![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mcgillianaireThis article originally appeared in The Times on 6 April but I've copied it below because it's behind a pay wall. Like it or not, 21st century multicultural London is changing English more than anywhere else in the world.
Young people are shaping the future of the English language in an unexpected way (Photolibrary.com)
Helen Rumbelow
April 6 2011 12:01AM
As young Britons shape the future of our language in ever more radical ways, the UK is no longer the true custodian of the Queen’s English
Here is a simple test, for which there is a one-word answer. The word you choose says something very revealing about you, and about the future of our language and national identity.
Ready? I thought I was. I was standing in the British Library in London. Jonnie Robinson, its sociolinguistics curator, asks me if I want to try.
“You see an attractive person. What do you call them, one slang word, beginning with ‘P’?” The British Library is not the kind of place you shout out at bootilicious ladies walking by, yet still, I think for a second, I can’t come up with anything but “pretty” and it’s not even slang.
Are you with me? That means you’re old, well, at least over the age of 20. You probably believe in the purity of the language of Shakespeare. You harrumph at the way English is corrupted by the Americans. You know that transatlantic speech — as featured in the most pervasive films, music and television — is the biggest influence on Britain’s otherwise great tongue. You are, in short, a dinosaur. Robinson shakes his head. “Ask any teenager, they’ll say ‘peng’.”
Peng? I repeat, Lady Bracknell-style. I find this hard to believe, but later I perform the Peng Test on friends and acquaintances. Sure enough, every teenager (and a smaller group of those that parent or teach teenagers) knows it, and the rest of the country looks as befuddled as a High Court judge.
“It doesn’t matter where the teenagers come from,” Robinson says. Yesterday I had an all-female, all-white group of girls from Manchester Grammar School. They all said peng. It’s all classes, regions, everywhere.” For extra points, a lot of them said “well peng”, which, Robinson says, shows how quickly Jamaican patois has been absorbed into contemporary British speech.
Of course, teenagers have always picked up bits of ridiculous slang, in the same way that they pick up smoking and unsuitable friends; it’s their job. But what the just complete Evolving English project at the British Library has revealed is more than that: a generational divide, with young people shaping the future of English in unexpected ways. Those that fail the Peng Test probably also fail to understand the way our speech — and therefore our national culture — is influenced and shaped. It turns out that Americans are, contrary to their all-bad reputation, preserving the old-fashioned way of speaking English; they are the custodians of the Queen’s Speech. It is the modern Brits who are the radical ones, responding not to American- English, but the English spoken by Caribbean and Asian immigrants.
“There are about 400 million native English speakers. But 1.4 billion speak it as a second language. Those numbers have crossed over relatively recently, after the Second World War. Since then the gap has accelerated. But the fact that we native speakers are the minority still takes people by surprise.”
To chart this, Robinson has collected as many voices speaking today’s English as he can. At the end of the exhibit at the British Library were dark little booths, each furnished with a copy of Mr Tickle. It looked like a seedy facility for people who get very excited by Mr Tickle’s tickling, but no. Here people were asked to read the text into a microphone and answer some questions about slang. “Mr Tickle has all the consonant and vowel sounds in English and not just British-English. It is absolutely linguistically valid. Mr Sneeze just didn’t work, I tried.” Robinson will never run out of bedtime stories: together with online contributions from all over the world, he has recorded more than 10,000 Mr Tickles, held in the databank for researchers from the future.
“We did something similar in 2005,” he says. “We asked the question about slang for attractive and out of thousands of answers, we recorded peng only twice, both Black Caribbean young people from the South East. This time, just six years on, I listened to a sample of 50 and we had half a dozen pengs. But this time the only thing they had in common was that they were young.”
Another word on the move is garage. Say it out loud. Did the second syllable rhyme with that in mirage? Mine did, and Robinson looks at me pityingly.
“Hmn, yes, you are unusual,” he says. “That puts you in the same camp as your grandparents.”
It is also the preferred pronunciation by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), true to the word’s French origins. And, according to a sample of the Evolving English project, it is also the preferred pronunciation in America, where more than five out of six say it that way. But the British are changing. Young people have taken the collective decision to rhyme it with “marriage”, and the sticklers for the old way will soon be gone for ever.
Think about the controversy, then say that word. The OED states that the only way to say “controversy” is to put the stress on the first syllable. In Robinson’s 2011 survey, this was the way all Americans said it. But that way is dying out here: conTROversy is a mark of youth. “This change is happening only in the UK,” Robinson says.
Ditto, harass, or applicable. Oldies HArass, where APplicable. Young people have changed the pronunciation to haRASS and apPLIcable. It drives their grannies nuts.
“Older people I know get really annoyed on this one. They often blame the Americans for the way it’s transformed here in the UK. But hey presto, yet again it’s the British changing, not the Americans.” And we’re not even getting into the war zone that exists over “scone”, the linguistic equivalent of the Gaza Strip. Suffice to say, 100 per cent of Americans in Robinson’s project side with the older English way, the way your great-aunt says it, and the way cited first in the OED. This rhymes scone with “bone”. Yet two thirds of a sample of the British in Robinson’s project now rhyme it with “gone” — myself included since anyone saying it to rhyme with bone makes me want to vomit over the afternoon tea.
In a lot of ways this process has been going on for centuries: with Britain’s colonial outposts retaining more conservative speech. The way Americans drop the “h” on “herb” has to be their single most annoying characteristic, but Robinson surprises me by saying you have to go back only six or seven generations before that original French pronunciation was the standard way in Britain too.
We all used to shorten the “a” in bath and grass, until, 400 years ago, “an influential group of young Londoners” lengthened it to the long “a” in “baaath”. The old way is now heard only in those distant outposts: the North of England and America. There they don’t speak funny, they speak the real language of Shakespeare.
“A few hundred years ago we would have sounded very similar to Americans, but then we diverged and are continuing to diverge away from that,” Robinson says.
“We do sometimes use American vocabulary, but it is very context-specific. You may order a regular fries in McDonald’s because that’s what’s on the menu, but anywhere else it’s small chips. You don’t see a Matt Damon film and start talking like him to your mates. If you read The Times cover to cover you would struggle to find more than a couple of examples of an American word for which there is a British alternative.” This is because, Robinson says, the “biggest impact on language change is face-to-face contact. That is more important than TV and films”. And because, at any given British secondary school, there will be more Asian-English or Jamaican-English speakers than Americans, that is the direction in which English is changing. Which is where we return to peng.
David Crystal is one of the world’s foremost writers on English, one of his 100 books is The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. “Americans are blamed for everything, but beneath a language question is a social or political one. The reason why people don’t like Americanisms is that they don’t like Americans, on some level,” Crystal says.
Most of today’s word-sex is still going on in London and it is between Jamaican, Cockney and Asian styles.
“There are between 200 and 300 languages spoken in London alone. People often say English accents and dialects are dying out, but more accurately it is a small number of rural accents dying out, replaced by new urban ones. Some of which cool British youngsters find extremely enticing.”
For instance, Jamaican and many Asian-English speakers use a different stress pattern, stressing each syllable of a word instead of just one (“syllable-timed”). This gives a “rat-a-tat-tat” effect instead of the “tum-ti-tum” (stress-timed) of British English. British-English speakers would say “IND-ia”, while Indian-English speakers would say something more like “IN-DI-A”. It’s one reason, Crystal says, why we find the Indian speakers in call centres so hard to understand.
“Rapping is a development of that Jamaican stress-pattern. And now British kids, who have never used syllable-timed speech, can use it quite naturally,” Crystal says.
Many Asian languages also have what linguists call a “question tag”, a one-word device to turn any sentence into a question. British-Asians have recently adopted the Cockney-sounding “innit?” to stand in for their native question tag.
“You don’t get American teenagers saying innit, but most British teenagers now will, at least ironically. British-Asian speakers of all ages will say it, but not older native English speakers,” Robinson says.
The hip-hop group N-Dubz, a trio of Irish-English-Jamaican-Cypriots from North London, write in what linguists call Multicultural London English. The opening line of their song, Defeat You, “Listen to I, innit?” is only four words, but those four words are what results when Jamaica and Asia mates with Cockney. Those four words are also arranged in such a way as to annoy the pants off the listener’s parents.
Eventually, most sociolinguists believe, sheer weight of numbers will force native English speakers to change the way the English-as-a-second- language crowd do things. For example, a few pieces of advice may be eradicated in favour of what some Chinese-English speakers call “advices”. More efficient that way. Don’t panic, don’t mourn. It’s the future, and it’s the way it has always been. Innit?
Young people are shaping the future of the English language in an unexpected way (Photolibrary.com)
Helen Rumbelow
April 6 2011 12:01AM
As young Britons shape the future of our language in ever more radical ways, the UK is no longer the true custodian of the Queen’s English
Here is a simple test, for which there is a one-word answer. The word you choose says something very revealing about you, and about the future of our language and national identity.
Ready? I thought I was. I was standing in the British Library in London. Jonnie Robinson, its sociolinguistics curator, asks me if I want to try.
“You see an attractive person. What do you call them, one slang word, beginning with ‘P’?” The British Library is not the kind of place you shout out at bootilicious ladies walking by, yet still, I think for a second, I can’t come up with anything but “pretty” and it’s not even slang.
Are you with me? That means you’re old, well, at least over the age of 20. You probably believe in the purity of the language of Shakespeare. You harrumph at the way English is corrupted by the Americans. You know that transatlantic speech — as featured in the most pervasive films, music and television — is the biggest influence on Britain’s otherwise great tongue. You are, in short, a dinosaur. Robinson shakes his head. “Ask any teenager, they’ll say ‘peng’.”
Peng? I repeat, Lady Bracknell-style. I find this hard to believe, but later I perform the Peng Test on friends and acquaintances. Sure enough, every teenager (and a smaller group of those that parent or teach teenagers) knows it, and the rest of the country looks as befuddled as a High Court judge.
“It doesn’t matter where the teenagers come from,” Robinson says. Yesterday I had an all-female, all-white group of girls from Manchester Grammar School. They all said peng. It’s all classes, regions, everywhere.” For extra points, a lot of them said “well peng”, which, Robinson says, shows how quickly Jamaican patois has been absorbed into contemporary British speech.
Of course, teenagers have always picked up bits of ridiculous slang, in the same way that they pick up smoking and unsuitable friends; it’s their job. But what the just complete Evolving English project at the British Library has revealed is more than that: a generational divide, with young people shaping the future of English in unexpected ways. Those that fail the Peng Test probably also fail to understand the way our speech — and therefore our national culture — is influenced and shaped. It turns out that Americans are, contrary to their all-bad reputation, preserving the old-fashioned way of speaking English; they are the custodians of the Queen’s Speech. It is the modern Brits who are the radical ones, responding not to American- English, but the English spoken by Caribbean and Asian immigrants.
“There are about 400 million native English speakers. But 1.4 billion speak it as a second language. Those numbers have crossed over relatively recently, after the Second World War. Since then the gap has accelerated. But the fact that we native speakers are the minority still takes people by surprise.”
To chart this, Robinson has collected as many voices speaking today’s English as he can. At the end of the exhibit at the British Library were dark little booths, each furnished with a copy of Mr Tickle. It looked like a seedy facility for people who get very excited by Mr Tickle’s tickling, but no. Here people were asked to read the text into a microphone and answer some questions about slang. “Mr Tickle has all the consonant and vowel sounds in English and not just British-English. It is absolutely linguistically valid. Mr Sneeze just didn’t work, I tried.” Robinson will never run out of bedtime stories: together with online contributions from all over the world, he has recorded more than 10,000 Mr Tickles, held in the databank for researchers from the future.
“We did something similar in 2005,” he says. “We asked the question about slang for attractive and out of thousands of answers, we recorded peng only twice, both Black Caribbean young people from the South East. This time, just six years on, I listened to a sample of 50 and we had half a dozen pengs. But this time the only thing they had in common was that they were young.”
Another word on the move is garage. Say it out loud. Did the second syllable rhyme with that in mirage? Mine did, and Robinson looks at me pityingly.
“Hmn, yes, you are unusual,” he says. “That puts you in the same camp as your grandparents.”
It is also the preferred pronunciation by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), true to the word’s French origins. And, according to a sample of the Evolving English project, it is also the preferred pronunciation in America, where more than five out of six say it that way. But the British are changing. Young people have taken the collective decision to rhyme it with “marriage”, and the sticklers for the old way will soon be gone for ever.
Think about the controversy, then say that word. The OED states that the only way to say “controversy” is to put the stress on the first syllable. In Robinson’s 2011 survey, this was the way all Americans said it. But that way is dying out here: conTROversy is a mark of youth. “This change is happening only in the UK,” Robinson says.
Ditto, harass, or applicable. Oldies HArass, where APplicable. Young people have changed the pronunciation to haRASS and apPLIcable. It drives their grannies nuts.
“Older people I know get really annoyed on this one. They often blame the Americans for the way it’s transformed here in the UK. But hey presto, yet again it’s the British changing, not the Americans.” And we’re not even getting into the war zone that exists over “scone”, the linguistic equivalent of the Gaza Strip. Suffice to say, 100 per cent of Americans in Robinson’s project side with the older English way, the way your great-aunt says it, and the way cited first in the OED. This rhymes scone with “bone”. Yet two thirds of a sample of the British in Robinson’s project now rhyme it with “gone” — myself included since anyone saying it to rhyme with bone makes me want to vomit over the afternoon tea.
In a lot of ways this process has been going on for centuries: with Britain’s colonial outposts retaining more conservative speech. The way Americans drop the “h” on “herb” has to be their single most annoying characteristic, but Robinson surprises me by saying you have to go back only six or seven generations before that original French pronunciation was the standard way in Britain too.
We all used to shorten the “a” in bath and grass, until, 400 years ago, “an influential group of young Londoners” lengthened it to the long “a” in “baaath”. The old way is now heard only in those distant outposts: the North of England and America. There they don’t speak funny, they speak the real language of Shakespeare.
“A few hundred years ago we would have sounded very similar to Americans, but then we diverged and are continuing to diverge away from that,” Robinson says.
“We do sometimes use American vocabulary, but it is very context-specific. You may order a regular fries in McDonald’s because that’s what’s on the menu, but anywhere else it’s small chips. You don’t see a Matt Damon film and start talking like him to your mates. If you read The Times cover to cover you would struggle to find more than a couple of examples of an American word for which there is a British alternative.” This is because, Robinson says, the “biggest impact on language change is face-to-face contact. That is more important than TV and films”. And because, at any given British secondary school, there will be more Asian-English or Jamaican-English speakers than Americans, that is the direction in which English is changing. Which is where we return to peng.
David Crystal is one of the world’s foremost writers on English, one of his 100 books is The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. “Americans are blamed for everything, but beneath a language question is a social or political one. The reason why people don’t like Americanisms is that they don’t like Americans, on some level,” Crystal says.
Most of today’s word-sex is still going on in London and it is between Jamaican, Cockney and Asian styles.
“There are between 200 and 300 languages spoken in London alone. People often say English accents and dialects are dying out, but more accurately it is a small number of rural accents dying out, replaced by new urban ones. Some of which cool British youngsters find extremely enticing.”
For instance, Jamaican and many Asian-English speakers use a different stress pattern, stressing each syllable of a word instead of just one (“syllable-timed”). This gives a “rat-a-tat-tat” effect instead of the “tum-ti-tum” (stress-timed) of British English. British-English speakers would say “IND-ia”, while Indian-English speakers would say something more like “IN-DI-A”. It’s one reason, Crystal says, why we find the Indian speakers in call centres so hard to understand.
“Rapping is a development of that Jamaican stress-pattern. And now British kids, who have never used syllable-timed speech, can use it quite naturally,” Crystal says.
Many Asian languages also have what linguists call a “question tag”, a one-word device to turn any sentence into a question. British-Asians have recently adopted the Cockney-sounding “innit?” to stand in for their native question tag.
“You don’t get American teenagers saying innit, but most British teenagers now will, at least ironically. British-Asian speakers of all ages will say it, but not older native English speakers,” Robinson says.
The hip-hop group N-Dubz, a trio of Irish-English-Jamaican-Cypriots from North London, write in what linguists call Multicultural London English. The opening line of their song, Defeat You, “Listen to I, innit?” is only four words, but those four words are what results when Jamaica and Asia mates with Cockney. Those four words are also arranged in such a way as to annoy the pants off the listener’s parents.
Eventually, most sociolinguists believe, sheer weight of numbers will force native English speakers to change the way the English-as-a-second- language crowd do things. For example, a few pieces of advice may be eradicated in favour of what some Chinese-English speakers call “advices”. More efficient that way. Don’t panic, don’t mourn. It’s the future, and it’s the way it has always been. Innit?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-04-27 06:58 am (UTC)English in particular (as far as I know, which isn't very far) has always been an astoundingly nimble language relatively happy to borrow words from conquerors and conquered and relatively tolerant of regional variations (if I'm not mistaken there are still some Celtic-origin words used in English in northern England such as crag, meaning rock (?)).
Americans successfully standardised their language early on, when there were only a few white Americans around. The English did attempt it (for the purposes of standardised legal language if I remember correctly) but it had always been a naturally variant language and the resulting compromises let to our inconsistent spelling. England had significant regional and class differences. America at the time didn't.
So the Americans have a historical advantage in keeping their language from evolving rapidly. But is that particularly desirable?
Adopting new words are an English tradition. One early example that comes to mind would be 'skin'. The English word for skin was hide. The Viking word for skin was skin. We now use both words to mean slightly different things. English has always done that and will continue to do so. I don't see that as a bad thing. And if some words get replaced.. that's fine too, I think.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-27 11:00 am (UTC)I think this is true for most languages and was certainly true for English as well but has perhaps changed post-WWII.
if I'm not mistaken there are still...
Yep!
I don't see that as a bad thing. And if some words get replaced.. that's fine too, I think.
Agreed. I love the fact English is influenced by so many other languages, thanks to the Empire. Long may it continue!
no subject
Date: 2011-04-27 08:28 am (UTC)Eh? That's just counterfactual. I never hear HArass in the US. That's one of those pronunciations like conTROversy that leaps out of a BBC show as being British and not American.
As for ApPLIcable, the "newer" is surely the more common pronunciation here and has been for an age. Sometimes I hear "APplicable" but it's distinctly uncommon.
It's a bit silly to claim that US English pronunciation is not changing as is British English, as if this is somehow not an immigrant society and that the language is not constantly being influenced. Or not by immmigration - there's a strange and rather inexplicable vowel shift going on right now among whites in the upper great lakes that means the speech there is already quite different than when I grew up. The only way it would seem otherwise is by being very selective with the examples.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-27 11:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-27 06:25 pm (UTC)There's certainly a kind of English now they call Globish or Globish English, which is spoken by non-English-as-a-first-language speakers, but I wonder if Globish is very uniform at all. Probably there are many Globishes.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-27 06:50 pm (UTC)My suspicion is that the youf of Toronto (and GTA) are developing a slang/language similar to the Jafaican (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English) that has developed here in London thanks to its growing immigrant population. More than half the kids going to school in Inner London are immigrants. In twenty years that's going to have a dramatic effect on the way English is spoken here as compared with the rest of the UK, particularly rural areas.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-27 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-27 06:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-27 06:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-27 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-27 09:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-27 10:07 am (UTC)And yes, I had to look up "peng". I really did have no idea about that one.
no subject
Date: 2011-04-27 11:21 am (UTC)As for "peng", I was going to post a poll about it tomorrow but I must admit I knew what it meant before reading the article. I try to keep in touch with as much English teen slang from all corners of the globe but it is not an easy task now that I'm not one any more!
no subject
Date: 2011-04-27 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-04-28 06:54 am (UTC)On a more germane level, the discussion of how to pronounce "garage" was interesting. I must be at some transitional point, since the thing where you park a car always rhymes with "mirage", but the style of music which features young Brits rapping in slang is always going to rhyme with "marriage".
I assume it does that because the style of music bands like the Strokes play rhymes with "mirage", since it was in such a location that their musical ancestors first played.