Evolving English

Not Old English - Young English

It’s the last week of the exhibition and we’re going back to the start of the language – no, not Old English but the language of our childhoods. We’ve just launched a new website, Playtimes, that has wonderful recordings and film footage of singing games, clapping songs, skipping rhymes and all kinds of imaginative play from over one hundred years of children’s play. 

The website is the culmination of a two year project in which we’ve been digitising previously unheard and unseen collections including the internationally renowned ‘Opie Collection of Children’s Games and Songs’ and the ‘Damian Webb/Pitt Rivers Collection’ with support from the AHRC Beyond Text programme. These collections feature audio recordings and photographs made between the 1960s and the 1980s. If, like me, you grew up in that period you’ll hear many familiar though long-forgotten playground rhymes with nostalgia and a Proustian sense of recollection. 

We’ve also been making new recordings with our project partners in schools in London and Sheffield, so you can explore both the continuities and changes in children’s play. Michael Rosen and children from the schools provide introductions to the films. The footage shows that children’s games such as Tag and “Ipi–dipi-dation” are thriving in 21st century school playgrounds. 

The site is a great source of information supporting linguistics, childhood studies, education, sociology, musicology, folklore or anthropology, or simply a nostalgic trip back to your own childhood. Go play! www.bl.uk/playtimes   

Eyether, eether; neyether neether - let’s not call the whole thing off

There’s just over three weeks left to join in our online Map Your Voice project. With over 1,000 voices recorded already we’ve been delighted with the response and, far from calling the whole thing off, we’d like even more contributions before the exhibition closes on 3 April 2011. The recordings will become part of our collections and contributors can either read the Mr Tickle text (see my November post) or pronounce a set of 6 words. We hope to work with researchers now and in the future to analyse the data and share any findings but, in the mean time, I’ve had an enjoyable couple of days listening to a selection of recordings.

The following observations are based on a random sample of 60 contributions from North America (USA and Canada) and 60 from Britain and Ireland featuring speakers pronouncing the set of 6 words.

1. controversy

The OED currently only lists CONtroversy. This is the pronunciation used by every contributor from North America and 20 out of 60 from Britain and Ireland, but two-thirds of British and Irish speakers prefer conTROVersy. Clearly this is evidence of a new pronunciation emerging in Britain and Ireland that linguists have been monitoring for some time and similar findings are confirmed by the entry in the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (JC Wells, 2008).

2. garage

The OED lists a pronunciation in which the final syllable rhymes with ‘mirage’ ahead of a pronunciation rhyming with ‘marriage’. It doesn’t include the alternative in which the final syllable rhymes with ‘barge’. 9 out of 60 North American recordings show a preference for this ‘barge’ option; the remainder use the ‘mirage’ variant. Speakers in Britain and Ireland, however, overwhelmingly favour the ‘marriage’ alternative (46 out of 60), while 9 use ‘barge’ and 5 ‘mirage’. As with controversy then, innovation is clearly limited here to British and Irish English. The 1^st edition of the BBC’s Broadcast English (1929) featured in our exhibition includes only the ‘mirage’ option, but by 1931 the 2^nd edition acknowledges that garage ‘may now be rhymed with marriage and carriage’ – a good indication of when this new pronunciation first came to the attention of linguists.

3. neither

The OED suggests the first syllable rhymes with ‘scythe’ more frequently than with ‘seethe’ in British English and the reverse in American English. 33 out of 60 British & Irish speakers have the ‘scythe’ pronunciation, while 27 out of 60 use ‘seethe’; 15 out of 60 American English speakers use ‘scythe’, while 45 out of 60 prefer ‘seethe’ - i.e. variation occurs in our data in both varieties and the relative frequency pretty much confirms the OED distinction for US English, but British English speakers are perhaps more equally divided than the OED suggests.

4. scone

The OED cites a pronunciation rhyming with ‘bone’ ahead of a pronunciation rhyming with ‘gone’. All the US voices in our survey have the former, but intriguingly 3 out of 10 Canadians use the latter. In Britain and Ireland, where pronunciation of this word is an extremely popular dinner table debate, 41 out of 60 speakers rhyme scone with ‘gone’, while 19 out of 60 rhyme it with ‘bone’. Clearly variation exists here in British, Irish and Canadian English, but apparently not in the USA.

5. schedule

The OED distinguishes between 'shed' as a British English pronunciation and 'sked' as American English. Not surprisingly, then, all the North American voices use 'sked'. However, 25 out of 60 British and Irish speakers agree, while 35 out of 60 prefer 'shed'. We might, therefore, interpret this as evidence of recent influence from US English, but there could be other factors, e.g. the subconscious spelling association with similar words like scheme, school etc. which are clearly 'sk' for all speakers. It’s certainly plausible to imagine that schedule is first encountered in its written form rather than as a spoken form (I don’t imagine it’s a very high frequency word for young children), but perhaps there is indeed American influence at play, too.

 6. attitude

The OED only includes a pronunciation in which the final syllable sounds like 'tyood' (i.e. not like ‘tood’ or ‘chewed’). All the US English voices use ‘tood’, although again Canada shows some variation with 3 out of 10 speakers offering ‘tyood’ and 1 speaker clearly using ‘chewed’. In Britain and Ireland ‘tood’ is completely absent, while 10 out of 60 speakers use 'tyood' (generally, but not exclusively, older speakers) and 50 out of 60 use ‘chewed’.

This is obviously a very small dataset and insufficient to draw any firm conclusions but nonetheless revealing. I've not had chance to assess the non-native speaker contributions, but they are, no doubt, equally interesting – with sufficient responses we might, for instance, be able to identify any trends in preference for British or American variants. We’d also very much like to have contributions from native speakers of English not yet well represented in the dataset, so voices from India, the Caribbean, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa are especially welcome.

Jonnie Robinson

King James Bible in context

Yesterday's sell-out talk by David Crystal on the influence of the King James Bible on English today clearly wowed the crowds in the British Library Conference Centre. Afterwards, a couple of people mentioned to me that they were surprised to hear how many of the idioms usually associated with the King James version orginated in earlier translations. The momentous 'Let there be light' is an example of this.

A number of English-language translations were in circulation before the appearance of the King James version in 1611. In fact, this is one of the reasons why a new translation became desirable. In the Evolving English exhibition gallery we show two examples. From the 14th century, there's a beautiful manuscript in the tradition of John Wycliffe. And next to that, the very special Cologne Fragment, the sole surviving evidence of William Tyndale's first attempt to print his New Testament in 1525.

The British Library is fortunate to hold copies of most early printed editions of the Bible in English. A guide to these Early Printed Bibles, with selected shelfmarks, is available on the BL Website. But for librarians and others who really want to know about all the different editions of the English Bible, one resource stands out: the bible of Bibles, you might say.

 

This is the Historical catalogue of printed editions of the English Bible 1525-1961, compiled by TH Darlow and HF Moule, revised and expanded by AS Herbert (London & New York, 1968). Most librarians just call it 'Darlow and Moule'. If you need to know how many Bibles were published in a particular year, who the translators were, or how to distinguish between variant editions, then this is the book for you. And in this detailed chronological listing, the 1611 King James Bible slots in at number 309.

Your words

As Evolving English enters its final few weeks we’ve been delighted with the way visitors have engaged with the exhibition. We know from previous experience that people from all walks of life are intrigued – sometimes irritated – by all manner of minute differences in the way we use English and we all have a special relationship with ‘our’ English.

It should come as no surprise, then, to report that the VoiceBank booths installed in the exhibition gallery and at participating regional libraries have been particularly popular. Onsite visitors are able to record their accent by reading a text provided or can give us an example of a word or expression that is special in their English. A staggering 8,000 visitors have already ‘donated’ their voices to the British Library. The age and geographic range of the speakers is encouraging and the enthusiasm with which people describe their words is extremely infectious.

The resulting archive will be a wonderful snapshot of 21st-century English and an extraordinary resource for linguistic research in years to come.

The following is a list of 10 words selected at random from recordings made on 16 November 2010. In each case I include the definition offered by the visitor, some personal details to give a sense of the speaker’s background and a reference, where available, to previous evidence of a given word.

brozzen = full, eaten too much food (male, b. 1974, Yorkshire Dales)
see entry for ‘brossen’ in English Dialect Dictionary and ‘brussen’ in Austin Mitchell’s ‘Teach Thissen Tyke’ on display in Evolving English

fouter = to idle, while away time aimlessly, e.g. ‘och I was just foutering about’ (female, b. 1949, Ballymena)
see Dictionary of the Scots Language

goober = idiot, e.g. ‘especially if they’ve messed something up’ (female, Reading)
see Green’s Dictionary of Slang

gyp = grief or stress, e.g. ‘she gave me a load of gyp’ (male, b. 1975, Goole)
see Oxford English Dictionary

mardy = grumpy, upset, out of sorts – can be applied to person or machine, e.g. computer (male, b. 1974, Leicestershire)
see Oxford English Dictionary

peng = attractive (female, b.1996, London)
see Urban Dictionary and BL Voices of the UK project

spoggy = chewing gum (female, b. 1965, Grimsby)
see Urban Dictionary

squitsies = immune from being caught when playing ‘it’ (male, b. 1970, Essex)
see Lore of the Playground by Steve Roud

twitten = narrow alleyway between two streets (female, b. 1963, Sussex)
see Oxford English Dictionary and British Library Voices of the UK project

wozzock = lummox, clumsy oaf – generally used affectionately (female, b. 1962, Yorkshire/Durham)
see entry for ‘wazzock’ in Oxford English Dictionary

Clearly several words have been recorded in previous surveys and dictionaries, but this is valuable supporting evidence to show how words are used now and the relationship people have with them. One speaker, for instance, describes with affection, how at university ‘mardy’ gave him a sense of identity he had previously been unaware of. Describing himself as a ‘Leicestershire RP speaker’ (i.e. pretty middle class), he realised for the first time that not everyone understood ‘mardy’ and that he was, therefore, subconsciously using an East Midland dialect term.

Words that haven’t yet made it into authoritative dictionaries are equally interesting. ‘Peng’, for example, is acknowledged at urbandictionary.com and was also supplied by two young speakers of British Caribbean background in the Voices of the UK project. So a survey as recent as 2005 suggests that ‘peng’ was restricted to speakers from a very particular community, but evidence in the VoiceBank seems to confirm it’s now widely used by young speakers in the UK regardless of ethnicity. The fact many speakers illustrate its usage by offering the phrase ‘well peng’ shows how quickly it’s been absorbed into contemporary British English slang.

My own personal favourite is ‘wazzock’ (pronounced by the visitor here as ‘wozzock’), because – like ‘mardy’ for the Leicestershire speaker – it has a special linguistic back story for me. ‘Wazzock’ reminds me of watching a Castleford Rugby League match in the 1980s with my father-in-law to be. As a staunch user of Standard English, but admirer of the richness of northern dialect, he was particularly entertained by the repeated use by Cas fans of the word ‘wazzock’ in descriptions of the referee. He subsequently adopted the word himself when attending Derby County football matches, much to the embarrassment of his daughter, who considered it somehow incongruous with the rest of his very careful and articulate use of Standard English.

All of which illustrates the sheer delight we all take in exploring, using, re-using and adapting our English to shape our identity. With six weeks to go we’re hopeful we’ll get even more contributions to our VoiceBank. If you’re unable to come to the exhibition you can participate online – the Map Your Voice web page offers a different set of activities and, having audited a small sample of the 200+ submissions we’ve received so far, I’ll report on first impressions in a forthcoming blog post.

Jonnie Robinson, February 2010

Handy resources for tracking down early texts in English #2

The previous posting in this sub-series highlighted an online resource, the English Short Title Catalogue. This time it's a good old fashioned printed reference book: RC Alston’s A bibliography of the English language from the invention of printing to the year 1800. It’s one of those works with a complicated printing history. In essence, the published version incorporating corrected reprints was issued from 1974 to 2008 in over 20 numbered volumes. In other words, it’s big.

Robin Alston writes that his aim was to create ‘a systematic record of writings on English, and on other languages, based on the collections of the principal libraries of the World’.

Each volume focuses on a different aspect of the English language: for example, vol 1 is ‘English grammars written in English’, vol 4 is ‘Spelling’, and vol 9 is ‘Non-standard English, cant, dialect’.

Within each volume, there is then a detailed listing of books printed from the 15th to 18th centuries relevant to that topic, accompanied by selected illustrations of title-pages. Each book cited in the Bibliography is given a unique number. So if you see a footnote in a scholarly article that cites ‘Alston, v1, no 157’ or the like, this is what it’s all about!

New 'Sound Cases' talk

Thursday 3 February 13.00 - 1400

'One Language Many Voices: Exploring English at the British Library'

This talk will explore the themes of the exhibition through our audio archives. From historic dialect recordings to contemporary pop music, Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator, Sociolinguistics and Education, will demonstrate how sound recordings capture the extraordinary variety of the English Language.

Free/Advance booking essential/Centre for Conservation

More information at http://boxoffice.bl.uk or tel +44(0)1937 546546

Teenagers, accents and full stops

The Evolving English Exhibition is supported by a wide range of events and activities. The learning programme for schools and colleges is proving to be particularly popular. Julian Walker is one of the workshop leaders, and author of the book Evolving English Explored (available from the British Library Online Shop). I copy here part of his report on how things have been progressing. Thanks Julian!

On the first day of the workshops for Evolving English we had in a sixth-form from south-west London. We were discussing accents - one of the girls said that she speaks with a south-east accent at school but at home uses the accent from her family, who come from near Glasgow. Not just her accent, her vocabulary changes too, so that she goes shopping with her friends, but with her family she goes to get her messages. Babies greet at home, but cry away from home; at home she says ‘heid’ and ‘wa’er’, and at school ‘head’ and ‘water’. She says she switches automatically, and her friends confirmed this What happened if she hit her thumb with a hammer, I asked; what came out, south-east or Scots? ‘It depends where I am’, she said.

The Riot Act has provoked a lot of discussion, particularly the full-stop. How often do you see a full-stop in a poster? In workshops our interpretation of this is generally ‘end of’, that it acts as a marker of the fulfilling of legal and moral responsibility – basically saying ‘shutup and go away’. Curiously, it means almost the same in current text messaging. If at the end of a text conversation you get a message ‘ok’, that’s fine. But ‘ok.’ is different – it means ‘ok, and now shutup’. One girl said, ‘my Mum uses full stops at the end of text messages all the time. I hate it.’

We are used to teenagers being the movers and shakers in language change, but maybe weren’t expecting it with punctuation.

RP and the BBC

I’m indebted to Jack Windsor Lewis for pointing out potentially misleading statements in my recent blog entry on RP. The Evolving English exhibition includes several items that explore the emergence of prestigious forms of English – examining aspects of vocabulary, spelling, grammar and pronunciation. The labels in the gallery give considerably more detail and there’s a brief description of my understanding of RP on our Sounds Familiar website.

Preparing exhibition labels has been extremely demanding: restricted to roughly 50 words and conscious of a desire to address a variety of audiences in terms of age, exposure to English and familiarity with academic terminology, describing complex linguistic issues was a fascinating challenge. That doesn’t, of course, excuse inaccuracies, but short cuts are perhaps inevitable and so we use the current term, Received Pronunciation (RP), as convenient shorthand throughout the exhibition to refer to a regionally neutral middle-class accent of England. This reflects current conventions, but I acknowledge it was not a universally recognised term at the time of the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English.

As regards the Committee’s influence in promoting what we now call RP, Broadcast English [BBC, 1929] does indeed confirm that there was no consensus regarding ‘correct’ pronunciation and the authors stress that the guide is intended to give Recommendations for Pronouncing Doubtful Words. Nor does the pamphlet contain any evidence that the Committee recommended the exclusive use of RP by announcers. However, apart from VERY occasional exceptions this was the predominant voice heard on the BBC for many years and, let’s be honest, is still the voice of most BBC announcers and enjoys a healthy representation across all its broadcast platforms. RP’s early (and continued?) association with the BBC has certainly had an impact on British audiences in terms of notions of ‘correct’ speech – particularly, perhaps, for previous generations.

The Evolving English exhibition features audio extracts of early BBC broadcasts, including two recordings made by members of the Advisory Committee. In Spoken English [Linguaphone, 1927] George Bernard Shaw describes his role on the Committee and discusses the members’ deliberations. He describes what we would now recognise as RP using terms such as “refined” and “speaking presentably” and considers such speech to be “distinguished from ignorant and illiterate”, with “provincial or cockney dialect” singled out for particular criticism.

In Talks on English Speech [Linguaphone, 1930], Committee Secretary A. Lloyd James describes “a representative English pronunciation […] a type that can be broadcast from Lands End to John o’ Groats without fear of any considerable body of hostile criticism […] this is sometimes called ‘standard pronunciation’”. Not RP by name perhaps, but certainly by nature. While he acknowledges that ‘standard pronunciation’ can vary from speaker to speaker and change over time he too contrasts it with varieties that are “not as well educated”, such as the speech of Cockneys who “certainly have no business to teach the pronunciation of the English Language”.

Such observations clearly reflect the very different cultural, social and linguistic climate of the time and should be viewed in that context. Higher education for James’s generation was almost entirely restricted to an elite social set, most of whom had RP as a mother tongue. The minority who didn’t speak RP would, I suspect, have quite naturally adopted RP or near-RP during the course of their progress through education.

I personally find these recordings and the apparent (if not overtly stated) policy of the BBC for much of the 20th century compelling enough to suggest that the Advisory Committee was extremely influential in promoting the use of what we now refer to as RP over other varieties. They may not have done so deliberately and I wouldn’t want to suggest that the BBC’s undeniable preference for RP – however the situation was arrived at – is anything other than a perfectly understandable reflection of the prevailing social circumstances.

In the exhibition and indeed in the accompanying book, written by Professor David Crystal, we celebrate the Committee’s contribution to the English Language and consider the role of its successor, the BBC Pronunciation Unit, as significant chapters in the Evolving English story. I acknowledge, on reflection, that the wording of some labels might be open to misinterpretation, but I hope this assures you that we considered a variety of sources and consulted widely with academics before selecting and interpreting the exhibition material.

Jonnie Robinson

Mr. Tickle continued...

There's a new addition to the Evolving English web pages: an interactive map onto which anyone may upload a recording of their voice.

To join in, you'll need access to an iPhone or Android-based smartphone, or a computer with a microphone and an internet connection. The voice map features two specially selected texts for you to read aloud.

The first is a list of just six words - controversy, garage, neither, scone, schedule, attitude - chosen for the way their pronunciation varies both regionally and internationally.

The second text is the children's story Mr. Tickle by Roger Hargreaves. This evokes a wide range of the sounds of spoken English, and its direct and informal style is ideal for all ages and non-native English speakers too. It takes around four minutes to read aloud. Read Jonnie Robinson's earlier post to get all the background.

Since it went online a week ago, the Evolving English voice map has already attracted contributions from Britain, the USA, Canada, and the Philippines. Recording and uploading are straightforward to do, and full instructions are given.

Please note: be sure to add geolocation and correct title or we can't use it. We need to listen first to check everything's OK, so it won't appear on our map immediately. Please allow up to 48 hours.

Wherever you are, we want your voice!

Books that didn’t make the exhibition #3

The Englishes of the Caribbean appear throughout the exhibition: in manuscript (John Agard's draft of the poem 'Listen Mr Oxford Don'), in print (a 1731 issue of the Barbados Gazette), as sound recordings (Linton Kwesi Johnson), and in film (a hilarious Jamaican Dr Who sketch from 'The Real McCoy'). As always, however, the richness of the British Library's collections means that we could have told so many more stories.

The Belizean lingo is a 106-page book which reproduces a wide range of material gathered by the broadcaster and comedian George McKesey. Among its  contents is the story shown here 'Bra Hanahncy an di Craab' (Brother Anancy and the Crab). Tales about the trickster Brother Anancy (or Anansi) are found throughout the Caribbean and also in West Africa.

 
Page from George McKesey, The Belizean lingo (Belize City, 1974). Shelfmark: YA.1989.a.1076.
© The British Library Board.

This variety of English is today usually called Kriol, or Belizean Creole English. It is part of a family of Englishes spoken in and around the Caribbean. Jamaican Patois and John Agard's Guyanese are also part of this family.

Kriol is used as the spoken language by the vast majority of the population of Belize. This book's publication in 1974 came shortly after the country's name was changed from British Honduras. It can be seen in the light of a growing sense of national identity.