94 DEVELOPMENT: ASPECTS OF ENGLISH Letters to the newspapers and fussy complaints about many of these cause them to find their way into the education system and become part of the standard written language. The standard language ideology Where this prescriptivism occurs throughout history, it is often accompanied by con- servative moral politics and a nostalgic ‘golden age’ sense of history: language is always seen as becoming debased, distorted and corrupted. The slippage between language and moral judgement is often an easy one. Prescriptivism can be very powerful, because prescriptivists are often in influential positions. Jonathan Swift set out a proposal for correcting and ‘ascertaining’ (that is, fixing forever) the English language. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary also had an improving aim, and was sold alongside popular rules of grammar. Prince Charles has made connections between slovenly grammar, slovenly appearance, and lawlessness. The elevation of one dialect as the prestige standard usually also involves the relative disparagement of the other varieties of the language. So, for example, writing in any dialect other than Standard English in anything but a very informal context would be regarded as improper, ignorant or even humorous over the last century. Of course there are huge advantages in having a standard written form, since no accent or region is privileged. Any English user from any region or any part of the world can read this book – even read it aloud in any accent – without a hint of the Birmingham or Teesside accents of its two authors. Nevertheless, the tendency of much standardisation is towards the homogenisa- tion of English. Traditional dictionary-writers and grammarians up until modern times, devisers of educational tools and curricula, governments looking for national pride and cost-efficient schooling, all dislike multiple possible versions of what needs to be taught. Testing and the awarding of qualifications are difficult if there is not a stan- dard answer. Dialectal variations are regarded as quaint curiosities, worthy of study for their ‘folk’ origins. The apparently reasonable position that encourages Standard English as a written norm which can be realised in any accent, in practice tends towards a more sinister position, in which an accent tending towards an educated South-Eastern middle-class variant is held up as the ‘natural’ spoken form of Standard English. This used to be called Received Pronunciation or BBC English, though as mentioned in B1, even this has changed enormously over the last century and is currently in the process of being casualised towards the accents of other large cities (see B9 for fur- ther discussion and illustration). Working against the processes of standardisation and homogenisation is what seems to be the natural condition of diversity in language use. Local innovations and changes in linguistic fashion, the movement of people into different contact situations, and the natural creativity of individuals and groups all produce a constant stream of new forms of English. Most innovations flutter and die, of course. Current faddish phrases will go the way of ‘fab’, ‘groovy’, ‘ace’ and ‘so long daddy-o’, but they will surely be replaced by hundreds more. Occasionally, when an innovation is particu- larly apt, or the user is particularly influential, or the use is especially persistent, the innovation will diffuse more widely through the local social culture, and then into the language system in general. It will become standard, and will eventually lose its innovative, non-standard origins. LANGUAGE ATTITUDES 95 Local innovations and non-standard varieties are sustained by language loyalty. Ironically, this can be seen as the local form of standardisation, which resists national standardisation of the language. People who speak with a Welsh, Northern English, or American or Australian accent, or who use Hiberno-English, West Midlands English or Geordie dialects don’t simply do so because they have not yet got around to learning more standard forms: they maintain their variety as a matter of identity, both individual and cultural. It is virtually impossible to get a northern English person to say /ka£sel/ for /kasel/ (‘castle’), or /rwn/ for /rkn/ (‘run’), or /fekn/ (‘phone’) for one of the several northern variants of that diphthong, and the reason is not inarticulacy nor (primarily) hostility to southern forms but rather a language loyalty to their own vernacular. Language loyalty maintains regional accents and dialects against national standardisation and homogenisation, but of course those local varieties are also subject to just as much change over time as the language as a whole (see B9). LANGUAGE ATTITUDES Prestige, stigmatisation and language loyalty As members of different speech communities, social networks and communities of practice, all of us have deeply ingrained attitudes towards language varieties which are learnt during the socialisation process. One of the most crucial topics of sociolinguistic language attitudes research centres around the notions of prestige and stigmatisation which we have already come across in A10 and B8. It is important to bear in mind that, while official language varieties such as Standard English are those imbued with the most power and prestige within societies, speakers from particular social group- ings may find prestige in non-standard varieties. Attitudes towards prestige and stigmatisation are fundamentally dependent upon speakers’ positive and negative perceptions of relations between different groups, significantly interrelated with per- ceptions of individual and group identities. Sociolinguist Peter Garrett (2007: 116) gives a useful summary of the three dif- ferent categories that are commonly thought to make up language attitudes: q cognitive: beliefs and stereotypes q affective: evaluations of one another q behavioural: how we behave towards each other based upon our beliefs, stereo- types and evaluations. With the behavioural category, it is important to acknowledge that we cannot escape stereotyping one another on the basis of the language we use – we all have linguistic prejudices, they are unavoidable. However, it is crucial to recognise this and realise that our judgements about language usage are based upon linguistic prejudice – there is nothing inherent within the English language system (or any other language system for that matter) that makes one variety better or superior to another variety. B9 96 DEVELOPMENT: ASPECTS OF ENGLISH The varieties encoded with the most social, political and economic power are those that become the most prestigious versions (see B8). One key principle of sociolinguistics is that all language varieties are, and should be seen as, equally complex. To explore this further, we will again consider Received Pronunciation (RP), which we came across in B1 and B8. RP is traditionally seen as the accent imbued with the most social, economic and political power in England, thus, historically at least, the accent with the most prestige and status. However, there is nothing inherently superior about this particular accent. RP is simply the variety that has come to be associated with the most social, political and economic power. Value judgements of ‘correctness’ and ‘purity’ are completely arbitrary. Additionally, RP is a phe- nomenon attached to the English spoken in England. It does not exist in Scotland, or any other country in Great Britain and it does not exist in other languages, such as German. A classic illustration of the arbitrary nature of prestige is the example of rhotic- ity, which we have already come across in A8 and A9 – an accent feature positively evaluated and imbued with prestige in New York, yet associated with the non- standard, stigmatised varieties in south-west England and the north-west of the country, in the county of Lancashire. Our individual perceptions of which varieties have prestige and stigmatisation crucially depend upon our own accent and dialect and any language loyalty that we have towards particular varieties. As speakers we also shift our speech styles depending upon context, as we have already seen in A9. We all regularly alter our styles along with a whole range of indexes that encode our social identities depending upon whom we are interacting with and in what specific setting the interaction is taking place. These style shifts between different varieties can be either conscious or uncon- scious. For example, many of our students consciously report a change in accent and dialect from when they are at university to when they go home and interact with family and friends from their local region. This is a result of individuals’ conscious and subconscious awareness of beliefs and stereotypes of language usage and how people evaluate and judge one another on the basis of such language choices. Interrelated with this is the fact that we frequently change our sociolinguistic speech styles in order to engage in a process of what is known as accommodation. The term ‘accommodation’ is primarily associated with the work of Howard Giles (1973), who devised Speech Accommodation Theory (SAT). The crucial notions within this theory are convergence and divergence. Convergence refers to how individuals build a sense of solidarity and collective group identity within particular speech communi- ties, social networks or communities of practice by converging language practices, such as adopting similar dialect features. Divergence describes the process by which we may differ our speech styles to signal social distance or the existence of an asymmetrical power relationship between ourselves and others. In one of Giles’s (1973) seminal speech accommodation works, he conducted a study on British schoolchildren’s perceptions of particular character traits and accents. He discovered that speakers with an RP accent were perceived to be the most intelligent, whereas speakers with a Birmingham (a city in the West Midlands of England) accent, were perceived to be the least intelligent. LANGUAGE ATTITUDES 97 Speech Accommodation Theory has been broadened out and renamed Communication Accommodation Theory (CAT). CAT includes the additional investigation of convergence and divergence in the form of fellow interlocutors’ body language and gestures, as well as their spoken language styles. Legitimate group membership of a speech community, social network or com- munity of practice is crucial in order to claim convergence with others in speech, body language and gesture. The following example illustrates the consequences of what can happen when legitimate group membership is not the case. Experimenting with different speech styles and producing a style that is deemed to go against fellow speakers’ expectations can be very revealing in terms of pointing to the norms of accommodation, convergence and divergence. Based on an activity devised by Ronald Wardhaugh (2006), sociolinguistics students at Nottingham were set the task of deliberately changing one small aspect of their speech style in particular contexts in order to reveal how communicative norms are deeply encoded with levels of formality and perceptions of speech community membership. They were asked to assess the consequences of their deviation from the expected norm on the basis of what happened subsequently in the interaction and then post a report of their findings on an electronic discussion board. One student reported the following encounter, which focuses in particular upon the local Nottingham term of endearment ‘duck’. She had conducted the small shift in speech style experiment in a café in the university’s Students’ Union: After having a cup of tea in the Portland building a cleaner came to remove my cup. ‘Have you finished with that Duck?’ he asked. My natural response was to say, ‘Yes thank you.’ However I knew it was a perfect situation to put this task into practice and employ real informality where it is not appropriate, ‘Yeah, cheers Duck,’ I said. The worker glared at me, picked up my cup, frowned and walked away . . . If I had used another term of endearment such as ‘luv’ it perhaps would not have been as offensive, but the fact that I repeated his term, which is also very much a feature of his Midlands dialect and therefore clearly uncommon to me, made it appear that I was mimicking and insulting rather than engaging in friendly exchange. Individuals who are legitimate members of the Nottingham speech community and who thus share its speech norms can use ‘duck’ as a reciprocal term of endearment to one another, regardless of age and gender. However, on the basis of the cleaner’s body language and gesture he clearly did not perceive the student to be a legitimate member of the local speech community. The paralinguistic features of the cleaner, the glare and frown, along with a lack of any further spoken communication after the student called him ‘duck’ appear to be clear signs that the student had broken the expected norms of this context, particularly in terms of lacking the required speech community membership to share legitimately in such solidarity-building behaviour in an asymmetrical power relationship. Thus, her reciprocal repetition of this lexical item, which would be evaluated as an in-group identity marker in other situations where membership is legitimate, fails. Can you think of similar situations where reciprocal usage of a dialect feature has failed due to lack of speech community membership? 98 DEVELOPMENT: ASPECTS OF ENGLISH Attitudes in court Negative attitudes towards language varieties based upon stereotyping and prejudice can potentially have very serious consequences, particularly in formal, institutional settings. A good example of this is how the language of the courtroom is assessed and evaluated. Sociolinguists have found that usage of certain regional accents and dialects in courtroom settings can lead to witnesses and suspects being treated as less trustworthy and less reliable. In an Australian courtroom context, Diana Eades (1992) has examined a difference in cultural interactional norms which leads to evidence presented by Aboriginal individuals being perceived as unreliable. Eades reports that a respectful silence is typically observed after a question is asked in Aboriginal communication. However, in a white Australian courtroom setting Eades found that these silences have been viewed with a great deal of suspicion. They are negatively evaluated as strategic devices, used to buy time in order to concoct an alter- native version of the truth. Any evidence produced following such silences is subject to question, reinforcing the white Australian stereotype that Aboriginals are not to be trusted and thus are unreliable witnesses or guilty suspects. Similarly, Dixon et al. (2002) discovered that there was a higher conviction rate for defendants with Birmingham accents in courtrooms in England than for defend- ants with RP accents. The stigmatisation of the Birmingham accent originally found by Giles is still subject to linguistic prejudice. Changing attitudes Despite the persistent negativity associated with the Birmingham accent in England, it is important to highlight that certain stereotypes and language attitudes can change over time. Contrary to populist beliefs and stereotypes, often perpetuated by mostly right-wing elements of the mass media who bemoan language innovation, as we have seen already in A9 and B8 the English language (and any other language system) is not static or fixed – it is constantly changing and evolving. To illustrate this point further, it is observable that language loyalty to RP has been dying out in England for several years now. Newer varieties, including the aforementioned Non-Regional Pronunciation (NRP, see B1), along with a variety that has come be known as Estuary English, have been empirically observed as taking the place of RP. Estuary English takes its name from the Thames Estuary in south-east England and it is a term that became popularised in the 1980s. An effective way to conceptu- alise Estuary English is to view it as located as a mid-point on a continuum, with RP at the one end and Cockney, the local variety, at the other. One popular explanation for the development of Estuary English put forward by linguists including David Crystal (1995) is that RP is going through a process of casualisation at the same time as Cockney speakers are experiencing social mobility and thus moving away from the most stig- matised variety. Estuary English is seen by sociolinguists as evidence that a process known as dialect levelling is taking place, as certain features from this south-east variety have been witnessed spreading across the country. Crystal suggests that the spread of Estuary English can be attributable to a number of factors, including commuting patterns, with far more people now taking advantage of relatively straightforward commutes to the capital, the mass media, particularly high-profile celebrities on television and radio CODIFICATION 99 who speak a form of Estuary English, as well as the building of new cities outside the capital post-World War Two. The spread of people from the capital who moved to these new towns, along with their social and economic mobility, resulted in modification of their accent and dialects, as well as influencing individuals who were already residents in these locations. Crystal (1995) characterises some of the key features associated with this variety. These include glottal stops (also discussed in B1 and D1), especially in word final position or before a consonant, though glottal usage is variable, and only Cockney speakers would use a glottal stop before a vowel. From a grammatical perspective, Estuary English speakers will omit the ‘-ly’ adverbial ending as in ‘You’re moving too quick’, but they are far less likely to use the double negative, where more than one negative word occurs within the same clause, which is firmly associated with non-standard variants, including Cockney, such as ‘I never did nothing’. There is also usage of what is known as the confrontational tag question (a con- struction added to a statement), in this case to add negative evaluation to a statement, such as ‘I told you that already didn’t I’. Crystal points out that ‘innit’, the well-known Cockney tag, frequently cited as an obvious stereotypical feature, can only be found in jocular Estuary speech, though he does point out that this tag may well become part of Estuary English in future. It is still too early to see what the overall impact of Estuary English will eventu- ally be on the population of England as a whole. Evidence of dialect levelling has been found in many different locations within England, though regional variants are still going strong. Dialect levelling is further explored in D9. CODIFICATION The development of corpora of World Englishes can be a great aid to the description and eventual codification of varieties (the term corpus, along with its plural, ‘corpora’, is defined as a body or a collection. In specific reference to language study, corpus linguistics refers to a collection of a body of texts, used for linguistic description and analysis: see also A11). While a handful of World Englishes corpora were in existence by the early 1990s, including Australian and New Zealand varieties (based at Macquarie University and Victoria University, Wellington, respectively), in 1990 an International Corpus of English was proposed by Sidney Greenbaum at University College London (UCL). He had previously worked on one of the first-ever linguistic corpora, the Survey of English Usage, a collection of British English compiled in conjunction with his UCL colleague Randolph Quirk. Greenbaum’s vision was to compile parallel corpora in different countries where English is used as either a first or second, official language. The aim was thus to col- lect data from Kachru’s inner and outer circles. Each group of researchers has been presented with the task of compiling a one-million-word corpus recorded after 1989. To date, the following countries have been involved in this international corpus: Australia, Canada, Ghana, Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Jamaica, Kenya, B10 . national standardisation of the language. People who speak with a Welsh, Northern English, or American or Australian accent, or who use Hiberno -English, West Midlands English or Geordie dialects. inherent within the English language system (or any other language system for that matter) that makes one variety better or superior to another variety. B9 96 DEVELOPMENT: ASPECTS OF ENGLISH The varieties. and B8 the English language (and any other language system) is not static or fixed – it is constantly changing and evolving. To illustrate this point further, it is observable that language loyalty