(This next one is a two-parter because it's quite long. I also think there's at least some natural division between the first and second halves: in this first part I discuss English social class and its relation to dialect, my slightly complicated status in that regard, and how languages/dialects deemed non-standard are oppressed.)
Now'en, ow yer goin? Or rather, Hi, how are you
all? I found myself reflecting on eye dialect recently when it briefly came
up in a conversation. (As one of those boringly overeducated people, I find
most conversations involving me inevitably tend back to linguistics. Well, when all you've got is a hammer...)
So as it turns out, there are lots of things that I find
interesting associated with that particular topic! (Allow me to subject you to
all of them in short order...) On a more serious note, it's an interesting
jumping-off point to explore my slightly odd but by no means unprecedented
class/linguistic status, in the hope that (as I suspect may become more common
in the future) there are other people who newly find themselves in a similar
position and are wondering what to do about it, and to explore the concept of writing down
dialect in general.
Ideas Above One's Station [link]
Here's the deal. Historically in English society (i.e.
very roughly from the Reformation to the 19th century), the class division has been Working/Middle/Upper class: the Upper class was the aristocracy (who owned
their land and money by inheritance and didn't have to work for or at either of
them - aka Old Money), the Middle class was the educated professionals (who had
land and money through working for it - aka New Money), and the Working class
was the rest of the population (who had neither land, money nor (historically)
education, and would work apprenticed trades for little money). Lots of comment
has been passed on this three-part division; I'm no specialist on the matter,
though if you're interested in an informative observational comic slant on it
I'd recommend Kate Fox's Watching the English.
Anyway. Social mobility in this classic framework (let's
fix it at, say, the Victorian era to make it sound less hand-wavey) is limited:
you need a title to be an aristocrat, and you need an education to be middle
class. You can, of course, buy a title (if you're middle class to start with),
but you'll be sniffed at as New Money for a few generations; similarly, if a
person from the working class suddenly comes into money (the stereotype goes),
their lack of social graces and restraint with their money will mark them out
as another type of New Money; their offspring (or their offspring's offspring),
brought up and educated in a middle class manner, will in all likelihood be
accepted, provided they are suitably reticent about their parents' (or
grandparents') background.
These old school social climbers have it particularly
tough - they'll be looked down upon by the members of the class they want to
join, but that pales in comparison to how they'll be despised by the class
they're trying to leave behind. It's not hard to imagine why - the people
they've grown up with, who have supported and looked after them, are now made
to feel as if they aren't good enough, or that the climber thinks that they are
better than them. Well into the 20th century "class traitor" seems to
have been a stinging insult.
Then, most noticeably starting around the 1960s, things
changed. To my mind the most influential factor seems to be the two World Wars
fought within fifty years, at devastating cost to the British Empire and all
that it encompassed. Huge sections of the adult male population were killed,
leaving large vacuums that society instinctively moved to fill. The Old Guard
try to stand against the changes as best they can, but they are so depleted,
and the post-War economic changes have put enough of the money into the hands
of the other classes, that once the children born after 1945 (the Baby Boomers)
become a societal force there is little that they can do. Along with increased
immigration making the population more culturally diverse as well, English and
British society is commonly referred to currently as being in an egalitarian
age - indeed, some even talk about being persecuted for being "too
posh", sometimes calling this "reverse snobbery". Others claim
that we now live in a classless society.
Talking Proper, Like What I Do [link]
How does this relate to eye dialect? I'm getting there.
One of the most concentrated class indicators is the use of language. You can
probably come up with plenty of examples yourself of words, constructions or
pronunciations that are considered "colloquial", "uneducated"
or "vulgar". In linguistics this is called proscribed usage (not to
be confused with prescribed usage, which is the opposite!). With my
Social Justice hat on, I would say that adherence to arbitrary linguistic norms
is used as a tool of class oppression; you can find pages and pages of
exposition on why (for instance) splitting infinitives or ending a sentence
with a preposition or any number of pedantic bugbears are aesthetically,
logically or morally wrong, but the truth is there is literally no inherent
superiority in any one linguistic construct, and please do quote me on that.
The only fundamental requirement of language as a means
of communication is that each party understand what the other is saying. As
people like Jakobson explore, there are many more layers communicated in a
phrase than what each word literally means in a dictionary (think tone of
voice, colloquial vs. non-colloquial (aka register), references to shared
culture, poetic quality of the phrase itself etc.) - this is why formal,
written English is more long-winded than conversational English: we've only got
twenty-six letters and about twelve punctuation marks to get our point across
unambiguously, compared to the full range and expressive power of the human
voice (not to mention non-verbal cues). Of course, once democratisation via the Internet gets involved, the
collective genius of crowd-sourcing comes up with emoticons, but that's another
story.
But anyway, the idea of language use as class marker is
pervasive - it's commonly cited as the most enduring way to tell someone's
class. The educated middle classes are supposed to speak RP (Received Pronunciation, aka BBC English or what most people overseas think of as "a
British accent"), the upper classes a distinctively archaic strain of it
(sometimes termed U RP, presumably after Nancy Mitford's beloved U and non-U word lists), and the working classes any other local dialect, referred to
collectively and somewhat pejoratively as "regional accents". Anyone
jumping a class is expected to acquire the native accent/dialect; hence adopting
RP is sometimes knocked as "talking posh".
Linguistically, RP can be called the prestige dialect of
UK English - it is seen as the standard from which other varieties deviate.
Under the language-as-communication idea I set out a minute ago you can see why
a standard dialect is needed - otherwise speakers of divergent dialects won't
be able to understand each other. This is more or less indeed how standard written English emerged; the problem comes (from an anti-classist perspective) when the
standard is valorised over other dialects.
Once-A-Nighters [link]
Here's where I come in. As you can probably tell from my
writing style, I've had quite a Classical education, all things considered. I
also speak with a Yorkshire accent despite currently being based in the South
for my studies, an accent and idiom that I've chosen to retain despite the
faint expectation for me to acquire RP. As it happens, at my secondary school
(also in the South) I did adopt RP, mainly in a bid to avoid drawing attention
to myself, but also to see if I could. At home I would revert to a Yorkshire
accent. While at school I could switch accents in the same sentence; I haven't
bothered with RP for a few years now, though when showing some non-native
friends how to speak RP I found it came back easily enough.
Where I fit into the classical English class system is unclear.
By education I'm clearly middle-middle or upper-middle class (going by Kate
Fox's subdivisions), but by accent and (apparently) demeanour I identify with my
family and my home, broadly working class. In 19th century Russian society
there was a group known as the raznochíntsy (singular razonchínets,
acute marks stress, pronunciation). The
name comes from the words rázny (different) and chin (class,
rank), so means something like "other-classers" - the heading for
this section comes from an anecdote my Russian tutor told me about one of his
classmates coming across the word and reading it not as razno-chinets
but raz-nochinets (raz means "once", noch'
means "night"), and coming up with the above. Anyway, the raznochintsy
were the sons of peasants made good - so they were educated, but not part of
the nobility (Russians haven't historically really ever had a middle class). This made them a
societal force to be reckoned with because they had the intellectual clout to
make themselves heard without the crippling guilt the more progressive nobles
inherited. Many ended up in Siberia for their troubles (link to the Decembrists for an example of how welcome dissent was), though not
before raising the intellectual fervour that ended with the Revolution.
On a Slide Rule [link]
I find the term quite attractive: I have an education,
but I refuse to allow that to negate my Northernness. I am quite capable of
speaking RP, but I will not enunciate for your benefit, which is a coded
classist way of delegitimising speech you deem nonstandard. (Though if you
legitimately didn't hear what I said I'll be happy to repeat it for you.)
I can imagine that some people, on reading the above,
would argue that I belong unquestionably to the middle class and am
intellectualising my denial. To which I would say, that's pretty damn rude. I
personally say that someone's identity is their decision, and people should
respect that, even if they would not identify similarly themselves and can't
understand why someone would want to.
I choose instead to conceptualise it like so: my identity
does not reduce to a single point without further reference. There are people
who can describe themselves as Yorkshire without further qualification and feel
that that describes them fully, just as there are people who can describe
themselves as from a part of London, or on a broader level as English, British,
Irish or whatever. I, however, see myself as a point on a line between
Yorkshire/working class and middle class. It took me a long time and a lot of
distress, but I have come to feel comfortable where I am, and feel no immediate
need to justify (in the typographical or rhetorical sense) to either end.
(I should probably mention here that I'm not entirely of
English blood; to my mind this doesn't factor overmuch into my cultural and
linguistic identity, though.)
Impure Dialect [link]
My idiolect (personal usage), therefore, falls on a
similar line between Standard English/RP (the former henceforth SE) and Broad
Yorkshire (aka Tyke, likewise BY). Historically (and rarely nowadays in rural
and deprived areas) there exist speakers of BY who speak without an awareness
of the forms of SE - they are typified as "uneducated", because of
the aforementioned equation of the standard/prestige dialect with education.
It is the defining characteristic of educated,
non-Standard speakers' idiolect that their diction is informed by two points,
not by one. In parallel with my scale of identity above, there is the
"pure" dialect at one end, and the standard at the other. Where there
is a divergence between pure and standard, the mixed speaker will have to
choose one form or another. This is a well-studied phenomenon in linguistics
known as code-switching, often examined in bilingual children for maximal
differentiation; the choice seems to come down in bilinguals to which language
a concept is felt to be easier to express in, or to which language the concept
itself is associated with. If you have learnt about a topic in your second
language, it may be easier to switch to the second language to discuss the
topic - you may not even know the relevant terminology in your first language,
even though it is usually the more "natural" to you.
For mixed dialect speakers this choice is coloured by
class. Regardless of whether a construct that exists in the pure dialect feels
more appropriate in context, the standard form will be preferred. This is a
concern quite apart from whether the listener will understand the pure form -
if this would not be the case, the choice is straightforward. (Or the pure form
can be given glossed.) It must be stressed that this is also separate from
concerns of colloquial/non-colloquial register - instances of native pure
speakers choosing standard forms over stigmatised pure forms in speech abound,
and besides, beyond the concept of possible inappropriate register, colloquial
standard usage is rarely stigmatised (outside of the most soullessly pedantic circles, at least). That a dialect is not permitted to exist except for in
negative reference to a standard is the essence of its linguistic oppression.
What I contend is the oppression of a dialect bears
comparison to the phenomenon of linguicide: the government of a country
attempts to exterminate a minority language and replace it with
the standard language. You can see the appalling treatment of Insular Celtic speakers by
the British and French governments (and that of Native American languages by
the nascent United States, or Aboriginal languages in Australia, and the list
sadly goes on) as examples of this enforced cultural assimilation; while
frequently enforced top-down by state education (in which children speaking the
"wrong" language are beaten, for instance), it also, more
pervasively, takes root from the bottom up when native speakers tragically see
no use in teaching their native language to their children, thereby depriving
it of vital new life and them of their cultural heritage.
(And on that cheery note we'll pause. Join us next week for the concluding half, in which I discuss how eye dialect fits into this framework by telling a Manc joke (aw yiss), how dialects/languages can use written tradition to legitimise their way from this linguistic oppression (with reference to Scots), and whether Broad Yorkshire in particular can ever expect to get one.)
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