Lingua inglese - English varieties

English varieties in the world

The title of this book means that English is one language but it can be pronounced in many ways. This is because English is spoken by millions of people (Black people, Americans, Europeans and soon…).

Where English is spoken

English is spoken in the:

• Inner circle: When it is spoken as mother-tongue by 320 million people (England and Ireland, USA and Canada…)
• Outer circle: When it is spoken as an official language in countries with multi-linguistic varieties (India, Africa…)
• Expanding circle: When it is spoken in a specific context such as business, university, tourism, political institutions… In the expanding circle, it is spoken as a Lingua Franca (Frankish Tongue).

A Lingua Franca is a mixed language used in the Levant made up of Italian words deprived of their flexions (Ex. Io mangiare) and it is spoken by people belonging to different countries to communicate and to understand themselves.

What a language is

There are two definitions:

1. Language is the whole system of words used by people. It is a social behaviour used, by humans, animals and even plants, to satisfy needs and necessities. In language, there are symbols which can be written or oral and a meaning that is arbitrarily assigned. Meanings can change throughout the years and new symbols can be created (Ex. Laser, byte…). This is because historical and social conditions change.
2. Language is the faculty of speaking a tongue. It is related to physiology, expression, gestures but it also involves many parts of the body (hands, mouth, eyes…). It can be transmitted with a vocal-auditory channel or with graphic, visual and tactile (Braille) channel. In the transmission, there is a medium (letters and sounds) and a message, what we want to communicate.

Languages are very wide

In a language we can have:

• Dialects: It’s a specific way to speak a language. Once they were spoken mainly by common people and less by noble people but nowadays they are very used.

They can be classified in:

• Regional dialects — Associated with a geographical area (Sicilian).
• Social dialects — Associated with social features (Dialect spoken by teenagers, Black people, the Queen…).
• Varieties because language goes beyond social/cultural limits. Here we have, for instance, British English, American English, Legal English, Business English…

The main difference between dialect and variety is: dialect isn’t different only for pronunciation but also for grammar and vocabulary. Then, it isn’t written, like the variety, but it has a history, it’s more localized.

The history of English

English has had mainly seven linguistic stages:

1. Proto Indo-European: It existed 3000-4000 BC in the area that is currently the Russian steppe north of the Black Sea and it disappeared in 2000 BC. It is the common ancestor of all European languages.
2. Proto Germanic: It was spoken by people who moved from Russia to Northern Germany and Scandinavia. It has been divided in: Proto East Germanic, Proto North Germanic and Proto West Germanic.
3. Old English: It was spoken from the origin to 1066 and it used an alphabetic system made up with runes. The first inhabitants of England at the time of the Roman invasion spoke a Celtic language but no literary text remains. The Romans conquered almost of what is now Britain, building the Hadrian’s Wall to separate it from Scotland. Then three German tribes arrived: the Angles settled from the Thames to Humber, the Saxons settled in the south areas such as Essex, Middlesex, Sussex, Wessex and the Jutes settled in the Central East. In the 9th century, Norsemen from Norway began to raid the North West areas and also Ireland while Danish began to attack the east coast. Nowadays no records of English pronunciation exist but we can imagine how it was pronounced thanks to philological studies.

The main features were:

• The first syllable was always accented.
• All consonant clusters were pronounced (Cneo-Knee Writan-Write).
• Geminated consonants were pronounced as in Italian.
• Initial h- was aspirated.
• Nouns, pronouns, adjectives and articles could be singular or plural.
• Verbs could be “weak” if they ended in –ed or “strong” if they were as today’s irregular verbs.
• The word order was SVO, different from the Latin SOV.

All people left their traces in the lexis: Celtic (clan, penguin…), Romans (wine, street, London, cross, cheese…), Norse (anger, bloom, raise, slaughter, ugly… and the suffixes Lewishham, Brighton, Hammersted, Warwick).

4. Middle English: It was spoken from 1066, when William the Conqueror got control of England and after the conquest, Norman French and Latin became the language of the political and religious classes while English was spoken by the lowest social classes. An important source of this period is the Ormulum, a text written by a monk which shows how the language was at that time and its most important changes.

The main features were:

• The rise of the use of prepositions.
• Less inflections.
• More linear phrase order.
• Addition of the final -e to many words which lasted with a consonant.

Probably five dialects existed in Middle English: Southern, Kentish, East Midlands, West Midlands, Northern and they were rather different. Words which date back to this period are, for example: Duke, prince, prison, curtain, present, calf, steak (steɪk), deck, necessary, popular.

5. Late Middle English: Many factors contributed to the development of English as the Standard language: the Chancery's activity, the poet Chaucer and Caxton’s printing. Caxton was a printer who worked in London and he contributed to the language development because he translated and commented on the texts he printed.

6. Early Modern English: In this period two main factors made English important: the Elizabethan period and, above all, Shakespeare. Shakespeare introduced different forms of personal pronouns, the final –th for the 3rd person singular instead of –s and the relative pronoun which. We also had an enormous increase in vocabulary (about 6000 entered). The pronunciation was similar to American and Irish English.

7. Modern English: English linguists of this period considered the changes which affected the language as a negative process and so they elaborated spelling rules which are still used today but, however, nowadays changes still happen. This phenomenon is called Great Vowel Shift (GVS) and it affects long vowels.

Some examples are:

• [a:] [æ:] [ɛ:] [e:] [eɪ] Name
• [ɛ:] [e:] [i:] Sea
• [e:] [i] Need
• [i:] [i:] [əɪ] [ʌɪ] [aɪ] Time
• [ɔ:] [o:] [əʊ] Stone
• [o:][u:] Doom
• [u:][əʊ] [ʊ] [aʊ] House

The main features of this period are:

• The definitive loss of declensions (apart from the –s of the plural and the possessive case).
• The definitive loss of conjugation endings (apart from the –s of the 3rd person singular, the –ing and –ed).
• The regular use of modals.
• The fixed word order.

New words have been introduced, for instance: Ballet, group, cargo, anchovies, blitz, hamburger, vodka, goulash, hurricane, tobacco, potato, chocolate and many Italian words such as pizza, pasta, risotto, cappuccino, mozzarella, lasagne, mafia…

English variety in England

In British Irelands, there are two countries: the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom. The UK is divided into four regions: North Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Britain. England is divided into 40 counties: they are smaller than Italian regions but bigger than provinces. The counties date back to the Middle Ages. Ex: Nottinghamshire (Notts), Yorkshire (Yorks)…

England is the country in the world where English varies most from one area to another. In Great Britain, pronunciation reflects both regional and social factors. Traditionally there is a stereotypical classification:

• Geographically which divides England into the North and the South.
• Social classes classification where there are people who know and people who do not know Received Pronunciation.

Dialects in England

1. South East (London and Kent)

London is a vast metropolitan area where people coming from all over the world meet. So there are plenty of varieties of English and the most important are:

• The Queen’s English, used only by the Royal Family in official situations.
• The BBC English (Received Pronunciation): It became the predominant accent among the upper classes of Britain in the 19th century. It was also used at Eton and Harrow schools and at Oxford and Cambridge universities. Today it is a reference accent despite the fact that it is used by a small and declining portion of the British population. It is also considered the type of English foreigners want to learn but it can't be considered as “the British English” since it is a minority accent and many inhabitants of Scotland, Wales and Ireland do not know it.

It can be divided into:

• General RP: used as a teaching model, in dictionaries…
• Refined RP, used especially in the past and regarded as affected.
• Near RP, RP English with few regional characteristics.

The main features are:

• The r-dropping: RP has no r-sound following a vowel car /ka:/
• Diphthongs containing /ə/.
• /a:/ in dance, glass
• /ɒ/ not, dog, instead in GA it’s pronounced long/o/ is pronounced short
• /o:/ is pronounced /əʊ/ so, both

The Cockney, in the East-End of London

The term dates back to the 14th century when it was used to describe a malformed egg. By the 17th century, country people used it to describe the city ignorant people ignoring the real life. This term was then narrowed to Londoners and since the 19th century, it is used to refer to the East-End working class in London and its speech. The main features are:

• The H dropping (H not aspirated)
• The final G is dropped: darling → darlin’
• T/K replaced by glottal stop before a vowel or at the end of the word: stop /stɒʔ/
• Vowel shift/i:/ /ɪə/ beef /eɪ//aɪ/ name /aʊ//a:/ about/aɪ//ɔɪ/ time /aʊ//æʊ/ coat
• They use /ʧ/ and /ʤ/ instead of /tj/ and /dj/: tune, dune
• Double negative
• Use of ain’t, instead of is not, are not, has not, have not.
• It is common in Cockney accent, but also in other accents, the rhyming slang: it is a slang invented for fun and because people like to feel insiders, so other people can’t understand them. They use substitute words, usually two, as a coded alternative for another one; then the second word of the substitute phrase is dropped. Ex: Bread (bread and honey) for money.
• The Estuary English, in the East-End area of London but also in the southeast of England. It was first recognized in 1984 and it is an intermediate language variety between Received Pronunciation and Cockney.

The main features are:

• Turning a/l/ into /u/ or /o/ after a vowel: /mi:u/ for meal
• T replaced by glottal stop before a vowel or at the end of the word
• Final y is pronounced as /i:/ instead of /I/
• They use /ʧ/ and /ʤ/ instead of /tj/ and /dj/
• Omission of the –ly adverbial ending: “You are driving too slow”
• Generalization of the 3rd pers. sing.: “I gets out”
• Frequent use of “cheers” for “thank you” and “goodbye”
• Use of “mate” for friends, colleagues…

2. North

Nearly half of the population of England speak with some kind of Northern accent. It is spoken above all in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Northumberland and Cumbrian. It’s a very conservative accent, in fact, it represents an older variety of English. It’s conservative also in grammar, because we can find the pronouns “thou” or “thee”, used in Shakespeare's time. This accent is far from uniform.

However there are some shared features with the Midlands pronunciation:

• /ʌ/ is pronounced as /ʊ/: love, bus
• /a:/ is pronounced as /a/: bath, past
• /æ/ is pronounced as /a/: ham, mad
• /h/ is dropped.

3. Midlands

Midlands accent has some shared features with Northern accent but it has also got some more:

• [ɪ] tend to become [i:] Es: It
• [ŋ] in final –ng tend to be pronounced [ŋg] Es: Singing
• Use of the present perfect with no auxiliary. Es: I done it
• Use of the present perfect for the past. Es: I do it yesterday
• Use of her instead of she. Es: What’s her doing?
• Use of up instead of to. Es: He went up the pub
• Words are similar to English but there are some different, especially used by older people. Birmingham is Brum and the inhabitants are Brummies, miskin is dustbin.

4. The West Country

The dialect of the south-western counties of England such as Devon and Somerset is often called West Country, characterized by:

• Rhotic accent
• The /r/ sound is a retroflex /r/, so it is formed by a bunching of the tongue towards the back of the mouth.