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THE HISTORY OF LATE MODERN ENGLISHES
CHAPTER 1: INTO THE MIDDLE OF THINGS
English ‘began’ when the Germanic tribes brought their languages over to the British Isles, starting in about the year 450. 1712 Jonathan Swift wrote a letter lamenting the state of English of the time, and making suggestions for its improvement: A proposal for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English tongue. It was addressed to Robert Harley, the equivalent of Prime Minister of the country. We can find differences from how English is nowadays:
- How the language is written down, i.e. the ‘long s’ [ſ];
- The use of capital letters;
- Some odd uses of the punctuation. On the lexical level:
- Ascertain : today it means ‘to find out for certain’, but in Swift’s time it could have the meaning of ‘to fix’. The comparison we are going to take into consideration includes a large number of ‘Englishes’, different versions of the language found throughout the world: English as a first language, English as a second language used for administrative purposes, English acting as a means of communicating country to country + multitudinous local dialects. Example of 4 types of English (cfr. Page 3 – 4):
- ENGLISH 1: Waltzing Matilda. A song composed by and Australian poet in 1895 telling the story of an itinerant worker (a swagman) camping by a water hole (billabong), shaded by a gum tree (coolabah), waiting for his tea kettle (billy) to boil. A sheep (jumbuck) came along and the swagman killed it and put it in his food (tucker) bag. The sheep’s owner pursues the man who, to avoid capture, drowns himself in the water hole. In terms of grammar, this is like standard English, and its distinguishing features are the Australian words mentioned above.
- ENGLISH 2 : the words are relatively standard but the grammar is not. It is a passage taken from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , written in the dialect of Missouri where the author was born. An interesting linguistic feature is in the first three words where the structure is “The widow” (subject) followed immediately after by the pronoun she. Other features of Mark Twain’s language are noticeable, like the use of ‘double negatives’ – a practice not followed in standard English – plus the use of them as a demonstrative adjective instead of the standard these/those them new clothes. Also, some of the verb forms are not standard: rung as the past tense of ‘ring’; warn’t for ‘weren’t’; learned , where we would expect ‘taught’.
- ENGLISH 3 : the word lassies gives away the passage’s origin, as it is the Scottish word for ‘girls’. It is an example of written Scots, taken from information panels in the Birthplace Museum of Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns. The passage’s grammar is quite standard, but the lexis can cause some problems laich meaning ‘low’, ‘lowly’ that are non-standard. Scunnering , from ‘scunner’ that means ‘disgust’ and it is associated with the standard English ‘shun’. The word shows that the spellings
sometimes reflect the way the word was pronounced + quite often British dialects drop the final ‘g’ in words ending in -ing.
- ENGLISH 4 : it is part of an advertisement broadcast on the Solomon Island in 1971, in the Southwest Pacific Ocean; their official language is Pidgin. The advert is for the razor blade Gillette. The language is clearly based on English, though often words are written with different spellings. Baibai stands for the verb do when asking questions. DATES ARE APPROXIMATE. Old English the language from its beginning until the Norman invasion of 1066. Middle English from 1066 until about 1509 when Henry VIII became king. Early Modern English from 1509 until about 1700. After that is Late Modern English and then Present Day English , with a start date, according to some linguists, at the end of the Second World War. Historical overview: English is a language on the Germanic branch of the Indo- European language tree. It grew out of the tongues that the Anglo- Saxon tribes brought with them to Britain from the areas of Denmark and North Germany. OE was a very ‘synthetic’ language, which generally used suffixes to show some grammatical relations. Which for was used depended on the gender of the noun the adjective referred to, and what its grammar function was. The verbs had irregular forms and its vocabulary was developed by using compounds as well as using affixes. ME saw a considerable Norman/French influence on the language: borrowing wors became a major way of expanding the vocabulary. Many grammatical complexities disappeared. Endings were often dropped, and the verb system simplified as well. There were also pronunciation changes, with the phenomenon of the Great Vowel Shift (GVS). EModE was characterised by a massive expansion of vocabulary, largely through the borrowing of words from other languages. There were also great changes in how words were spelt and how grammatical forms were used. The 17 TH^ CENTURY saw the beginnings of a period of consolidation, so there was the establishment of an institution to look after language matters the Royal Society of London in 1664 set up a committee to look at ways of improving and fixing the English language.
‘universal grammar’ which underlay all languages despite differences between them learning one language will help learning another. The book’s Preface talks about the simplicity of English, pointing out the lack of suffixes used to mark grammatical functions, and the regularity of the verb system. Lowth argues that, given its simplicity, English should be highly regarded and internationally used, but it was neither, and it’s the fault of how it was taught people need proscription as well as prescription. Richard Postlethwaite’s Grammatical Art Improved: in which the Errors of Grammarians and Lexicographers are Exposed contains a section of ‘exercised of bad English’ requiring readers to identify examples of poor usage. Lowth’s Grammar is both prescriptive and proscriptive, but he’s rather gentle in the way he states rules. The XVIII century also saw the emergence of books specifically advising readers of linguistic dos and don’ts – ‘usage guides’. i.e. Herny Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Most of these books deal with grammar, lexis and spelling, but there were also pronunciation guides. John Walker’s A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, 1791 pronouncing words ‘the wrong way’ can cause all sorts of negative judgments, so his dictionary contains detailed advice to the Irish and the Scots on how to obtain ‘a just pronunciation of English’, that is, that of educated Londoners, free from all the vices of the vulgar. Robert Baker’s Reflections on the English Language, 1770 127 linguistic points – to do with grammar, words often confused, proper lexical usage. His advice was fierce and forthright. Samuel Johnson decides not to ignore ‘hard words’ in his dictionary, covering obscure items as well as everyday items. Two other major innovations: 1- He tries to identify the ‘primitive significations’ of words, then to introduce subdivisions carrying different shades of meaning. 2- Johnson’s use of quotations to provide examples of how the words he has defined are used. The greatest number of quotations are from Shakespeare, then we have Bacon, Pope, Milton and Spenser, but also the Bible was a common source – the dictionary, therefore, had a moral as well as a linguistic purpose. Attention is often drawn to the inaccuracies and idiosyncrasies in Johnson’s Dictionary: his etymologies were often suspect, and occasionally his definitions are just wrong. As for idiosyncrasies, the most famous is his definition of oats ‘a grain, which in England id generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people’. It reveals his professed antipathy to Scotland. On occasions he does not fail to make his feelings towards certain words clear. In his initial Plan , the Dictionary’s aim is ‘to fix the English language’. In the Preface , instead, there is prescription with plenty of fierce comments about how the language should be used. But there is also a lot of descriptive linguistics, statements about how words ARE used, rather than statements about how they SHOULD be used. GRAPHOLOGY: We talked about the long and the short ‘s’ : the two letters do not represent different sounds. What distinguishes them is that the ‘short s ’ is used in word-final positions (at the end of words), and word-initially when the word has a capital letter. The ‘long s ’ is used word- initially and medially, never finally or as a capital letter.
Capital letters : in EmodE, initial capital letters were associated with ‘important words’, particularly nouns.Thomas Dyche says that ‘All Emphatical or Remarkable Words’ should be given an initial capital letter. The word LORDSHIP in Swift’s extract is so emphatical that it is written entirely in capitals. Also, the capital effectively introduces a new sentence, and not all nouns have capitals the rules controlling capitalisation were a little loose. The arbitrariness of capitalisation must have irritated printers no end. The lack of clear principles for when to use an initial capital meant they had to look carefully at every word before printing it. This led them to push for a simpler principle, whereby every noun was to begin with a capital. Dyche did not agree with this choice, so extensive initial capitalisation disappeared rather dramatically from printed texts in the second half of the century. Another aspect is the capitalisation of the initial letter of the first word of a sentence, that in Swift’s time was the entire word. Swift’s punctuation is a little different from ours too. Quite possibly spacing decisions are to do with the printer’s need to maintain text that is ‘justified’. GRAMMAR: One major difference between EModE and LModE is that the later period had more complex verb forms that were coming into use. One of these forms is the ‘progressive’ ( -ing form). Its main use today is to describe an action that is ongoing and temporary. Another structure that was increasing in use was the ‘passive’. The passive-continuous combination only started to come in at the end of the eighteenth century. VOCABULARY: Eighteenth-century linguistic sensibilities could easily be offended. The spirit of the age, too, was against the introduction of large quantities of new words: reactions to foreign borrowings were commonly negative.
Various economic factors helped to stimulate the increase in reading: fast and cheap printing techniques were introduced while producing paper was made easier. Taxes decreased too. There was more interest in linguistic matters, increasing literacy and a growing belief that language was for everyone, not just the educated few. There came a need for instruction on how to develop language skills the appearance of many new books about language use: grammars, usage guides, pronunciation manuals, dictionaries. e.g. William Cobbet’s Grammar of the English Language , 1819. It was directed to a specific audience: at first it was his son, who needed good grammatical knowledge to enter into the world of books; but also it is based on the idea that ‘language is for all’: the full title of the book says “intended for the use of schools and of young persons in general: but more especially for the use of soldiers, sailors, apprentices, and plough-boys”. The preoccupations with prescription and proscription continued all throughout the XIX century. Some of the language books written in the period follow the idea that focusing on ‘mistakes’ is a good pedagogic strategy for teaching correct language use. This new century introduces what we call the ‘split infinitive’ where a word (usually an adverb) is placed between the word ‘to’ and its associated infinitive. The case seems to be based on a comparison with Latin, where the infinitive was just the one word. Same with English: it has ‘to+past participle’ so nothing should come between the two particles. A good knowledge of grammar was thought to open paths to knowledge of all kinds, but it was also a question of morality. Correct use of language was certainly regarded as a sign of good character, while bad language use indicated a bad character therefore, ‘mistakes’ were regarded as more than inconsequential slips. Mugglestone described them as shibboleths , serious linguistic taboos. The Oxford English Dictionary in 1844 a group of scholars in the Philological Society expressed an interest in compiling a new dictionary of English. Richard Trench produced a report entitled On Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries , with many deficiencies in it, including scant coverage of obsolete words and a lack of quotations illustrating words in use. In 1858 the Society proposed the creation of a new dictionary, in which we find also the contribution of James Murray. During his editorship in 1879 the Society agreed to change the name to Oxford English Dictionary. A huge number of volunteer workers were recruited to work on the project, by being assigned particular books, and asked to copy out example passages illustrating the use of specific words. WHERE DID THE STANDARD ENGLISH COME FROM? In the case of British English, the roots were both geographical and class-related. A standard for pronunciation was developed too, and in the XIX century the term Received Pronunciation (RP) came into use. Prescription is the mother of standardisation. The prescriptive efforts of all those books about language use contributed to the standardisation of English during the XIX century. However, there were many varieties in the forms of English during the period: differences in register, differences according to social class, different regional dialects, different types of slang. i.e. Sir Walter Raleigh’s language followed the standard model when he wrote, but he spoke in dialect.
It was common in the XIX century too to use more than one language style: a formal way of writing for certain sorts of speech, and a ‘ slipper English ’ – an informal style used when wearing their slippers at home. XIX century Britain was a highly class-conscious society, and language use was a prime class marker. It was not just pronunciation and accent that were a question of class; grammar was also involved. Here are some grammatical examples of what the nineteenth and early twentieth century upper class smiled, rather than frowned, upon:
- Use of the present tense for future action this usage suggests the ordered lives of the upper classes, where when once something is arranged, it means it really will happen.
- Use of a past tense where PDE would use the present perfect;
- Using a transitive – or reflexive – verb intransitively;
- Use of the perfect infinitive after a past tense. Example of Chapter 10 of The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens in which the protagonist is a Cockney. Cockney is a regional dialect of the east of London. The XIX century was the period when the study of regional dialects was becoming established as a branch of language study. Slang is another language variety, often regarded as a ‘low’ or ‘disreputable’ form of language, and its use upset the prescriptivists. Slangs sometimes have a regional aspect to them, but they are also often ‘secret languages’ spoken by a group of people sharing some interest and it is often intended to exclude those who are not members of the group. (i.e. Cockney rhyming slang) The XIX century was a period with unremitting fertility of lexis. The first citations are not always the first occurrences of words, so can’t be used as definitive statements about when words first appeared. Also, many words are already—existing words with some ‘new’ added element, or they may be being used in some ‘new’ meaning. There are two major reasons why the lexis of a language grows:
- Through extensive contact with other languages and cultures.
- The introduction of new ideas and inventions into the culture, with new words required to express new concepts. a. Many XIX century borrowings were Empire-related. NEW WORDS, NEW FORMS, NEW MEANINGS Abducted the word was known since 1623, but in 1850 it came to be used in the study of anatomy, to refer to a muscle, or a part of a limb, that moves away from the body. Sometimes an already-existing word is adapted for use as a different part of speech: a process called ‘functional shift’. (i.e. the word chocolate , which in 1604 was used as a noun, in 1850 became used as a verb). The nineteenth century was a period of ‘ - isms’ , and that was indeed a favourite suffix animism, dynamism, humorism, industrialism, narcotism, servilism, socialism, and spiritualism. Another popular suffix was - ize , as well as -metry, -logy, -graphy.
SOUND VARIETIES
The letter ‘r’ is a major variation attractor. It is called rhotacism , defined in the OED as the ‘unusual pronunciation or pronounced production’ of the letter ‘r’. in RP, a written ‘r’ is sometimes pronounced and sometimes not; but in some British dialect it is always pronounced
- though with various different pronunciations. Where the ‘r’ occurs before a vowel (pre-vocalic) it is pronounced: rob, royal, enrich, across, arrest. Otherwise, it is not pronounced: actor, arm, heart, car, fever. An exception is when a word ending with ‘r’ is followed by one beginning with a vowel, in which case some speakers may pronounce the ‘r’ ( far and wide ). Languages and dialects which do not pronounce the ‘r’ before a consonant or in word-final position are called non-rhotic (AmE is generally rhotic). DIPHTHONGS AND LONG VOWELS In south-east English and RP, the word face is pronounced with a diphthong - / feɪs/ - but in many parts of Britain, the long vowel /e:/ is used instead of a diphthong - /fe:s/. In fact, the long vowel pronunciation was once found in all regions and the south-eastern diphthong came along later but it began to spread more widely. In Scotland, Wales, Devon, and Cornwall still prevails the long vowel. In AmE too you can find a monothong where RP has a diphthong. /t/ AND OTHER PLOSIVES (/p/ - /b/ - /d/ - /k/ - /g/) They are produced by an explosive release of air following a closure of the air passage at some point in the speech organs. The closure can occur between the two lips, between the tongue and the palate, and between the back of the tongue and the palate. Another place where the closure can occur is between the vocal cords: the resulting sound is known as a ‘ glottal stop ’ and its phonetic symbol is [ʔ]. In some varieties of English, you can find the glottal stop mostly instead of a /t/, but it can also replace a /d/ or other plosives. In Cockney, for instance, it occurs when a /t/ is found intervocally – ‘t-glottalisation’. So RP / bʌtə/ (‘butter’) is in Cockney pronounced / bʌʔə/. / ŋ/ - ‘ng’ Phoneticians describe it as a velar sound, because it is formed by an obstruction involving the back of the tongue and the soft palate, or ‘velum’. Velar sound cause problems for different types of speakers, including children learning their first language. It is easier if the velar is replaced by an ‘alveolar’ sound: these are produced more to the front of the mouth, where the obstruction is formed by the front of the tongue and the bony ridge above the upper teeth, called the ‘alveolar ridge’. This process is called ‘ alveolar substitution ’.
Young children do it when they replace the sounds /k/ and /g/ with the alveolar equivalents /t/ and /d/. / ŋ/ is replaced by many English speakers by the alveolar /n/, often reflected in spelling: singing may be written singin’ , or the Sctos word scunnerin , which has lost its final ‘g’. GRAMMATICAL VARIATIONS They often reveal processes of regularization and simplification: irregular forms are made regular, and where you have two forms in StE, a single form can be used for both. Here are some examples which we will take into consideration more in detail. (1) Find out where this leak start from. (Norfolk) (2) He didn’t save nothing else. (Essex) (3) When us used to be on the farms us used to go on. (Devon) (4) I could’ve went anywhere [that] I wanted to. (Gloucestershire) (5) I used to go to Kendal them two days. (Lancashire) (6) We didn’t do too bad really. (Lincolnshire) (7) I joined the bell- ringers in ’92, forty-nine year this month. (Lincolnshire) (8) Your stones crosses every joint. (Yorkshire) (9) It was done pretty quick. (Devon) (10) [we made] a good thirty, forty gallon [of cider]. (Somerset) (11) That’s what they farmers used to want. (Essex) (12) He was never wealthy nor nothing. (Shropshire) (13) You never knowed anything about it. (Gloucestershire) (14) I can remember she. (Devon) Sentence (8) uses the -s endind throughout the present tense for all persons. In Sentence (1) the -s suffix is not used where it should be; the speaker probably uses this form throughout the present tense. In StE it is common for there to be just one negative element in a clause, but multiple negatives are often found in non-standard varieties: Sentence (2) has a double negative, and in Sentence (12) there are three. Regular verbs in English use the suffix -ed to form both the past tense and the past participle, but we have a good number of irregular verbs, where the past tense and past participle are different. In non-standard varieties, irregular verbs are often made regular: Sentence (13), Sentence (4) shows that the past tense form went is used for the past participle gone. Pronouns are often non-standard in dialects. Sometimes an object pronoun will be used for a subject, as in Sentence (3). In Sentence (14) you have the opposite: the subject pronoun occurs where StE would have the object. Sometimes the personal pronoun (them) replaces a demonstrative determiner (adjective), like in Sentence (5) and Sentence (11). Sentences (6) and (9) show adjectives being used as adverbs; this is particularly common when the adverb would end in -ly , where the suffix is just dropped. Another suffix that sometimes is dropped is the -s which in StE is used to form a plural noun, as in Sentence (7). In Sentence (10) we find how this happens when the noun occurs with a number.
The word adder comes from Germanic and in ME it was naddre , later changed with the ‘n’ being added to the indefinite article ‘an’. In early days, the word simply referred to a snake of whatever type. A map like that can tell us about linguistic influences on the language. Viper is of Romance origin, it came into Middle English after the Norman conquest. Hagworm is a word of Norse derivation, and it is found in areas where the Vikings invaded. In Vol.1 of Accents of English , Wells introduces the ‘LEXICAL SETS’: groups of words, chosen because each contains a specific vowel or diphthong in its stressed syllable. The pronunciations given are the RP and GA (General American). The number of varieties of language we are taking into consideration are eight:
- Cockney;
- Multicultural London English;
- Estuary English;
- the West Country English;
- northern dialects;
- Welsh English;
- Scots;
- Irish English.
Warning! Within most areas, there are variations, sometimes significant ones, which will not be covered. Dialects do not have sharp geographical boundaries – they often mingle, picking up characteristics from each other. Variations are often not just defined by regions; very often their use has a socio-economic dimension. COCKNEY For pronunciation: h-dropping ; how the letters written ‘ th ’ are pronounced. In RP there are 2 pronunciations of that: in words like anything, through, thinking, thought , the sound is unvoiced (/θ/). In words like mother and that it is a voiced sound (/ð/). Cockney maintains the voiced/unvoiced distinction, but instead of the unvoiced /θ/ they use unvoiced /f/ , and voiced /ð/ becomes voiced /v/ ; the glottal stop ; it often replaces a /t/ intervocally or at the end of words; the ‘ alveolar substitution’ , with the /ŋ/ of the suffix -ing often pronounced as if written -in ; the diphthong /eɪ/ which in Cockney is pronounced /aɪ/ ; the diphthong /aʊ/ sometimes becomes /æə/ in words like pund or how.
sometimes used by politicians to sound ‘of the people’. Thus the former Prime Minister Tony Blair introduced elements of EE into his speech and so did Princess Diana. EE has the glottalization feature but it’s not as marked as in Cockney, though it does have some glottals in word-final positions – i.e. I got it the two final /t/ sounds become glottals in both Cockney and EE. A glottal is also found in the word ‘Gatwick’. The ‘l-vocalisation’ it is found where an /l/ sound is replaced by a vowel or diphthong: RP /hɪl/ becomes /hiʊ/ and ‘milk’ becomes /miʊk/. the yod coalescence’ ‘yod’ is the name given to the tenth letter in the Hebrew alphabet, and also used to describe the sound /j/ in phonetics. This sound in RP is found in words like ‘dune’ and ‘Tuesday’ (/djʊn/ - /tjʊzdiː/); in EE the sounds /dj/ and /tj/ are replaced by /dʒ/ and /tʃ/. EE is principally an accent, but there are some lexical and syntactic characteristics associated with it. (1) A: What are you doing here? – B: I came to finish those letters, didn’t I? This is called a ‘confrontational’ tag question, one which suggests that the person you are speaking to really should know something already. (2) A: Did you go there last Wednesday? – B: No, I never went there on Wednesday. In StE, never means ‘not ever’. This sentence shows that it can refer to just one occasion. (3) Don’t do it so quick. An adjective is used in place of an adverb. (4) So I goes down the shop and buys some. It contains another variation attractor, where the present tense third person singular verb ending is used for all persons. (5) The door came off of its hinges. An odd prepositional form. Off of where you normally would use just ‘off’ – same with ‘inside inside of; outside outside of’. THE WEST COUNTRY West Saxon was one of the main dialects of OE, it was at the origin of the West Country dialects of English that we now find in Devon, Somerset, Cornwall, Dorset, Wiltshire (south-west counties). It is regarded by some as ‘rustic’, but it has noble beginnings since it was spoken at the court of King Alfred the Great. West Country English is often exaggerated, sometimes to the point of caricature, and it replaces the unvoiced sound /s/ with the voiced /z/ - somebody becomes somebody , zaid, zider. Other unvoiced consonants can also be used, like /f/ becoming /v/. The West Country dialect is rhotic, with a retroflex version of ‘r’ – the one that gets to America! The alveolar substitution also occurs in WCE.
A very distinctive characteristic of this accent is the pronunciation of the diphthong in words like arrive. The RP /aɪ/ can be pronounced as /ɔɪ/. All the grammar variations of this dialect are covered in the ‘Grammatical variations’ section in the previous chapter. THE NORTH The North covers a very large area, and encompasses a wide variety of accents. There’s the accent of Birmingham; then there are the Lobscouse , Liverpool’s local accent. Then on the other side of northern England there’s the Geordie language (Newcastle upon Tyne). Yorkshire covers a substantial part of northern England, with a number of local accents, sometimes quite different from each other. The pronunciation feature most characteristic of northern dialects involves the RP vowel in words like path, past dance, can’t. it’s /ɑː/ in RP and the northern version is close to the /æ/. This means that words like ant and aunt are pronounced the same. Northern dialects do not characteristically have the /ʌ/ sound that is used in words like bus, love, must, flood. They use the vowel /ʊ/ as in put. This means that words like putt and put are pronounced the same. One of the variation attractors relates to diphthongs and long vowels. Northern dialects tend to use long vowels: the diphthong / əʊ/ is /o:/; / eɪ/ is /e:/. The grammatical variations include the omission of a determiner , particularly the definite article, or the use of the thou form, almost died out in northern dialect, or the dislocation. CHAPTER 6: A TONGUE OF SMALL REACH – WALES, SCOTLAND, IRELAND The Celtic League an organisation founded in 1961 which promotes Celtic identity. Three members of the league are Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The Celts were fierce warriors who fought with the romans. Where they originally came from is uncertain: some say western Asia, others from further east. The Celts had a nomadic streak and spread both east and west. They tended to stay in tribes rather than creating a single nation. Julius Caesar defeated them in 52 BC; eventually, the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall to keep the Celts out of Roman England.
In Old English times, the dialect of Northumbria filtered into the south of Scotland and its progress has been steady since. With the Act of Union formally uniting England and Scotland in 1707, the guarantee of the dominance of English was obvious and the English were resolute in their efforts to quash Scottish Gaelic. Scottish Standard English is the accepted norm in the country, but there are several Scottish dialects. The word ‘Scots’ is used as an umbrella term covering the variety of Scottish dialects: the dialects in the northern islands of Orkney and Shetland, the Doric, the Glaswegian and Edinburgh dialects, the ‘Lallans’ – from the Lowlands. Scots has a more distinctive vocabulary than StE. Words like about, powerful, however , which usually contain the diphthong /aʊ/ in RP, in Scottish English are found to be pronounced with the vowel /u:/. Same with RP /əʊ/ becoming /o:/. RP /ʊ/ and /u:/ are the same in SSE. In words like nurse, bird, heard RP is /ɜː/, but in SSE these words have different vowels, /ʌr/ in nurse , /ɜːr/ in bird and /ɜːr/ in heard. The Scottish ‘r’ sometimes is trilled and sometimes is tapped, whereas the glottal t is found in some Scots dialects rather than in SSE. Two sounds that occur in Scottish English but not in RP are:
- the written ‘wh’, that is actually pronounced as if it were written ‘hw’ (/ʍ/).
- The ‘ch’, most known for its occurrence in the word ‘loch’. Its phonetic symbol is /x/. the sound is not used in RP so many English people pronounce ‘loch’ as if it were ‘lock’. This sound often expressed sorrow, and it might be an imitation of the sound of a sigh. Most of the differences between StE and Scottish English are to do with lexis and pronunciation, but also on the grammatical level too. One of the most distinctive is the negation Scottish seem to dislike the -n’t forms in words like won’t – haven’t. it’s more common to find in Scottish these words like I’ll not – I’ve not. Nae is also used for StE not , but it can also be added to auxiliaries or modals. Another distinctive feature regards the plural pronoun yous. Scots distinguishes the singular you and the plural yous. IRISH ENGLISH: In 1642 the English Parliament declared that Ireland would have been replanted with many English noble families of Protestant religion, contrasting the Catholicism pervading the island. In 1649 Cromwell took his troops to Dublin and, after rejecting a surrender, the town of Drogheda – 40 miles north of Dublin – was stormed, and much of the population were massacred. England followed with military action by a colonisation of the northern part of Ireland, peopling it with Protestants – many of them Scottish – who brought their languages with them. A large number of Irish moved out of Ireland after 1801 when the country became part of the United Kingdom, and in the XIX century famine caused millions more Irish to emigrate, many to America. The Irish pressed for independence fighting a war from 1919 to 1921, resulting in the creation of an Irish Free State in 1922, over which the Parliament of the UK had some restricted authority. However, the northern part of Ireland insisted on maintaining its separateness, thus
becoming in 1949 the Republic of Ireland in the south and Northern Ireland still remaining within the United Kingdom. With all these upheavals came linguistic changes. Irish was once dominant on the island, and still the first language of the Republic, but only 2% of the population actually speak it, as Irish English is widespread. Ireland has a great variety of accents of English, with the Northern Irish and Republic Irish accents being particularly distinctive. One of the ways to identify a Northern Irish accent quickly is by their pronunciation of the RP diphthong /aʊ/. In Northern Irish, the diphthong would be rendered with the sound / ɛʉ/ , the second element being a close, central, rounded vowel. A distinctive characteristic of some southern Irish accents is the use of voiceless / t/ and voiced / d/ for the RP voiceless– voiced pair / θ/ and / ð/. Northern Irish has a particularly distinctive intonation, which rises at the end of utterances, whether they are questions or not. As regards grammar, southern Irish has several characteristics which come from the Celtic language, Irish. One is the use of after, followed by the - ing form of the verb. This is sometimes called the ‘ after perfect’. Another common characteristic is the use of and as a *conjunction, often replacing ‘ when ’ or ‘ while ’. We also find a process similar to the ‘focus fronting’ in Welsh, but it is called ‘cleft sentences’. Because so many of the British coming into Northern Ireland were from Scotland, it is not surprising that Northern Irish elements of Scots. One example is the plural form of you.
