Variation within UK and problem of the standard language
British English, or UK English (BrE, BE), is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere. The Oxford English Dictionary applies the term to English "as spoken or written in the British Isles; especially the forms of English usual in Great Britain...", reserving "Hiberno-English" for "The English language as spoken and written in Ireland". There are slight regional variations in formal written English in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within the United Kingdom, and this could be described as "British English". The forms of spoken English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken, and a uniform concept of "British English" is therefore more difficult to apply to the spoken language. Dialects and accents vary between the four countries of the United Kingdom, and also within the countries themselves. There are also differences in the English spoken by different socio-economic groups in any particular region. The major divisions are normally classified as English English (or English as spoken in England, which comprises Southern English dialects, Midlands English dialects and Northern English dialects), Welsh English (not to be confused with the Welsh language), and Scottish English (not to be confused with the Scots language). The various British dialects also differ in the words that they have borrowed from other languages. The form of English most commonly associated with the upper class in the southern counties of England is called Received Pronunciation (RP). It derives from a mixture of the Midland and Southern dialects which were spoken in London during the Middle Ages and is frequently used as a model for teaching English to foreign learners. Although speakers from elsewhere within the UK may not speak with an RP accent it is now a class-dialect more than a local dialect. It may also be referred to as "the Queen's (or King's) English", "Public School English", or "BBC English" as this was originally the form of English used on radio and television, although a wider variety of accents can be heard these days. About two percent of Britons speak RP, and it has evolved quite markedly over the last 40 years. The present views on the number of English dialects vary, which is seen best in several existing classifications of regional dialects.
The picture which emerges from the kind of dialect information obtained by the Survey of English Dialects relates historically to the dialect divisions recognized in Old and Middle English. A major division is drawn between North and everywhere else, broadly following the boundary between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia. David Crystal in his “The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language” speaks of 16 existing dialects in England. In this analysis, the vowel in such words as up (‘oop’ in the Now, [ᴧp] in the South) is considered to be the chief distinguishing feature, and a division between North and South has been made on this basis. The traditional North-South boundary turns out to be no longer in England, but on the border between England and Scotland, and it is this division which gives rise to the most noticeable dialect distinction in modern British English.
Below there is provided a study of several English dialects in which their peculiar phonetic and grammatical (as well as lexical) features are studied. Case study 1: RP N owhere is the social hierarchy in Britain as clear as in the question of speech. The way English is spoken gives away not only regional identity but to some extent class status too. It is, for one sociologist, “the snobbery that brands the tongue of every British child”. Since the days of Shakespeare, the English of south east England has been considered the ‘standard’, for no better reason than that the south east is the region of economic and political power. The emergence of an upper and upper-middle class mode of speech, ‘received pronunciation’, was systematically established through the public school sytem attended by the boys of wealthier families. Broadly speaking there are two kinds of RP. One is ‘unmarked’ RP, which suggests no more than that the speaker is well-eductaed (although of course many well-eductaed people speak with a regional accent). This is the dialect of the BBC, and thus it has a kind of authority. Through radio and television unmarked RP is becoming a more widely spoken accent. Then there is ‘marked’ RP, which indicates high social class and is spoken, for example, by many army oficers who come from uppermiddle class families. Although soken by less than 5% of the population, Rp has immense influence.Those who speak it enjoy a social authority that contradicts democratic ideals. As long as RP remains suggestove of authority, some job advertisements will demand ‘well spokenness’, and some ambitious politicains will hide their regional accents with RP. Words air, there, their, where, somewhere and parents in traditional forms of RP would be pronounced with a diphthong – that is two vowel sounds. Older RP speakers would start with an <e> sound – as in bed – before drifting into a weak vowel rather like the initial sound in about. This type of pronunciation, also applied to words such as dare, hair and bear, was until relatively recently common in many English accents. The diphthong emerged once speakers began to omit the <r> sound at the end. Speakers throughout the UK once pronounced this <r> sound, but it is increasingly restricted to speakers in the West Country and far South West of England, a small area of Lancashire and most of Scotland and Ireland. It is also present in most US English accents. The <r> sound was initially replaced by the weak vowel at the end of the diphthong, but nowadays most younger RP speakers omit this final part of the diphthong and simply use a long <e> sound – thus shared is pronounced with exactly the same vowel as in shed, only the vowel is noticeably longer. This demonstrates perfectly how successive sound changes can radically alter the pronunciation of a set of words. Most RP speakers now only distinguish between pairs such as fairs and fez or flared and fled simply by vowel length. Older speakers tend to use a diphthong for the first word in each pair.
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