The discussion of class and language continues with a guest post by John Wells, Emeritus Professor of Phonetics at University College London, and author of Accents of English, English Intonation, and the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. He writes a daily blog on phonetics at phonetic-blog.blogspot.com.

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It was interesting to read Ben Trawick-Smith’s discussion of the decline of non-rhoticity in American English (‘The fall of the r-less class’). How different things are in England! Most of this country is non-rhotic, but we have two traditionally rhotic areas, i.e. areas where /r/ is retained before a consonant and finally, as in farmer. One is a small patch in Lancashire, where some older people in places like Blackburn and Accrington speak like this. The other is the vaguely defined West Country, with its ooh-aar burr, the popular stereotype of a Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Devon or Cornish accent.

Like any local accent in England, these are also associated with being working-class or lower-middle-class. The upper crust have no regional accent. And the way the upper crust speak is non-rhotic.

But both these rhotic areas are shrinking. They are under attack from two kinds of pressure: regional and social.

In the States these pressures led to the spread of Midwestern-style rhoticity to communities that had previously been non-rhotic. Bostonians and New Yorkers no longer drop r as resolutely as they once did (though you have only to watch episodes of Judge Judy from Massachusetts to see that there are still quite a few non-rhotic Americans around). More importantly, it is no longer smart to be non-rhotic. In England, it is the other way round. Rhotic pronunciation is, for us, a quaint local feature, almost as quaint as boasting of your brand-new combine harrrvesterrr. (In Scotland and Ireland, needless to say, things are different.)

As we all know, regional accents are becoming less regional, as we lose the most strikingly local features of pronunciation to the levelling effect of the rest of the country. What London did yesterday, Reading does today and Southampton will do tomorrow, followed closely by Bristol and Exeter. People in Plymouth no longer sound particularly Devonian to outsiders, and many people in Swindon no longer sound particularly Wiltshire. We mustn’t exaggerate: Bristolian remains pretty distinctive, and it is even rumoured that girls called Normal or Evil are still to be found there (the famous Bristolian intrusive l).

The social pressure comes about as we lose the sharp distinctions of social class that our grandparents and great-grandparents endured. The era of Downton Abbey, where everyone knew their place and spoke accordingly, has given way to a demotic (relative) equality, where not only do many people of working-class origin move their accent a bit up-market, but also the upper-middle classes and even the upper crust feel pressure to move down-market (as Dan Clayton discussed in his post yesterday). Compare the Queen’s pronunciation with that of her son Prince Charles and even more strikingly with that of her grandsons, Princes William and Harry.

By the way – I was the one who coined the term rhotic, forty-odd years ago, as the OED bears witness (see image above). Until I did so, people had been characterizing my own speech, and that of most English people, as “r-ful”. That really sounded awful.

Class English month continues with the pronunciation theme: guest blogger Ben Trawick-Smith, from Dialect Blog, takes a look at (non-)rhoticity in American English. Ben has worked as an actor, playwright, director, critic and dialect coach. His other passions include linguistics, urban development, philosophy and film. Ben lives with his wife in Seattle, Washington, in the USA.

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George Bernard Shaw deemed the US and Britain ‘separated by a common language.’ Yet a century ago, the ‘elites’ of these two nations shared quite a bit of linguistic common ground. When one listens to the accents of America’s old East Coast moneyed class – those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, William F. Buckley, and Katharine Hepburn – one notes striking similarities to the ‘Queen’s’ English once spoken on the other side of the Atlantic.

The common denominator is non-rhoticity, sometimes known as ‘r-lessness.’ Non-rhotic accents drop the r’s in words like car or butter, while a rhotic accent keeps said r’s intact. We tend to think of England as non-rhotic, where Ireland, the US and Scotland are ostensibly rhotic. In reality, however, there are exceptions to these generalizations: Northeastern US accents, popular Dublin English, and some urban Scottish accents being the most notable.

The past century has seen American and British attitudes toward non-rhoticity diverge. Where r-lessness was once a prestige feature in both countries, it is a marker of working-class or vernacular speech in 21st-century America (typical of the broadest New York City, Boston and African American Vernacular Englishes). In England, on the other hand, non-rhoticity is stronger than ever, colonizing the country’s last rhotic safe havens.

So what happened? Arguably, World War II happened. Upon arriving home, middle-class American GIs scattered throughout the country in search of jobs and housing. Sheer numbers probably influenced the resulting dialect shift: since rhotic Americans likely outnumbered the non-rhotic, /r/ won out. R-fulness became the norm, while ‘r-dropping’ became (to the unenlightened) a regional, lower-class aberration. Thus the feature did an about-face: what was a badge of upper-crust honour now marks low socioeconomic or educational status in the U.S.A.

I can think of few features with such rapidly devalued social currency. Contemporary English people may find older varieties of Received Pronunciation hopelessly stuffy. Likewise, the Irish still laugh at ‘Dortspeak,’ the British-influenced accent once spoken by Dublin’s elite (and recently well-summarized by Stan Carey on this blog). But in both cases, these accents merely lost their elite status, rather than being relegated to different classes entirely.

How we perceive non-rhoticity in America is inconsistent. American non-rhotic accents are largely stigmatized; New Yorkers and Bostonians, every bit as non-rhotic as Londoners a century ago, now often insert the /r/ wherever it appears written. And yet, paradoxically, we Americans readily accept this feature in the speech of Britons, even finding it ‘proper’ or ‘elegant.’ Is this a case of American dialect self-loathing rearing its ugly head?

In his recent guest post about the language of the theatre, Ben Trawick-Smith mentions the privileged position of Received Pronunciation. RP, he writes, was virtually de rigueur in English theatre “until it became apparent to (some) Britons that dialect prejudice is as bad as any other”.

An RP accent, even a modified one that combines it with regional qualities, has prestige because it implies a certain level of education, social status, prosperity and perhaps political power. Centuries ago it was the accent of the courts and high society in London and the home counties; people moving there to advance in life often adopted it as their own.

Later, RP became the accent of public schools and the BBC, which strengthened and stabilised its status as the “standard” form of English speech. It was (and remains) linked to class consciousness. In an excellent historical essay, The Rise of Prescriptivism in English (PDF), Shadyah A. N. Cole writes:

As the middle class increased in numbers and in wealth, they desired also to have the manners and education of those above them in social status, or at least the appearance of them. … When appearances failed to signal the distinction between classes, manner of speaking including pronunciation and grammar were found to be useful in making the distinction.

Cole argues that this desire for “a veneer of educated speech”, along with “a lack of confidence in their own variety of language”, set the stage for the development of prescriptive grammar. Nowadays RP is less exalted, and regional dialects are encountered more often in the media. But where there’s cultural difference and social inequality, there will also be prejudice and snobbery; terms like feral underclass were used to describe rioters in England earlier this year.

Ireland, though a relatively small island, abounds in dialectal variation. Here, as elsewhere, accents mark geographic identity (and social standing, to a lesser degree), and people sometimes embrace new dialects to distance themselves from areas or attributes they don’t wish to be associated with. Raymond Hickey calls this “linguistic dissociation”, and in his book Dublin English he discusses the phenomenon of “Dortspeak” in some detail.

Dortspeak is a homogenised middle-class accent that spread from Dublin 4 (= a postal district of Dublin, also known as D4). It got its name from the D4 pronunciation of Dart (Dublin Area Rapid Transit, a commuter train service), and has been described as a mixture of Irish English, British English, and the American English heard in TV shows like Friends. Less flatteringly, it has been called a “strangulated middle-class mid-Atlantic airhead accent”.

Dortspeak is widely scorned, and heavily satirised in journalist Paul Howard’s fictional creation Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, who for example pronounces (and spells) start as “stort” and right as “roysh”. Professor T. P. Dolan says people are switching from local accents to the D4 accent “because it is seen as the way to get ahead” – by adopting it, people aim to cut an obvious tie to their background, whatever it might be.

A new kid (or shall I say app) on the block, this super tool is based on the popular Sound Foundations book and chart, written by Adrian Underhill. It comes in two versions: a free app which includes the phonemic chart only, with the pronunciation of the phonemes and example words, and a premium edition (available for both Apple and Android operating systems) which you can see featured in the video below.

The premium version includes a carefully selected wordlist of over 650 words. Every word in the wordlist has an audio recording, and the selected vocabulary demonstrates how sounds are used at the beginning, middle and end of words. The wordlist only contains high frequency words (= red words in the Macmillan English Dictionary).

You can find out more about the apps on this dedicated website.

Two words that seem to get commonly mixed up are wary and weary. These two words have very different meanings and so are not interchangeable, but it doesn’t stop people from doing it. Most often, people use weary when they mean wary. Here are some annoying sentences that have insulted my ears recently:

I’m quite weary of their dog, it looks really aggressive.
Since I got knocked off my bike, I’m weary of the roads around here.
I’d be weary of her if I were you, she’s got a nasty temper.

Perhaps I’ve got this wrong though. Perhaps there is a new atmosphere of extreme apathy pervading us all and things we used to find scary are now merely tiresome. What trouble we’d all get into if we really were weary of being wary and it’s always foolish not to be wary of feeling weary, especially when driving your car.

I think my favourite new entry to the Open Dictionary this week has to be sarchasm. It’s such a perfect word, combining both of the key ideas behind its meaning – sarcasm and chasm – in a very  simple, tidy way. I did have difficulty when I first saw it though, trying to decide how to pronounce it. It’s one of those that, until you know the meaning, you’re not quite sure how to say. Should it be sar-chasm as in chair, or sar-chasm as in, well, sarcasm? Of course, the fact that it’s actually a homonym for sarcasm is part of the appeal; you can say the word, and leave others to decide which meaning you intended …

There was an interesting piece on pronunciation in last week’s roundup, and it reminded me of something I’d seen on the Guardian Mind your Language blog, about English language learners being too shy to speak. It’s an age-old problem: students don’t want to make themselves look silly by mispronouncing things, so they stay quiet. I spent my first few weeks in Colombia in silence, after someone laughed at my pronunciation of Valencia (said with the Peninsular -th sound – Valenthia – instead of the Colombian -z), so I could totally sympathize with my students, months later, who resisted practising their English out loud. As Adrian says, however, there’s a lot more to correct pronunciation than not being laughed at, so it’s worth persevering; getting the pronunciation right will definitely help the learning experience.

Following on from Sharon‘s piece this morning, ‘Pronunciation research’, the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 also covered the story of the British Library creating a snapshot of changing English, something I really fancy getting involved in. Today polled the public in its introduction to the item, with rather telling results. In addition, Professor John Wells was on the show and had some interesting comments about the way the presenters spoke, pronunciation and more general changes in the language. Have a listen and see if you agree with the new pronunciations discussed and let me know your views about that old chestnut – language change. Do we embrace it, or resist it? Personally, I’m with the Borg on this one – ‘resistance is futile’.

Note: There is an email link embedded within this post, please visit this post to email it.

It’s not surprising that we quite often talk about pronunciation on the Macmillan blog – see this post, for example, or this one – but it’s not something that the rest of the world is perhaps quite as interested in as we are. Today, though, it’s on the tips of the newsreaders’ tongues, as the British Library prepares to launch an exhibition designed to show how pronunciation in Britain is changing. The ‘script’ it’s using for the experiment is the children’s book Mr Tickle. Linguists at the Library believe pronunciation is largely a matter of fashion, with age being one of the key factors in whether you say, for example, skedule or schedule. It’ll be interesting to see what results they come up with, but don’t forget that if you or your students aren’t sure of the standard pronunciation of a word, get straight onto the Macmillan Dictionary, for free soundfiles.

HRT…in the UK, this acronym commonly stands for hormone replacement therapy, a common treatment for women undergoing the menopause. Linguistically however, HRT stands for high-rising terminal. This is the questioning intonation that appears at the end of a sentence, whether it is a question or not. This pronunciation habit seems particularly prevalent amongst younger people in the UK, Australia and the US. The high-rising terminal is confusing, as on one hand it suggests that the speaker is checking you agree with what they have said so far, and on the other, it sounds like he or she is unsure of what they’re saying. I wonder if this phenomenon is happening among speakers of  other languages?