Gramley, Stephan; P?tzold, Kurt-Michael. A Survey of Modern English

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

as early as at eighteen months (Gleason 1987: 198). Note also the greater number of

unmitigated imperatives and other types of directives used by boys (discussed in 7.2.1),

just as fathers use particularly many of them with their children, especially their sons (see

below). Boys also talk more about sports and transmit more information while girls talk

more about school and sitting games, use fewer direct requests, laugh more and are more

compliant. At nursery school age and beyond (three to seven), for example, children

portray fathers’ speech as straightforward, unqualiﬁed and forceful; mothers’ speech, as

talkative, polite, qualiﬁed and higher pitched. This shows how unerringly children imitate

gender role models.

The models available have traditionally been considered to vary so much between men

and women that the adult input language is often termed ‘motherese’, for it is mothers,

above all, who simplify their language according to the child’s age. Motherese involves

slowness, redundancy, simplicity and grammaticality. Utterances are shortened: mothers

stay about 1.5 words in length ahead of the child. There is a great deal of repetition.

There is present orientation, and there is control. Fathers have fewer exchanges with their

children but tend to introduce more new words, to use more imperatives, to ask fewer

questions and to make fewer repetitions. Nevertheless, motherese, in the sense of simpli-

ﬁed language, is used by both parents (Gleason and Greif 1983).

9.5 NON-VERBAL BEHAVIOUR

Communication takes place not only by means of language, but also through other non-

verbal channels such as gestures, mimicry, posture, eye contact, smiling, touch and so

on. Non-verbal communication is implicit, compared to explicit communication with

words. Indeed, so important is non-verbal behaviour for communication that the signals

it provides may override the actual words a person uses. For example, we are all aware

of the false smiles we sometimes encounter and are wary of their bearers, however friendly

their words. ‘In general, it was found that, when there was inconsistency among com-

ponents, the implicit cues dominated the verbal cues in determining the total impact’

(Mehrabian 1972: 103).

As far as gender behaviour is concerned, it seems that women are generally more

sensitive to non-verbal signals than men are. This may have to do with the fact that women

have less power and status in society and are therefore in greater need of interpreting

implicit messages (Eakins and Eakins 1978a: 149) or it may be due to the requirements

of motherhood, i.e. the need to respond to non-verbal signals from children (ibid.: 66).

Smiling Women have been found to smile more than men, even when the smile has

nothing to do with whether the person smiling is happy. Just why this is the case is not

clear, but explanations tend to emphasize either the greater politeness of women or the

relatively weaker social position most women have.

The traditional female role demands warm, compliant behavior in public situations;

the smiling facial expression may provide the mask to convey this impression. . . .

For her, the smile may be situationally or role deﬁned, rather than being relevant to

the immediate verbal interchange.

(Bugental et al. 1971: 315)

222 USES AND USERS OF ENGLISH

Touch Closely related is the area of touch. In general it seems to reﬂect socio-economic

status: the higher the status, the more liberty one can take in touching others. It likewise

reﬂects age, with the older person generally having the greater freedom to touch. Since

women are generally touched more and do less touching, this ﬁts the pattern established:

women have less status and are often classed with children. Think of the use of modes

of address (see Chapter 8), where the socially more powerful or the older has the right

to initiate the use of ﬁrst names. Touching behaviour is, however, further complicated by

the factor of sex: if a woman touches a man, her touch is very likely to be interpreted as

a sexual gambit.

Proximity and body posture In a similar manner women are approached more

closely in comparison to men, thus underlining the fact that women are allowed less

personal space. Women are expected to move out of the way of men in passing on the

streets. Body posture emphasizes this, too: men hold their arms and legs at a wider angle

than women do. In other words male territoriality is greater than that of females.

Eye contact People look at higher status speakers more than lower status ones, and

women maintain more eye contact than men do. One study of visual behaviour closes

among other things with this remark:

An understanding of how power, dominance and status are communicated has prac-

tical value as well as theoretical importance. If, because of traditional socialization

processes, men typically assume a dominant visual display and women adopt a

submissive posture during mixed-sex interaction, then nonverbal cues can contribute

to the perpetuation of perceived status differences between the sexes.

(Dovidio and Ellyson 1985: 146)

9.6 FURTHER READING

General introductions. On gender (and language) Crawford 1995. On language: Coates

1986; Eakins and Eakins 1978a. Lakoff 1976 is a seminal, though somewhat intuitive

book.

For an example of guidelines on the use of inclusive language see Linguistic Society

of America (1995). Recent books containing articles (reprinted) on a wide selection of

topics are: Cheshire and Trudgill 1998; Coates 1998. Note also Johnson and Meinhof

(1997) on language and masculinity.

Sociolinguistic variationist approaches can be seen in: Labov (NYC) 1972a; Macaulay

(Glasgow) 1978, Trudgill (Norwich) 1972. An inﬂuential alternative social network

approach (Belfast) is presented in Milroy and Margrain 1980. See Lanham and

McDonald for white English speaking South Africans (1979) and Levine and Crockett

for Piedmont North Carolina (1966). Socialization and gender differences among chil-

dren are, for example, nicely illustrated in the titles listed in the bibliography by Sachs

1987. See also Swann 1992. On discourse: Coates 1996 (articles). On politeness: Holmes

1995; and Harper et al. 1978: 216–18 for a review of the literature on gender speciﬁc

non-verbal behaviour.

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LANGUAGE AND GENDER 223

National and regional

varieties of English

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Part 3

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). There are, of course, numerous other

languages which are spoken by the citizens of these various countries, and some of these

will be mentioned brieﬂy below. Yet it is English which predominates. In fact, 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. This is reason

enough to examine English in the British Isles more closely and to try to ﬁnd out more

about its nature.

BrE comprises numerous, often greatly differing regional variants. Furthermore, in

England, Scotland and Ireland there exist what are called traditional dialects. These are

the regional dialects of England and the Scots dialects of Scotland and Ireland (see 10.2.2).

They grew up over centuries of relative geographic isolation and exhibit fairly obvious

lexical, morphological, syntactic and phonological differences from each other and from

GenE. Furthermore, a particular type of pronunciation, Received Pronunciation (or RP),

which enjoys special prestige in England and other parts of the UK, is in wide use and

will be discussed below once again (see also 1.4).

10.1 ENGLAND AND WALES

The vast majority of the inhabitants of England (approximately 48 million) and Wales

(approximately 3 million) 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.

10.1.1 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

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Chapter 10

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 (MacKinnon 1997).

Although the future of Welsh is by no means assured, its use seems to have stabilized

somewhat vis-à-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 (see 10.1.2).

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.

In grammar Welsh English is, for the most part, similar to GenE. However, Welsh

inﬂuenced English grammar (and vocabulary) is more likely to be heard in non-

anglicized areas. Moreover, non-standard Welsh English has additional forms for habitual

aspect constructed with the uninﬂected auxiliary do (present) or did (past) plus the inﬁni-

tive (He do go to the cinema every week) or with an inﬂected form of be plus an ing-form

of the verb (He’s 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 south-

east, 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 (I’m not sure is it true or not). Furthermore, possession

can be expressed by using a prepositional construction (There’s no luck with the rich,

‘they have no luck’). All of these examples have parallels in IrE (see 10.3.4). A further

instance of inﬂuence from the substratum is the use of there in exclamations where GenE

would have how (There’s young she looks!, ‘How young she looks!’). The use of an all-

purpose tag question isn’t it?, ﬁnally, is reminiscent of the same construction in second

language Englishes in Africa and Asia (see Chapter 14). All examples are from Thomas

1984; 1985. Further non-standard grammatical features of Welsh English, as mentioned

in Thomas 1985, are no different from many of the widespread non-standard forms of

England as listed and illustrated under (2), (3), (6), (9) and (10) in the following section

on England.

10.1.2 England

The regional dialects of 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 compre-

hension does not actually occur very frequently. The reasons for this lie in the fact that

almost 90 per cent of the population of Great Britain lives in cities and towns and the

speech forms of urban populations are less noticeably different from each other than those

228 NATIONAL AND REGIONAL VARIETIES OF ENGLISH

of traditional rural communities. Furthermore, speakers of the traditional dialects almost

always have a command of GenE.

The traditional dialects are fairly distinctively divergent from GenE in grammar,

morphology, vocabulary and pronunciation. Usually these divergences are unpredictable

because they do not stand in a regular correspondence with GenE. In this chapter we will

not be looking at them any further. A comprehensive investigation of English dialects

was carried out in the Survey of English Dialects (SED), which was conducted in England

and Wales in the 1950s and early 1960s.

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. For 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 (see Map 10.1 below). 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 /

υ/. In the

north the two groups of words have an identical vowel, namely /

υ/, so that look and luck

are homophones. A second distinction involves the distribution of // and /ɑ/. In such

words as bath, after, pass, dance and sample the realization in the north is a phonemic-

ally short vowel as in GenAm (see Table 4.7 and section 12.1.5) though the quality of

/ is nearer [a] in northern England. The south, in contrast, has a long vowel, either [a]

or [ɑ]. 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 /

ɒ/. A ﬁnal distinc-

tion is the presence of the short low back vowel /

ɒ/ preceding a voiceless fricative in

words like moss, off, broth in the north. The south has a long vowel here, /ɔ/. (RP once

had /

ɔ/, and some older speakers still use it while younger ones use /ɒ/). 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. Where

it does exist, it is often restricted to the domestic, the local, the jocular or the juvenile.

A wide display of different terms is provided, for example, by children’s words for ‘time

out’ or ‘truce’ in games: fainties (southwest and southeast), cree (Bristol), scribs (mid

southern coast), barley (western midlands and northwards to eastern Scotland), exes (East

Anglia), crosses (Lincolnshire), kings (Yorkshire and southwards), skinch (Durham–

Newcastle) (Trudgill 1990: 119).

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:

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ENGLISH IN THE BRITISH ISLES 229

1 third person singular don’t (she don’t 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 don’t have none);

4 widespread use of ain’t for be and the auxiliary have (I ain’t interested; he ain’t

comin’; we ain’t 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/as

did it); or none at all as the subject of a restrictive relative clause (he was the man

did it) (see 5.5.5);

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 (she’s 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).

10.1.3 The RP accent

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 any more. 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.

Ramsaran remarks that RP may be viewed:

as a kind of standard, not necessarily deliberately imposed or consciously adopted,

not a norm from which other accents deviate, nor a target towards which foreign

learners need necessarily aim, but a standard in the sense that it is regionally neutral

and does undeniably inﬂuence the modiﬁed accents of many British regions.

(1990b: 183)

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 pro-

portion 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

230 NATIONAL AND REGIONAL VARIETIES OF ENGLISH

channels and radio stations. Further designations for this accent include Public School

Pronunciation, the King’s/Queen’s English and Oxford English. In linguistic treat-

ments 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. Nevertheless, General RP is a useful concept and is adopted in

Chapter 3 on pronunciation as the descriptive basis together with GenAm, with which it

is compared and contrasted in Chapter 12. 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 situ-

ated well away from the lower end of the socio-economic scale, while differing to some

noticeable degree from what we recognize as RP’ (1982: 301).

Within RP itself there are several streams. For one there is Reﬁned or U-RP (= Upper

Class RP). Among the various characteristics which Wells cites for it the most likely diag-

nostic feature is a single tapped [

ɾ] in intervocalic position, which is recessive in General

RP. The Reﬁned variety has sub-varieties which Gimson once called Conservative and

Advanced RP (1980: 91). The former counts as old-fashioned and will most likely be

heard only among older speakers. It is characterized by a diphthongization of /

/, some-

thing like [e

]. Furthermore, /ɔ/ may still be realized as the centring diphthong [ɔə].

The centring diphthongs themselves end closer to [a] than to [ə]: [a], [εa] and [υa]. /əυ/

may be [oυ], and, ﬁnally, the vowel in words of the type moss, off and broth can be old-

fashioned /

ɔ/ rather than General /ɒ/. As for Advanced RP, many people consider it

affected. However that may be, it often shows the way that General RP may develop. Its

features might include the fronting (and unrounding) of /u

/ and /υ/ to [%] or [$] and [$];

the vocalization of [] to [υ]; or the use of [ʔ] for /t/ before accented syllable or pauses

as in [n

ɒʔ ivn] (not even) or [siʔ] (see it). A second major strand within RP is Adoptive

RP. This is the accent of someone who has learned RP as an adult, perhaps for voca-

tional reasons. If well learned, it is no different from General RP. However, it may well

be that such speakers retain their ‘native accents’ for more informal registers and that

they have difﬁculty using RP in informal speech styles (Wells 1982: 284).

Justifying the choice of RP Just what is the basis for the primacy of RP, espe-

cially in foreign language teaching? In the vast literature in which this question has been

batted around four major positions have evolved.

The aesthetic argument An early stance maintained that RP ‘is superior, from the

character of its vowel sounds, to any other form of English, in beauty and clarity’ (Wyld

1934: 606). This position can hardly be seriously defended, for it would ﬁnd /pa

nt/

aesthetically pleasing when it is the RP pronunciation pint, but unaesthetic as the Cockney

pronunciation paint. Furthermore, it is based completely on social prejudice that cannot

be substantiated by native speakers of English who are unfamiliar with RP. North

Americans, for instance, are not only incapable of distinguishing RP from near-RP; they

cannot even be counted on to distinguish it from Irish, Scottish or Welsh English (all are

equally foreign and British sounding).

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ENGLISH IN THE BRITISH ISLES 231