In the previous post on this topic, we looked at the criteria traditionally applied by dictionary-makers when considering new words for inclusion. The question is as old as lexicography itself. When he wrote his Plan of an English Dictionary in 1747, Dr Johnson noted that it is ‘not easy to determine by what rule of distinction the words of this dictionary were to be chosen’. And having aired his ideas on the subject, he acknowledged that it isn’t always possible to make clear rules and then adhere to them strictly. 

The Oxford dictionary website also has a go at explaining its inclusion principles – this time by means of an elaborate flowchart which takes you through the various decision points. Having cleared numerous hurdles, the successful word is at last included in the dictionary ‘in due course’. I’m not sure I agree with every stage of this. For example, if the question ‘Is its use limited strictly to one group of users?’ is answered with a ‘Yes’, the word is consigned to a sort of purgatory where its behaviour is monitored for possible future inclusion. But dictionaries routinely include vocabulary typical of specific user-groups – the important thing is to apply an appropriate label to indicate that it is not part of the general language. On the whole, though, the Oxford chart gives a good outline of the key criteria: does the evidence come from a range of sources (what we referred to previously as ‘dispersion’), and does it have ‘a decent history of use’(the longevity argument)?

The problem is that the approach applied by both Oxford and Merriam-Webster is rooted in the past. It reflects the realities of print-based dictionary publishing – and those days are gone.

What has changed? First, what we’d call the ‘publishing cycle’. When dictionaries existed mostly as printed books, publishers would produce a new edition every four or five years. They collected new vocabulary as it appeared, but they could take the long view on whether something was worth including. We do things differently now. Consider for example the linguistic fallout of the global financial crisis that began in 2008 – just a year after Macmillan published the second edition of its dictionary. With the dictionary now mainly consulted online, we were able to add important new usages, such as the word credit crunch or the new sense of toxic (when applied to debts) – without having to wait several years. The second big change, which has been gathering pace since the turn of the century, is that the amount of evidence available to us has grown exponentially, thanks to the Web and social media. Thirdly, we’re no longer limited by space constraints. Even the largest printed dictionaries don’t have the infinite amounts of space that online media provide, so they have to be selective. That’s no bad thing: the removal of these limits shouldn’t be a licence to include just anything. But it does allow us to re-think – and broaden – our inclusion policies.

Above all, older notions about ‘what gets into the dictionary’ reflect the idea of the lexicographer as a gatekeeper, the belief that it is up to us to decide (on behalf of everyone else) which facts about language deserve the special status of  being admitted to a dictionary. This notion of the dictionary having special ‘authority’ (which it confers on the words it includes) is well-established, and still has wide appeal. But it may be incompatible with the priorities and expectations of users of the Web – especially digital natives. If a word is in common use, people expect to find it in their online dictionary, and they won’t be impressed by the argument that it first requires ‘a decent history of use’. For many users, in other words, speed and convenience, getting a useful answer now, may be more important than authority.

As in so many other areas, one of the impacts of the Web has been a challenge to the old top-down model of one ‘expert’ provider and many passive recipients. It isn’t simply a case of users expecting dictionaries to respond more rapidly to language change – many of them also want to be involved in the compilation process. (Wikipedia is the obvious analogy.) In the final part of this series, we’ll discuss the implications of ‘crowd-sourced’ dictionary content (already a central feature of Wordnik, for example, and of our own Open Dictionary), and we’ll also look at emerging language technologies which might just change everything.

The attention paid to grammar and style can overshadow something equally significant about language: that it is so often and so naturally playful. In our love of puns and Scrabble, riddles and nonsense, rhyming slang and literary experimentation, we see the instinctive inclination to play with words and letters as though they were an abstract kind of toy for which playtime never ends.

Wordplay, in a word, is fun. It can break ice and break conventions, exercise the mind and stretch the imagination. Language, like physical play, is a medium through which we can indulge our creative instincts. Some people channel this into inventing entire languages; more commonly it manifests in our love of coining and using new words.

In an interesting post last week, Orin Hargraves wrote about fad words such as Tebowing and cyberchondria, describing them as “novel playthings” that we soon abandon “because we know that others will be coming along soon.” In a subsequent post about how words get into the dictionary, Michael Rundell described taking a familiar word and “doing something inventive with it to create a new meaning”, offering the amusing example “meerkatted to attention”.

Portmanteaus are an especially popular type of new word. Here, much of the groundwork has already been laid in the form of two or more existing words. There is a surreal kind of entertainment in seeing words joined improbably together, and when newspaper headlines join in the game, these blends spread all the faster. Any heavy snowfall nowadays is likely to be accompanied by references to snowmageddon, snowpocalypse, blizzaster and so on. There is novelty too in trendy gerunds, such as Tebowing and planking.

The last two links lead you to Macmillan’s online Open Dictionary, which offers readers the opportunity to submit new words and phrases; and to its BuzzWord archive, which looks in detail at some of the neologisms and topical terms that have leaked into more mainstream use. They show how the Internet enables us to share new coinages and verbal inventions faster and with a wider audience than has ever been possible before.

Inventing words and usages comes naturally to us, but getting one into a reputable dictionary is a rare feat. A more realistic ambition is to see a word we created attain modest currency beyond our personal use – or we can simply enjoy it for its own sake. Don’t be put off if someone says your neologism is “not a word”. Unless you’re using language in a formal capacity, it is yours to manipulate as you please. The great lexicographer James Murray wrote that “the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference”, and much of the fun is at the fringe.

Humans never outgrow a fascination with new playthings, but after a certain age it is unseemly and unrealistic to expect a steady stream of surprise gifts from doting parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. One consolation for this loss is new words: clever coinages come along all the time to supply our craving for novelty. A word, term, or phrase that was unknown yesterday can be on everyone’s lips in a matter of hours or days because it fulfills a human need: a new thing to have fun with.

The soberer side of this phenomenon is the province of lexicographers and dictionary publishers, who must decide whether a newly-minted word is of sufficient importance and longevity to be included in a dictionary. Here’s the dilemma: it’s a commercial dead-end for a dictionary to seem out-of-date and old-fashioned, but a dictionary that allows every fashionable word to climb onto its bandwagon will quickly lose the respect of its peers.

Language watchers may have noted a spate – perhaps it was only a spatter – of news stories six weeks ago, grandly proclaiming “Tebowing now an official dictionary word” or “Tebowing makes it into the dictionary.” It’s the sort of headline that makes lexicographers roll their eyes heavenward. The flutter of excitement, upon analysis, turned out to be in essence a promotion from a website, The Global Language Monitor, which has been involved previously in various schemes to call attention to itself by baiting journalists on a short deadline with faux news. In fact, Tebowing has not been added to any respectable dictionary, and it’s too early to tell now whether it will be.

What (in case you’ve been living under a rock) is Tebowing? It’s a word based on the surname of Tim Tebow, quarterback for the Denver Broncos football team. He’s an evangelical Christian and he manifests his faith, quite unconventionally, by genuflecting. Yes: genuflecting. English already has a word for what he does, but the novelty of its being done by a football player in uniform, combined with the easy convertibility of his name to a gerund and the fun of saying “Tebowing” certainly encouraged the coinage. A coinage, however, is a far cry from an entry as a headword, and it seems unlikely that Tebowing will appear in any dictionary soon. The word got a lot of airtime when the Broncos pulled off a number of heart-stopping, eleventh-hour victories, but they lost their bid to participate in their division’s championship playoffs. No amount of genuflection seems to have been able to change the fact that their opponents played better football.

A trip down short-term memory lane shows that fad words like Tebowing come along all the time – and they go with equal frequency. Do you remember cyberchondria? It gets about three hits today if you try it in Google News, but for a few weeks back in the day (5 years ago or so) it was nearly as frequent as Tebowing was in December. Snowmageddon had a heyday in 2010 when the East Coast of the US was blanketed in several feet of snow, but it left lexicographers cold and the word does not yet appear in any standard dictionary. Matrimania – hyping of all things related to marriage – seems to have been coined around the turn of this century and it enjoyed a few days in the limelight, but has hardly been seen since. People enjoy words like these when they come along, and today unconventional reference websites like Urbandictionary and Wikipedia provide a place to record them, but speakers are fickle. We soon abandon these novel playthings because we know that others will be coming along soon.

Learning a rule or convention in language gives people a secure footing in an area of usage. When the convention is ignored or challenged, this can undermine the pocket of security and offend people’s sense of what is proper and necessary. This might help explain the levels of anxiety and outrage we see when, for example, the serial comma appears to be under threat, or when unnecessary apostrophes – such as the one in Waterstones’ name – are discontinued.

Minor matters of style and punctuation have a way of agitating people, and worlds of contention spring from trivial distinctions. Language usage is also a convenient scapegoat through which people can express their displeasure and unease with big business, youth culture, societal change, the anticipated end of civilisation, and so on.

One of the grievances people have about apostrophe use in particular is that doing it improperly leads to ambiguity. But Stephen Bullon, in his recent post about the Waterstones story, doubts that there is any “apostrophe-driven ambiguity in speech”. Language Log makes a similar point: that although languages are “loaded with ambiguity”, it’s not the kind that leads to genuine confusion.

So what does the future hold for the apostrophe?

Throughout its history, the apostrophe has been dogged by inconsistent use. There is no reason to think we can create a uniform system simply by demanding that people get it right, because what’s “right” is different for different people. Besides, when editors, linguists and lexicographers confuse its and it’s – and they do – there is little hope for less language-sensitive writers.

In a post here in 2009, Gwyneth Fox said she was beginning to think apostrophes should be abolished. But they’re too ingrained in everyday writing to be just done away with (unless you are G. B. Shaw). If they go, they will go gradually. Robert Burchfield, noting the prevalence of the mark’s misuse and the abandonment of it by many businesses, called it “only a moderately successful device” that was “probably coming to the end of its usefulness, certainly for forming plurals and marking possession”.

We may see a trend towards using it less where its absence doesn’t appear too odd. Well-known companies deleting it from their names will contribute to this shift, as will its omission from much informal communication in text messages and online chat, especially where character count is a constraint. Given our ever-increasing use of these forms of communication, the apostrophe situation could look quite different in a few decades’ time.

One of the best things I learned this year (from my friend Sylviane Granger) was that a lot of teachers use our blog as a source of inspiration for lessons and assignments for their students. But this isn’t really surprising, when you look at the huge range of material contributed by so many great writers. When Kati Süle asked me to select my favourite posts from 2011, it seemed like an impossible task – there haven’t been any posts which I didn’t enjoy or learn from. But I’ll have a go at summarizing some of the highlights.

Following last year’s world tour of Englishes, our new What’s Your English? theme kicked off in February with a look at Romantic English. ‘Kick off’, of course, is originally a football term, but has broadened out to refer to starting any kind of process. It’s a reminder of the central role of metaphor in the way we communicate. We had a Metaphor Month in April, but for me this is a thread that runs through almost everything we talk about in the blog. In March, for example, Andrew Delahunty, who knows more about the language of sport than anyone I know, showed how work-related vocabulary (‘a bad day at the office’) has become part of the vocabulary of football commentators. You could see this as evidence of sports pundits’ well-known addiction to clichés – a topic covered by our guest blogger Stan Carey in one of his many entertaining posts – but it’s also a nice example of the more creative use of metaphor.  Metaphor is the single most important mechanism by which words acquire new meanings. Some are just playful exploitations of familiar uses, heard once and then forgotten; others (like Andrew’s ‘bad day at the office’) leave their mark on the language for a while; but some ‘settle in’ to become full members of the lexicon, adding new senses to older words. Martin Shovel’s post on metaphor explained how it all works, with reference to the ground-breaking ideas of George Lakoff.

A new word for me this year was ‘r-less’. As part of our month exploring the contentious subject of language and class, Ben Trawick-Smith corrected the common misconception (well, common to me at least) that all Americans had rhotic accents, sounding the r’s in words like bird or butter. Not so: non-rhoticity (or ‘r-lessness’) has a long and complex history in north America. John Wells responded with a post on rhoticity in England, and (among other interesting observations) gave us the exact citation proving that he was the one who coined the word rhotic in the first place.

This is one of the best things about the blog: when a post confronts us with hard evidence that challenges a commonly-held (and plausible) belief. Dan Clayton, writing in ‘Gender English’ month, debunked the notion that women and men – driven by evolutionary factors – use language in significantly different ways. Dan reported on the painstaking research done by Deborah Cameron, who concluded, after surveying huge amounts of conversational data, that ‘the linguistic evidence for differences between the sexes is actually very slight’. Serious research like this sits happily alongside sharp observation of language trends. Lindsay Clandfield’s thought-provoking post on the widespread use of exclamation marks in online communication offered a more subtle explanation of this trend: maybe it’s not that writers are just overexcited, but that email and other online media are, by their nature, a little impersonal (‘without affect’, as one writer put it), so an exclamation mark here and there may add a touch of friendliness.

Inevitably, most of us on the Macmillan team have a UK perspective. But the international flavour of the blog ensures we don’t focus too much on this particular corner of the linguistic world. As Brits, we’re familiar with the relationship between language and class in our own culture, but Robert Lane Greene’s piece during Class English month provided a fascinating account of the equally complex (but quite different) features of the north/south divide in the US and its linguistic impacts. In a similar vein, Vicki Hollett tackled ‘small talk’, and gave some well-observed insights into the differences in the way Americans and Brits handle this aspect of language.

It’s a measure of the range and quality of this year’s blog activity that Jonathan Marks’ comment on a recent microblog was a perfect mini-tutorial in itself: wonderfully erudite, but full of humour too. Our readers’ comments are a vital part of the whole enterprise – as revealed, for example, in the record haul of comments attracted by Stan Carey’s satire on management-speak, ‘Critical learnings going forward’. In fact, one of Stan’s popular posts from last year, on ‘man words’ (like manbag and man flu) was kept alive throughout 2011, with a string of new suggestions added in the comments (the last of these – mansplaining – coming over a year after the original post). While I’m on the subject, a big thank you to Stan for his consistently brilliant posts: whatever the subject, he has always had something interesting and original to say. Thanks too to Kerry Maxwell, whose BuzzWords help keep us up to date, as well as providing one of the best accounts you’ll find anywhere of the factors that contribute to the ongoing evolution of English.

This year has been all about sublanguages – the forms of language we use in particular situations (when you’re online, for example, or doing ‘small talk’ at a party) or for talking about particular subjects. These have covered a wide spectrum of topics, from poker to house music, and from rhotic accents to the environment. Whether you’re ‘learning’ English, ‘living’ it (through regular use in your job or area of study), or just ‘loving’ it (or all three), I hope there has been plenty to keep you interested.

Best wishes to everyone, and we look forward to enjoying your company in the New Year.

In a comment to my post about confusing word pairs, I said that as a child I called a pen a “biro” and a vacuum cleaner a “hoover”. I knew the terms pen and vacuum cleaner, but only later did I learn that biro was named after the Hungarian inventor László Bíró, while hoover comes from the Hoover Company – in other words, that they’re eponyms.

An eponym – back-formed from eponymous – is when something is named after a person or other proper noun. Eponym can refer to the source and to the thing named, which could be a place, action, object, description and so on. An eponymous album is one with the same name as the band, while an eponymous character or hero is one whose name appears in the title of the story, such as Emma or Oliver Twist.

The origins of some eponyms are well known, such as boycott from Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott and mesmerise from Franz Mesmer. Others are less obvious. Sandwich, panic, silhouette, algorithm and nicotine all derive from proper nouns: John Montagu (4th Earl of Sandwich), Pan (Greek god), Etienne de Silhouette (French finance minister), al-Khwārizmī (Persian mathematician) and Jean Nicot (French diplomat who inspired the formal plant name Nicotiana).

Mentor was the name of Odysseus’ friend in The Odyssey, and the word is popular today both as a generic noun for someone who advises another, and as a verb for what they do. It also led to the adjective mentorial and the noun mentee, meaning a person who is mentored (though protégé is generally preferred).

Scientific discoveries are frequently named after their discoverer. Medical science is full of examples, while laws and principles (many of them in physics) are often eponymous. These might, however, be more accurately considered pseudo-eponyms.

Some writers’ styles and ideas have been distinctive enough to give us eponymous adjectives, for example Kafkaesque, Dickensian and Orwellian. Although these words convey a meaning associated with the writers, they have taken on a life of their own. This is especially true of sadistic and its noun form sadism, which we owe to the Marquis de Sade.

Brand names too can become so widely used that the object or activity loses its strict association with the brand. It happened to biro, escalator, yo-yo, and zipper, and it’s happening to Rollerblades and Google – both of which are still trademarks. Corporations tend to resist this trend, but over time it can be hard to prevent genericization of a successful brand name.

Eponyms are still appearing, many of them nonce words. When the celebrity Kim Kardashian’s marriage broke up rather quickly this year, comedian “Weird Al” Yankovic reportedly said: “72 Days is now an official unit of time known as a Kardash.” It’s a new eponym, but an old kind of fame – or infamy.

My colleague Finn Kirkland has mentioned his problems with the word serviette. I have a battered copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary dating back to the 1920s, which includes this entry:

serviette n. (vulg.) table-napkin

Note the ‘vulg.’ label (short for ‘vulgar’). The dictionary’s Introduction explains:

“This qualification implies that the use of the word or sense … is due either to want of education or to want of manners.”

Those were the days! Serviette is one of several words that appear in the satirical poem ‘How to get on in society‘ by the late John Betjeman. Betjeman was a connoisseur of the intricacies of the English class system, whose complexities are well-illustrated by George Orwell’s remark that he was born into ‘what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class’. Betjeman’s poem is full of words which were thought to be typical of aspiring members of the middle classes, including: lounge (we’re supposed to say sitting room), toilet (the approved term is lavatory), sweet (the noun, used to mean ‘dessert’, but the preferred upper-class word is pudding), couch (say sofa), and of course serviette (sorry, Finn!). The poem appeared in a collection of writings called Noblesse Oblige, published in the 1950s and edited by the famously snobbish Nancy Mitford. The same book introduced the concept of  ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ English, where ‘U’ stands for upper class, and it includes a handy glossary of ‘U’ words and phrases. Interestingly, Mitford’s target was not ‘the lower orders’ – who knew their place – but middle-class people whose vocabulary choices reflected an anxiety to sound ‘posh’. They would use words like preserve, sufficient, pass away, or Pardon?, where the upper and working classes – who shared a preference for plain speaking – would say jam, enough, die, or What?.

Today’s dictionaries generally shy away from assigning class markers to words. The Oxford Dictionary of English, for example, has a helpful usage note at its entry for innit, which accepts that this is a word that ‘induces rage and consternation in traditionalists’, but goes on to give a calm, corpus-based account of the word’s use in contemporary English. The contrast, in other words, is between a prescriptive position (‘traditionalists’) and a descriptive one, and there is no suggestion that people who use innit are in want of education or manners.

The so-called ‘Academy of Contemporary English‘, on the other hand, has no such qualms, and its website frequently uses words like ‘ignorant’ and ‘illiterate’ when describing everyday usage. A section of the site called ‘The People’s English’ sounds promising (surely anything prefixed ‘The People’s’ must be a good thing?), but it is devoted to a critique of ‘the absolutely appalling level of English used by “ordinary” people’. With its references to ‘the populace’ (‘the standard of English among the populace gives cause for grave concern’) and its obvious disappointment that ‘people who should know better’ don’t ‘set an example’, this is one place where the old class structures familiar to Nancy Mitford are apparently still in place.

But if the ‘Academy’ (like its parent the Queen’s English Society) looks a little out of touch, it is clear from this month’s ‘class English‘ posts (and Comments thereon) that the way people speak and the words they use remain potent markers of class. What has changed since the 1950s is the relative status of different sociolects: as Dan Clayton and John Wells both show, working-class speech can have its own prestige, while there is a degree of pressure on the upper classes to adopt more demotic modes of speech. Two shining examples of this trend are Tony Blair and George W. Bush. Blair was educated at a leading public school then at Oxford, but was famous for his glottal stops. Bush came from a wealthy New England family (his grandfather was a Senator in Connecticut), but spent most of his political life pretending to be just a ‘good old boy‘ from Texas.

In its most familiar sense, jargon means specialised, often technical vocabulary associated with a particular type of work or area of activity. For example, there’s scientific jargon, medical jargon, airlinese, and business speak (the last of which I’ve written about before).

Jargon is part of a sublanguage, and is subject to forces of change just like our common vocabulary is. Technology evolves quickly and its jargon is churned out at a corresponding rate. Entire avenues of research and use are rendered obsolete by superior (or better commercialised) developments, so what were technological buzzwords one year might be unrecognisable just a few years later.

On her Fritinancy blog, Nancy Friedman recently wrote about the “Tech Jargon of Yore”, the yore in her title an ironic note on how rapidly tech terminology can become outdated. Browsing Jargon Watch, a book of popular digital jargon from 1997, she says these words “remind or enlighten us about the demands, annoyances, and fixations” of the mid-1990s.

Some of these phrases, such as astroturfing and going postal, have survived the intervening years, while others were briefly popular but faded fast. Bitnik, for example, refers to “someone who uses a public, coin-operated computer terminal to log onto the Internet.” Jargon Watch has seven bit words, apparently – all of them obsolete according to Nancy.

Fast-forwarding to the jargon of today, Adrian Weckler’s article “Tech lingo 101 FTW, OK?” in Ireland’s Business Post reports that IT and online jargon has gotten out of hand, and that abbreviations now “rule our lives”. Acronyms and initialisms have always been popular in brand names, but they seem more prevalent than ever, partly on account of microblogging services like Twitter that encourage compression and make every typographic character count.

David Pogue in the NYT has a related complaint, wondering why tech writers rely so much on jargon and attributing it to habit, laziness, or self-aggrandisement. As the writer of a tech column, he has learned some tricks designed to “communicate technical points without losing the novices”. This is crucial when conveying any kind of specialised material to a wide audience.

In tech journals and on tech websites, a certain level of familiarity may be assumed, and in more mainstream contexts some specialist terminology has become common enough to be used without fear of unintelligibility. So long as jargon is reasonably transparent and pitched at the appropriate level, there is no cause for alarm; when communication fails because the words we use are too obscure or esoteric, people will either stop reading or let us know.

Do the “walls of techno-babble” leave you feeling cached out, stuck in dial-up while others are high-speed beta users in the cloud? Is tech jargon’s functionality in need a reboot? Let us know in a comment – or in the “comment field”, if you prefer.

Class English month continues with a guest post by one of our regular contributors, Dan Clayton. Dan is a middle-class grammar school boy who has tried to talk like a Cockney for the last 15 years after failing to talk like a working-class northerner before that.

___________

When Jarvis Cocker wrote the lyrics to Pulp’s classic Common People, he sang about a wealthy student who wanted to adopt the style and mannerisms of working-class people. In one line he described how she would “Smoke some fags and play some pool, pretend (she) never went to school” but in the next line tell her “still you’ll never get it right”, because she was never really from the working class. She was engaging in a kind of class-tourism that her rich daddy could save her from any time it got too much, or too “real”.

Language is a huge element in the creation of identity, so it’s not surprising that as well as picking up the cigarettes and pool cues, when the middle classes try to act working class they often pick up some slang terms and drop their h’s and g’s, so “I hate her singing” soon becomes “I ‘ate her singin’”, perhaps with a mate, geezer or bruv chucked in, depending on the age of the speaker.

What’s interesting about this kind of “talking down” is that it’s one of those rare occasions when working-class people actually appear to have something that upper- and middle-class people want. For a long time, the standard variety of English and the most respected accent (Received Pronunciation or RP) have been the preserve of the wealthy, or those who aspire to be wealthy. Most of us have been told that these are the forms of English that we should be using if we want to be successful in education and employment, yet now we hear more and more markers of working-class identity – slang terms from the inner city and patterns of pronunciation that are derived from Cockney and Multicultural London English – and fewer markers of upper-class identity.

What’s happening? Are we becoming a classless society, with a healthy cross-fertilisation of language? Probably not. While statistics seem to suggest the gap between rich and poor is growing ever wider in the UK, the language of the working class seems to be getting appropriated by those higher up the social scale without much movement the other way.

The French philosopher, Pierre Bourdieu talked in the early 1970s about language as an element of what he termed cultural capital and made the point that the middle and upper classes often have access to not just financial capital but a wealth of social connections and signifiers of social status, such as the standard and respected form of a language, while the working class generally do not. But here we see how an otherwise impoverished group can have their own cultural capital in the form of language. Working-class speech forms clearly have some kind of prestige, often among young men who perceive working-class language as more masculine and authentic. It’s something they want and something they want to buy into.

As I talked about in the post about street slang last month, certain types of language seem to signify rebelliousness and an unwillingness to conform, and working-class speech is often seen as having this covert prestige. Of course, the irony is that just as the working class starts to have its own cultural capital, it starts to get snatched away by those who like what it represents.

Last week I wrote about the traditional prestige of the RP accent, and how its privileged status reflects class consciousness. My focus was on pronunciation, but the distinction extends beyond the RP accent to vocabulary, grammar, and so on – to the standard English dialect.

Standard English is an important and useful variety of English, but its status comes from historical circumstance rather than inherent linguistic superiority. This point is sometimes missed by those who hold that there is an ideal form of English – which typically corresponds to the form they were taught or to which they aspire.

Standard English has been quite consistent for a long time, but it too changes, and at any one time it is not uniform. It differs from place to place, notably from country to country, for example on points of spelling, punctuation, and idiom.

The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century signalled a shift towards standardisation in English, which previously had been marked by great flexibility and inconsistency in its orthography. Influential books such as bibles and grammars added to the weight of esteem in which the standard literary style of English was increasingly held.

In her book Language Change: Progress or Decay?, Jean Aitchison describes how a widespread feeling arose that “someone ought to adjudicate among the variant forms of English”, and how Samuel Johnson undertook that task in his monumental dictionary:

Johnson, like many people of fairly humble origin, had an illogical reverence for his social betters. When he attempted to codify the English language in his famous dictionary he selected middle- and upper-class usage. … in many instances [he] pronounced against the spoken language of the lower classes, and in favour of the spoken and written forms of groups with social prestige.

Johnson’s bias is not unusual today. Think of how ain’t is still widely considered incorrect, vulgar, even “barbaric”. (A more neutral description is “non-standard”, but many people infer this to mean “sub-standard”.) There are groups that set out to promote and protect their idea of standard English, lest its presumed purity be corrupted by “lesser” varieties of the language. But regional dialects are no less correct – it all depends on the context.

The debate also envelops geopolitics. Mario Saraceni, a linguist at the University of Portsmouth, recently called on native English speakers to “give up their claim to be the guardians of the purest form of the language”, and for the “myth of the idealised native speaker” to be abandoned. Macmillan Dictionary Blog contributor Dan Clayton examined Saraceni’s comments on his own language blog, and wisely noted that arguments over language

are rarely contained to the words, the sounds and the grammar of a language, but are much more often about our views of other people, their habits, their cultures and our own prejudices.

What do you think? Does this tally with your own experience of language discussions and debates?

For more on “class English”, see Macmillan Dictionary’s page of resources on the subject.