A History of English Language

The nineteenth century and after 297
people in all parts of the country. It is a class rather than a regional dialect. This is not the
same as the spoken standard of the United States or Canada or Australia. The spread of
English to many parts of the world has changed our conception of what constitutes
Standard English. The growth of countries like the United States and Canada and the
political independence of countries that were once British colonies force us to admit that
the educated speech of these vast areas is just as “standard” as that of London or Oxford.
It is perhaps inevitable that people will feel a preference for the pronunciation and forms
of expression that they are accustomed to, but to criticize the British for omitting many of
their r’s or the Americans for pronouncing them betrays an equally unscientific
provincialism irrespective of which side of the Atlantic indulges in the criticism. The
hope is sometimes expressed that we might have a world standard to which all parts of
the English-speaking world would try to conform. So far as the spoken language is
concerned it is too much to expect that the marked differences of pronunciation that
distinguish the speech of, let us say, Britain, Australia, India, and the United States will
ever be reduced to one uniform mode. We must recognize that in the last 200 years
English has become a cosmopolitan tongue and must cultivate a cosmopolitan attitude
toward its various standard forms. 9 228. English Dialects.
In addition to the educated standard in each major division of the English-speaking world
there are local forms of the language known as regional dialects. In the newer countries
where English has spread in modern times these are not so numerous or so pronounced in
their individuality as they are in the British Isles. The English introduced into the
colonies was a mixture of dialects in which the peculiarities of each were fused in a
common speech. Except perhaps in the United States, there has scarcely been time for
new regional differences to grow up, and although one region is sometimes separated
from another by the breadth of a continent, the improvements in transportation and
communication have tended to keep down differences that might otherwise have arisen.
But in Great Britain such differences are very great. They go back to the earliest period of
the language and reflect conditions that prevailed at a time when travel was difftcult and
communication was limited between districts relatively close together. Even among the
educated the speech of northern England differs considerably from that of the south. In
words such as butter, cut, gull, and some the southern vowel [Λ] occurs in the north as
[U], and in chaff, grass, and path the southern retracted vowel [a:] occurs as short [a] in
northern dialects. In the great Midland district one distinguishes an eastern variety and a
western, as well as a central type lying between. But such a classification of the English
9
The issues are clearly presented and debated by Randolph Quirk, “Language Varieties and
Standard Language,” English Today, 21 (1990), 3–10, and Braj B.Kachru, “Liberation Linguistics
and the ‘Quirk Concern,”’ English Today, 25 (1991), 3–13.