other negative associationshere specifically Lord Chief Justice Jeffreys accusations of
lying.
Private spheres of usage
In the seventeenth century thou can be found in letters exchanged by spouses, and parents
may use it when addressing their young children. But in these cases, too, mixed usage prevails,
with you clearly as the usual form, and thou often appearing in formulaic use at the beginning
and end of the letter. In the following extract from a letter written in 1621 by Thomas Knyvett to
his wife, you appears when he is discussing the choice of cloth patterns, but thou is used in the
more intimate (if rather conventional) closing of the letter. Even there you intervenes in the last
sentence:
I haue been to look for stufe for yr bedde and haue sent downe paternes for you to choose which you
like best. Thay are the neerest to the patourne that wee can finde. If you lack anything accept [except] my
company you are to blame not to lett me knowe of it, for my selfe being only yours the rest doe followe.
Thus in hast Intreating the to be merry and the more merry to think thou hast him in thy armes that had
rather be with you then in any place vnder heaven; and so I rest
Thy dear loving husband for ever
Tho: Knyvett
As you came to be used in the singular as well as in the plural, the traditional number
contrast was lost in the second-person pronoun system in supra-local uses of English. As a
result, as in Modern English, it is not always clear whether you refers to one or more people.
Different varieties of English have remedied the situation by introducing plural forms such as

youse, you all, or you guys. In the eighteenth century, the distinction was often made by using
singular you with singular is (in the present tense) and was (in the past tense); in the plural you
appeared with the corresponding are and were. This practice was, however, soon condemned as
a solecismungrammatical and improperby the prescriptive grammarians of the period. One
of the significant issues that has been debated in the history of periphrastic do is whether it
arose in literary or colloquial contexts. Those who argue for its literary origins suggest that it
grew out of the causative function. Conversely, those who are in favor of colloquial origins refer
instead to the influence of language contact or semantic weakening of the lexical verb do.
Causative do occurred frequently in official Court correspondence in the early fifteenth century.
But it could also occur in private letters as something of a politeness marker, to indicate that the
writer did not necessarily expect the recipient to carry out the request him- or herself, as in the
following illustration from Margaret Pastons letter to her husband John in c1453: Also I pray
yow at ye woll do bey a loff of gode sugowr.
Periphrastic do clearly gains momentum in the sixteenth century, and interestingly
affirmative statements (its least typical context today) also seem to have played a significant role
in the process. In effect, it looks as though do had the makings of being generalized to all
sentence types in Tudor English, had not something interfered with its progress in affirmative
statements. Earlier research suggests that in the sixteenth century the rise of do was being led by
interrogatives followed by negative declaratives, and, at a somewhat slower pace, by the use of
do in affirmative declaratives such as I did mislike the Queenes Mariage from Sir Nicholas
Throckmortons confession of treason in 1554. However, the fact that affirmative statements are
much more common in communication than negative statements, and especially questions, in
fact serves to make affirmative do numerically the most frequent kind of periphrastic do in texts.
The development clearly falls into two phases: the use of affirmative do first increases
between the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, after which there is a dramatic decline in
the latter half of the seventeenth century. Evidence suggests that affirmative do was used very
frequently in the first two decades before 1600, but that its use plummeted during the first
decade of the seventeenth century. Do did not recover from this drop but continued to be used
at this much more moderate level in the following decades. In the north, use of the periphrasis
was less frequent than it was in London at this time. Nevertheless, while an upward trend
continued in the north (and also especially in East Anglia) for some time after 1600, in London,
and at Court this pattern of usage came to an abrupt end. A similar but more modest drop was
found with negative do. Why should this drop have occurred in the capital after 1600? One
would have expected do to continue to rise as it did in East Anglia.
One motive might have been contact with Scots in the capital following the arrival of King
James and the Scottish court in London after the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603. The timing
would match the date of change, and the new ruler and his officers must have enjoyed high
prestige in the metropolis at the time. This contact hypothesis is attractive but more work is, of
course, called for to confirm it. Many scholars argue that the appearance of do in affirmative

declaratives in the sixteenth century was not so much to do with syntaxthat is, with
introducing an auxiliary to all sentence types. Instead they suggest that the influence of textual
and stylistic factors which operate in response to certain structural features (constraints) in the
clause could have been more important. These are related to structural complexity and ease of
information flow. An adverbial separating the subject from the verb, for instance, makes the
clause harder for the reader to parse. Inserting do into a context like this can facilitate it.

Contacts and Conflicts: Latin, Norse, and French

For much of its history the English language in England (and elsewhere) has been in a state
of coexistence, or competition, or even conflict with one or more other languages, and it is these
tensions and connections which have shaped the language quite as much as any factors internal
to English itself. Other languages current in England in the Middle Ages and their impact on
English.
Multilingual and multicultural medieval England
At the present time, there are five languages in Britain, just as the divine law is written in five books,
all devoted to seeking out and setting forth one and the same kind of wisdom, namely the knowledge of
sublime truth and of true sublimity. These are the English, British, Irish, Pictish, as well as the Latin
languages; through the study of thes criptures, Latin is in general use among them all Bede (8 th
century)
Pictish northern Scotland, British Welsh, Irish language of the Scotti
946 grant of land by King Eadred (reigned 946-55) to his subject Wulfric: in it Eadred is said
to hold the government Angulsaxna cum Norhymbris/paganorum cum Brettonibus of the Anglo
Saxons with the Northumbrians, and of the pagans with the Britons, while his predecessor
Edmund (reigned 940-46) is described

asking

Angulsaxna & Norhymbra/paganorum

Brettonumque of the Anglo-Saxons and Northumbrians, of the pagans and the Britons.
Pagans means Scandinavians, and so peoples speaking three different languages are
recognized here: the Scandinavians speak Norse, the Britons speak Celtic, and the Anglo-Saxons
(of whom the Northumbrians had come to form a part) speak Old English.
Jocelin of Brakelond on Abbot Samson (early 13th century)
He was eloquent both in French and Latin, having regard rather to the sense of what he had to say
than to ornaments of speech. He read English perfectly, and used to preach in English to the people, but in
the speech of Norfolk, where he was born and bred, and to this end he ordered a pulpit to be set up in the
church for the benefit of his hearers and as an ornament to the church
A trilingual culture exemplified within a single person
Celtic strictly speaking, Brittonic Celtic or British was the language of those peoples who
occupied the country before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons; likely to have remained a spoken
language in parts of England through much of the Anglo-Saxon period, before it became

confined to those areas which are (from an Anglocentric perspective) peripheral: Cornwall,
Wales, Cumbria, and Scotland.
Latin spoken and read right through the medieval period, beginning with the arrival of
missionaries from Rome in 597.
Old Norse language of Scandinavian settlers who entered the country in the Viking Age,
and settled especially in the north and east of England.
French language of Norman conquerors who arrived in 1066, although in time it came to be
spoken more widely by the upper and middle classes.
In terms of language contact and the history of English, these languages in particular Latin,
French, and Norse are source languages or donor languages.
Celtic little impact on English.
Fewer than a dozen words were borrowed from Celtic into English in the Anglo-Saxon
period, such as brocc (badger) and torr (rock).
Britons were the subordinate people in Anglo-Saxon England - ones who learned the
language of their conquerors (OE) and who gave up their own language.
OE word for Briton wealh also came to mean slave (it survives in modern English as the
first element of walnut, as the surname Waugh, and, in the plural, as the place-name Wales).
BUT great quantity of place-names in England which are of Celtic origin, especially rivernames (such as Derwent, Ouse, and Lune).
History of Latin in England history of a primarily written language.
Not to say that Latin was not spoken it was, often exclusively in some environments but
simply that it was always a learned second language. Language of learning, and of the church.
But there was almost no one speaking or reading Latin in England who did not also possess
English(or sometimes French) as their first language.
Old Norse only spoken in England, never written. Geographically widespread and
surprisingly long-lived - first language of a substantial immigrant community. Settled Norse
speakers in England from 870s onwards, following Viking wars of the time of King Alfred and
establishment of so-called Danelaw (area to the north and east of old Roman road known as
Watling Street actual term dates from 11th century). England settled by both Danes and
Norwegians and perhaps even a few Swedes; as the Scandinavian languages at this point were
hardly differentiated from one another a unitary language, Norse.
Norse continued to be spoken in north of England into 11 th century, and possibly into 12th in
some places. In early 11th century status of Norse in England received a high-level fillip through
accession of Danish King Cnut and his sons (ruled over England 1016-42).
Consequence of Norman Conquest - new rulers spoke a different language from their
subjects. Originally the Normans had been Scandinavians (Norman comes from Northman)
who had been granted a territory in northern France in early 10 th century. These early Normans
spoke Old Norse but by early 11th century they had given up Old Norse and had adopted French
- spoken by their subjects and neighbors.

French as it came to be spoken in England often termed Anglo-Norman designation based

as much on political factors as on linguistic ones. Little value in accounts which depict two
distinct speech-communities, English and French, running on non-convergent parallel lines for a
number of centuries.
In first decades after 1066 those who spoke French were the Norman invaders, but not many
generations were required before the situation had become very different. From middle of 12 th
century at the latest, most members of the aristocracy were bilingual what is more their
mother tongue is likely to have been English; there can have been very few, if any, monolingual
French speakers by that point.
By 13th century educational treatises which provide instruction in French, and it seems
from the target audiences that not only was French having to be learned by the aristocracy, it
was also coming to be learned by members of the middle classes. One consequence of this
opening-up of French to those outside aristocracy is that the language began to be used in
increasingly varied contexts French became less restricted in usage precisely as it ceased to be
anyones mother tongue in England instead it became a generalized language of culture.
Result of contemporary currency of French as an international language outside England.
Language contact: Linguistic change is initiated by speakers, not by languages James Milroy
Languages do not exist apart from their users, and any study of language contact must be
emphatically social in approach.
Processes of contact, their linguistic consequences.
Nature of social contact, together with configurations of speech-communities, has governing
effect on type of linguistic impact that will occur. Contact between languages - between users of
languages involves bilingualism either individual (monolingual society at least in part made
up of bilingual speakers) or societal (bilingual society made up of monolingual speakers).
Viking Age England bilingual society dominantly made up of monolingual speakers of
different languages (high degree of mutual intelligibility).
Post-1066 England individual bilingualism (no form of mutual intelligibility).
Who was bilingual, and what form their bilingualism took, changed over time.
Once their early monolingual period had come to an end, Norman aristocracy who spoke
French as their first language and who learned English as their second. But soon French became
the learned second language, after which it also began to be learned by those below the level of
the aristocracy. It is important to stress that French speakers in England always formed a
minority; the majority of the population were monolingual, and the language they spoke was
English. All those who knew Latin also spoke at least one other language, sometimes two
(French and English). Another form of language contact: between an individual and a written
text in a foreign/second language. In the medieval period even written texts had a dominantly
oral life: literature was social, texts were read out loud, and private silent reading had barely
begun. Latin is the language of conversation and debate in many ecclesiastical and scholarly
environments.

How do these various circumstances of bilingual contact individual and/or societal work
out in terms of their effect on English? How exactly do elements - words, sounds, even
syntactical constructions - from one language come to be transferred into another language?
Languages in contact do not exist apart from their users, so there must be specific, observable
means by which linguistic transfer occurs.
How do these various circumstances of bilingual contact individual and/or societal work
out in terms of their effect on English?
How exactly do elements - words, sounds, even syntactical constructions - from one
language come to be transferred into another language?
Languages in contact do not exist apart from their users, so there must be specific,
observable means by which linguistic transfer occurs.
Borrowing (English to Serbian: modem, kul, fensi) vs interference (French to English:
bourjeois). Distinction turns on the status of the person(s) who act(s) as the bridge between
languages. Borrowing primary agent speaker of recipient language. Interference primary
agent speaker of source language. To move from level of idiosyncratic usage to general usage,
innovation has to be widely accepted in speech community.
Stability as a constitutional property of language.
Some domains more stable, e.g. phonology, some less stable, e.g. vocabulary.
A language in contact with another tends to maintain its more stable domains. If recipient
language speaker is agent tends to preserve phonology of own language, accept new
vocabulary items from source language. If source language speaker is agent tends to preserve
own language phonology, thus imposing it on recipient language.
Word transferred through borrowing likely to be nativized to recipient language in terms of
its phonological shape or pronunciation. Word transferred through interference likely to
preserve phonology of source language, and introduce that to recipient language.
Lexical transfer (transfer of words from source language to recipient language) is the most
common result of language contact. Bound morphemes may also be transferred, as may
individual sounds, or word-orders and sentence structures, or(at the written level) letter forms
and spelling conventions. All the subsystems of language can be affected through contact, and
in the history of Englishs contact with other languages in the medieval period, all of them were.
Estimates place the size of the Old English lexicon at c 50-60,000 words, that of Middle
English at 100-125,000 , that of modern English at over half a million. This expansion has
occurred overwhelmingly through the transfer of words from source languages, rather than
through the formation of new words out of native resources. As much as 70 percent of the
modern English lexicon is comprised of loanwords, the comparable figure for the Old English
lexicon is probably less than 5 percent.
Loanwords proper vs loan- translations, semantic loans:
Loanword - may arise either through borrowing or interference, but it involves the
incorporation of a lexical item from the source language into the lexicon of the recipient

language; the item may undergo phonological and morphological adaptation in the process.
Representative loanwords in Old English are munuc monk, from Latin monachus, li fleet, from
Old Norse li), and prut proud, from Old French prud. In a loan-translation or calque, the
elements of the lexical item in the source language are translated into corresponding elements
in the recipient language so that the form of the source item is not actually transferred. Old
English examples are wellwillende literally well-wishing, benevolent from Latin benevolens,
anhorn literally one-horn unicorn, from Latin unicornis, and (as a partial loan-translation)
lismann fleet-man, sailor,follower, from Old Norse lismar.
In a semantic loan the form of a lexical item in the recipient language remains the same, but
its meaning is replaced by the meaning of an item from the source language. Examples are Old
English synn (original meaning crime,fault now religious transgression from Latin peccatum)
or modern English dream where the present meaning derives from Old Norse draumr, but the
form derives from the cognate Old English dream (soundsof)joy; the Old English word for
dream was swefn, which has since disappeared from the lexicon.
Chronological stratification of loanwords is broadly defined in English. Broad strata correlate
with time when source language was spoken. Stratification based on phonological grounds
depending on which sound-changes in the source and recipient languages the words have or
have not participated in. Latin loans in Old English conventionally subdivided into early,
popular loans (arising through oral contact, up to c 600), and later, learned ones (arising
through Christianization and books). Some treatments further subdivide early, popular loans
into pre-and post-migration loans. There were also later book-based loans in the Middle English
period. Norse loans more difficult to stratify.
Broad distinction between those which appear to have entered English through borrowing (10 th and
11th centuries) and those which have entered through interference following language death (11 th and 12th
centuries):
The two processes may have been occurring contemporaneously in different parts of the
country. Leaving aside a few early loans in Old English, French loans in Middle English are
traditionally subdivided into two groups: an earlier group from Norman French dialect, and a
later group from central French. The distinction reflects the shift in power and influence from
Normandy to Paris and the Ile de France from 13th century onwards.
Not all parts of speech are equally represented as loanwords. Nouns and adjectives are by far
the most frequently transferred word-classes, followed by verbs and adverbs, and far ahead of
grammar words such as conjunctions and pronouns.
What about the sociolinguistics of usage?
Nu scylun hergan hefnrics uard,

Her ist scop aelda barnum

metuds mctiend his modgidanc,

heben til hrofe, haleg scepen;

uerc uuldurfadur sue he uundragihus,

tha middungeard moncynns uard,

eci dryctin,or astelid.

eci dryctin,fter tiad

firum foldu,frea allmectig.

He, the holy Maker, first made heaven as a

-Cdmon

roof for the children of men. Then the

Guardian of mankind, the eternal Lord,

Now we must praise the Guardian of

the heavenly kingdom, the might of the

afterwards adorned the middle-earth for the

people of earth, the almighty Lord.

Ordainer and his minds intent, the work of

the Father of glory, as He, the eternal Lord,
established the beginning of every wonder.
A heavy influence from Latin ecclesiastical culture is present, as well as calques, semantic
loans, semantic changes. Words for God: uard Guardian, line 1), metud Ordainer, line 2,
uuldurfadur Father of glory, line 3, dryctin Lord, lines 4 and 8, scepen Maker, line 6, and frea
Lord, line 9, allmectig almighty, line 9 loan-translation of omnipotens. A hundred years earlier,
none of these meant God. Contact with the church created a demand for new vocabulary - met
by native words changing their meaning or by calquing.
Inscription on an early 11th century grave-marker from the Old Minster, Winchester, which
apparently commemorates a Scandinavian of the time of Cnut: HER LI GVNNI: EORLES
FEOLAGA, means either Here lies Gunni, Eorls Companion or Here lies Gunni, the earls
companion (2nd more likely to be correct). Gunni - Old Norse personal name language contact
often results in expansion of onomasticon. FEOLAGA loanword from Old Norse - felagi
companion, comrade, trading partner; survives in modern English as fellow. EORL likely to
show influence from Old Norse in its meaning semantic loan; native OE word eorl used in
poetry with a general meaning of man, warrior, hero; cognate Old Norse word jarl - term of
rank; this Norse meaning grafted onto English form English word came to mean earl and
ousted earlier English term of rank ealdormann (survives as alderman).
Syntax: phrase HER LID Here lies not found anywhere else in Anglo-Saxon inscriptions
possible that it shows influence of Latin on Old English hic iacet here lies (not found in
inscriptions), comparable hic requiescit here rests (found). Written in OE using Roman alphabet;
shows one loanword from Old Norse, one semantic loan, and one personal name; and it
probably reveals Latin influence on its syntax and phrasing. Peterborough Chronicle
maintained into the 12th century. First Continuation (covering 1122 to 1131) and Second or Final
Continuation (1132 to 54). Passage quoted comes from entry for 1135, death of Henry I and
accession of Stephen:
God man he was and micel ie wes of him: durste nan man misdon wi oer on his time. Pais he
makede men and dr. Wua sua bare his byrthen gold and sylure, durste nan man sei to him naht bute
god. Enmang is was his nefe cumen to Engleland, Stephne de Blais; and com to Lundene; and te
lundenisce folc him underfeng and senden fter e rce-biscop Willelm Curbuil; and halechede him to
kinge on Midewintre Di. On is kinges time wes al unfri and yfel and rflac, for agenes him risen sona

a rice men e wron swikes, alre fyrst Balduin de Reduers; and held Execestre agenes him and te king it
best, and sian Balduin acordede. a tocan a ore and helden her castles agenes him.
He was a good man and there was great fear of him; no-one dared act wrongly against another in his
time. He made peace for both men and animals. Whoever carried a gold and silver burden, no-one dared
say to him anything but good. At this time his nephew, Stephen de Blois, had come to England, and he
came to London, and the people of London received him and sent for the archbishop, William Curbeil; and
he consecrated him as king on Midwinter Day. In this kings time everything was unpeace and evil and
plunder, for those powerful men who were traitors immediately rose against him, first of all Baldwin de
Redvers; and he held Exeter against him and the king besieged it, and afterwards Baldwin submitted.
Then the others occupied and held their castles against him.
It demonstrates demise of OE inflectional system and transition to relatively uninflected
state of Middle English. Loanwords come from both Norse and French. It is not surprising to
find Norse influence in text written in Peterborough within the Scandinavian-settled region of
the Danelaw. Only Norse loan - tocan (they) occupied, (they) took. Important and significant
word as it is a central item of vocabulary, and it ousted native OE term niman. Language also
shows some English words holding their own against Norse loans which had entered the
language by this time: e.g., 3rd person plural possessive personal pronoun still OE-derived her,
rather than Norse-derived their. French loanwords castles, pais, acordede submitted.
Construction of personal names Stephne de Blais and Balduin de Reduers. French influence goes
beyond merely lexical - pais

interesting for phonological reasons: following Germanic

Consonant Shift only a tiny number of words in OE began with [p] introduction of Romance
(French or Latin) words reintroduced [p].
Orthographically language in transition - Anglo-Saxon spelling conventions still present:
sc not yet replaced by sh in rcebiscop but now accompanied by Romance (specifically French)
conventions: u used for medial [v] in sylure silver, digraph th used in byrthen burden
alongside older Anglo-Saxon letters and in is this and unfri unpeace.
Not every loanword recorded in medieval texts succeeded in establishing itself and became
in anyway a continuing, let alone a permanent part of the language. Linguistic change occurs
through thousands or millions of individual human choices, and so it is in this sense
preeminently evitable. Similarly, there were many developments which were only local or
regional, and never became established more generally across the country.
Did late OE and early Middle English writers deliberately exclude or include Norse and
French loans precisely because they were conscious that they were loans?
The Ormulum composed in the late 12th century by a certain Orm (who named it after
himself) intended as a preaching tool to be read out loud to lay audiences.
Probably composed somewhere not far in time and space from Continuations of
Peterborough Chronicle. Language marked by very heavy Norse influence: many Norse
loanwords found recorded there for the first time; Orms third-person plural personal pronouns
are the new, Norse-derived one. Unlike Peterborough Chronicle, Ormulum contains very few

loanwords from French (fewer than a dozen). Reason cannot be lack of exposure to French
influence: French orthographic practices prominent in Orms spelling system- Ormulum may be
first extant English manuscript to use French-derived sh for earlier sc, and wh for earlier hw.
Orms non-use of French-derived vocabulary looks deliberate recognized to be loanwords.
Inclusion of French-derived orthography but exclusion of French-derived vocabulary, may
indicate a sociolinguistic situation in which literate readers were familiar with French spelling,
but illiterate listeners were ignorant of French words. Did language contact play a role in loss of
inflectional endings? Contact between speakers of English and speakers of Norse suggested as
having been crucial. English and Norse mutually intelligible languages -however, while
cognate English and Norse words were generally similar, or even identical,in their basic form,
they often differed with respect to inflexional endings: compare OE giest and Old Norse gestr
guest, guma and gumi man, scipu and skip ships. Repeated contact on daily or even domestic
basis between speakers of the two languages

- inflectional differences became eroded or

ignored played no role (or were even a hindrance) in effective communication. Most inflections
probably non-functional in Norse-English communication they decayed, and alternative
methods of expressing grammatical relationships came to be more prominent above all
method of relatively fixed word-order. First point in support English inflections decayed
earlier in north and east of England than in south and west precisely in those parts of the
country where Scandinavian settlement led to contact situations. Second similar inflectional
decay occurred in Norse language in England.
First point of qualification gradual decay of inflections and tendency towards analysis, i.e.
towards a relatively fixed word-order, were already present in OE as a result of fixing of stress
on first syllable in Germanic period; whole process certainly not initiated by contact with Norse
speakers, only encouraged or accelerated. Second probably misleading to label this contactinduced loss of inflections as creolization or the development of a new mother tongue out of a
pragmatic contact language. Syllable in Germanic period; whole process certainly not initiated
by contact with Norse speakers, only encouraged or accelerated.

Australia, New Zealand and South Africa

These three countries have been grouped together for a number of reasons:
First of all, they are the only large areas in the southern hemisphere in which English is
spoken as a native language.
This itself is related to the relatively large-scale settlement of all three by English
speaking Europeans at roughly the same time (Australia from 1788, South Africa
essentially from 1820, New Zealand officially from 1840).
All three were, for a considerable period of time, British colonies and hence open to
British institutions (government, administration, courts, military, education and religion)
as well as the use of English as an official language.
Australia

When the first European settlers reached Port Jackson (present day Sydney) in New South
Wales in 1788 the continent was inhabited by the native or Aboriginal peoples.
Since these peoples were linguistically divided and technologically far less advanced than
the European newcomers, they had relatively little impact on further developments, including
language. Today the Aboriginal population numbers about 0.25 million in a total of about 19
million.
Initially Australia served as a British penal colony and was populated chiefly by transported
convicts.
With the economic development of the country (wool, minerals) the number of voluntary
immigrants increased, and it boomed after the discovery of gold in 1851.
The convict settlers were chiefly Irish (30 per cent) and southern English. The latter had the
strongest influence on the nature of AusE. Because of their largely urban origins the English
they used contained relatively few rural, farming terms and perhaps a greater number of words
considered to be less refined in polished English society.
The pronunciation which has developed, while distinctly Australian, has a clearly urban
southern English bias; and although it is often compared to Cockney, the similarities are only
partial.
Today the vast majority of the population speaks English; and over 80 per cent of them have
it as their native language. Aboriginal languages are in wide use only in Western Australia and
the Northern Territory; in the late twentieth century Aboriginal languages were used there by
perhaps as much as a quarter of the population.
Non-British immigration has been significant since the Second World War. The long
practiced white Australia policy, which discouraged non-European, even non-British
immigration (except for New Zealanders) has yielded to more liberal policies: by the 1970s a
third of the immigrants were Asians and only a half were Europeans.
Regardless of the presence of numerous immigrant languages the primacy of English has
never been called into question; the influence of both immigrant and Aboriginal languages has
been limited to providing loan words.
AusE is most easily recognized by its pronunciation. The intonation seems to operate within
a narrower range of pitch, and the tempo often strikes non-Australians as noticeably slow.
Except for the generally slower pronunciations of rural speech, there is no systematic regional
variation in AusE, but there are significant social differences.
Frequently AusE pronunciation is classed in three categories. The first is referred to as
Cultivated and resembles RP relatively closely; it may, in fact, include speakers whose
pronunciation is near-RP. It is spoken by proportionately few people (in one investigation of
adolescent speakers approximately 11 percent. Nevertheless, it is the type of pronunciation
given in the Macquarie Dictionary.
The second type is called General, spoken by the majority (55 percent); its sound patterns
are clearly Australian, but not so extreme as what is known as Broad (34 percent;), which
realizes its vowels more slowly than General. In the light of Australias early history, in which
two groups stood in direct opposition to each other, namely the convicts and the officer class
which supervised them, the following remark seems fitting:
In sum, Australian English developed in the context of two dialects each of the bearing a certain
amount of prestige. Cultivated Australian is, and continues to be, the variety which carries overt prestige.

It is the one associated with females, private elite schools, gentility and an English heritage. Broad
Australian carries covert prestige and is associated with males, the uneducated, commonness and
republicanism The new dialect is General which retains the national identity associated with Broad but
which avoids the nonstandardisms in pronunciation, morphology and syntax associate with uneducated
speech wherever English is spoken. (Horvath)
Today teenage speakers tend to cluster in the area of General, perhaps being pushed there to
distinguish themselves from the large number of immigrants who have adopted Broad.
In addition to the remark made above on the narrower range of pitch in AusE, one further
comment is appropriate. This is the use of what is called the High Rising Tone (sometimes also
called Australian Question Intonation), which involves the use of rising contours for statements.
It is part of the turn-taking mechanism, and it is used chiefly in narrative and descriptive texts.
It is apparently a low prestige usage, favored more by young people; it is also more common
among females than among males and may be observed increasingly often, especially among
young women, in other national varieties of English.
There are only a few significant differences in the realization of AusE consonants when
compared with RP and also with GenAm. Among these is the tendency to flap and voice
intervocalic /t/ before an unstressed syllable in Broad and General, though rarely in Cultivated.
T-flapping is very similar to the same phenomenon in GenAm. This necessarily means that
there is an absence of the glottal stop [], which many urban varieties of BrE have in the same
environment (e.g. butter is [b] rather than [b]. Unlike GenAm, but like RP, AusE is nonrhotic. As in Cockney there is also a certain amount of H-dropping (ouse for house). However,
Horvaths Sydney investigation turned up relatively little of this. In addition, the sound quality
of /l/ is even darker than a normal velarized [l]; it is, rather, pharyngealized [l ] in all positions.
Furthermore, there seems to be widespread vocalization of /l/, which leads to a new set of
diphthongs (NZE is similar). In the following the vowel system of General/Broad AusE is
presented schematically in comparison with an unshifted RP point of departure.
One of the main differences, noted by various observers, is a general raising of the simple
vowels. A counter-clockwise lowering and retraction of the first element in the diphthongs
which move towards a high front second element, and a clockwise lowering and fronting of the
first element of the diphthongs which move towards a high back second element are further
changes. To some extent AusE represents a continuation of the Great Vowel Shift, which began
in the late Middle English period and which is continuing in the same sense in London English
(Cockney).

bit bt // raised //
foot foot // raised //
bet bit // raised //
bat bet // raised //

cut cut // raised //

box box // raised //
Diacritic = raised

Beyond such differences in the phonetic realization of the vowels, it is notable that far fewer
unstressed vowels are realized as // in AusE than in RP. This means that the distinction
maintained in RP between <-es> and <-ers> (as in boxes /z/ and boxers /z/ or humid /d/ and
humoured /d/) is usually not made.
Indeed, it may be possible to say that there is a certain centralization of // which brings it
closer to //, but also sometimes to fronted [] as well.

 fleas fleas /i:/ //

goat goat // //
who who /u:/ //
out at /a/ /o/
bird bird /:/ raised /:/
Ill oil /a/ //
face fice /e/ //
start start /:/ /a:/
In morphology AusE reveals a preference for several processes of word formation which are
less frequent in English at large. One of these is the relatively greater use of reduplication,
especially in designations for Australian flora and fauna borrowed from Aboriginal languages
(bandy-bandy, a kind of snake, gang-gang, a kind of cockatoo) proper names (Banka Banka, Ki Ki,
Kurri Kurri) and terms from Aboriginal life including pidgin/creole terms (mia-mia hut, kai kai
food). In addition the endings {-ee/-y/-ie} /i/ (broomy, Aussie, Tassie, Brizzie, surfy) and {-o}
[] (bottlo, smoko) occur more often in AusE than in other varieties.
AusE shares all but a small portion of its vocabulary with StE; however this small, Australian
element is important for giving AusE its own distinctive flavour. Indeed, next to pronunciation
it is the distinctively Australian words which give this variety its specialcharacter.
Rhyming slang, though hardly of frequent use, is often regarded as especially typical of
AusE, e.g. sceptic tanks Yanks. In addition, there are a number of Australian words which
originate in English dialects and therefore are not a part of StE everywhere, e.g. bonzer terrific,
chook(ie) chicken, cobber mate, crook ill, dinkum genuine, larrikin rowdy, swag bundle, tucker
food
Many borrowings come from Aboriginal languages, of which some 40 words are still current
in AusE and include: billabong (dried out river), boomerang, budgerigar, dingo, gin Aboriginal
woman, koala (an animal), kookaburra (a bird), mallee (a tree, scrub), nulla-nulla Aboriginal club,
wallaby small kangaroo, wallaroo mountain kangaroo, wombat burrowing marsupial, woomera
(throwing stick, boomerang).
There are a variety of words for Aboriginal hut: gunya (Port Jackson), mia-mia (Victoria),
humpy (Queensland), wurley (South Australia).
Other words are general StE, but may be applied somewhat differently in AusE. For
example, early settlement gave AusE station for a farm (from earlier prison station).
Paddocks are fields.
A mob of sheep is a flock or herd.
Muster for rounding up cattle is explained as due to the military arrangement of the
convict settlements, as are superintendent of the station and huts of the men.
Squatter, initially someone with small holdings but later large ones, took on a connotation
of wealth.
Further terms from this period include outback, overlanders cattle drivers, stockman man in
charge of livestock, jackaroo apprentice on a station , but also cocky small farmer.
Mate/mateship grew into its present legendary egalitarian male friendship and
interdependence, first in the workplace and then more generally. Today an egalitarian
mateyness contributes to the immediate use of first names, often abbreviated or given the
Australian diminutive in {-o} as in Stevo from Stephen.
Borrowing was not only from Aboriginal languages and dialects, but also from both
standard BrE and standard AmE.
The former gives us railway (AmE railroad), goods train (AmE freight train), guards van (AmE
caboose), but AmE cowcatcher (not needed in Britain).

Australians have semi-trailers or semis not BrE articulated lorries; and AusE has truck, not lorry;
station wagon, not estate car.
In the political arena we find states and interstate; federalists and state-righters; Senate, House of
Representatives all AmE in source, but each state upper house is called a Legislative Council and
the lower, a Legislative Assembly (Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia) or
House of Assemby (Southern Australia, Tasmania) all more BrE.
Store has the AmE meaning; other AmE borrowings include older block area of land for
settlement etc., township, bush the countryside as opposed to town and more recently french
fries, cookies and movies.
The language situation in New Zealand resembles that in Australia in many ways. Virtually
everyone can speak English, and most have it as their native language. The large minority of
Maoris, the native Polynesian people of New Zealand, are rapidly losing their native tongue. At
the end of the 1970s only about 20 per cent of them, which is approximately 3 percent of the
population of the country, were still fluent in it, and few of these speakers were younger people.
The decision in 1987 to give Maorithe status of official language is unlikely to change anything.
The historical development of New Zealand is closely related to that of Australia. Before British
sovereignty over the territory was officially proclaimed in 1840 there were already some 2,000
English speaking people there. They had come, mostly via Australia, to establish whaling
stations or to work as Christian missionaries to the Maoris. After 1840 European settlement was
more closely regulated (but with no transported convicts and no penal stations) and grew
gradually in the following decades, drawing on immigration chiefly from Great Britain and
Australia. It was these people, Australians and many English immigrants with a London bias to
their speech, who determined the linguistic character of New Zealand. The English which the
present day New Zealand population of almost 4 million (including approximately 15 per cent
Maoris and 6 per cent other Polynesians) speaks is very much like AusE, suggesting a single
dialect area with two major varieties. Indeed, it has sometimes been said that, linguistically
speaking, New Zealand is to Australia as Canada is to the United States. The differences within
each of the pairs are small, but for the smaller partner psychologically vital. The pronunciation
and the vocabulary of NZE is noticeably different for non-New Zealanders, but the grammar is
fully standard, differing from other standard varieties only in preference for use of some forms:
The differences between NZE and other varieties are to be found in matters of degree rather than in
categorical distinctions, but NZE is not just the same as BrE or AmE: it is a distinct variety, in grammar
as well as in lexis and pronunciation.
For all practical purposes New Zealanders sound like Australians, at least to outsiders; of
course, to New Zealanders the Australian accent seems quite different
There seems to be little or no regional difference in pronunciation despite the fact that New
Zealanders feel there is (but see remarks below on Otago and Southland).
Social or class differences do, however, show up, though less than in Britain. It may also be
the case that RP is still more a model in New Zealand than in Australia; certainly it is favoured
in serious broadcasting and the news.
Investigations of attitudes show associations of RP with ambition, education, reliability,
intelligence, higher income and occupational prestige, but association of NZE accents with
friendliness and a sense of humour. While RP has high overt prestige, North American accents
show the overall highest covert prestige.

In contrast to AusE: A true New Zealand standard is still evolving (Bayard 1990: 67). Note,
too, that correction in the direction of the prestige sometimes results in such hypercorrect forms
as /e/ for /a/ in such words as I or like.
The explication and figures presented above for AusE, apply to NZE as well. The shifts
shown there include such items as the growing merger of /e/ and /e/, which compounded
with the raising of // to /e/ led to the following misunderstanding.
A visiting American phoning a colleague at his house got one of the mans children on the
line. The American heard, much to his astonishment, Hes dead rather than the intended
Heres Dad
While much of NZE pronunciation is the same as in AusE, including the even more frequent
use of the high rising tone, a few points are arguably different and merit pointing out.
One of these is the greater retraction and centralization of // in NZE, a point which nonNew Zealanders have often commented on. Hence the vowel of kit becomes [1] or even a
stressed schwa []. This explains the surprise of an American hearing Flight 846 at Wellington
Airport announced as follows: Flight ite four sucks
There is also a very noticeable tendency to vocalize /l/ in NZE. The result has had a far
reaching effect on the vowel system because it has created a number of new diphthongs.
This occurs more commonly after front than after back vowels and often involves
neutralization (i.e. otherwise different vowels are no longer distinguished when followed by
/l/), e.g. bill = bull, fool = full and kill = cull, or, even more extreme, pool = pull = pill = pall, all of
which might be rendered as pooh.
A related phenomenon is the neutralization of the /e/// opposition in words like
helicopter, help, Wellington, which then sound like hallicopter, halp and Wallington.
The centring diphthongs // and // are merging (beer = bear) for more and more young
people, as in AusE and SAE as well.
On the other hand, young people show signs of increasing use of the glottal stop in words
with final /t/.
The vocabulary of NZE has been influenced by new flora, fauna, topography, institutions
and the presence of a non-English speaking people. In addition, it shares many items with AusE
that differ from other national varieties of English.
Like AusE there is relativelylittle regionally different vocabulary, but note a certain type of
large, smooth sausage, which in Auckland is called polony, in Christchurch saveloy, in Southland
Belgium, Belgium roll/sausage (AusE uses polony and saveloy, Adelaide fritz, Brisbane and Sydney,
devon) (Burridge and Mulder 1998: 4).
What distinguishes NZE most from AusE is the existence in NZE of a sizeable number of
borrowings from Maori. Examples include the following: hoot money, kiwi a kind of (flightless)
bird, the NZ symbol, ngaio a kind of tree, Pakeha white New Zealander, wahine woman, whare
small house, hut, yacker work.
The fact that /a/ as in whare /wari/ can become // in NZE led one schoolboy to make the
following spelling mistake: Dad thought Mum looked tired so he hired a whore for the
holidays.
The vocabulary of NZE has been influenced by new flora, fauna, topography, institutions
and the presence of a non-English speaking people. In addition, it shares many items with AusE
that differ from other national varieties of English.

Like AusE there is relativelylittle regionally different vocabulary, but note a certain type of
large, smooth sausage, which in Auckland is called polony, in Christchurch saveloy, in Southland
Belgium, Belgium roll/sausage (AusE uses polony and saveloy, Adelaide fritz, Brisbane and Sydney,
devon).
What distinguishes NZE most from AusE is the existence in NZE of a sizeable number of
borrowings from Maori. Examples include the following: hoot money, kiwi a kind of (flightless)
bird, the NZ symbol, ngaio a kind of tree, Pakeha white New Zealander, wahine woman, whare
small house, hut, yacker work.
The fact that /a/ as in whare /wari/ can become // in NZE led one schoolboy to make the
following spelling mistake: Dad thought Mum looked tired so he hired a whore for the
holidays.

English in North America

English is spoken as a native language in two major spheres in America. The larger one
covers the United States and English speaking Canada; the other, lesser, sphere is the Caribbean
area, centering on Jamaica, the Lesser Antilles and Guyana. There are a few peripheral areas,
the creole speaking sections along the Atlantic coast of Central America and the Gullah area of
South Carolina and Georgia.
The largest single English speaking area in the world is that formed by the United States and
Canada. Approximately 85 per cent of the 275 million Americans and almost two thirds of the
Canadian population of about 31 million had English as their native language in 2000. This is a
sum total of approximately a quarter of a billion speakers. Many, but by no means all, of the
inhabitants of Canada and the United States who do not have English as their first language,
nevertheless use it in a multitude of different situations. The United States does not have an
official language despite efforts by the English Only movement; however, some 23 states have
passed laws making it their official language. In Canada both English and French are official
languages. The next most widely used languages are Spanish and French. Significant numbers
of Spanish speaking residents, many of whom are recent immigrants (both legal and
undocumented), live in Miami (especially from Cuba) and New York (especially from Puerto
Rico), as well as in neighbourhood pockets in many large American cities (generally from
Mexico and Central America). Others live in communities whose Spanish language traditions
go back hundreds of years (chiefly Chicano communities of the southwest). French is the
majority language of Quebec (almost 6 million native speakers with an English speaking
minority of approximately 600,000). Ontario and New Brunswick also have sizeable
francophone minorities; relatively few French speakers live in the remaining provinces and
territories. In the United States the only concentrations of French are in New England, close to
French Canada and in Louisiana, where speakers are divided into those of the standard
metropolitan variety (descendants of the original French settlers), of Cajun French (descendants
of the Acadians, expelled from what was then renamed Nova Scotia) and speakers of Creole
French (mostly descendants of slaves).
Canada and the United States have large numbers of speakers of other mother tongues. Few
of them, however, have settled in such a way that their languages have also been able to serve as
community languages. Nevertheless, there are rural communities in both countries in which
immigrant languages have been maintained over several generations (e.g. the German speaking
Amish of Pennsylvania and the Russian speaking Doukhobors of Saskatchewan), and there are

urban communities such as the numerous Chinatowns and Little Italys, where languages
besides English, French and Spanish are maintained.
Non-immigrant and non-colonial languages are still in daily use in some Native American
environments. Perhaps 0.5 million of the 2 million American Indians and Alaska Natives in the
United States can speak their traditional languages. In Canada approximately 62 per cent of the
more than 0.5 million Native Canadians and Inuits (Eskimos) now have English as their native
tongue (and 5 per cent have French); less than 200,000 speak their native languages.
Despite the large number of non-English native speakers (over one half in New Mexico, over
one third in Hawaii, California, Arizona and Texas and over one quarter in New York), there are
few places in the United States and Canada where it is not possible to communicate in English.
Despite highly developed FrenchEnglish bilingualism, there are some 4.25 million
monolingual French speakers in Canada. Language retention for English in Canada is given as
111.4 per cent, which means that English is spreading at the cost of other languages; for
Canadian French the rate is 95.9 per cent; for all other languages, just over half (54.9 per cent). In
the United States several non-English speaking groups are expanding noticeably, above all
Spanish and Chinese; but the retention rate for native born children is generally not much
higher than 50 per cent in the first American born generation.
Canadian English
CanE is solidly part of the American variety of English. Yet there are important features of
CanE which distinguish it as an independent sub-variety of AmE. What is distinctly Canadian
about Canadian English is not its unique features (of which there are a handful) but its
combination of tendencies that are uniquely distributed. Not the least of the factors
contributing to the independence of CanE are the attitudes of anglophone Canadians, which
strongly support a separate linguistic identity.
The effect of attitudes on language behaviour is revealed in a study in which Canadians with
relatively more positive views of the United States and of Americans are also more likely to have
syllable reduction in words like the following:
Mirror (= mere), warren (= warn), or lion (= line).
They also have fewer high diphthongs in words such as about or like (Canadian Raising) and
are more likely to voice the /t/ in words like party, butter or sister. Finally, they use more
American morphological and lexical forms.
Pro-British attitudes correlate well with a preservation of vowel distinctions before an /r/,
such as spear it vs spirit, Mary vs merry vs marry, furry vs hurry and oral vs aural as well as distinct
vowels in cot vs caught.
Pro-Canadian attitudes mean relatively more leveling of the vowel distinctions just mentioned,
more loss of /j/ in words like tune, dew, or new (also true of speakers with positive attitudes
towards the United States).
A number of surveys have been conducted to register preferences with regard to the
pronunciation of various individual words (tomato with /e/ or //, either with /i/ or /a/,
lever with /e/ or /i/ etc.), as well as spellings. Approximately 75 per cent say zed (BrE) instead
of zee (AmE) as the name of the letter and just as many use chesterfield (specifically CanE) for sofa
(AmE and BrE). Two thirds have an /l/ in almond (GenAm), but two thirds also say bath (BrE)
the baby rather than bathe (AmE) it.

BrE spellings are strongly favored in Ontario; AmE ones in Alberta. Indeed, spelling may call
forth relatively emotional reactions since it is a part of the language system which (like
vocabulary use) people are especially conscious of, in contrast to many points of pronunciation.
This means that using a BrE spelling rather than an AmE one can, on occasion, be something of
a declaration of allegiance. As the preceding examples indicate, differences between CanE and
US AmE are, aside from the rather superficial spelling distinctions, largely in the area of
pronunciation and vocabulary. Grammar differences are virtually non-existent, at least on the
level of StE.
Vocabulary provides for a considerable number of Canadianisms. As with many varieties of
English outside the British Isles, designations for aspects of the topography and for flora and
fauna make up many of these items. Examples are: sault waterfall, muskeg a northern bog,
canals fjords (topography), cat spruce a kind of tree, tamarack a kind of larch, kinnikinnick
plants used in a mixture of dried leaves, bark and tobacco for smoking in earlier times (flora);
and kokanee a kind of salmon, siwash duck a kind of duck (fauna). The use of the discourse
marker eh? is also considered to be especially Canadian.
Im walking down the street, eh? (Like this, see?) I had a few beers, en I was feeling priddy good, eh?
(You know how it is.) When all of a sudden I saw this big guy, eh? (Ya see.) He musta weighed all of 220
pounds, eh? (Believe me.) I could see him from a long ways off en he was a real big guy, eh? (Im not
fooling.) Im minding my own business, eh? (You can bet I was.)
The pronunciation of CanE (sometimes called General Canadian) applies to Canada from
the Ottawa Valley (just west of the QuebecOntario border) to British Columbia and is similar to
GenAm. It shares the same consonant system, including the unstable contrast between the
/hw/ of which and the /w/ of witch. Its vowel system is similar to that of the northern variety of
GenAm, which means that the opposition between // and // as in cot and caught has been
lost (except by the Anglophiles mentioned above).
What shows up as the most typical Canadian feature of pronunciation is what is generally
called Canadian raising. This refers to the realization of /a/ and /a/ with a higher and nonfronted first element [u] and [i] when followed by a voiceless consonant. Elsewhere the
realization is [au] and [a]. Hence each of the pairs bout [but] bowed [baud] and bite [bit]
bide [bad] have noticeably different allophones. While other varieties of English also have such
realizations (e.g. Scotland, Northern Ireland, Tidewater Virginia), the phonetic environment
described here is specifically Canadian.
One of the most interesting aspects of Canadian raising is its increasing loss (leveling to /a/
and /a/ in all phonetic environments) among young Canadians. This movement may be
understood as part of a standardization process in which the tacit standard is GenAm and not
General CanE. This movement has been documented most strongly among young females in
Vancouver and Toronto and is indicative of a generally positive attitude towards things
American, including vocabulary choice. However, an independent development among young
Vancouver males, namely rounding of the first element of /a/ before voiceless consonants as
[ou], is working against this standardization and may be part of a process promoting a covert,
non-standard local norm.
American English

The regional varieties of English in the United States consist of three general areas: Northern,
of which CanE is a part, Midland and Southern. Each of these may be further differentiated into
subregions. Grammar is of relatively little importance for these three areas; most of the dividing
and subdividing is based on vocabulary and pronunciation, though the two may not lead to
identical areas. However, the lexical distinctions are themselves most evident in the more oldfashioned, rural vocabulary.
Pronunciation differences, in contrast to lexis, are evident in everything a person says and
less subject to conscious control. The Southern accents realize /a/ as [a] or [a], that is, with a
weakened off-glide or no off-glide at all, especially before a voiced consonant, and /u/ and //
are being increasingly fronted. Lack of rhoticity is typical of Eastern New England and New
York City, but not the Inland North. It is also characteristic of Coastal Southern and Gulf
Southern, even though younger white speakers are increasingly rhotic, while Mid Southern
(also known as South Midland) has always been rhotic.
Northern does not have /j/ in words like due or new, nor does North Midland, but /j/ may
occur throughout the South. The //// opposition is maintained in the South (with
tendencies towards its loss in parts of Texas), but has been lost in the North Midland and is
weakening in the North. Canadian raising is a Northern form which, despite its name, is
common in many American cities of the Inland North.
The Northern Cities Shift is a demonstration of changes within AmE pronunciation. It is
taking place in the northern dialect area of the United States (including Detroit, Chicago,
Cleveland, Buffalo) and affects the short vowels. This involves a chain-like movement in which
realization of each of the phonemes indicated changes, but the distinctions within the system
are maintained.
Ann Ian // //
lunch launch // //
bit bet // //
talk tuck // //
bet but // //
locks lax // //
The pronunciation of the Northern Midland area more or less from Ohio westwards, has
often been referred to as General American (GenAm). This label is a convenient fiction used to
designate a huge area in which there are numerous local differences in pronunciation, but in
which there are none of the more noticeable subregional divisions such as those along the
eastern seaboard. Furthermore, the differences between North Midland and Inland North are
relatively insignificant. Both areas are rhotic, are not likely to vocalize /l/, have /a/ as [] or
[a], do not distinguish // and // (or increasingly do not) and no longer maintain the /j/ onglide in the due words. Most significant of all for the selection of North Midland for the label
GenAm is the fact that it is this type of accent more than any other which is used on the national
broadcasting networks.
The most noticeable regional contrast is that between North and South. This division is, in
addition to vocabulary and pronunciation differences, underscored to some extent at least by
grammatical features. It seems that it is only in Southern varieties, including Black English
Vernacular (or African American Vernacular English), that such admittedly non-standard
features occur as perfective done (e.g. I done seen it), future gon (Im gon [not goin] tell you
something) and several more far reaching types of multiple negation, such as a carry-over of
negation across clauses (Hes not comin, I dont believe = I believe hes not coming).

It is also in the South that an area is to be found with speech forms approaching the
character of a traditional dialect (such as otherwise found only in Great Britain and Ireland, and
possibly also in Newfoundland). The dialect which is meant is Appalachian English and the
related Ozark English, which are found in the Southern Highlands. The English of these regions
is characterized by a relatively high incidence of older forms which have generally passed out of
other forms of AmE. Examples include syntactic phenomena such as a-prefixing on verbs (Im afixin to carry her to town), morphological-phonological ones such as initial /h/ in hit it and
haint aint and lexical ones such as afore before or nary not any.

African American Vernacular English

It is the poorer, working and lower class African Americans, both in the rural South and the
urban North, who speak the most distinctive forms of this dialect. It is often distinctly
associated with the values of the vernacular culture including performance styles especially
associated with black males in such genres as the dozens, toasting, ritual insults etc., but also
chanted sermons.
One of the main debates which have raged in connection with AAVE concerns its origins.
Some maintain that it derives from an earlier Plantation Creole, which itself ultimately derives
from West African Pidgin English. This would mean that AAVE contains grammatical
categories (especially of the verb phrase) which are basically different from English. The
converse view is that AAVE derives from the English of the white slave owners and slave
drivers, which ultimately derives from the English of Great Britain and Ireland. AAVE, so
conceived, is only divergent from StE in its surface forms. It is, in addition, possible to take a
position in between these two, maintaining that both have had influence on AAVE.
Since AAVE has its more immediate origins in the American South, pronunciation
similarities between the two are hardly astonishing.
1) realization of /a/ as [a] before voiced consonants (I like it sounds like Ah lock it);
2) convergence of // and /e/ + nasal (pin = pen);
3) merger of // and /:/, especially before /l/ (boil = ball);
4) merger of // and // before /k/ (think = thank);
5) merger of /i(r)/ and /e(r)/ (cheering = chairing) and of /(r)/ and /(r)/ (sure =
shore).
A number of grammatical features specific to BEV/AAVE have been pointed out. They
include
1) stressed ben (sometimes given as bn) as a marker of the remote past (e.g. The woman ben
married, which does not mean The woman has ben married (but no longer is), as a StE
speaker might assume, but indicates something which happened in the more distant past
and whose results are in effect: The woman has been married a long time
2) non-finite be as a marker of habitual aspect, e.g. he be eating he is always eating; this stands in
contrast to he eating he is eating (right now);

3) perfective done (sometimes given as dn) for perfective or completive aspect as when an
event has taken place and is over (even though its effects may still be in effect), e.g. they
done washed the dishes they have already washed the dishes;
4) sequential be done, often as a future resultative marker, shows one of several possibilities of
combining the aspectual markers just given, e.g. Ill be done killed that motherfucker if he
tries to lay a hand on my kid again Ill kill him if he should try to hurt my kid.
5) no or infrequent third person singular present tense {-S} where the verb be appears as an
inflected form we find I + am, but you, he/she/it, we, yall, they + is
6) third person singular present tense {-S} used as a marker of narrative in contrast to
unmarked non-narrative usage; this is viewed as a recent development
7) the past and the past participle are frequently identical, e.g. I ate I ate or I have eaten;
the two are distinguished when emphatic (I DID eat vs I HAVE ate) or when negated (I
didnt eat vs I aint/havent ate)
8) some young speakers form the simple past of a verb using had + lexical verb as in I had
got sick I got sick)
9) relative clauses are seldom formed using who, which and whose; zero relative is preferred,
even when the relative element is the subject of the relative clause, e.g. Thats the man [0/]
come here the other day.
10) plural marker and demonstrative them is widely used (as elsewhere in non-standard
English), e.g. them/dem boys; this includes what is known as the associative plural, a form
of them added to a definite noun, e.g. Felicia nem (< and them) done gone Felicia and the
others have already gone;
11) negative concord (also known as multiple negation or pleonastic negation) allows not
just one single negation, as in StE, but permits the negation to be copied onto all the
further indefinite (so-called negative polarity items), even in cases where the negation is
copied onto a subordinate clause as in He dont think nothing gonna happen to nobody
because of no arguments
12) question formation may occur without inversion both in indirect questions, e.g. They
asked could she go to the show, and in direct questions (though less frequent), e.g. Who that
is? Why she took that?;
13) double modals (as are frequently used in Southern AmE), e.g. I might could of (= have)
gone.

Scotland and Ireland

The move from England to Scotland is one of the linguistically most distinct that can be
made in the British Isles as far as English is concerned. StE itself is well established throughout
Scotland in government, schools, the media, business etc. in the specifically Scottish variety of
the standard, which is usually referred to as Scottish Standard English (SSE).
Yet in many areas of everyday life there is no denying that forms of English are used in
Scotland which are often highly divergent from the English of neighbouring England. These
forms are ultimately rooted in the rural dialects of the Scottish Lowlands, which differ distinctly
from the dialects south of the Border: there is a greater bundling of isoglosses at the border
between England and Scotland . . . than for a considerable distance on either side of the border.
(Note: an isogloss represents the boundary line between areas where two different phonetic,
syntactic or lexical forms are in use.) The traditional rural dialects as well as their urban
variations are collectively known as Scots.
Besides SSE and Scots one further non-immigrant language is spoken in Scotland. That is
Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language related to both Welsh and Irish. At present only a small part of
the population (no more than 1.5 per cent) speaks Gaelic; the Gaelic language areas are located
in the more remote regions of the northwest and on some of the Hebrides. Since 40 per cent of
Gaelic native speakers live today in urban (= English language) Scotland, their continued use of
the language is questionable. Those who speak Gaelic are, in any case, bilingual and also speak
English; their English is often influenced by their Celtic substratum.
There are several different types of Scots, each with a different status and prestige. The
variety so often and so subjectively regarded as vulgar is urban working class Scots;
considerably more positive are the often romanticized rural dialects; a third type is literary Scots
(sometimes termed Lallans, Lowlands). This final variety is also sometimes pejoratively
referred to as synthetic Scots because it represents an artificial effort to re-establish a form of
Scots as the national language of Scotland and as a language for Scottish literature. Scots is
commonly subdivided into four regional groupings.

Central Scots runs from West Angus and northeast Perthshire to Galloway in the
southwest and the River Tweed in the southeast. It contains both Glasgow and
Edinburgh and includes over two thirds of the population of Scotland; it also includes the
Scots areas of Ulster

Southern Scots is found in Roxburgh, Selkirk and East Dumfriesshire.

Northern Scots goes from East Angus and the Mearns to Caithness.

Island Scots is the variety in use on the Orkney and the Shetland Islands. The Shetlands
are further distinguished by the continued presence of numerous words which
originated in Norn, the Scandinavian language once spoken in the Islands.

The historicity of Scots as the descendant of Old Northumbrian is clearly given, and Scots is
consequently a cousin of the English of southeastern England, which was the basis of StE. Of
course, Scots has been highly influenced by StE. Lallans, as a language with literary ambitions,
has drawn heavily on the older Scots language for much of its vocabulary, but this is not a

natural process and the words it has adopted have no real currency, for few will seriously use
scrieve rather than write or leid rather than language. Scots has retained numerous dialect words
such as chaft jaw, lass girl, ken know, or ilka each, every. The lack of a Scots standard is also
reflected in the fact that there is sometimes a variety of local words for the same things, e.g.
bairn, wean, littlin, geet (child) or callant, loon, chiel (boy), or yett, grind (garden gate) without
there being any generally recognized Scots word. More divergent, and hence more autonomous,
are some of the grammatical forms. Among these note, for example, such non-standard
morphology as the past and past participle forms of the verb bake, namely, beuk and baken or
those of work, where both forms are wrocht (sometimes also spelled wrought). A few words also
retain older plural forms: coo cow, plural kye cows (see English kine), soo pig (see StE sow),
plural swine pigs, or ee eye, plural een eyes.
The second person pronoun often retains the singularplural distinction either by using
thou/du vs ye/yi/you or yiz/youse. Instead of StE relative whose one may find that his or that her.
Furthermore, the demonstratives comprise a three way system: this/that/yon and here/there/yonder
(for close, far and even further). Prepositions beginning with be in StE often begin with a- in Scots,
so afore, ahind, aneath, aside, ayont and atween. The verb is negated by adding na(e) to the
auxiliary, e.g. hasna(e), dinna(e). Furthermore, the auxiliaries are used differently; for example,
shall is not present in Scots at all.
The syntax of Scots includes the possibility of an {-s} ending on the present tense verb for all
person as a special narrative tense form, e.g. I comes, we says etc.
The pronunciation of Scots, finally, is also tremendously important in defining its
autonomous character. Quite in contrast to the other varieties of English around the world,
Scots dialects . . . invariably have a lexical distribution of phonemes which cannot be predicted
from RP or from a Scottish accent [i.e. SSE]. E.g. the following words, all of which have the
vowel /u/ in SSE, are realized with six different phonemes in the dialect of Angus: book //,
bull //, foot //, boot //, lose /o/, loose //.
Some of the more notable features of Scots pronunciation:
/x/ in daughter; in night it is []
/kn-/ in knock, knee (especially Northern Scots)
/vr-/ in write, wrought/wrocht (especially Northern Scots); Island Scots: /xr-/
the convergence of // and /t/ to /t/ and of // and /d/ to /d/ in Island Scots (the
Shetlands)
/u/ in house, out, now; Southern Scots: /u/ in word-final position
// or /y/ in moon, good, stool; Northern Scots: /i/
/e/ in home, go, bone; Northern Scots: /i/
/hw-/ in what, when etc.; Northern Scots: /f-/
In Urban Scots many of the features listed are recessive, for example, /x/, /kn-/, or /vr-/.
However, /hw/ is generally retained; furthermore, Scots remains firmly rhotic. Yet some
younger speakers do merge /w/ and /hw/, and some also delete non-prevocalic /r/. Often

pronunciations in which only certain lexical items retain a more traditional Scots pronunciation
are found with only selected words while other words have an SSE realization. For example, the
vowel // is found in the items bloody, does and used; /i/ in bread, dead and head; /u/ in about,
around, brown, cow, etc; and /e/ in do, home, no etc.
StE in Scotland is virtually identical to StE anywhere else in the world. As elsewhere, SSE has
its special national items of vocabulary. These may be general, such as outwith outside, pinkie
little finger, or doubt think, suspect; they may be culturally specific, such as caber a long and
heavy wooden pole thrown in competitive sports, as at the Highland Games or haggis sheep
entrails prepared as a dish; or they may be institutional, as with sheriff substitute acting sheriff
or landward rural.
Syntactically, SSE shows only minor distinctions vis--vis other types of StE. For instance, in
colloquial usage, the modal verb system differs inasmuch as shall and ought are not present,
must is marginal for obligation and may is rare.
SSE has its own distinct pronunciation as is the case with all national or regional varieties of
English. Some of its features are similar to those of Scots: It maintains /x/, spelled <ch>, in
some words such as loch or technical.

/hw/ and /w/ are distinct as in wheel and weal.

/l/ is dark [] in all environments for most speakers though it is clear

everywhere for some speakers in areas where Gaelic is spoken or was earlier; it is also
clear in the southwest (Dumfries and Galloway)

This variation in the pronunciation of /l/ is rooted in the fact that SSE includes two very
different traditions. One of these is the Lowlands Scots background. The other tradition is that
of Gaelic as a substratum. This means that the phonetic habits of Gaelic are carried over to
English. The more immediate the influence of Gaelic, the more instances there will be of English
influenced phonetically by Gaelic.
SSE is a rhotic accent, pronouncing /r/ wherever it is written. The articulation of the /r/ is
sometimes rolled or trilled [r], sometimes flapped [], sometimes constricted []; however, some
speakers even have non-rhotic realizations. Whatever the case, SSE differs considerably from
other rhotic accents because it preserves the /e///// distinction before /r/ in words like
heardbirdword, where in RP and GenAm these vowels have all merged to central //.
Moreover, Scottish English also distinguishes between /o/ and // before /r/ as in hoarse and
horse.
The vowel system of SSE does not, on the other hand, maintain all the vowel contrasts of RP.
Where the latter has /u/ in fool and // in full, SSE has undifferentiated /u/ in both and often
central [] or even fronted [y]. Not quite as widespread is the loss of the contrast between //
and // (not vs nought) and the opposition between // and /a/ (as in cat and cart) are
missing as well, though even less frequently.
It has been suggested that these three stand in an implicational relationship, which
means that whoever neutralizes ///a/ also neutralizes the other two pairs. And whoever

loses the opposition between // and // also loses that between // and /u/, but not
necessarily the ///a/ one.
Scottish English does not rely on vowel length differences as both RP and GenAm do.
Length does not seem to be phonemic anywhere. However, there are interesting phonetic
differences in length which have been formulated as Aitkens Law. According to this all the
vowels except // and // are long in morphemically final position (for example, at the end of a
root such as brew, but also at the end of bimorphemic brew + ed). Vowels are also longer when
followed by voiced fricatives, /v, d, z/ and /r/. Because of this, brewed contrasts phonetically
with brood, which has a shortened vowel.
Ireland is divided both politically and linguistically and, interestingly enough, the linguistic
and the political borders lie close together. Northern Ireland (the six counties of Antrim,
Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone is politically a part of the United
Kingdom while the remaining 26 counties form the Republic of Ireland. Although Irish English
(IrE), which is sometimes called Hiberno-English, shares a number of characteristics throughout
the island, there are also a number of very noticeable differences.
The northern counties are characterized by the presence of Scots forms. These originated in
the large scale settlement of the north by people from the Scottish Lowlands and the
simultaneous displacement of many of the native Irish following Cromwells subjection of the
island in the middle of the seventeenth century.
In what is now the Republic, a massive change from the Irish language (a Celtic language
related to Welsh and Scottish Gaelic) began around the year 1800. The type of English which
became established there stems from England and not Scotland and shows some signs of earlier
settlement in the southeast by people from the west midlands of England.
Most characteristic of southern IrE, however, are the numerous features in it which reflect
the influence of Irish as the substratum language. In a few areas in the west called Gaeltacht,
Irish is still spoken; and Irish is the Republics official language (together with English, the
second official language). The percentage of population who actually speak Irish is, however,
very low (around two per cent).
The northern and eastern parts of the province are heavily Scots and Protestant; the variety
of English spoken there is usually referred to as Ulster Scots or, sometimes, Scotch-Irish. Further
to the south and west the form of English is called Mid-Ulster English, and its features
increasingly resemble those of English in the South, with South Ulster English as a transitional
accent.
Northern Ireland has a number of distinct speech areas. In the north and the east there is a
band of Scots speech areas running from County Down through Antrim and Londonderry to
Donegal. Notably different is the lack of dark [l]. Generally to the south of these areas comes
Mid-Ulster English, which is also the variety spoken in Belfast. In the very south of Ulster there
is what has been called South Ulster English, a transitional dialect between Ulster English and
Ulster Scots and southern Hiberno-English.

In general, it seems that Southern Irish English has more features in common regionally than
it does differences; nevertheless, a speakers origin is usually localizable. Social distinctions are,
in contrast, much clearer. At the top of the social pyramid there is an educated variety,
sometimes termed the Ascendancy accent, which is relatively close to RP. However, this accent
does not serve as a norm. Indeed, if there is a standard of pronunciation, it is likely to be based
on that of Dublin. English in Dublin is, of course, far from uniform.
Bertz recognizes three levels:

Educated, which is reserved for more formal styles and used by people with academic
training;

General, which is found over a wide range of styles and is used by the more highly
trained (journalists, civil servants etc.); and finally,

Popular, which is again stylistically more restricted, namely, to informal levels and which
is typically heard among speakers with a more limited, elementary education.

Further distinctions in IrE are those which run along urbanrural lines. Filppula (1991)
found that three typically IrE constructions (clefting, topicalization and the use of the
subordinate clause conjunction and) were significantly more frequent among rural than among
Dublin speakers. The explanations offered are: urban speakers are further from the Irish
substratum; there were lower frequencies in rural Wicklow, which has long been English
speaking, than in Kerry and Clare, where change has been more recent; furthermore, Dubliners
have more contacts with the non-Irish English speaking outside world.

Wales and England

English in the British Isles
English is the primary language of both Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales) and Ireland
(the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland). English is native to England and a major part of
Scotland, from where it was transplanted to the other native English speaking areas in the
British Isles and around the globe. It is perhaps because its origins are here that this variety,
British English (BrE), is often regarded by English learners in many parts of the world as
somehow the best English.
The vast majority of the inhabitants of England and Wales speak English as their first
language; yet there are considerable minorities who do not. This is perhaps most obvious in
Wales, where around 20 per cent of the population speaks Welsh. In addition, there are large
minorities in urban centres throughout Great Britain who immigrated from the Indian
subcontinent or Cyprus and whose mother tongues are not English.
Wales

Wales is the only area in the British Isles where one of the original Celtic languages has been
able to survive as the daily language of a large number of people: just under one fifth use Welsh;
of these about 70 per cent use it as their exclusive home language and a further 13 per cent use
both it and English as their home languages. Although the future of Welsh is by no means
assured, its use seems to have stabilized somewhat vis--vis English. There are Welsh language
schools in the predominantly Welsh speaking areas in the north, and a fair amount of
broadcasting is carried out in Welsh as well. Welsh English shares many of the linguistic
features of southern England. What marks it off from the English of England is the effect of the
Celtic substratum, which shows most obviously in its sing-song intonation, presumably
influenced by Welsh.
In monolingual areas such as the southeast, the influence of Welsh is considerably weaker.
Here, for example, monolingual English speakers generally have non-rhotic accents, while
bilingual ones further to the west are more likely to have rhotic ones. Throughout Wales clear [l]
is the rule, whether prevocalic or postvocalic. This, too, may be due to the substratum, but it is
also typical of the English southwest. Welsh influenced English grammar (and vocabulary) is
more likely to be heard in nonanglicized areas.
Non-standard Welsh English has additional forms for habitual aspect constructed with the
uninflected auxiliary do (present) or did (past) plus the infinitive (He do go to the cinema every
week) or with an inflected form of be plus an ing-form of the verb (Hes going to the cinema every
week). The latter construction correlates well with the equivalent Welsh form while the do-form,
which is predominant in the southeast, is an English construction apparently originally
borrowed from the neighbouring English counties, but which is spreading into the be + V-ing
area in the west.
Fronting for topicalization (Singing they were) is common in Welsh English and is a reflex of
the substratum. The same is true of the practice of reporting indirect questions in the same word
order as direct questions (Im not sure is it true or not). Possession can be expressed by using a
prepositional construction (Theres no luck with the rich, they have no luck). A further instance of
influence from the substratum is the use of there in exclamations where GenE would have how
(Theres young she looks!, How young she looks!). The use of an all-purpose tag question isnt it?,
finally, is reminiscent of the same construction in second language Englishes in Africa and Asia.
Further non-standard grammatical features of Welsh English are no different from many of the
widespread non-standard forms of England.
England
As one moves from area to area in England the variety of local forms in use can be
impressively different. It may be difficult, for example, for Somerset and Yorkshire people to
understand each other. Yet lack of mutual comprehension does not actually occur very
frequently. The reasons for this lie in the fact that almost 90 percent of the population of Great

Britain lives in the cities and towns and the speech forms of urban populations are less
noticeably different from each other than those of traditional rural communities. Furthermore,
speakers of the traditional dialects almost always have a command of GenE.
Within the cities there has been a great deal of levelling (koineization) to a common
denominator of forms, and here the more common, overarching, public, media-oriented
linguistic culture of General English has become dominant. This is not to say that there are no
regional distinctions between the areas. Although there are, they are hardly as extreme as those
between many of the traditional dialect areas. The major division within England is between the
north and the midlands, on the one hand, and the south, on the other. The chief differences lie
in several features of pronunciation.
In southern England, the vowel in such words as luck, butter, cousin or love is pronounced
with a low central or fronted vowel // and is therefore distinctly different from that of pull,
push, could or look, all of which have //. In the north the two groups of words have an identical
vowel, namely //, so that look and luck are homophones.
A second distinction involves the distribution of // and //. In such words as bath, after,
pass, dance and sample the realization in the north is a phonemically short vowel as in GenAm
though the quality of / / is nearer [a] in northern England. The south, in contrast, has a long
vowel, either [a] or []. In a third group of words, namely quarry, swath, what, which have a
/w/ preceding the vowel, the northern vowel is fronted [a] while the south has back //.
A final distinction is the presence of the short low back vowel // preceding a voiceless
fricative in words like moss, off, broth in the north. The south has a long vowel here, //. (RP
once had / /, and some older speakers still use it while younger ones use / /). Other
important distinctions within the regional accents of England are the exclusive use of a clear [l]
in the southwest and the presence of rhotic areas both in the southwest and in Lancashire in the
north. Regional variation in vocabulary is infrequent outside the traditional dialects.
Grammatical variation within GenE is probably less a regional dimension, though this can
be the case, than it is an educational one. Those who value education are likely to use StE
habitually while those whose orientation lies elsewhere are more likely to use non-standard
GenE, which shares a number of characteristics which transcend not only the regional
boundaries of England, but its national borders as well and are to be found among native
speakers of the language all over the English speaking world. These features include the
following:
1) third person singular dont (she dont know);
2) non-standard past and past participial forms (they come to see us yesterday; you done
a good job; have you went to see them yet?);
3) multiple negation (she dont have none);
4) widespread use of aint for be and the auxiliary have (I aint interested; he aint
comin; we aint seen him);
5) never for (do) not (Did you take them sweets? No, I never);

6) various non-standard relative pronouns such as what or as (he was the man what/a did it); or
none at all as the subject of a restrictive relative clause (he was the ma did it);
7) the demonstrative determiner them (where did you get them new glasses?);
8) the reflexive pronouns hisself and theirselves (he hurt hisself playing football);
9) no plural form after numbers (shes five foot five tall and weighs eight stone);
10) not quite so widespread is the use of the ending {-s} for all persons in the west of England
(I likes it, you likes it, she likes it), but the lack of any {-s} in East Anglia (she like it).
In England there is one accent which is not connected with a specific locality though it is
rather more southern than northern in its overall character. This is RP, which is short for
Received Pronunciation, where received originally meant accepted in the sense of being the
accent current in the best social circles. This rather restricted reference is hardly appropriate in
present day English society, for RP is not limited in such a strict way anymore. This is not to say
that there are no social distinctions connected with it, for clearly there are. RP is closely
associated with education itself as well as with the kind of higher social position and
responsibility which is often associated with education. Despite the advantages of RP as a
regionally neutral accent, it has not displaced the local accents of England. Estimates about the
number of people who speak RP natively (i.e. who learned it at home as children and not later
in life) are usually set at three to five per cent of the population. As such, RP is clearly a minority
accent. However, its speakers occupy positions of authority and visibility in English society
(government and politics, cultural and educational life, business and industrial management)
far out of proportion to their actual numbers. Until the Second World War, RP was also the
exclusive accent of the BBC. Perhaps because of its one time dominance in broadcasting RP is
sometimes referred to as BBC English, even though a wide range of English and non-English
(Scottish, Irish, North American, Australian) accents can be heard daily on the BBC and other
television channels and radio stations. Further designations for this accent include Public
School Pronunciation, the Kings/Queens English and Oxford English. In linguistic
treatments of the accent, RP has become the usual label. The accent itself is neither changeless
nor uniform, nor is there complete agreement about just what it is. With perhaps a few
concessions to local pronunciation habits, it might be possible to extend the number of speakers
to whom RP applies; within England this would include a total of perhaps ten per cent, but it
would also include many of the most prestigious accents in countries like Australia, New
Zealand and South Africa. Such an extended accent is called near-RP by Wells and is somewhat
vaguely defined to refer to a group of accent types which are clearly educated and situated
well away from the lower end of the socio-economic scale, while differing to some noticeable
degree from what we recognize as RP. Within RP itself there are several streams. There is
Refined or U-RP (= Upper Class RP). Among the various characteristics which Wells cites for it
the most likely diagnostic feature is a single tapped [] in intervocalic position, which is
recessive in General RP.
The Refined variety has sub-varieties which Gimson once called Conservative and
Advanced RP. Conservative RP counts as old-fashioned and will most likely be heard only

among older speakers. It is characterized by a diphthongization of //, something like [e].

Furthermore, // may still be realized as the centring diphthong [ ]. The centring diphthongs
themselves end closer to [a] than to []: [a], [a] and [a]. // may be [o], and, finally, the
vowel in words of the type moss, off and broth can be old-fashioned // rather than
General //.
Urban British English
Urban accents are related to the pronunciations of the regions in which they are situated
with a sometimes high degree of koineization.
There are relatively few local lexical items. Non-standard grammatical features are often
shared over a wide geographic range (nationally or even internationally) (= GenE).
Phonetic variables are particularly revealing as sociolinguistic indicators of class, gender
and age.
Sociolinguistic indicators are most visible for pronunciations currently involved in
change.
Phonetic realization correlates highly with speech style (word list style, reading style,
interview style, casual conversation).
Stigmatized pronunciations are most subject to variation according to style since they are
most closely monitored.
Sociolinguistic indicators are not absolute, but functions of the frequency of occurrence.
Pronunciation change comes either from above (the overt norm) via the middle class or
from below (the covert norm) via the working class.
Middle class women are most often leaders in change towards the overt norm; working
class men are most often the initiators of changes towards the covert norm.
Cockney
Traditionally, a Cockney is an inhabitant of Londons East End, but from the point of view of
language Cockney or near-Cockney can be heard throughout the city. In general, it is a working
class accent, and as such it has little or no overt prestige. Its covert prestige is, however,
enormous. In the form of it which Wells describes under the label London English, it is today
the most influential source of phonological innovation in England and perhaps in the whole
English-speaking world.
The grammar of Cockney is basically of the non-standard vernacular type. Its vocabulary is
equally unexceptional.
However, it is well known for its rhyming slang. This is not an exclusively Cockney feature,
nor is it typical of the everyday speech of most Cockneys. But it does help to contribute to the
image of Cockney as colourful. In rhyming slang a word is replaced by a pair of words, the
second of which rhymes with the one replaced. For example, my wife may disappear in favour of
my trouble and strife or, positively, my fork and knife. The new pair is often shortened so that
someone may say Use your loaf instead of Use your loaf of bread; both mean the same: Use your
head. The expression Lets get down to brass tacks (Lets get down to business) is originally
rhyming slang (brass tacks = the facts).

What is most distinctive about Cockney is its pronunciation; and what is significant about
this is the fact that Cockney pronunciations have often indicated the way in which RP was
eventually to develop. Among the consonants, Cockney is characterized by H-dropping. While
the spelling <h> at the beginning of words such as hour and honor is never pronounced in any
standard variety and while its pronunciation in some items is variable (hotel, herb, human)
depending on the region or the individual, there are no limits in Cockney on the words
beginning with <h-> which may sometimes occur without /h/, e.g. ouse for house.
The voiceless stops /p, t, k/ are frequently more strongly aspirated than in RP or GenAm.
They are affricates in some cases: [ts] (tea) or [kx] (call). Furthermore, in final position the same
stops may have glottal coarticulation, i.e. a glottal stop just before the oral one, e.g. [t] (hat). It
is also possible for the glottal stop to replace /p, t, k/ completely. This could lead to a loss of the
distinctions between whip, wit and wick, all as [w]. In addition, intervocalic /t/ may be
realized as tapped [] or as the glottal stop. The former is making inroads into RP; the latter is
found in numerous urban dialects in Great Britain (but seldom in Ireland). The fricatives //
and // are very frequently, but not exclusively pronounced as /f/ and /v/ respectively, i.e.
three = free and mother rhymes with lover. One exception is that initial // is not realized as /v/;
instead /d/ may be used (these = Ds). Following /t, d, n/ Cockney may have /u/ instead of
/ju/ (tune = toon, dune = doon, news = noos). In the case of /t/ and /d/ there seems to be a
switch in progress towards a following /j/ which is then palatalized, e.g. /t/ + /j/ /t/
(Tuesday = Chewsday). One last point about the consonants is the vocalization of /l/. Here words
like milk may be pronounced with new diphthongs, e.g. [m k]. The same sort of thing is
happening in Australia and New Zealand and in the American South. The traditional complex
vowels (long vowels and diphthongs) of Cockney are noticeably different from their RP and
GenAm equivalents. Those which are front or have a front second element in RP start at a
progressively lower or more greatly backed position. Those which are back or have a back
second element in RP start at a progressively lower or more fronted position. One of the
consequences of these shifts in articulation is that RP light sounds virtually the same as Cockney
late.
Estuary English (London regional English) is a koineized form of English that seems to be
developing in London and its vicinity (the Thames Estuary and the lower Thames valley). It
shares the less stigmatized features of Cockney and may be on its way to becoming competition
to RP as the pronunciation norm in Britain, as evidenced by the spread of some of its features to
cities far removed from the London area (e.g. Bristol, Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow).
Like Cockney it shows:

a move of /e/ to [a] and /a/ to [],

L-vocalization,
the palatalization of initial /tj-/ and /dj-/,
the loss of /j/ in words like new etc.,
Increasing replacement of /t/ by [].
It does not, for example, have H-dropping or the replacement of /, / by /f, v/. And in
contrast to Cockney the realization of /r/ in Estuary English may be [] (i.e. a velar
approximant) and /s/ may be rendered as // at the beginning of consonant clusters, e.g. in
student, stop, obstruct.