A History of Modern Colloquial English

Abstract

At the risk of offending certain susceptibilities this type of English must be further described and particularized.As regards its name, it may be called Good English, Well-bred English, Upper-class English, and it is sometimes, too vaguely, referred to as Standard English.'For reasons which will soon appear, it is proposed here to call it Received Standard English. This form of speech differs from the various Regional Dialects in many ways, but most remarkably in this, that it is not confined to any locality, nor associated in any one's mind with any special geographical area ;it is in origin, as we shall see, the product of social conditions, and is essentially a Class Dialect. Received Standard is spoken, within certain social boundaries, with an extraordinary degree of uniformity, all over the country. It is not any more the English of London, as is sometimes mistakenly maintained, than it is that of York, or Exeter, or Cirencester, VARIETIES OF SPOKEN ENGLISH 3or Oxford, or Chester, or Leicester. In each and all of these places, and in many others throughout the length and breadth of England, ReceivedStandard is spoken among the same kind of people, and it is spoken everywhere, allowing for individual idiosyncrasies, to all intents and purposes, in precisely the same way.It has been suggested that perhaps the main factor in this singular degree of uniformity is the custom of sending youths from certain social strata to the great public schools. Ifwe were to say that Received English at the present day is Public School English, we should not be far wrong.It has been said that Received Standard is one from among many forms of English which must be grouped under Class Dialects. By the side of this type there exist innumerable varieties, all more or less resembling Received Standard, but differing from it in all sorts of subtle ways, which the speaker of the latter might find it hard to analyse and specify, unless he happened to be a practised phonetician, but which he perceives easily enough. These varieties are certainly not Regional Dialects, and, just as certainly, they are not Received Standard.Until recently it has been usual to regard them as so far identical with this, that the differences might be ignored, and what we here call Received Standard, and a large part of these variants that we are now considering, were all grouped together under the general title of Standard English, or Educated English. This old classification of English Spfeech, as it now exists, into Provincial (Regional)Dialects, and Standard or Educated English, was very inadequate, since it ignored the existence of Class Dialects, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it ignored the existence of more than one Class Dialect, and included under a single title many varieties which differ as much from what we now call Received Standard as this does from the Regional Dialects.The fact is that these types of English, which are not Provincial or Regional Dialects, and which are also not Received Standard, are in reality offshoots ...