British English
Encyclopedia
British English, or English (BrE, BE, en-GB), 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; esp[ecially] 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
. For example, although the words wee and little are interchangeable in some contexts, wee (as an adjective) is almost exclusively written by some people from some parts of northern Britain
(and especially Scotland
) or from Northern Ireland
, whereas in Southern England
and Wales
, little is used predominantly. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within the United Kingdom, and this could be described by the term British English. The forms of spoken English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken, so a uniform concept of British English is more difficult to apply to the spoken language. According to Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English, "For many people . . . especially in England [British English] is tautologous
," and it shares "all the ambiguities and tensions in the word British, and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity."
is a West Germanic language
originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialect
s brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany
and the northern Netherlands
. The resident population at this time was generally speaking Brythonic
—the insular variety of continental Celtic which was influenced by occupation by the Romans
. This group of languages ( Welsh
, Cornish
, Cumbric) cohabited alongside English
into the modern period, but due to their remoteness from the Germanic languages
, influence on English was notably limited. However, the degree of influence remains debated, and it has recently been argued that its grammatical influence accounts for the substantial innovations noted between English and the other West Germanic languages. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon
Kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. The original Old English language
was then influenced by two waves of invasion; the first was by language speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family; they conquered and colonised parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries. The second was the Normans
in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman
and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman
. These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it was never a truly mixed language
in the strictest sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication).
Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian
core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of the European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language
of great flexibility and with a huge vocabulary
.
vary amongst the four countries of the United Kingdom
, as well as 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, West Country 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 Scottish and Northern English dialects include many words originally borrowed from Old Norse
and a few borrowed from Gaelic, though most of the structure and common words are conservative Anglo-Saxon, hence "kirk" (church), "beck" (stream), "feart" (feared), "fell" (hillside), "kistie" (chest, box), "lang syne" (long ago) and so on.
Following its last major survey of English Dialects
(1949–1950), the University of Leeds
has started work on a new project. In May 2007 the Arts and Humanities Research Council
awarded a grant to a team led by Sally Johnson, Professor of Linguistics and Phonetics at Leeds University, to study British regional dialects.
Johnson's team are sifting through a large collection of examples of regional slang words and phrases turned up by the "Voices project" run by the BBC
, in which they invited the public to send in examples of English still spoken throughout the country. The BBC Voices project also collected hundreds of news articles about how the British speak English from swearing through to items on language schools. This information will also be collated and analysed by Johnson's team both for content and for where it was reported. "Perhaps the most remarkable finding in the Voices study is that the English language is as diverse as ever, despite our increased mobility and constant exposure to other accents and dialects through TV and radio." Work by the team on this project is not expected to end before 2010. When covering the award of the grant on 1 June 2007, The Independent
stated:
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 in the early modern period and is frequently used as a model for teaching English to foreign learners. Although speakers from elsewhere in England 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.
In the South East there are significantly different accents; the London Cockney
accent is strikingly different from RP and its rhyming slang can be (and was initially intended to be) difficult for outsiders to understand.
Estuary English
has been gaining prominence in recent decades: it has some features of RP and some of Cockney. In London itself, the broad local accent is still changing, partly influenced by Caribbean speech. Communities migrating to the UK in recent decades have brought many more languages to the country. Surveys started in 1979 by the Inner London Education Authority
discovered over 100 languages being spoken domestically by the families of the inner city's school children. As a result, London
ers speak with a mixture of accents, depending on ethnicity, neighbourhood, class, age, upbringing, and sundry other factors, and Multicultural London English has emerged as a mixture of these influences.
Since the mass internal immigration
to Northamptonshire
in the 1940s and its position between several major accent regions, it has become a source of various accent developments. In Northampton the older accent has been influenced by overspill Londoners. There is an accent known locally as the Kettering
accent, which is a transitional accent between the East Midlands
and East Anglia
n. It is the last southern midland accent to use the broad "a" in words like bath/grass (i.e. barth/grarss). Conversely crass/plastic use a slender "a". A few miles northwest in Leicestershire the slender "a" becomes more widespread generally. In the town of Corby
, five miles (8 km) north, one can find Corbyite, which unlike the Kettering accent, is largely influenced by the West Scottish accent. This is due to the influx of Scottish steelworkers.
In addition, most British people can to some degree temporarily "swing" their accent towards a more neutral form of English at will, to reduce difficulty where very different accents are involved, or when speaking to foreigners. This phenomenon is known in linguistics
as code shifting
.
is governed by convention rather than formal code: there is no equivalent body to the Académie française
or the Real Academia Española
, and the authoritative dictionaries (for example, Oxford English Dictionary
, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
, Chambers Dictionary
, Collins Dictionary) record usage rather than prescribe it. In addition, vocabulary and usage change with time; words are freely borrowed from other languages and other strains of English, and neologisms are frequent.
For historical reasons dating back to the rise of London
in the 9th century, the form of language spoken in London and the East Midlands
became standard English within the Court, and ultimately became the basis for generally accepted use in the law, government, literature and education within Britain. Largely, modern British spelling was standardised in Samuel Johnson
's A Dictionary of the English Language
(1755), although previous writers had also played a significant role in this and much has changed since 1755. Scotland, which underwent parliamentary union
with England only in 1707, still has a few independent aspects of standardisation, especially within its autonomous legal system.
Since the early 20th century, numerous books by British authors intended as guides to English grammar and usage have been published, a few of which have achieved sufficient acclaim to have remained in print for long periods and to have been reissued in new editions after some decades. These include, most notably of all, Fowler's Modern English Usage and The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers
. Detailed guidance on many aspects of writing British English for publication is included in style guides issued by various publishers including The Times
newspaper, the Oxford University Press
and the Cambridge University Press
, and others. The Oxford University Press guidelines were originally drafted as a single broadsheet page by Horace Henry Hart
and were, at the time (1893) the first guide of their type in English; they were gradually expanded and eventually published, first as Hart's Rules
and, most recently (in 2002), as part of The Oxford Manual of Style. Comparable in authority and stature to The Chicago Manual of Style
for published American English, the Oxford Manual is a fairly exhaustive standard for published British English, to which writers can turn in the absence of any specific document issued by the publishing house that will publish their work.
. Once regarded as a Cockney feature, it has become much more widespread. It is still stigmatised when used in words like later, but becoming very widespread at the end of words such as not (as in no/ʡ/ interested). Other consonants subject to this usage in Cockney English are p, as in pa/ʡ/er, k as in ba/ʡ/er and d, as in brea/ʡ/ before a vowel—brea/ʡ/ and bu/ʡ/er.
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
used in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
from forms used elsewhere. The Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
applies the term to English "as spoken or written in the British Isles; esp[ecially] the forms of English usual in Great Britain", reserving "Hiberno-English
Hiberno-English
Hiberno-English is the dialect of English written and spoken in Ireland .English was first brought to Ireland during the Norman invasion of the late 12th century. Initially it was mainly spoken in an area known as the Pale around Dublin, with Irish spoken throughout the rest of the country...
" for the "English language as spoken and written in Ireland".
There are slight regional variations in formal written English in the United Kingdom
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. For example, although the words wee and little are interchangeable in some contexts, wee (as an adjective) is almost exclusively written by some people from some parts of northern Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
(and especially Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
) or from Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
, whereas in Southern England
Southern England
Southern England, the South and the South of England are imprecise terms used to refer to the southern counties of England bordering the English Midlands. It has a number of different interpretations of its geographic extents. The South is considered by many to be a cultural region with a distinct...
and Wales
Wales
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...
, little is used predominantly. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within the United Kingdom, and this could be described by the term British English. The forms of spoken English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken, so a uniform concept of British English is more difficult to apply to the spoken language. According to Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English, "For many people . . . especially in England [British English] is tautologous
Tautology (rhetoric)
Tautology is an unnecessary or unessential repetition of meaning, using different and dissimilar words that effectively say the same thing...
," and it shares "all the ambiguities and tensions in the word British, and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity."
History
EnglishEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
is a West Germanic language
West Germanic languages
The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three traditional branches of the Germanic family of languages and include languages such as German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, the Frisian languages, and Yiddish...
originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialect
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
s brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
and the northern Netherlands
Netherlands
The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...
. The resident population at this time was generally speaking Brythonic
British language
The British language was an ancient Celtic language spoken in Britain.British language may also refer to:* Any of the Languages of the United Kingdom.*The Welsh language or the Brythonic languages more generally* British English...
—the insular variety of continental Celtic which was influenced by occupation by the Romans
Roman army
The Roman army is the generic term for the terrestrial armed forces deployed by the kingdom of Rome , the Roman Republic , the Roman Empire and its successor, the Byzantine empire...
. This group of languages ( Welsh
Welsh language
Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
, Cornish
Cornish language
Cornish is a Brythonic Celtic language and a recognised minority language of the United Kingdom. Along with Welsh and Breton, it is directly descended from the ancient British language spoken throughout much of Britain before the English language came to dominate...
, Cumbric) cohabited alongside English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
into the modern period, but due to their remoteness from the Germanic languages
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
, influence on English was notably limited. However, the degree of influence remains debated, and it has recently been argued that its grammatical influence accounts for the substantial innovations noted between English and the other West Germanic languages. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon
Anglo-Saxons
Anglo-Saxon is a term used by historians to designate the Germanic tribes who invaded and settled the south and east of Great Britain beginning in the early 5th century AD, and the period from their creation of the English nation to the Norman conquest. The Anglo-Saxon Era denotes the period of...
Kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. The original Old English language
Old English language
Old English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...
was then influenced by two waves of invasion; the first was by language speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family; they conquered and colonised parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries. The second was the Normans
Normans
The Normans were the people who gave their name to Normandy, a region in northern France. They were descended from Norse Viking conquerors of the territory and the native population of Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock...
in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman
Old Norman
Old Norman, also called Old Northern French or Old Norman French, was one of many langues d'oïl dialects. It was spoken throughout the region of what is now called Normandy and spread into England, Southern Italy, Sicily, and the Levant. It is the ancestor of modern Norman, including the insular...
and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman
Anglo-Norman language
Anglo-Norman is the name traditionally given to the kind of Old Norman used in England and to some extent elsewhere in the British Isles during the Anglo-Norman period....
. These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it was never a truly mixed language
Mixed language
A mixed language is a language that arises through the fusion of two source languages, normally in situations of thorough bilingualism, so that it is not possible to classify the resulting language as belonging to either of the language families that were its source...
in the strictest sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication).
Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian
Anglo-Frisian languages
The Anglo-Frisian languages form a group of West Germanic languages consisting of Old English, Old Frisian, and their descendants...
core of English; the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of the European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language
Loanword
A loanword is a word borrowed from a donor language and incorporated into a recipient language. By contrast, a calque or loan translation is a related concept where the meaning or idiom is borrowed rather than the lexical item itself. The word loanword is itself a calque of the German Lehnwort,...
of great flexibility and with a huge vocabulary
Vocabulary
A person's vocabulary is the set of words within a language that are familiar to that person. A vocabulary usually develops with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge...
.
Dialects
Dialects and accentsRegional accents of English speakers
The regional accents of English speakers show great variation across the areas where English is spoken as a first language. This article provides an overview of the many identifiable variations in pronunciation, usually deriving from the phoneme inventory of the local dialect, of the local variety...
vary amongst the four countries of the United Kingdom
Countries of the United Kingdom
Countries of the United Kingdom is a term used to describe England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. These four countries together form the sovereign state of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which is also described as a country. The alternative terms, constituent...
, as well as 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, West Country dialects, Midlands English dialects and Northern English
Northern English
Northern English is a group of dialects of the English language. It includes the North East England dialects, which are similar in some respects to Scots....
dialects), Welsh English
Welsh English
Welsh English, Anglo-Welsh, or Wenglish refers to the dialects of English spoken in Wales by Welsh people. The dialects are significantly influenced by Welsh grammar and often include words derived from Welsh...
(not to be confused with the Welsh language
Welsh language
Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
), and Scottish English
Scottish English
Scottish English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Scotland. It may or may not be considered distinct from the Scots language. It is always considered distinct from Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language....
(not to be confused with the Scots language
Scots language
Scots is the Germanic language variety spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster . It is sometimes called Lowland Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language variety spoken in most of the western Highlands and in the Hebrides.Since there are no universally accepted...
). The various British dialects also differ in the words that they have borrowed from other languages. The Scottish and Northern English dialects include many words originally borrowed from Old Norse
Old Norse
Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....
and a few borrowed from Gaelic, though most of the structure and common words are conservative Anglo-Saxon, hence "kirk" (church), "beck" (stream), "feart" (feared), "fell" (hillside), "kistie" (chest, box), "lang syne" (long ago) and so on.
Following its last major survey of English Dialects
Survey of English Dialects
The Survey of English Dialects was undertaken between 1950 and 1961 under the direction of Professor Harold Orton of the English department of the University of Leeds. It aimed to collect the full range of speech in England and Wales before local differences were to disappear...
(1949–1950), the University of Leeds
University of Leeds
The University of Leeds is a British Redbrick university located in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England...
has started work on a new project. In May 2007 the Arts and Humanities Research Council
Arts and Humanities Research Council
Established in April 2005 as successor to the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the Arts and Humanities Research Council is a British Research Council and non-departmental public body that provides approximately £102 million from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the...
awarded a grant to a team led by Sally Johnson, Professor of Linguistics and Phonetics at Leeds University, to study British regional dialects.
Johnson's team are sifting through a large collection of examples of regional slang words and phrases turned up by the "Voices project" run by the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
, in which they invited the public to send in examples of English still spoken throughout the country. The BBC Voices project also collected hundreds of news articles about how the British speak English from swearing through to items on language schools. This information will also be collated and analysed by Johnson's team both for content and for where it was reported. "Perhaps the most remarkable finding in the Voices study is that the English language is as diverse as ever, despite our increased mobility and constant exposure to other accents and dialects through TV and radio." Work by the team on this project is not expected to end before 2010. When covering the award of the grant on 1 June 2007, The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
stated:
Regional
The form of English most commonly associated with the upper classUpper class
In social science, the "upper class" is the group of people at the top of a social hierarchy. Members of an upper class may have great power over the allocation of resources and governmental policy in their area.- Historical meaning :...
in the southern counties of England is called Received Pronunciation
Received Pronunciation
Received Pronunciation , also called the Queen's English, Oxford English or BBC English, is the accent of Standard English in England, with a relationship to regional accents similar to the relationship in other European languages between their standard varieties and their regional forms...
(RP). It derives from a mixture of the Midland and Southern dialects which were spoken in London in the early modern period and is frequently used as a model for teaching English to foreign learners. Although speakers from elsewhere in England 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
Independent school (UK)
An independent school is a school that is not financed through the taxation system by local or national government and is instead funded by private sources, predominantly in the form of tuition charges, gifts and long-term charitable endowments, and so is not subject to the conditions imposed by...
English", or "BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
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.
In the South East there are significantly different accents; the London Cockney
Cockney
The term Cockney has both geographical and linguistic associations. Geographically and culturally, it often refers to working class Londoners, particularly those in the East End...
accent is strikingly different from RP and its rhyming slang can be (and was initially intended to be) difficult for outsiders to understand.
Estuary English
Estuary English
Estuary English is a dialect of English widely spoken in South East England, especially along the River Thames and its estuary. Phonetician John C. Wells defines Estuary English as "Standard English spoken with the accent of the southeast of England"...
has been gaining prominence in recent decades: it has some features of RP and some of Cockney. In London itself, the broad local accent is still changing, partly influenced by Caribbean speech. Communities migrating to the UK in recent decades have brought many more languages to the country. Surveys started in 1979 by the Inner London Education Authority
Inner London Education Authority
The Inner London Education Authority was the education authority for the 12 inner London boroughs from 1965 until its abolition in 1990.-History:...
discovered over 100 languages being spoken domestically by the families of the inner city's school children. As a result, London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
ers speak with a mixture of accents, depending on ethnicity, neighbourhood, class, age, upbringing, and sundry other factors, and Multicultural London English has emerged as a mixture of these influences.
Since the mass internal immigration
Immigration
Immigration is the act of foreigners passing or coming into a country for the purpose of permanent residence...
to Northamptonshire
Northamptonshire
Northamptonshire is a landlocked county in the English East Midlands, with a population of 629,676 as at the 2001 census. It has boundaries with the ceremonial counties of Warwickshire to the west, Leicestershire and Rutland to the north, Cambridgeshire to the east, Bedfordshire to the south-east,...
in the 1940s and its position between several major accent regions, it has become a source of various accent developments. In Northampton the older accent has been influenced by overspill Londoners. There is an accent known locally as the Kettering
Kettering
Kettering is a market town in the Borough of Kettering, Northamptonshire, England. It is situated about from London. Kettering is mainly situated on the west side of the River Ise, a tributary of the River Nene which meets at Wellingborough...
accent, which is a transitional accent between the East Midlands
East Midlands
The East Midlands is one of the regions of England, consisting of most of the eastern half of the traditional region of the Midlands. It encompasses the combined area of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Northamptonshire and most of Lincolnshire...
and East Anglia
East Anglia
East Anglia is a traditional name for a region of eastern England, named after an ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the Kingdom of the East Angles. The Angles took their name from their homeland Angeln, in northern Germany. East Anglia initially consisted of Norfolk and Suffolk, but upon the marriage of...
n. It is the last southern midland accent to use the broad "a" in words like bath/grass (i.e. barth/grarss). Conversely crass/plastic use a slender "a". A few miles northwest in Leicestershire the slender "a" becomes more widespread generally. In the town of Corby
Corby
Corby Town is a town and borough located in the county of Northamptonshire. Corby Town is 23 miles north-east of the county town, Northampton. The borough had a population of 53,174 at the 2001 Census; the town on its own accounted for 49,222 of this figure...
, five miles (8 km) north, one can find Corbyite, which unlike the Kettering accent, is largely influenced by the West Scottish accent. This is due to the influx of Scottish steelworkers.
In addition, most British people can to some degree temporarily "swing" their accent towards a more neutral form of English at will, to reduce difficulty where very different accents are involved, or when speaking to foreigners. This phenomenon is known in linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
as code shifting
Code-switching
In linguistics, code-switching is the concurrent use of more than one language, or language variety, in conversation. Multilinguals—people who speak more than one language—sometimes use elements of multiple languages in conversing with each other...
.
Standardisation
As with English around the world, the English language as used in the United Kingdom and the Republic of IrelandRepublic of Ireland
Ireland , described as the Republic of Ireland , is a sovereign state in Europe occupying approximately five-sixths of the island of the same name. Its capital is Dublin. Ireland, which had a population of 4.58 million in 2011, is a constitutional republic governed as a parliamentary democracy,...
is governed by convention rather than formal code: there is no equivalent body to the Académie française
Académie française
L'Académie française , also called the French Academy, is the pre-eminent French learned body on matters pertaining to the French language. The Académie was officially established in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. Suppressed in 1793 during the French Revolution,...
or the Real Academia Española
Real Academia Española
The Royal Spanish Academy is the official royal institution responsible for regulating the Spanish language. It is based in Madrid, Spain, but is affiliated with national language academies in twenty-one other hispanophone nations through the Association of Spanish Language Academies...
, and the authoritative dictionaries (for example, Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
LDOCE
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, first published by Longman in 1978. The dictionary is available in various formats: paper with a bundled DVD-Rom or freely online. The LDOCE is an Advanced Learner's English dictionary, providing definitions by using a restricted vocabulary, helping non...
, Chambers Dictionary
Chambers Dictionary
The Chambers Dictionary was first published by W. and R. Chambers as Chambers's English Dictionary in 1872. It was an expanded version of Chambers's Etymological Dictionary of 1867, compiled by James Donald...
, Collins Dictionary) record usage rather than prescribe it. In addition, vocabulary and usage change with time; words are freely borrowed from other languages and other strains of English, and neologisms are frequent.
For historical reasons dating back to the rise of London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
in the 9th century, the form of language spoken in London and the East Midlands
East Midlands
The East Midlands is one of the regions of England, consisting of most of the eastern half of the traditional region of the Midlands. It encompasses the combined area of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Northamptonshire and most of Lincolnshire...
became standard English within the Court, and ultimately became the basis for generally accepted use in the law, government, literature and education within Britain. Largely, modern British spelling was standardised in Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...
's A Dictionary of the English Language
A Dictionary of the English Language
Published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, is among the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language....
(1755), although previous writers had also played a significant role in this and much has changed since 1755. Scotland, which underwent parliamentary union
Acts of Union 1707
The Acts of Union were two Parliamentary Acts - the Union with Scotland Act passed in 1706 by the Parliament of England, and the Union with England Act passed in 1707 by the Parliament of Scotland - which put into effect the terms of the Treaty of Union that had been agreed on 22 July 1706,...
with England only in 1707, still has a few independent aspects of standardisation, especially within its autonomous legal system.
Since the early 20th century, numerous books by British authors intended as guides to English grammar and usage have been published, a few of which have achieved sufficient acclaim to have remained in print for long periods and to have been reissued in new editions after some decades. These include, most notably of all, Fowler's Modern English Usage and The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers
Ernest Gowers
Sir Ernest Arthur Gowers GCB GBE Hon. D.Litt Hon. ARIBA was a British civil servant, now best known for work on style guides for writing the English language.-Life:...
. Detailed guidance on many aspects of writing British English for publication is included in style guides issued by various publishers including The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
newspaper, the Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...
and the Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press
Cambridge University Press is the publishing business of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by Henry VIII in 1534, it is the world's oldest publishing house, and the second largest university press in the world...
, and others. The Oxford University Press guidelines were originally drafted as a single broadsheet page by Horace Henry Hart
Horace Hart
Horace Henry Hart was an English printer and biographer, best known as the author of Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers, first issued in 1893....
and were, at the time (1893) the first guide of their type in English; they were gradually expanded and eventually published, first as Hart's Rules
Hart's Rules
Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford was an authoritative reference book and style guide published in England by Oxford University Press...
and, most recently (in 2002), as part of The Oxford Manual of Style. Comparable in authority and stature to The Chicago Manual of Style
The Chicago Manual of Style
The Chicago Manual of Style is a style guide for American English published since 1906 by the University of Chicago Press. Its 16 editions have prescribed writing and citation styles widely used in publishing...
for published American English, the Oxford Manual is a fairly exhaustive standard for published British English, to which writers can turn in the absence of any specific document issued by the publishing house that will publish their work.
Glottal stop
In informal British English, it is common for the sound /t/, except at the beginning of words, to be replaced by a glottal stopGlottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
. Once regarded as a Cockney feature, it has become much more widespread. It is still stigmatised when used in words like later, but becoming very widespread at the end of words such as not (as in no/ʡ/ interested). Other consonants subject to this usage in Cockney English are p, as in pa/ʡ/er, k as in ba/ʡ/er and d, as in brea/ʡ/ before a vowel—brea/ʡ/ and bu/ʡ/er.
See also
- American and British English differencesAmerican and British English differencesThis is one of a series of articles about the differences between British English and American English, which, for the purposes of these articles, are defined as follows:...
- American EnglishAmerican EnglishAmerican English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States....
- Australian EnglishAustralian EnglishAustralian English is the name given to the group of dialects spoken in Australia that form a major variety of the English language....
- Canadian EnglishCanadian EnglishCanadian English is the variety of English spoken in Canada. English is the first language, or "mother tongue", of approximately 24 million Canadians , and more than 28 million are fluent in the language...
- Cornish EnglishAnglo-CornishAnglo-Cornish is a dialect of English spoken in Cornwall by Cornish people. Dialectal English spoken in Cornwall is to some extent influenced by Cornish grammar, and often includes words derived from the Cornish language...
- Cornish LanguageCornish languageCornish is a Brythonic Celtic language and a recognised minority language of the United Kingdom. Along with Welsh and Breton, it is directly descended from the ancient British language spoken throughout much of Britain before the English language came to dominate...
- English language in EnglandEnglish language in EnglandThe English language in England refers to the English language as spoken in England. These forms of English are a subsection of British English, as spoken throughout Great Britain. Other terms used to refer to the English language as spoken in England include:...
- Hiberno-EnglishHiberno-EnglishHiberno-English is the dialect of English written and spoken in Ireland .English was first brought to Ireland during the Norman invasion of the late 12th century. Initially it was mainly spoken in an area known as the Pale around Dublin, with Irish spoken throughout the rest of the country...
- Irish LanguageIrish languageIrish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...
- Languages in the United KingdomLanguages in the United KingdomThe de facto official language of the United Kingdom is English, which is spoken as the primary language of 95% of the UK population. Welsh is the second most spoken language in the United Kingdom.-Living:...
- New Zealand EnglishNew Zealand EnglishNew Zealand English is the dialect of the English language used in New Zealand.The English language was established in New Zealand by colonists during the 19th century. It is one of "the newest native-speaker variet[ies] of the English language in existence, a variety which has developed and...
- Regional accents of English
- Scots languageScots languageScots is the Germanic language variety spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster . It is sometimes called Lowland Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language variety spoken in most of the western Highlands and in the Hebrides.Since there are no universally accepted...
- Scottish EnglishScottish EnglishScottish English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Scotland. It may or may not be considered distinct from the Scots language. It is always considered distinct from Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language....
- Telford accentTelford accentThe accent that is spoken in Telford, England is unique but not dissimilar to accents of the surrounding regions.Telford speech could essentially be described as a mixture between that of the rest of Shropshire and that of the nearby Black Country region. It can also be described as a variety of...
- Terminology of the British Isles
- Ulster English
- Ulster Scots languageUlster Scots languageUlster Scots or Ulster-Scots generally refers to the dialects of Scots spoken in parts of Ulster in Ireland. Some definitions of Ulster Scots may also include Standard English spoken with an Ulster Scots accent...
- Welsh languageWelsh languageWelsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic languages spoken natively in Wales, by some along the Welsh border in England, and in Y Wladfa...
External links
- Sounds Familiar? Examples of regional accents and dialects across the UK on the British LibraryBritish LibraryThe British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...
's 'Sounds Familiar' website - Accents and dialects from the British Library Sound Archive
- Accents of English from Around the World Hear and compare how the same 110 words are pronounced in 50 English accents from around the world - instantaneous playback online
- The Septic's Companion: A British Slang Dictionary an online dictionary of British slang, viewable alphabetically or by category