I have managed to cause a stir with my dismissive comments on estuary english on the BBC in my last post. I do not think the estuary english phenomenon should be confused with a regional accent. I have absolutely no prejudice against regional accent. I sport the remnants of one myself. The genuine regional accent of Essex is very pleasant, and not too dissimilar to that of Suffolk. It is not a bastardized version of cockney adopted by the weak-minded because it is redolent of a set of identifiable and fashionable cultural attitudes, of which materialism and anti-intellectualism are the most prominent.
Is it snobbery to despise estuary english and those who speak it? No. It is something called taste.
As a public service institution, the BBC has a duty to engage Wigger culture, not just via (c)rap music on Radio 1 Xtra, but also in news and current affairs programmes. Otherwise the uneducated oik may feel alienated by intellectuals born of privilege who speak wiv a posh accent, init?
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Maybe next year the Open will be decided by phone-in votes?
Ah neva fort yood rite nuffink like vat, Mu-ree, but Ah dahn’t kaya. Naa, cummin dahn ne A firteen in maa Cor-teen-ah for a bot-tol ov be-ah?
Oh God! If Schadenfreude is so bad then why does it feel so good?
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That wotsername is been like fired and also everyone wiv their “Oh I bet its some weally weally sinister strategy” have been proved wrong as Murdoch goes down the plughole with Rebecca Brooks. This is quite good. Remember that Conrad Black wasn’t immune so why do we assume Murdoch will be after he loses his servile politico support?
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I actually have more respect for Murdoch than some of these here politicians.
But can’t wait till they all go down:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8Tiz6INF7I
Good, Clark, but I think you blew it on “bot-tal.”
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Here’s how David Cameron, wishing you to understand that he is basically an oik despite the disadvantage of an Eton and Oxford education, would say it:
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“boh-ul”, that is to say with a glottal stop (i.e., gloh-ul stop).
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There’s a vid here that will help you perfect this verbal exploit, and qualify you for public office as a member any political party, liberal, labor or con.
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Well maybe not the BNP. Nick Griffin still speaks like the Cambridge-trained lawyer that he actually is.
No, Canspaccy, it’s definitely closer to “tol” than “tal”, though there’s a hint of a “w” in there somewhere, too. I live near Rit-twl (Writtle), so I should know. And the Bee-yen-pee is active round here, too.
“Canspaccy”
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I like it. 😀
Clark, I grant you, there is a hint of “w” in there.
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But wha’ever they say in Ri’uwl, there’s no “t” in i’.
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No’ in ‘ampshire, any’ow, where they speak a fine variety of oik. There, you have to pay close attention to what people are saying, rather than to how they are saying it, before you realize that they are actually quite normally intelligent.
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An important feature of oik is its disconnect from the written language, unlike what one might call intelligent local accents, such as, for example, those you will find in the North of England, many parts of Scotland and in most parts of of North America.
Canspeccy, there are definitely variants with sharply pronounced Ts, and I certainly hear the two Ts pronounced separately in “Writtle” and “bottle” sometimes. However, you are correct; those Ts can often be replaced with glottal sounds. Maybe hard Ts don’t get onto TV. I wouldn’t know, as I don’t watch TV.
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I have a tendency to speak ‘ampshire to dogs; they seem to like that, and they wag their tails. But if you want them to do as they’re told, nothing beats German. I’ve never worked out why UK dogs should know any German. My German is less than minimal, and I’m fairly certain that the average dog knows more German than me.
Do you two mind. I am a Hampshire Hog and a child of the New Forest.
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My last dog but two (a rescue like all of them and a brindle Boxer X) understood French! He was a dear creature. When he died I buried him in the garden. Months later when I returned from a short holiday in Glasgow, his white bones including his jawbone were all over the lawn. ‘Quelle horreur!’ he would have said.
Clark, I just checked David Lean’s version of GBS’s Pygmalion and there’s no doubt Eliza Doolittle(Wendy Hillier) pronounces her “t”s, so I concede ‘ampshire oik may not be “the reawl thing (fing?).
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But without a code for dozens of vowel sounds it’s difficult to discuss this clearly in writing.
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Interesting about dogs and German. Maybe, though, its the accent? “Sie verdammten Hund” spoken as the peroration to a speech by Adolf Hitler, would likely get anyone’s attention.
Minister for Europe David Lidington has spoken after a member of British Embassy staff found guilty at court hearing in Tashkent.
Speaking today the Minister for Europe, David Lidington said:
“I was very concerned to hear that a locally-engaged member of staff at our Embassy in Tashkent was found guilty at a court hearing on 15 July of organising meetings without obtaining the permission of the Uzbek authorities. We believe the meetings in question – which were routine contacts on Embassy premises with civil society – were carried out entirely in accordance with international and Uzbek law. They were also entirely in line with President Karimov’s expressed wish to create an improved awareness of human rights in Uzbekistan. We have raised our serious concerns about the case with the Uzbek authorities.”
You are getting more and more like Charles Crawford – you will complaining about spelling next.
I speak with a cockney twang but I wouldn’t consider myself weak-minded, materialist or anti-intellectual. I had to deal with this sort of bullshit from Hooray Henries at Oxford, but I wouldn’t expect it from you Craig.
It’s not a case of adopting a “fashionable” accent – my life might well be easier if I spoke in a more “tasteful” way, as you put it – but rather of having the accent shared by my family and schoolfriends.
Voila
Do you have a link for that?
Voila! http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/news/latest-news/?id=631869682&view=News
Some previous from Liddington
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Palestinians: International Assistance
Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
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All Written Answers on 13 Jul 2011
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Anas Sarwar (Glasgow Central, Labour)
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To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what representations he has made to the Greek Government on the Gaza Aid flotilla.
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Hansard source (Citation: HC Deb, 13 July 2011, c385W)
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David Lidington (Minister of State (Europe and NATO), Foreign and Commonwealth Office; Aylesbury, Conservative)
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Officials from our embassy in Athens have discussed the matter of the Gaza flotilla with the Greek authorities and have relayed to them the United Kingdom’s position on this. Our travel advice for Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories gives clear guidance against any attempt to enter Gaza by sea. We continue to advise against participating in flotillas or overland convoys to Gaza because of the risks involved.
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What a bastard.
I misspelt his name. It is Lidington. But everyhthing is alright because he is after all a CHRISTIAN.
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Lidington was educated at the independent Haberdashers’ Aske’s Boys’ School in Elstree and at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge; he took an honours degree in History and a doctorate for research on Elizabethan history. His passion for history is shared by his brother, Peter, who is Head of History and Politics at Clifton College in Bristol. Whilst at Cambridge, he was Chairman of Cambridge University Conservative Association and Deputy President of the Cambridge University Students’ Union.
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His early jobs involved work for BP and Rio Tinto Group before being appointed in 1987 as special adviser to the then Home Secretary Douglas Hurd. He moved to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1989 when Mr Hurd was appointed Foreign Secretary.
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Lidington is married with four children. He is a now a Christian after converting from Judaism. He was the Captain of the Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge team that won the 1978 series of University Challenge.
I will do a post on this in the morning. As I feared, it is a rather close friend of mine. The good news is, he is not in jail.
Jake,
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You make an excellent point. Most of us speak as did those around us when we grew up, so why should we change?
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No reason at all, I would say, if you are comfortable with the way you have learned to speak and feel it is no impediment to achieving whatever may be your goals in life.
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However schools and broadcasters have an influence on the way people speak, and there seems a case for both schools and broadcasters promoting a more or less standard mode of speech that bears some resemblance to the written word.
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It is true that spoken and written English have a far from consistent relationship, but a greater degree of consistency is possible than is found in some regional modes of speech.
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Standardization in grammar is surely also desirable, much as I like to hear spoken my native Devon with its many grammatical peculiarities.
Don’t know about the estuary glottal stop, but there’s an interesting social inversion in Scotland. The glottal stop being such a prominent feature of the Glasgow patois, posh Scots use a very firm ‘d’ to distinguish themselves from the herd, so that ‘Scotland’ becomes ‘Scoddland’. Just listen to Lord Robertson, if you can bear it.
Priceless stuff !!
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And huge hilarity in the comments too.
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I’m enjoying the fruits of your little sojourn
Now, Farquhar, I always ensure that I am accompanied by an hodd wadder boddle whenever I visit the auspicious, ‘Kirsty Wark-ian’ residential pards of the great, ancient and wondrous metropolis of Glaazgow. This is to remind me never, ever to drop my gloddals.
Oi! Whatsitsallaboutfen,eh?
I know what Craig means – it’s that smarmy DJ-speak that bespeaks insincerity, phoneyness, cynicism, slick, LOUD metropolitan supremacism. A kind of constructed, corporate pseudo-proletarianism which holds no substance, has no link with reality. It’s, um, spray-tan. Yeah, that’s it, mate, it’s, uh, shallow, na’ahmean? Awright-then? Ahm deep, me.
Now all together ‘sitz Hasso siiitz! This should made all dogs sit down. This command might work on the Met, possibly, but to get the money back out of them would sound more like this
‘Und jetzt, sehr geehrte Herren, praktizieren wir den Kopfstand!
I think the next roll over should be off shore havens, banking therein and the swiss/jersey/ Turks and Caicos bank accounts of police officers, everywhere.
To broaden it out a bit, however, code-switching is common. Many of us switch accents in different situations – the Scots are especially good at this, I think and not just in the obvious, extreme, ‘Lulu’ (Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie) manner. Our accents sometimes also change as we age. When I listen to the reel-to-reel tapes which my father recorded in the 1960s and early 1970s, as a child I sound very East Yorkshire (I was born and spent the first few years of my life there). I lost that accent somewhere along the line and seemed to adopt a sort of generic English (sort of post-Sixties middle-class BBC, not as posh as RP), alternating with middle-class (but not Kirsty Warkian, perish the thought, along with the hodd wadder boddles!) West of Scotland Central Belt, depending on the context. People make fun of Nigel Kennedy, who seemed to go from upper middle class as a child to Estuary English as an adult, but apart from the constructed phoni-ness, the ‘act’ about which I wrote earlier, one can see how that might occur. It depends partly on whom we are talking with at a specific moment. The switch is almost subconscious – a little like playing scales on an instrument with which one is intensely familiar. The Queen’s accent has changed since the 1950s, and not just due to her ageing; it’s relatively less posh now. Some of us are more chameleon-like than others. I think those at the perceived periphery tend to be more flexible in this regard, probably through necessity. In the UK, of course, class, as well as region and country/centre-periphery, is involved wrt accents. We identify one another by class within the first few seconds of hearing one another speak, and not the just the class we currently occupy, but also the one we came from. Read David Crystal on any and all of this – it’s fascinating! In some senses, every communication is a performance. And now, for a song-and-dance routine!
If you think about, say, Andrew Marr, well, back in the mate 1980s I worked with his sister, Lucy, a lovely woman and a good doctor, btw, and they had middle-class Scottish accents. Andrew Marr, though he’d worked in London (eg. as editor of teh Independent) for many years, still had this accent when he started as Political Editor with the BBC. As time progressed, his accent grew less and less Scottish. However, James Naughtie never lost his Scottish accent, it’s one of his hallmarks and you know, in real life, he talks with the same accent as in the TV studio. Now, the Marrs were well-off, East Coasts Scots. So what’s the reason for the apparent and fairly rapid loss of Andrew Marr’s Scottish accent? I’m not placing any criticism; as I said, I code-switch myself. But it’s an interesting observation, no? Many northern English people end up with what’s known as a ‘generic Northern’ accent once they’ve lived/worked in London for a long time; their accents lose specificity and they catch on on the closest ‘generic’ code available – as I perhaps did with ‘post-Sixties BBC’ one (sorry about that; perhaps this is the reason why I continually offer people here cups of tea).
So, in essence, I think that those who have criticised Craig on this, and the ‘golf’ thread for being “snobbish” wrt accents, with respect, are missing the point. I don’t think this is a class issue, really. I think it’s about masks, the use of codes and the manipulation of the aural medium. It’s about corporatism utilising such instruments to perpetuate social control. I would recommend the poetry and non-fiction prose of Tom Leonard, which is genuinely radical, subversive, destabilising and progressive in the best sense wrt language/accents, etc. Once you’ve read (HEARD) Tom’s work, you’ll realise the difference b/w genuine expression and the phony, corporate variety. The current ‘tyranny’ of Estuary English is simply a replacement for the ‘tyranny’ of RP. Really, it’s all just PR. Not real. Not art. Nothing.
Suhayl what part of East Yorkshire.
I worked in a Linguistics Department and was pissed off having my Hull accent mocked by a professor FROM LIVERPOOL!!!
Still it helped having long vowels learning Estonian 🙂
In addition to David Crystal I guess you read Larry Trask who was very good explaining language change.
“The genuine regional accent of Essex is very pleasant, and not too dissimilar to that of Suffolk.”
I grew up in South Essex, Craig. Sorry, but what you have to say is utter drivel. The population overspill from London, the traditional middle classes, plus the rural Essex contingent were all present at my school in Shenfield (Brentwood) in the 1970s. My (middle class) accent is thus an odd mixture of posh and East London, although nearly 30 years in Yorkshire has lent me a Northern twang. It was great when I came to learn Hebrew at Uni – I have an accent with glottal stops, having grown up saying “wa’er” for water. Accents are what they are. They are neither ‘authentic’ or ‘affected’ — these are the meanings that language snobs and class-bound bores impute upon them,
Paul, that’s hilarious and amazing! Liverpool accents became fab with the Fab Four et al. Hull/esp. East Yorkshire accents never became ‘fab’ and indeed when a TV drama needs a ‘Northern yokel’ (male or female) figure, they’ll often possess some sort of Yorkshire accent. I find this irritating and patronising. I was at a conference at Cambridge University recently where one of the (middle class, RP accent, London, well-known) speakers referred in passing and without irony or humour, to “Lancastrian dullards”. I was sitting next to a professor who works at Cambridge University who originally was from Lancashire and we looked at each other at that moment and smiled, as if to say, ‘what a fucking moron’. The gentleman next to us said something under his breath like “utterly outrageous” and of course he was right, it was utterly outrageous. But people still get away with this kind of crap.
We lived at Castle Hill Hospital in the village of Cottingham, which then was entirely separate from Hull but which now is really a suburb of the city. I was born up the road, in Beverley. We also lived for a while in the Garden Village, in Hull; my mother taught for a short time at the Archbishop William Temple School (sadly, no longer in existence).
Yakoub, you’ve made excellent points, thanks. The search for ‘authenticity’ is indeed futile. One of my points, which perhaps was not entirely the same as those of Craig, was that the use in certain specific (and this is key) situations of (invariably brash, stereotypically wide-boy/girl) ‘populist’ presenters, etc. with Estuary English accents actually does two things:
1) Perpetuates the silly stereotypes (in similar fashion to the ‘dumb Yorkshireman/woman’ ones) about people who talk in those accents, i.e. that all people who talk in those accents are brash, materialist, coarse, grasping, uber-capitalist – it’s really a sub-Dickensian caricature of the London wide-boy. Think about caricatures of the ‘working classes’, the ‘mob’, etc. during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were not that dissimilar from those of the time of Irish (as Dreoilin astutely once pointed out some time ago) or Black people.
2) Render the false impression of a classless society, or of a society that is moving towards being classless, when all statistics point in the opposite direction. So it becomes part of the circus of deception. As for the the bread, well, we know where that went.
3) Centralises power in the public consciousness in the metropolis of London; to the rest of the country, these figures largely represent/emanate from ‘London’. RP does/did the same, of course, so it’s really a perpetuation of that process.
So we’re not talking, say, Professor Greg Philo (of the excellent Glasgow Media Group) here, who has a pronounced south-eastern accent but who is the antithesis of the stereotypes we usually see/hear in the media/in drama, etc.
Actually, my criticisms are not wholly true, in that we do now see/hear people with a broader variety of accents in the audio-visual media than before and they’re not always stereotyped in these ways. So it’s not monolithic or simple, there are various trends operating in this thematic area, I think. But it’s valid to highlight dominant trends, esp. where those seem to reinforce, rather than challenge, power.