The Beatles' wry Liverpool Scouse; the canny Cockney of London's music halls; Birmingham's frank, unpretentious Brum; and the melodic cadences of Newcastle's Geordie, are just four of the deep, evocative local traditions for which England is justly famous. Not that the English themselves cherish their rich heritage; until now, social advancement in England depended on cultivating "Received Pronunciation" (RP), also called "BBC English," a colourless, terminally posh, artificial accent. Doing so is not as easy as it sounds; the English are acutely aware of elocution. Journalists describe the differences in public figures' speech with scientific precision, right down to how explosive the T's are, how sibilant the S's. For example, Princess Diana's pronunciation of Tuesday ("chewsday") was immediately fingered as not quite the Windsor "tyooz-day." I doubt that such an arcane point would have been judged newsworthy in any other nation but England.
About the same time, BBC English suffered a major blow when the BBC itself abandoned it in favour of a "clarity policy." Regional accents are now allowed under the new regime, as long as the speech is clear and the grammar correct. Contemporary BBC correspondents in Scotland, Ulster, and Yorkshire report in their native accents; even Australian and Canadian correspondents speak accordingly. The BBC's clarity policy is controversial, but suggests that England is far in advance of the US, whose regional accents are virtually absent from the airwaves. The fact that the Americans pay greater lip service to egalitarianism than the English do only makes the BBC decision that much more remarkable.
But the sociolinguistic implications of a touch of Dorset on the evening news are nothing compared to the meteoric rise of Estuary English (EE) in daily English life. This term, coined in 1984 by linguist David Rosewarne, refers to EE's origins in Greater London, which is roughly equivalent to the Thames River Estuary. From there, EE took the nation by storm, particularly among the young, who find RP intolerably priggish; EE's working class diphthongs please a generation that despises England's historically rigid social stratification. Today, young Englishmen and -women whose nursery accent approximates RP actually "talk down," that is, they affect EE. Hence, EE represents a genuine revolution, the overthrow of established values.
Go To Page: 1 2
