CC BY
156
УДК 811.111.8
DOI: 10.33184/bulletin-bsu-2022.2.24
SPEAKING POSH OR DO YOU WANT TO SOUND OLD-FASHIONED?
© R. M. Salimova
Bashkir State University 32 Zaki Validi Street, 450076 Ufa, Republic of Bashkortostan, Russia.
Phone: +7 (347) 272 62 05.
Email: risal@list.ru
The article is devoted to the nature and changing status of traditional Received Pronunciation, still accepted as Standard English variety in the United Kingdom. It also reveals the peculiarities of non-regional pronunciation and popular Estuary English accent. The aim of the article is to single out innovations in the pronunciation model as well as demonstrate linguistic changes at the social level. Estuary English as a valid competitor for Received Pronunciation, its position in the sociolin-guistic pyramid in particular are being studied. The triangle model remains accurate enough for the description of social and regional patterns of accent variation in Britain. It ranges from acrolectal (non-regional pronunciation = RP) through mesolectal (Estuary English) to basilectal (Cockney). The basis for microresearch was theoretical works of contemporary British and Russian linguists as well as speeches of well-known English public personalities. Sociolinguistic analysis based on empirical material testifies to the influence of southeastern London as the main driving force. Lingo and socio-cultural factors predetermine the success of the so-called non-regional pronunciation through cultivation and popularization of Estuary English with further multilingual society democratization of the norm. While linguistic changes are in progress, both Received Pronunciation and Estuary English in Great Britain undergo considerable changes due to various internal and external factors.
Keywords: Received Pronunciation, Estuary English, linguistic changes, innovations, variety.
"It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him".
George Bernard Shaw
Teaching English requires a pronunciation model for emulation. Pronunciation patterns change as no accent remains static. Phonetic and phonological changes are always at work. The social variation, embracing gender, ethnic origin, religion, age and, undeniably, social class, is by far significant.
The sociolinguistic situation can be represented in the form of the pyramid, with basilects at the bottom, acrolects on top and mesolects in between [3, a 3]. The numerous broadest local accents, associated with working class people of the least socio-economic classes are termed basilects. The most prestigious forms of speech used by those having more advantages in terms of wealth, education, and social position are called acrolects. Whereas a range of accents intermediate between the two extremes represent mesolects. The sociolin-guistic pyramid worked out by B. Collins overlaps with the concept of Peter Trudgill's triangle [5]. Both British scholars display social varieties of modern flexible English on the so-called sociolinguistic map.
In this connection the term "accent bar", introduced by David Abercrombie, a British phonetician, seems to be appropriate. On one side of which were the RP speakers and on the other side the non-RP speakers. The only difference from the sociolinguistic term "colour bar" being the "accent bar" has a very small minority on the "right" side [1, a 48].
It is common knowledge that a variety of English pronunciation in the British Iles, identified with status,
wealth, and private education is RP (Received Pronunciation - нормативное произношение). This term has been used for a century running and has never been as homogeneous as Daniel Jones made it appear as a term in 1918 in his book "An outline of English Phonetics". These days the ambiguous status quo of the traditionally accepted accent is worth considering. The paradox is that it is still recognized as an orthoepic norm in the UK or the Standard national pronunciation [9, с. 248], but as little as 3% of educated people speak RP.
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Most of what we know about this unique posh accent stems from its strong basis. This institution is the English public school. RP is never explicitly taught in them but it is acquired effortlessly from fellow pupils, most of whom anyway have already learnt it at home at mother's knee. Therefore, an RP speaker speaks from experience. Speaking "posh" is a popular expression for speaking RP; it is a socially superior accent [7, a 135].
David Crystal uses the term "badge" to display a person's social identity. He considers Britain to be "linguistically much more class-conscious than other countries where English is used as a first lan-guage...with more clearly defined class boundaries than others" [2, c. 386].
The crucial fact about it is obvious: it is the status symbol of culturally and economically powerful elite, an aristocracy and merit is far beside the point. People are evaluated not according to their achievements or abilities, but according to their accent. The British-American social psychologist Howard Giles finds a direct correlation between language ideologies and language attitudes: "this standard variety is promoted through the education system as well as through the media and, in this way, standard language speakers gain high prestige and status" [4, c. 14]. He also treats the notion of standard language as an artificial construct or even a myth. Apart from RP, he provides examples of non-regional Parisian French and Castilian Spanish as standard varieties in France and Spain.
From H. Giles' research work, it is apparent that RP was associated with competent, reliable, educated, and confident speakers. It was also perceived as being the most aesthetically pleasing of all British English accents. However, RP speakers scored low on traits like friendliness, companionability, sincerity [4, c. 18].
In some English speaking countries, RP is not found very intelligible. It is a disliked accent in many parts of the world, (particularly in the USA and Scotland). No wonder, the most sinister, menacing characters in American science fiction and horror films are given RP accents. Think of Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in a series of American thrillers or funny sketches of Burniston, a Scottish comedy sketch show.
Curiously enough, in the Victorian era the meaning of "received" was "socially acceptable" [3, c. 3]. When initially introduced by D. Jones, it used to mean eagerness of dialect-speaking schoolchildren and university students for social advancement and, respectively, readiness to modify their accent in the direction of the social standard and acquisition of this type of pronunciation. Today the situation is reverse, young people do not aspire to RP. The conventional prestige "Oxford English"/"Queen's English"/"BBC English" was promoted by the British Broadcasting Company in the 20th century. All BBC announcers used to speak RP. The necessity being: a male, RP speaking, a good social position. But today this is no more than a stereotype as newsreaders, commentators, presenters, reporters, meteorologists do not speak RP. A splendid array of Scottish English, Welsh, Northern Irish, Geordie, Brummie, Scouse, Cockney can be gleaned from television. The label RP is referred to the upper-class speech of the 20th century [12]. The RP speakers are already nicknamed 60+ or "fuddy-duddy" (fuddy-duddy /'fAd.i.dAd.i/ disapproving: a person who has old-fashioned ideas and opinions) [11, c. 107]. There is an opinion that the RP accent is no longer the neces-
sary passport to privilege and power in many walks of life. There are signs of affected and sophisticated RP's prestige being eroded; no longer does it enjoy the unquestioned status that it previously did.
Modern RP is undergoing radical innovations. Today linguists are more likely to use the term NRP (non-regional pronunciation) to avoid stereotyping and specific regional characteristics. It's "an encompassing neutral type of modern British English, the one which lacks obvious local accent features and cannot be pinned down to a specific area" [Collins 2013:4]. Since the end of the 20th century non-regional pronunciation (NRP) has been effectively replacing traditional RP.
Changes make their way into this accent by diffusion from lower status-accents. Some salient phonological features of NRP are:
^ The employment of intrusive /r/.
E.g.: law and order ['lo:r an o:da], awe-inspiring ['o:r inspaiariq], Asia and Africa ['ei39 r an(d) fika].
^ Glottalling of syllable-final /t/ before another consonant. Medial /t/ is realized as glottal stop [7].
E.g.: mutton ['mA7n], get it [ge7i7], not a bit [noa7bi7],
I've gotto put a lot of butter on thaOittle bit of bread.
The spread of glottal stop into NRP is natural and the feature is derisively nicknamed "a slipshod Cock-neyism".
^ The disappearance of /ua/ and its replacement by /o:/ or /oa/.
E.g.: poor [pua]^ [po:] / [poa], sure [Jua]^ [Jo:] / [Joa].
^ Monophthongization of [ai] and [au] when followed by [a].
E.g.: power [paua] ^ [paa], fire [faia] ^ [faa].
^ HappY-tensing in the end of the word. E.g.: happy [hspi] sounding as [hspi:], coffee [kDfi] turning in oral speech into [kDfi:]. Thus, the compromising symbol -i- is shown in modern dictionaries to show the neutralization of short and long vowels.
^ Change of [ tj, dj, sj] into [tJ , d3, J], the effect is called yod coalescence. E.g.: can't you ['ka:n tJu], Tuesday ['tJu:zdei], module ['mDd3u:l], issue ['iJu:]. Such effect is heavily stigmatised as lazy speech by older generation of RP speakers.
^ Loss of [ j] before [u:] or yod-dropping is on the increase.
E.g.: student ['stu:dant], suit ['su:t], super ['su:pa].
This leads us again to the issue of which model to employ for teaching British English to non-native learners. For one thing, traditional RP is on its way out and NRP is taking its place. The latter provides a nonregional, nationwide layer, i.e. this accent cannot be pinpointed to a particular area. Despite all possible
intrusions (American and other middle-class regional accents), NRP is likely to remain intact and solid.
Estuary English (EE) also comes in as an option (a combination of RP and Cockney), the so-called happy medium. What is more, people in England prefer to speak Estuary English rather than RP. Peter Trudgill admitted: "it's a good idea if 24-year-old Poles sound as much as possible like 24-year-old, rather than 94-year-old English people [5, c. 179].
Originally coined by D. Rosewarne, the term EE was avidly embraced by the media. It is confined not only to the banks of the Thames Estuary and the county of Greater London, but is spreading outwards into surrounding areas. However, there is more to this than meets the eye! Estuary English is still a mesolectal variety and admits of specifically regional features. It displays a considerable degree of London influence, such as:
^ /l/ vocalization, its realization as a vowel of an /u/ type: bell [bsu];
diphthong-shift: face [fais], price [prois];
yod coalescence. E.g.: dune [d3u:n], tuna [tju:na];
^ merger of vowels before /1/.
E.g.: feel [fial], oil [oial], owl [aual]. A more detailed description of phonemic splits and mergers is given in J. Well's article [https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/ home/estuary/transcree.htm];
^ h-dropping. E.g.: hat [s?]. The glottal stop [7] is already firmly embedded in Estuary English at all social levels.
Though British linguists stigmatize "th-fronting", a salient Cockney feature involving the use of [f, v] instead of standard [0, 5], it has been suggested that this phonetic phenomenon is also on its way to make it into modern Estuary English. Here is an illustrative example of the main phonetic tendencies of popular Estuary English accent (Ricky Gervais versus Jamie Oliver) [13].
The great accent variability in the UK has led us to conclude that it is lingo and socio-cultural factors that predetermine the success of the accent. In the first place, it should be viewed positively by members of the society proper. There is also an opinion shared by Russian linguist T. B. Medvedeva that in a multilingual society democratization of the norm and cultivation of a particular variation may boost the spread and popularization of other variants. Estuary English in England is provided as an example [10, c. 79]
In fact, it is difficult to disentangle language from social life. It only remains to add that the situation in
Great Britain today can be presented as follows. Accent convergence is definitely taking place; the influence of southeastern London as the main driving force is unquestionable. No wonder, Estuary English is heralded by the British media.
The triangle model remains accurate enough for the description of social and regional patterns of accent variation in Britain. It ranges from acrolectal (nonregional pronunciation, which gradually absorbed Received Pronunciation) through mesolectal (Estuary English) to basilectal (Cockney) [8, с. 84].
Will NRP eventually stay on top of the future sociolinguistic pyramid? As linguistic changes are in progress, students learning RP as an orthoepic norm still have a non-regional model available to them. British phoneticians see nothing wrong in teaching intrusive /r/ and -t- glottalling at least to advanced students but teaching solely regional features such as l-vocalization or phonemic mergers will be too much of a good thing unless you are a "linguistic chameleon"[3, с. 293].
Overall, we feel that the real status of Received Pronunciation and Estuary English in Great Britain is still unclear. The flipside of that is both the accents undergo considerable changes due to various internal and external factors. Mass media and the immediate social environment reinforce latent attitudes. The specific changes in the Standard English may affect not only native speaking population but also the use of the English language in our digital Global village.
LITERATURE
1. Abercrombie D. Fifty years in phonetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.
2. Crystal D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. 3 edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
3. Collins B. and Mees I. Practical phonetics and Phonology. 3 edition. A resource book for students. London and New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2013. 330p.
4. Giles H., Raki T. The Oxford handbook of language and social psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 568p.
5. Trudgill P. Sociolinguistic Variation and Change. Ed-inburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. 208 p. URL: https:// www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/trudgill.htm
6. Wells J. URL: https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/tran scree.htm
7. Salimova R. M. Teoreticheskaya fonetika angliiskogo yazyka: monografiya [Theoretical English phonetics: monograph]. Ufa: RITs BashGU, 2020.
8. Salimova R. M. Yazykovye edinitsy v svete sovremennykh nauchnykh paradigm: mat-ly VI Vseros. nauchno-prakt. konf. s mezhdunar. uchastiem. Ufa: RITs BashGU, 2021. Pp. 79-85.
9. Sokolova M. A. Teoreticheskaya fonetika angliiskogo yazyka [Theoretical English phonetics] / M. A. Sokolova, I. S. Tikho-nova, R. M. Tikhonova, E. L. Freidina. Dubna: Feniks+, 2010.
10. Medvedeva T. V. Filologicheskie nauki. 2001. No. 1. Pp. 78-83.
11. Faskhutdinov R. Angliiskii Yazyk [English language]. Moscow: Eksmo, 2020.
12. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHgrDDwXkTA
13. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3JSMe2QSfc
Received 25.04.2022
DOI: 10.33184/bulletin-bsu-2022.2.24
ШИКАРНАЯ РЕЧЬ ИЛИ ХОТИТЕ ЛИ ВЫ ЗВУЧАТЬ СТАРОМОДНО?
© Р. М. Салимова
Башкирский государственный университет Россия, Республика Башкортостан, 450076 г. Уфа, ул. Заки Валиди, 32.
Тел.: +7 (347) 272 62 05.
Email: risal@list.ru
Статья посвящена природе и изменяющемуся статусу нормативного произношения, которое все еще рассматривается в качестве варианта стандартного английского языка в Соединённом Королевстве. Цель статьи заключается в том, чтобы выделить новообразования в произносительной модели, а также продемонстрировать лингвистические изменения на социальном уровне. Анализу подвергается Эстуарный Английский язык как существенный конкурент нормативному произношению, в особенности его положение в социолингвистической пирамиде. Основу микроисследования составили теоретические работы современных британских и российских лингвистов, а также выступления известных английских публичных деятелей.
Ключевые слова: нормативное произношение, эстуарный английский, лингвистические изменения, вариант.
ЛИТЕРАТУРА
1. Abercrombie D. Fifty years in phonetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991. 127 p.
2. Crystal D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. 3 edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 573 p.
3. Collins B. and Mees I. Practical phonetics and Phonology. 3 edition. A resource book for students. London and New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2013. 330p.
4. Giles H., Raki T. Language attitudes: the social determinants and consequences of language variation // The Oxford handbook of language and social psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 568p.
5. Trudgill P. Sociolinguistic Variation and Change. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. 208 p. URL: https://www.phon.ucl.a c.uk/home/estuary/trudgill.htm
6. Wells J. URL: https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/estuary/transcree.htm
7. Салимова Р. М. Теоретическая фонетика английского языка: монография. Уфа: РИЦ БашГУ, 2020. 180 с.
8. Салимова Р. М. О социальных границах в британских акцентах // Языковые единицы в свете современных научных парадигм: мат-лы VI Всерос. научно-практ. конф. с междунар. участием. Уфа: РИЦ БашГУ, 2021. С. 79-85.
9. Соколова М. А. Теоретическая фонетика английского языка / М. А. Соколова, И. С. Тихонова, Р. М. Тихонова, Е. Л. Фрейди-на. Дубна: Феникс+, 2010. 192 с.
10. Медведева Т. В. Самая популярная разновидность произношения? (к вопросу о путях развития произносительной нормы в британском варианте английского языка) // Филологические науки. 2001. №1. С. 78-83.
11. Фасхутдинов Р. Английский язык. М.: Эксмо, 2020. 128 с.
12. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHgrDDwXkTA
13. URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3JSMe2QSfc
Поступила в редакцию 25.04.2022 г.
