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Band 33 (2008) Heft 2 Special Issue Broadcast English - Past, Present And Future Guest editors: Jürg Schwyter (Université de Lausanne) Didier Maillat (Université de Fribourg) Christian Mair (Universität Freiburg) Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Lynda Mugglestone Spoken English and the BBC: In the Beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Jürg Rainer Schwyter Setting a Standard: Early BBC Language Policy and the Advisory Committee on Spoken English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Catherine Sangster The Work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit in the 21st Century . . . . . . 251 Hamish Norbrook The English of Broadcast News: When English is Not the First Language of the Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 Jennifer Price New News Old News: A Sociophonetic Study of Spoken Australian English in News Broadcast Speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Didier Maillat “Broadcast Yourself! ” The Future of Broadcast English in an IT Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311 Inhalt 190 Reviews Eva Maria Eberl Manuela Wagner, First Steps to Communication: A Pragmatic Analysis. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2006 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 Dagmar Deuber John Holm and Peter L. Patrick (eds.), Comparative Creole Syntax: Parallel Outlines of 18 Creole Grammars. (Westminster Creolistics Series 7). London: Battlebridge, 2007. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338 Alwin Fill Christina Sanchez, Consociation and Dissociation. An Empirical Study of Word-Family Integration in English and German. Tübingen: Gunter Narr 2008 . . . 341 Notes on Editors and Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345 Der gesamte Inhalt der AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Band 1, 1976 - Band 32, 2007 ist nach Autoren alphabetisch geordnet abrufbar unter http: / / www-gewi.uni-graz.at/ staff/ kettemann This journal is abstracted in: ESSE (Norwich), MLA Bibliography (New York, NY), C doc du CNRS (Paris), CCL (Frankfurt), NCELL (Göttingen), JSJ (Philadelphia, PA), ERIC Clearinghouse on Lang and Ling (Washington, DC), LLBA (San Diego), ABELL (London). Gefördert vom Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur in Wien, der Steiermärkischen Landesregierung und der Stadt Graz Anfragen, Kommentare, Kritik, Mitteilungen und Manuskripte werden an den Herausgeber erbeten (Adresse siehe Umschlaginnenseite). Erscheint halbjährlich. Bezugspreis jährlich 76,- (Vorzugspreis für private Leser 54,-) zuzügl. Postgebühren. Einzelheft 42,-. Die Bezugsdauer verlängert sich jeweils um ein Jahr, wenn bis zum 15. November keine Abbestellung vorliegt. © 2008 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Dischingerweg 5, D-72070 Tübingen E-mail: info@narr.de Internet: www.narr.de Die in der Zeitschrift veröffentlichten Beiträge sind urheberrechtlich geschützt. Alle Rechte, insbesondere das der Übersetzung in fremde Sprachen, sind vorbehalten: Kein Teil dieser Zeitschrift darf ohne schriftliche Genehmigung des Verlages in irgendeiner Form - durch Fotokopie, Mikrofilm oder andere Verfahren - reproduziert oder in eine von Maschinen, insbesondere von Datenverarbeitungsanlagen, verwendbare Sprache übertragen werden. Printed in Germany ISSN 0171-5410 1 See, for example, Leitner (1979), Zimmermann (1982) and Hendy (2007) for Britain and the BBC, Leitner (1984) and Delbridge (1999) for the ABC in Australia, Engelman (1996) and Hilmes (1997) for American Broadcasting, Bell (1983, 1991) for New Zealand, and Escoffey (1974) and Norbrook and Ricketts (1997) for the contribution of radio to (English) language teaching. Herbert (1997) charts some general changes in English-language broadcasting in Britain, the United States and Australia throughout the 20th century, and McArthur (1992: sub verbum) is a good starting-point for individual English-language broadcasters and their linguistic policies. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Introduction To mark the foundation of the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English 80 years ago in June 2006, the Section d’anglais and the Institut de linguistique et des sciences du langage (ILSL) of the University of Lausanne hosted a two-day conference on Broadcast English Past, Present, and Future. The conference’s scholarly aim was two-fold: on the one hand, to look at Broadcast English itself through time and chart its origins and main developments; and on the other hand, to investigate some of the linguistic processes that lay behind the coinage and diffusion of a kind of ‘broadcast style’, that is, generification, language standardisation and standardisation ideologies. The current volume brings together a selection of those conference papers, in much expanded form, that concern themselves with the first of those two aims. Although there exists a host of works, articles and book chapters on individual broadcasters’ language policies at a particular time 1 , Broadcast English Past, Present, and Future tries to give a somewhat more coherent chronological account - with its main focus on the United Kingdom and the BBC - of language issues from the emergence of large-scale radio broadcasting in the early 1920s to the present day and beyond. The volume thus includes not only two papers on spoken English and the early BBC but also the views on more recent and even current questions of language by two BBC insiders. Moreover, the volume contains a chapter on Australian broadcast English as an original off-shoot from Britain that eventually had to find its own way as well as a look into the future, especially with respect to Introduction 192 the role of the new(est) electronic media in deconstructing a rather monolithic notion of ‘broadcast English’. The six papers can thus be read individually, that is, as self-contained pieces concerned with their individual focus, but the volume as a whole is also conceived as a coherent unit, giving the reader an overview of the main linguistic topics and problems that broadcasters, and their listeners, have been and still are confronted with on an almost daily basis. The editors hope that this approach will address a broad readership: linguists, broadcasters and interested radio listeners alike. Consequently, technical linguistic terms and concepts are used only when necessary and then are either explained or should be self-evident. The volume begins with Lynda Mugglestone’s essay on ‘Spoken English and the BBC: In the Beginning’ which explores the inter-connection of language attitudes, cultural values and stereotypes of the BBC in the 1920s and British society at large. Far from having been confronted with a ‘blank slate’ upon its foundation in October 1922, as John Reith, the BBC’s first Managing Director, asserted and as was popular belief at the time, the BBC clearly intersected with a number of pre-existing agendas that included a hierarchical structuring of culture into high and low and of language into standard and regional. This fact influenced not only what was broadcast but also how it was broadcast - the latter of which became ever more important with the emergence of the BBC announcer as a new and separate occupation. BBCinternal discussions about linguistic standards thus became explicit and the BBC increasingly saw itself not only as a linguistic role model, to which its listeners could and should ‘ascend’, but also as an actual ‘standardiser’ of spoken English. This eventually led, in 1926, to the formation of the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English. Jürg Schwyter, in ‘Setting a Standard: Early BBC Language Policy and the Advisory Committee on Spoken English’, discusses not only the history and linguistic aims of that body, but also the various reasons for its failure. He shows that the initial dogmatic prescriptivism, whose goal it was to find, fix and diffuse the ‘best’ pronunciation variants and thus also achieve complete linguistic consistency among BBC announcers and newsreaders, soon gave way to a more pragmatic approach: the listening public’s reaction to BBC language policy was increasingly taken into account, the Advisory Committee itself was expanded and eventually included a Specialist Sub- Committee consisting entirely of professional linguists, and the main focus of attention was turned away from regulating pronunciation of general English to the pronunciation of English as well as foreign place and personal names. Ultimately however, Schwyter argues, the Committee stumbled over mistakenly treating Received Pronunciation (RP) in terms of fixity rather than focus; when this was eventually realized, the Committee was deprived of its raison d’être. Introduction 193 The BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English was not reactivated after the end of the Second World War; instead, a much smaller BBC-internal Pronunciation Unit was to emerge in the 1940s. Catherine Sangster’s contribution, ‘The Work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit in the 21st Century’, maps the development of the post-war Pronunciation Unit and then concentrates on present-day policies. Sangster shows how in the latter half of the 20th century the Unit not only underwent linguistic professionalisation (which is most evident in its recruitment policy and criteria) but above all how its remit had changed since the days of the Advisory Committee. Currently the Pronunciation Unit consists of three full-time pronunciation linguists, including Sangster herself, all academically trained phoneticians with extensive knowledge of modern languages. They do not give out mandatory pronunciations, as did the pre-war Advisory Committee, but instead research pronunciations and merely advise BBC staff on any words, names and phrases from any language that they may come across. To do this successfully, the Unit works within a set of clear pronunciation policies and research methods and its findings are made available to BBC staff through an on-line pronunciation database. Hamish Norbrook, in his ‘The English of Broadcast News: When English is not the First Language of the Audience’, also provides us with a BBCinternal view on language matters. Having worked for the BBC’s English Language Teaching Unit for more than 30 years, Norbrook illustrates how the news, arguably the most important output of international broadcasters such as the BBC, can be used to help non-native speakers to maintain or improve their level of English. News bulletins are particularly apt for this task because of their structural predictability and controlled language use. The BBC undertook various initiatives to this end, such as for example ‘Slow News’, that is, a lexically and syntactically simplified version of the day’s news read at three quarters of the normal speed, and, more recently, the extensive use of new technologies such as the BBC Learning English website with its news-focused discussion groups. With Africa as an example, Norbrook thus strongly argues for better knowledge of the needs of non-native speakers and shows how this could benefit listeners and broadcasters alike. The last two papers in the volume shift their focus away from Britain and the BBC. In ‘New News Old News: A Socio-Phonetic Study of Spoken Australian English in News Broadcast Speech’, Jennifer Price analyses some of the main changes in Australian newsreaders’ speech that have taken place since the 1950s. Radio broadcasting began in Australia in 1924; and when the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) was established in 1932 the BBC served as model in almost all respects, ranging from the use of the RP accent on air to a Standing Committee on Spoken English. Today, however, Australian newsreaders use an accent that clearly identifies them as Australian. With the help of instrumental analysis to support auditory impressions, Introduction 194 2 The editors would like to thank the BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, for kindly granting permission to quote extensively from BBC-copyrighted documents, and Lenny Kaye Bugayong for her invaluable help with the layout and the formatting of this volume. Above all, however, we gratefully acknowledge the generous financial support for the 2006 Broadcast English conference by the University of Lausanne Faculté des Lettres, the British Council Switzerland, and Swiss Virtual Campus; without them the idea, conception and fruitful debates underlying this AAA special issue would not have been possible. Price investigates vowel quality (three monophthongs and two diphthongs) and intonation patterns from three speaker groups of Australian newsreaders. Her vowel data show a clear shift away from RP to General or Broad Australian English from about the mid-1970s, whereas intonation patterns seem to become more ‘American-sounding’ as is evident from the more informal commercial FM radio news in Australia. Price’s essay demonstrates how broadcast organizations - and their language policies - were affected by a shift away from norm-dependent RPbased early BBC models to models of norm-developing local standards. This process is likely to be accelerated through the so-called New Media. In ‘”Broadcast Yourself! ” The Future of Broadcast English in an IT Age’, Didier Maillat charts the ‘democratisation’ of broadcasting through the Internet and the effect this enormous growth of multiple, often uncontrolled and very diverse broadcasting sources has on the language. He shows that, under these new conditions, the traditional, often state-owned radio and television broadcasters no longer function as gatekeepers and thus quasi-official promoters of the standard language. Rather, he argues, IT communication leads to a kind of language ‘de-standardisation’ which therefore not only contributes to variation and, ultimately, change but also requires linguists to reconsider theoretical notions such as the speech community, social networks, accommodation and the diffusion of linguistic innovations. Where exactly Broadcast English will be heading to is difficult to say. What the papers in this volume chronicle, however, is the ideological shift many broadcasters underwent from seeing themselves as the custodians of ‘good English’ (whatever this may have meant in a particular country at a particular time) to accommodating ever more to their audience’s preferred usage. This move away from strong linguistic conformity may lead us yet to a true ‘plurality of voices’ - standard as well as non-standard ones. 2 April 2008 JRS References Bell, Allan (1983). ‘Broadcast News as Language Standard’. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 40: Language and Mass Media, ed. Gerhard Leitner. 29-42. Introduction 195 Bell, Allan (1991). The Language of News Media. Language in Society 17. Oxford: Blackwell. Delbridge, Arthur (1999). ‘Standard Australian English’. World Englishes 18: 259-270. Engelman, Ralph (1996). Public Radio and Television in America. Thousand Oakes, CA: SAGE Publications. Escoffey, R.A. (1974). ‘The Contribution of BBC Radio and Television to Modern Languages Teaching: Radio’. Modern Languages in Scotland 4: 114-118. Hendy, David (2007). Life on Air: A History of Radio Four. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herbert, John (1997). ‘The Broadcast Voice’. English Today 15.13.2: 18-23. Hilmes, Michele (1997). Radio Voices: American Broadcasting 1922-1952. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Leitner, Gerhard (1979). BBC English und der BBC: Geschichte und soziolinguistische Interpretation des Sprachgebrauchs in einem Massenmedium. Linguistische Berichte 60. Wiesbaden: Vieweg. Leitner, Gerhard (1984). ‘Australian English or English in Australia: Linguistic Identity or Dependence in Broadcast Language’. English World-Wide 5: 55-85. McArthur, Tom (2002). The Oxford Guide to World English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Norbrook, Hamish and Keith Ricketts (1997). ‘Broadcasting and English’. In Ayo Bamgbose, Ayo Banjo and Andrew Thomas (eds). New Englishes: A West African Perspective. Asmara: First Africa World Press. 300-306. Zimmermann, Gerhard (1982). ‘Sprachkritik des Englischen am Beispiel der BBC’. Die Neueren Sprachen 81: 419-438. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de The first collection of articles on this topic is as international and varied as football itself. The publication covers media discourse, an online-dictionary of football terms, metaphors, the grammar of football commentary, emotions, football chants and football teams as multilingual eco-systems. Contributions from Sweden to Nigeria show how language operates in football. Would you know where footballing terms in Arabic come from? How does the German coach Otto Rehagel communicate with the Greek players? Which language did Materazzi use when insulting Zidane? Which special words do German, Polish and Igbo have for running, dribbling, penalty area and foul? In which country do the Canaries play the Roaring Lions? Where are famous footballers enshrined in a ‘Hall of Fame’? Which metaphors do Swedish, German and Russian football commentators tend to use? Are the British really less emotional than the Spanish when it comes to football commentating? And why are commentators from Russia to Italy speechless as soon as emotions really run high? That and much more is covered in this first wide-ranging compilation on the topic of football and language. Timed to coincide with EURO 2008, this book puts football on the map of current linguistics. Eva Lavric / Gerhard Pisek Andrew Skinner / Wolfgang Stadler (eds.) The Linguistics of Football Language in Performance, Band 38 2008, IV, 418 Seiten €[D] 78,00/ SFr 132,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6398-9 AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Spoken English and the BBC: In the Beginning Lynda Mugglestone Focussing on the period 1922-25, this chapter examines the formative developments which took place in terms of spoken English and the broadcast voice in the early BBC. Detailing the emergence of specific desiderata regarding accent, elocution, and speech-training, it traces the consolidation of the role of the ‘announcer’ (and the qualities of speech which were increasingly seen as both necessary and desirable for such a role). Looking in particular at the ways in which contemporary language attitudes, not least towards Received Pronunciation, impacted on changing criteria of acceptability, it uses archival documents from the BBC’s own history to explore the explicit engagement with issues of linguistic responsibility and norm. It was language which almost curtailed the historical conjunction between John Reith and the newly formed British Broadcasting Company to which he was to be appointed as General Manager. As Asa Briggs relates, with reference to broadcasting, Reith ‘did not even know the word until he read a public advertisement in the newspaper of 13 Oct 1922’ (Briggs 1961, i: 35). It is an anecdote which succinctly confirms the pioneering nature of these early days of the BBC. Broadcast as a verb was largely restricted to agricultural contexts by the Oxford English Dictionary as it then existed (‘To scatter (seed, etc.) abroad with the hand’). Only in 1933 would the revisions of the OED Supplement by Charles Onions and William Craigie record a newly dominant sense, together with its allied forms: broadcast (v.): ‘to disseminate (a message, news, a musical performance, or any audible matter) from a wireless transmitting station to the receiving sets of listeners’; broadcaster: ‘a broadcasting company, station, or instrument; also, a person whose speech, performance, etc. is broadcasted’, with a date of first use in 1922; broadcasting (vbl. sb.): ‘the action of the verb’, a word given as originating in the same year. Lynda Mugglestone 198 1 Two hours of the broadcast schedule on 18 October 1923 were, for example taken up by lengthy extracts from Macbeth. Established as a company in October 1922, and making its first broadcast in the following month, the BBC would nevertheless swiftly impact upon the lexical landscape of English. ‘A language, strange in the ears of the unenthusiastic, is being spoken by growing numbers of people every day’, the Times noted in December: ‘It includes words like “valve”, “harmonics”, “rectifier”, and “condenser”, and schoolboys talk it with ease and understanding’ (‘Wireless Sets for Christmas’ 1922: 7). A new descriptive label also emerged for the variety of English which was most often to be heard on the airwaves; ‘BBC English’ or, as defined in the later OED, ‘standard English as spoken by BBC announcers’. It is this which, with reference to the very earliest years of the BBC - the days of ‘Company’ rather than ‘Corporation’ - will be the main focus of the present contribution. ‘Early days are crucial ones’, John Reith affirmed (1924d: 24). Reith’s diction of the pioneer (‘there is a great attraction in pioneer work: in knowing that no foot has trod this path before’ (1923: 139) suggests, of course, the image of an entirely blank slate on which radio - or, as it was then most often known, wireless telegraphy or the wireless - was to inscribe its new-found role. It was ‘a new thing; a thing that has never been done before’, wrote C.A. Lewis in Broadcasting from Within (1924: 1), comparing his initial role as Organiser of Programmes to being a member of Columbus’ crew, setting off on a voyage of discovery. The BBC ‘had, at the outset, no traditions’, likewise states Peter Eckersley (1941: 54). Appointed as Chief Engineer in 1923, the fact that Eckersley was, at this point, also the only engineer at the BBC merely reinforces what he describes as ‘our sense of pioneering a fascinating new development’ (Eckersley 1941: 57). Nevertheless, in a variety of ways, this shared - and evidently popular - image of the blank slate was not, in fact, to be strictly accurate in either cultural or linguistic terms. Instead, the BBC was to intersect with a number of pre-established cultural agendas which would critically influence both the matter - and the manner - of broadcasting. A glance at the programming schedules from this period confirms, for example, the unselfconscious adoption of particular cultural norms (and the marginalisation of others) which came to govern both transmission and policy. Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Tosti, Wagner all featured during the evening (and sole) broadcast on 23 January 1923; Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Wagner appeared on the following day. Educational talks on ‘Spider Babies’ or ‘the World’s Flight’ appeared in October 1923, alongside a regular feature on ‘Dramatic Criticism’. Shakespeare was likewise often in evidence, even in a broadcast output then restricted to five and a half hours a day. 1 ‘No better plays for broadcasting could have been written’, as Cecil Lewis opined (1924: 62). ‘In our pro- Spoken English and the BBC 199 2 As the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography confirms, Scholes ‘was undoubtedly among the first to see the educational potentialities of broadcasting’ (J. O. Ward, ‘Scholes, Percy Alfred (1877-1958)’, http: / / www. oxforddnb.com/ view/ article/ 35971). grammes we have definite ideals’, Reith declared in the Radio Times (which was inaugurated in 1923 as ‘The Official Organ of the BBC’); ‘we aim at communicating from day to day the best of the world’s thought, culture, and entertainment’ (Reith 1925: 1). Reith’s evaluative diction was deliberate. As he endorsed in Broadcast over Britain, the emergent BBC was in no way ‘to be content with mediocrity’. Instead, Reith’s ideals of public service broadcasting rested in what he described as his ‘high conceptions of the inherent possibilities of the service’ (1924d: 32). ‘It is better to over-estimate the mentality of the public than under-estimate it’, he argued. Hence, while ‘it is occasionally indicated to us that we are apparently setting out to give the public what we think they need - and not what they want, […] few know what they want, and very few what they need’ (1924d: 34). While the occasional, plaintive, voice of dissent can be heard (‘Do they think the majority of their “listeners” are really interested in such lectures as The Decrease of Malaria in Great Britain; How to Become a Veterinary Surgeon; [or] The New Rent Act? ’ as a correspondent in Birmingham demanded (P.J. 1923: 12)), the early BBC would here remain resolute, insisting not only on the superior value of high culture but also on its transformative potential for individual listeners throughout the nation. An article in the Radio Times on ‘”Highbrows” and “Lowbrows”’ by Percy Scholes (appointed as BBC music critic in 1923), is, for instance, emphatic on the value of the cultural opportunities thereby presented. ‘I don’t blame the Lowbrow too much for his lack of interest in the sort of music that needs listening to with brains’, Scholes wrote; ‘I know that it is not altogether his fault’ since, until the advent of the gramophone and broadcasting ‘the opportunities of hearing the higher kinds of music were few’ (1923: 439). The selfconfessed ‘lowbrow’ was directed to read Scholes’ weekly column on classical music in the Radio Times, to listen to the symphonies and concerts described, and ‘he will find himself progressing until music that is at present frankly beyond his capacity of understanding will become to him comparatively simple’. 2 For the dramatist John Drinkwater, radio was seen as establishing a new-found cultural divide, and a beneficial agenda of change: ‘People who do not listen at all prefer inferior music and the back-chat of buffoons […] The staple of popular entertainment, the banal ballads and drivelling patter and imbecile melodies, cannot survive the test of being heard and only heard […]. Here is a great enterprise that will show as it has never been shown before that to listen […] is to be intelligent’ (Drinkwater 1924: 486). Lynda Mugglestone 200 Similar hierarchical models could impact on language, especially in terms of the distribution (and roles) allotted to standard and regional varieties on the airwaves. Here too broadcasting encountered a range of pre-existing conceptions, not least in terms of voice and the recommended mode of speech. Language - and linguistic variation - were by no means value-free in the early twentieth century. Instead, popular language attitudes were pervaded by wide-ranging assumptions about class, correctness, ‘educatedness’, and ‘culture’. George Bernard Shaw - later to be a member of the BBC Committee on Spoken English (see Schwyter, this volume) - had, for example, recently focussed popular attention on images of linguistic difference in Pygmalion by means of the transformation of the Cockney flower-seller Eliza Doolittle. Initially described as a ‘draggle-tailed guttersnipe’ who utters ‘such depressing sounds that she has no right to live’, Eliza Doolittle emerges into a temporary duchess with perfect propriety of phoneme and standard grammar, a linguistic as well as social metamorphosis. By means of Henry Higgins, a professor of phonetics, Eliza sheds ‘the accent that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days’ (Shaw 1916: 115). The Newbolt Report on the Teaching of English in England, published one year before the establishment of the BBC, was still more trenchant in its insistence on the social, cultural, and educational value of certain varieties of English above others, and on the needful acquisition of such varieties as a marker of education per se. As it made plain, ‘systematic training in the sounded speech of standard English, to secure correct pronunciation and clear articulation’ should henceforth be seen as a vital component of education (see Mugglestone 2007: 256-7). Even though the Newbolt Report occupied the ostensibly neutral territory of an official treatise, the attitudes to language which it revealed were often transparently filtered through discourses of prejudice and preconception in which a non-localised standard English - in both grammar and accent - was equated with civilization and intelligence. Regional marking was conversely constructed as a ‘perverted power’, and laden with images of corruption and cognitive deficiency. ‘If children are not learning good English, they are learning bad English’, the Report hence stressed in a firmly articulated dyad. Language - and linguistic variation - was made to operate within a prescriptive (and proscriptive) space where the role of the teacher was explicitly to combat ‘the evil habits of speech contracted in home and street’ by means of the systematic inculcation of ‘proper’ English. Given the pervasiveness of this kind of ideological framing, both inside and outside the school, it was perhaps inevitable that here too broadcasting would enter a fraught area of cultural debate. Conjectures about the ‘ideal “wireless voice”’ - and its standardizing potential - were raised in the Times even before Arthur Burrows made his inaugural transmission for the BBC on 14 November 1922. ‘A good pronunciation of standard English, it is hoped, Spoken English and the BBC 201 will be insisted on’, readers were informed in April of that year, likewise being vouchsafed the opinion that the presence of a strongly regional or local accent was to be discouraged (‘The “Wireless Voice”’ 1922: 13). Once broadcasting began, the educational remit of the early BBC was often perceived by its listeners as being equally applicable within this domain too. A letter headed ‘Wireless as the “Elixir of Life”’, published in the Radio Times (S.C.S. 1923: 163), unites elocution, education, and the prevalent discourse of opportunity in its praise for the ways in which broadcasting had brought ‘a wonderful means of education for our young people as well as us older ones who, living in remote country places in the last half century, had no opportunity of hearing good music, excellent elocution, or the thousands of interesting things which make up the everyday life of some of our fellow men’. Other articles closely echoed the Newbolt Report in their characterization of the linguistic ills of the nation, though it is notable that broadcasting, as well as the school, is now made the source of appropriate remedy and instruction. E.V. Kirk, of the West Ham Education Committee, for instance, discoursed eloquently on the ways in which ‘the environment in which many children are placed, often undoes the patient work of the teacher’. Like the authors of the Newbolt Report, he berated the ‘faulty pronunciation and bad colloquialisms heard in the street life and home life of children’ which, he added, ‘are difficult to eradicate during the few hours a child is at school’ (1923: 20). For Kirk, however, this was only to suggest the superior potential of broadcasting as an agent of standardization. It was radio, he argued, which now brought new opportunities and ‘a new influence to bear for the good in this respect’: The result is working itself out in many agreeable ways. The pronunciation of their words shows an improvement that is, in some cases, very distinct. Many children whom I know personally are overcoming the defects of their accent by studiously attempting to imitate the pronunciation of “Uncle A.” or “Uncle B.” Fortunately, these gentlemen set a standard that will benefit any child who can reach it, and the result will be a purer English spoken by those whom they influence. (Kirk 1923: 20) The paradigm thereby established is one of beneficial emulation, based on the accommodation towards what is depicted as the evidently desirable speech style - and perceived authority - of the presenters on the ‘Children’s Hour’ (the ‘Uncles’). Kirk’s vision of the BBC as a kind of Pygmalionesque Henry Higgins for the nation was to find a number of counterparts elsewhere. ‘Improving Our Speech’, for example, appears as a prominent sub-heading within another article in the Radio Times based on an interview with the novelist A.S.M. Hutchinson. He commended, in particular, the way in which the BBC brings home ‘the cultural value of the spoken word’ (in a form of words which, of course, serves to endorse the implicitly positive cultural meanings of certain styles of speech). This was made further explicit in Hutchinson’s subsequent praise for ‘the fine modulation, the correct pronun- Lynda Mugglestone 202 3 Regional broadcasting could flourish elsewhere, as on the Northern Programme (see Briggs 1991: 165 ff.). Nevertheless, as Briggs also contends, Reith’s interest in centralization, and ciation, the precise and often musical intonation of the official announcers’ (‘A Novelist’s Thoughts on Broadcasting’ 1924: 61). Moreover, just as Scholes had stressed the transformatory role of broadcasting with reference to the musical capacity of listeners, so too, Hutchinson argued, could - and should - ‘good’ spoken English on the airwaves act as a similar agent of change. Hence, while Hutchinson lamented that ‘speech is pretty dreadful nowadays’, radio gave grounds for a new sense of optimism: ‘I believe people are very ready and willing to take pattern by the best models. Your broadcasters can do that’. William le Queux, another highly popular novelist, endorsed the same hierarchical positioning of language and variation (and overtly qualitative metalanguage) in an article headed ‘Announcers as Teachers’. ‘Happily for us’, he declared, ‘the officials of our Broadcasting Company have been well chosen, and are all educated and refined men and women, who use cultivated language to which it is a pleasure to listen […]. We look upon our announcers as teachers. And they are’ (le Queux 1924: 151). Of course, regional varieties could also be heard on the early BBC. ‘I cannot tell how delighted I was to hear my own countrymen talking’, as the London-based Mrs L.C. wrote after listening to the Aberdeen station (L.C. 1924: 390). Likewise, on 25 January 1924, on the Manchester station, one could hear James Worsley (‘Dialect Entertainer’) delivering a spiel on ‘How Billy Armitage Geet a Neet’s Lodging’, while ‘A few impersonations in various dialects of people reciting a nursery rhyme before the microphone’ featured on May 2nd. ‘Our Lizzie’ (Helena Millais) was another popular performer, with a fusion of comedy and regional characterisation. Nevertheless, here too preexisting cultural stereotypes could come into play, consolidating - as in Millais’s work - an established link between comedy and dialect, particularly when seen from metrocentric perspectives. ‘Except when it is used to produce a comic effect, dialect finds no place in the broadcast programme’, Edward de Poynton argued, further endorsing perceptions of this kind (1924: 5). Such socio-cultural patterning was epitomised to good effect in a cartoon which appeared in the Radio Times on 23 November 1923. Here an image of a woman laughing uproariously while facing the radio is accompanied by the caption ‘Auntie (listening for the first time, after a humorous dialect number): “That’s the first time I’ve ever laughed without any idea what I’ve been laughing at”.’ The presence of regionality on the airwaves could moreover be subject to some interesting conjunctions within the programme schedules; a recital of Scottish folksong on the Edinburgh Relay Station in May 1924 was, for instance, immediately followed by a talk by the elocutionist Augustus Beddie on ‘The Speaking Voice’. 3 As here, elocution - in explicit as well as Spoken English and the BBC 203 the spread of simultaneous broadcasting from the London station established important counter-tendencies. 4 ‘BBC WAC’ refers to unpublished sources from the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham; see References for details. implicit forms - was also to be provided by the early BBC. This, however, was evidently seen as a matter for serious attention rather than comic response. ‘One foresees the possibility of a delicate and subtly modulated art of speaking, such as is to-day practised only by a few individual performers’, as William Archer (a ‘distinguished drama critic’) expounded in this context, stressing the centrality of voice to radio broadcasting (1924: 418). Like many others, Archer saw the cultural didacticism of the early BBC as the linchpin in a brave new world of articulatory endeavour and reform. After all, as he stressed of the exemplary elocution of the BBC, ‘should this art come into being, and become popular, it ought to have an excellent effect on the speaking of English throughout the world. People whose ears are thoroughly accustomed to clear and cultivated speaking will unconsciously imitate it, and will come to dislike the inarticulate slovenliness, not to mention the tell-tale local intonations, of everyday talk’ (Archer 1924: 418). Archer’s words - like those of le Queux and Kirk - reveal, of course, the operation of subjective inequality, mapping perceptions of deficit, ‘slovenliness’, or regionality (the ‘tell-tale local intonations’ mentioned by Archer) at one end of a scale of differential values. At the other end - equally subjective if more positively validated in popular language attitudes - were the ‘cultivated’, ‘educated’, and non-localised tones of men such as the ‘goldenvoiced’ Arthur Burrows (see Eckersley 1941: 13) who was an ‘Uncle’ on the Children’s Hour as well as regularly reading the news. ‘My father […] had a good, clear broadcasting voice with the absence of any regional accent. ‘B.B.C. English’,’ as Burrows’ son later noted (BBC WAC S236/ 12/ Burrows). 4 Here too, just as for classical music, the democratization of access enabled via the airwaves was regarded as particularly important. ‘British broadcasting is a practical application of democracy’, as Reith proclaimed (1925: 1). And a significant part of this, at least for many who wrote about radio and radio transmission at this time, was the national access which was thereby also provided to the elite speech styles of Received Pronunciation (RP) which had hitherto been described only by means of the laborious notation of pronouncing dictionaries or in attending lessons in elocution (see Mugglestone 2007). As Burrows’ son confirms, this was indeed ‘B.B.C. English’ as it came to be known and recognised over the succeeding decades. In wider cultural terms, as we have seen, broadcasting in the early twentieth century was often regarded as an active force for ‘raising up’, a notion which itself presents an interesting antithesis to the ‘dumbing-down’ which is a prevalent concern in more recent comments about the influence of radio Lynda Mugglestone 204 and television. Many writers, for example, stressed the heightened consciousness of speech - and an accompanying sensitization to notions of accent deficit as well as accent difference - which appeared to result from the centrality of voice in broadcast transmission. ‘The listener, wherever he may live, hears the announcements, the news bulletins, the talks, given in “Standard English”’, Edward de Poynton observed; ‘He hears great statesmen, famous scientists, noted literary men speak.’ Even if the names of such personages had previously been familiar to listeners, as Poynton continued, the act of reception via radio was capable of effecting a significant shift in perception: ‘Now their actual voices come to his ears and he notices the way in which they speak. He marks the absence of local accent and of dialect words […]. Our imaginary dialect-speaking listener realises that his is not the language of the great men he admires’ (Poynton 1924: 5). Normative images of English on the airwaves were, by extension, often depicted as being part of a hegemonic process by which broadcasting might indeed foster and achieve a new linguistic uniformity, based on a top-down model of change. While Poynton also admitted that ‘local patriotism’ played a strong role in maintaining regional markers, the fact remained, as he concluded, that regionality is ‘a handicap to the man who wishes to rise in the world’ (1924: 5). ‘To correct debased speaking is now one of the recognised tasks of education’, O.E. likewise acknowledged in a letter to the Times, making explicit the value of broadcasting in this respect: ‘why not advocate taking advantage of the greatest opportunity there has ever been - an improvement in the language of wireless broadcasting? ’ (1923: 8). He urged stronger regulation of the broadcast voice, and the elimination of ‘regional taint’ from the airwaves - an important consideration, he added, ‘when twenty or thirty speakers can influence half a million “listeners-in” every day of the week.’ As this indicates, popular language attitudes at this time could openly give credence to assumptions that instruction in ‘proper’ pronunciation was rightly part of that ‘duty’ and ‘responsibility’ of the BBC which regularly featured in Reith’s mission statements as Managing Director of the BBC. It is, of course, tempting therefore to assume an equally active - and deliberately normative - policy at work in this respect within the early BBC. Nevertheless, it is important here to remember the reality of working practices in an era in which fundamental questions about how to broadcast, at its most pragmatic level - as well as what to broadcast - dominated discussion. The BBC in its earliest days in 1922 consisted, for example, of just four employees - none of whom was a specialist ‘announcer’ (‘In broadcasting by wireless telegraphy, the person who announces the subjects of a programme and the items of current news’, as the OED later confirmed in a new sensedivision added only in the 1933 Supplement). Even Arthur Burrows, the man whose voice inaugurated broadcasting on the BBC as he read the results of the general election in November 1922, was not, in fact, an ‘announcer’ or Spoken English and the BBC 205 ‘broadcaster’ per se. Instead, though he was indeed to be heard introducing programmes, delivering the daily news, or acting as an ‘Uncle’ on the Children’s Hour, Burrows was formally employed as Assistant Controller and Director of Programmes. In a similar way, ‘Uncle Peter’ was the Chief Engineer, Peter Eckersley, who was also to be heard announcing programmes, as was Stanton Jeffries, whose official title was the musical director of the BBC (and who also regularly participated in the Children’s Hour as ‘Uncle Jeff’). This flexibility (‘the personal familiarity of the early pioneering days’, as it was described by Hilda Matheson (1933: 54)) characterised the early, multi-tasking BBC, and linked it to even earlier, pioneering days of British broadcasting, such as the regular half-hour weekly broadcasts from Writtle which had begun in February 1922, or the 2LO transmissions from London broadcast from May of that year (and on which Burrows had done most of the announcing, as well as using a set of tubular bells to mimic the chimes of Westminster). The eventual demise of this early, informal, broadcasting style was to be regarded with a certain regret, and definite nostalgia, by a number of those who wrote memoirs of this time. ‘Great days! Not easily forgotten’, as Lewis described the spontaneity, flexibility, and ‘hand-to mouth existence in programme organization’ which characterized the beginning of the BBC (Lewis 1924: 37). The emergence of the BBC announcer - as an occupation for which specific training was required, and for whom particular desiderata in terms of language were also to be applicable - was, in itself, to be a significant element of this transition. Burrows notes that the first announcer as such was appointed in late 1923, almost a year after the first BBC broadcasts were made. It was only in 1924, however, that a further development was introduced by which the announcer assumed a formalised role at every station, with a new stress on the perceived importance of the function he was to discharge. Even in general terms, it is clear that a new - and normative - consciousness of language starts to appear around this time within the BBC. It was in 1924, for example, that Reith actively sought to curtail the variability in the tense marking of the verb ‘to broadcast’. This ‘needs to be settled once and for all’, he informed readers of the Radio Times: We decided many moons agone, and in our correspondence internal and external gave effect to that decision, that the rulings which apply to the verb ‘to cast’ should also hold with ‘broadcast’. Hence ‘I have broadcast,’ not ‘I have broadcasted’. […]. The effects of quiet example are evidently not sufficient. All over the place one’s eye and ear are offended by the unpleasant suffix. (Reith 1924b: 305) Lynda Mugglestone 206 5 Principle and practice, however, continued to diverge for some time. It is notable, for instance, that the definition of broadcaster included in the 1933 Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary made use of ‘broadcasted’ rather than Reith’s preferred ‘broadcast’. ‘Please don’t do it’, he concluded, in an active injunction for future - and ‘corrected’ - language practice. 5 The established collocation ‘listener-in’ attracted a similar impulse towards regulation, being described by Reith as ‘another horror which continues to be perpetrated’ (1924b: 305). He favoured ‘listeners’, though it is clear that contemporary ‘listeners-in’ could maintain a certain defiance in this respect. ‘For some obscure reason the B.B.C. has taken a violent dislike to the term “listener-in,” although many of their own artistes and quite 90 per cent. of wireless enthusiasts make use of it’, L.A.L.H. countered: ‘to my mind, it expresses concisely and precisely what it is intended to convey. If one says, “Did you ‘listen’ last night? ” in nine times out of ten the reply would be, “To what? ”. But “Did you listen-in last night? ” instantly suggests wireless’ (L.A.L.H. 1924: 527). Within the BBC, pronunciation - and the matter of an accent appropriate for the airwaves, especially on the National Programme - would likewise emerge as part of a range of explicit discussions about the standards which broadcasting should both institute and maintain. Concerns of a far more pragmatic kind had, for instance, characterised early debates about the modes of preferred delivery, especially given the tendency for / s/ , / f/ and / / to distort when transmitted on then existing wireless apparatus. Likewise an early article by Burrows, headed ‘Would You Like to Broadcast? ’, dwells on the importance of clarity for the ‘broadcasting voice’ since ‘certain types of […] speaking voices transmit much better than others’, while neglecting the subject of pronunciation and accent altogether (1923: 154). In 1924, in contrast, attention was increasingly being directed towards the detailed regulation of spoken discourse, with particular implications for those who announced programmes or read the news. Internal BBC memoranda and correspondence can illuminatingly reveal the trajectory - and the consolidation - of these ideas. The formalization of the announcer as a vital component of BBC staff was first made, for example, in February 1924, in a letter sent by Charles Carpendale in London to Miller Craig, the Station Director in Glasgow. Here, in a language of explicit decree (which, by extension, also precludes dissent), Carpendale (the BBC’s Deputy Managing Director) informed Miller that ‘it has been decided that the staff of each station will be increased by an announcer whose primary duties shall be announcing nightly’ (BBC WAC R34/ 252/ Carpendale). While it was acknowledged that Station Directors will, on occasions, still ‘require to announce’, Carpendale also emphasised that, in so doing, the style and manner in which this aspect of broadcasting took place was henceforth to be subject to stringent evaluation. ‘I want this announcing brought to a fine art as it is one of the most Spoken English and the BBC 207 6 See e.g. Jones (1917: §7) who selected ‘Public School Pronunciation’ as the reference model to be described in his English Pronouncing Dictionary (the ‘everyday speech used in important parts of the programme’, Carpendale affirmed. As he added moreover, here acknowledging the force of current language attitudes and the sensitivities which these could reveal, ‘if it is not well done it tends to jar and annoy listeners more than anything else’. A sense of internal standardization is clearly in evidence. By March, for example, a new stress on ‘uniformity’ of speech style, and the means for achieving this, is being debated: ‘There should be a best way’, Peter Eckersley recommended: ‘while one does not want to be dogmatic, I think uniformity would be a good idea’ (BBC WAC/ R34/ 252/ Eckersley). Some resistance to this proposal was expressed; Arthur Burrows notably registered his lack of support on the grounds that ‘it will tend to rob our several provincial stations of their individuality’, as he wrote in response to Eckersley’s circulated memorandum on 5 March 1924 (BBC WAC R34/ 252/ Burrows). Nevertheless the dominant thrust was now towards the conscious articulation of new - and linguistically specific - desiderata for a different breed of announcers. Statements such as that by which ‘Announcers at the Provincial Stations might with advantage be brought to London for a short period every year […] to share in the benefit of collective study and training with the London Announcers’ (BBC WAC R34/ 252/ Fuller) reveal an intentional homogenization in this context within the BBC. A new sense of the emblematic role of the ‘BBC voice’ is also apparent. The voice of announcers was salient in the presentation of ‘the B.B.C. itself, its policy and ideals’, Walter Fuller argued - a means by which ‘to build up in the public mind a sense of the B.B.C.’s collective personality’ (BBC WAC/ R34/ 252/ Fuller). By June 1924, the phonetician Arthur Lloyd James (a founder member of the later BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English) was being employed to deliver programmes about good English, and the importance of national varieties. And by November Reith was issuing fresh directives on the social and cultural make-up of the announcer, countering previously established perceptions that the announcer is ‘the most junior official of all, occupying a position of not much responsibility with no future prospects’ with a new emphasis on the social and linguistic significance of this role. ‘I should like it to be made clear to Announcers how important their position is’, he decreed (BBC WAC R34/ 252/ Reith), specifying further that this importance resided in certain crucial qualifications of the good announcer: ‘Announcers should be men of culture, experience and knowledge, with’, he added, ‘good articulation and accurate pronunciation.’ By 1925 moreover, this has been further restricted to particular educational desiderata. A new requirement for announcers to have benefited from an education at a good public school - in an era in which Public School English could operate as a virtual synonym for RP 6 - would in fact have Lynda Mugglestone 208 the families of Southern English persons whose men-folk have been educated at the great public boarding schools’). entirely excluded the ‘golden-voiced’ but state-educated Burrows, who was, in reality, the son of an Oxford college porter. As Herbert Greenhalgh confirmed in the Radio Times (1925: 103), in terms of announcers ‘our standard is constantly being raised. Attainments that would have satisfied us a year ago would not be considered sufficient now, and probably a year hence we shall be still more particular.’ In a further contrast to the informality of the early days, speech training and rigorous testing began to be employed to ascertain the suitability of potential announcers. Announcing was no longer something by which a convenient BBC employee simply spoke into a waiting microphone. Instead announcers came with specialised remits and training schedules, delivering non-localised RP as they addressed the nation. The fact that they did so while wearing dinner jackets (an innovation introduced at the same time) merely served to confirm their emblematic propriety. As Reith was able to confirm in Broadcast over Britain, by late 1924 it was indeed true that ‘we have made a special effort to secure in our various stations men who, in the presentation of programme items, the reading of news bulletins and so on, can be relied upon to employ the correct pronunciation of the English tongue’ (1924d: 161). Moreover, he now expressed the distinctly normative hope that the ‘travesties of pronunciation’ he had encountered throughout Britain - as well as the ‘handicap’ they gave to their possessors - might thereby be eliminated. ‘I do not suppose that any one wishes to go through life handicapped by the mistakes or carelessness of his pronunciation, and yet this is what happened’, he noted, adding too his conviction of the utility of broadcasting in this respect: ‘This is a matter on which broadcasting can be of immense assistance.’ There is, however, a sense, expressed by Carpendale, Reith, and a number of others who worked at the BBC that, initially at least, this shift in policy, and in active language practice, was on one level simply a response to the increasing sensitization on the part of listeners to perceived standards of spoken English on the airwaves. ‘Broadcasting both domesticates the public sphere and socializes the private one’, as Andrew Crissell has noted (2002: 9). This seems to be particularly true in terms of language attitudes, and the public consciousness of varieties of English which, while prominent on the airwaves, differed in conspicuous ways from those which were used by the majority of the populace. Comments made by Reith in this context can, for example, initially suggest a clear conviction of projected responsibility - of a duty which is acquired from the public rather than necessarily initiated by the BBC itself. ‘The responsibility of being looked to in many quarters as authorities in standard pronunciation is an interesting, if some- Spoken English and the BBC 209 what onerous, responsibility’, as Reith wrote in the Radio Times in January 1924, one month before Carpendale circulated his own directives on the employment of announcers at all BBC stations, and the standards which they should maintain (Reith 1924a: 43). ‘Our responsibilities in this matter are obvious, since in talking to vast a multitude, mistakes are likely to be promulgated to a much greater extent than was ever possible before’, as Reith later affirmed in Broadcast over Britain (1924d: 161). Cecil Lewis, employed at the BBC since the beginning, was to use an almost identical form of words as he too sought to analyse the changes and transitions which had taken place within the inaugural years of broadcasting: ‘It has often been remarked - and this is one of the responsibilities that are indeed heavy to carry - that the announcing voice sets a fashion in speaking to many thousands of homes’, he wrote. For announcers, he added, this increasingly meant that the broadcast voice: ‘should therefore be faultlessly accurate both in diction and pronunciation’ (1924: 109-10). Lewis constructed an eloquent image of the growing discernment - and discrimination - of the microphone in this respect. ‘We had been appointed guardians and attendants of the most voracious creature ever created by man - a microphone - which clamoured daily to be fed’, as he wrote with a certain degree of anthropomorphic licence: ‘At first it was satisfied with simple fare and a little of it, but as the days went by its appetite grew in the amount it wished to devour but also became fastidious in the extreme as to the quality of the repast set before it’ (Lewis 1924: 26). By 1924 it was, he concluded, ‘a most terrible and insatiable monster’. Hilda Matheson shared in this sense of shifting realisation. ‘The most pervasive and powerful effects of broadcasting are seen, not in music, but in speech’, she affirmed, adding: ‘it […] only slowly dawned on us that the new emphasis and importance given the spoken, as distinct from written, language is likely to have results that were never dreamed of’ (Matheson 1933: 58). 1924 was moreover the year in which the Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges (later to chair the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English) also made a number of important - and highly public - statements on the precise nature of the linguistic responsibilities of the BBC, as well as the means in which they should be implemented. An article headed ‘Pure English by Wireless’ assumed, for instance, a prominent place in the Times in March. Bridges’s prescriptive - and conservative - interests in language (his ‘concern for the future of English speech’, as it is phrased here) were already fully in evidence in works such as his 1913 Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation, as well as in his status as a particularly active member of the Society for Pure English, a capacity in which, the article notes, he has ‘protested valiantly […] against the many degrading and disruptive influences at work’ in matters of linguistic usage. The BBC was, as the Times makes plain, deftly assimilated within these aims for reform, especially given Bridges’ Lynda Mugglestone 210 conviction of its value for the dissemination of non-localised norms of speech. ‘None but good English speakers should be employed by the broadcasting agencies’, Bridges stressed. ‘Good’, of course, operates euphemistically here, signifying little about the moral status of broadcasters. Instead, it acts as a way of deftly - if covertly - excluding the regionally-marked (or ‘bad’). For Bridges, radio was to be a ‘paramount and Imperial means of national culture’ - an image founded not only in the increased access it provided to the canon of great writers but also by its potential for the strategic inculcation of ‘pure’ and national (rather than ‘local’) English. As the article concluded: It is an inspiring idea that henceforth the voice that addresses millions, often on commonplace topics, shall come to be recognised as an exponent of the purest English […] surmounting all the inevitable differences of dialect - Southern, Midland, and Northern alike - might our wireless voice become the unlocalised and invisible paragon of English speech. (‘Pure English by Wireless’ 1924: 15) The scene was already, in effect, being set for the emergence of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English in 1926 (which, chaired by Bridges, would issue extensive directives on the matter of broadcast English; see Schwyter (this volume)). The increased involvement of Arthur Lloyd James was a further important component in this explicit reorientation of broadcast language practice for the National Programme. While Lloyd James would later act as Secretary to this committee and, from 1938, would be officially recognised as linguistic advisor to the BBC, by 1924, as we have seen, he was already assuming a position of some authority as a broadcaster on matters of language, regularly appearing on the prime 9 p.m. slot in the schedules. Of still more interest, however, are the lectures on speech - and especially on standard pronunciation - which he was asked to deliver within the Company to the staff of the BBC in London. As a 1925 memorandum in the BBC archives records, ‘The gist of his remarks was, that taken over the whole area of the British Isles, there are many distinct dialects, and usually one which causes less offence to the majority than others’ (BBC WAC R34/ 587/ 1. Announcers’ Lecture). This education in language consciousness, and associated notions of ‘offensiveness’ (or otherwise) was received with careful attention. Lloyd James’ comments were indeed perceived to be ‘so illuminating and so helpful’ that he was asked to deliver another lecture on the same topic in June. This, however, was to be broadcast internally to all BBC staff over the whole country who were involved in microphone work, rather than being restricted to those in the metropolis. As every Station Director was informed, ‘arrangements should be made for all who are interested in any microphone work at your station to be present, not only Announcers and Station Directors, but perhaps persons outside the Company who assist in Spoken English and the BBC 211 dramatic productions or speak regularly from the Station’ (BBC WAC R34/ 587/ 1. Announcers’ Lecture). This in itself, of course, serves as a strikingly unambiguous marker of the importance being given by 1925 to overt instruction in the matter of ‘proper’ speech within the BBC. Further confirmation, if any were needed, appears in the concluding statement of this memorandum, and the now overt acknowledgement that the matter of language standards is something in which the BBC is to be actively engaged: ‘We are daily establishing in the minds of the public the idea of what correct speech should be and this is seen as an important responsibility’. These words echo - but also succinctly reformulate - Reith’s statement of the previous year (see p. 209). The responsibilities once contemplated as a potentially onerous duty are, however, now made part of an explicit remit of what broadcasting should endeavour to achieve. This was to be a central part of the thesis which Lloyd James had himself broadcast to the BBC, and which he continued to promulgate in later years. Given the discriminatory nature of then existing language attitudes, the solution, as Lloyd James argued, rested not in any endeavour to expose the ideological foundation of such ideas (and thereby educate listeners into the true nature of the prejudice which common value-judgements on ‘good’/ ’bad’ or ‘regional’/ ’pure’ speakers served to reveal). Instead, he advocated educating all speakers in the articulatory nuances of ‘standard’ or non-localised speech. As he expounded in an article in Teaching World in 1927, in an article headed ‘A B.B.C. Expert’: For some reason a man is judged in this country by his language, with the result that there is, broadly speaking, a sort of English that is current among the educated and cultured classes all over the country. It has its little local variations, but these are of no matter, and a man who has this sort of accent moves among the rest of his fellow country men without adverse criticism. This type of speech avoids both the lapses of the uneducated and the affectations of the insufficiently educated at both ends of the social scale. As Lloyd James further specified, ‘it is the duty of the BBC to provide this sort of speech as often as possible.’ For Lloyd James, as for Reith, the educative - and exemplary - potential of broadcasting was therefore seen as vital. ‘The BBC is not content to be seen as a mere entertainer’, Reith had declared in an article headed ‘A Broadcasting University’ (1924c: 481). They were equally united in their sense of the pioneering potential of this new medium, though it was Lloyd James who most persuasively argued the cause of language standardization through the transmission of an authoritative norm of speech. An influential - and historically transformative - precedent was located in William Caxton. The printing press which Caxton had introduced to England in 1476 had, Lloyd James noted, been able to disseminate not only multiple identical Lynda Mugglestone 212 copies of the same work over the entire nation, but had also done so by means of a single written variety, the forerunner of modern standard English. It was this which had come to define modern textual practice in place of the multiple local variations of grammar and morphology, as well as spelling, which had previously characterised the manuscript culture of medieval England. If printing had, as Lloyd James argued, ‘fixed the shape of our visual language’, he envisaged a similar revolution at work by means of broadcasting or what was now eloquently redefined as the ‘speaking press’: Wireless now broadcasts the spoken language, and its effects upon the spoken language will be very similar to the effects of the printing press upon the printed language. The fifteenth century saw the birth of the printing press; the twentieth century sees the birth of the speaking press […] [which] may fix the shape of our aural language, and it will tend to standardize our pronunciation. (Lloyd James 1938: 30) Broadcasting, like printing, was thereby increasingly conceived as the catalyst for linguistic change, enabling the transmission of a non-localised and authoritative norm. Though ‘this may not be achieved in our lifetime’ as Lloyd James warned (1938: 30), it was this which, in the brave new world which he foresaw, might ultimately secure equality of accent for all, eliminating regional variation and the geographical markers of identity. That this was intended to have a strongly normative - and corrective - role for all speakers is made plain in other comments which Lloyd James makes. Natural features such as elision and assimilation are, for instance, likewise viewed as in need of remedy: ‘the slurring of sounds, the missing of sounds, the untidy articulation of sounds, is as much to be condemned as dirty or untidy print with wornout type’ (Lloyd James 1938: 115). It is an image of ‘good’ speech which tellingly underpins the classic stereotyping of the ‘clipped’ BBC enunciations of the first half of the twentieth century, not least given that Lloyd James also came to be responsible for the speech-training of announcers. This, however, lay in the future, though it is in the critical period between 1922 and 1926 when the foundations for this conception of the exemplary and potentially transformative role of BBC English were laid, with increasing explicitness, both inside and outside the BBC. Nevertheless, equally clear at this date were further manifestations of that ‘spirit of English liberty’ which, as Samuel Johnson had already stressed in his Dictionary of 1755, would, in Britain, always impede a merely subservient deference to the promulgated norms of a language academy or similar institution. Indeed, while Johnson had aimed his comments at the Académie Française, in the 1920s a range of dissonant responses to the BBC as self-appointed language academy can be detected, especially as the Advisory Committee of Spoken English came into being. ‘May it not be, however, that in the highbrows of the B.B.C. we have a British Academy in embryo? ’, demanded the North Mail and New- Spoken English and the BBC 213 7 The role of ‘Estuary English’ as a non-localised competitor to RP has been a subject of recent controversy. See Mugglestone (2007: chapter 8) and Wells (1994). castle Chronicle on 16 July 1926. It was the Manchester Guardian which was, in the following year, perhaps to have the last word. ‘In self-expression, we are heretic all, proud of our dialects and our difference’, it stressed, placing the standardizing endeavours of the BBC in a firmly critical context: The B.B.C., it is true, has attempted to achieve a pact of pronunciation within these islands […] [which is] in many respects a surrender to the slovenly and drawling speech of the Southern English. As it concluded, ‘it will be promptly disregarded by all self-respecting speakers of the language’. Pronunciation was, of course, to remain a more complex symbol of identity than either Lloyd James or Reith had envisaged. If the English of the early BBC provided an undeniable source of elite, non-localised models of enunciation, it was equally undeniable that other forces - especially those located in the covert prestige of the local and vernacular, as well as enforced by peer group pressures far removed from those of the BBC announcer - continued to influence both speech styles and language practice throughout the nation. Rather than the convergent and top-down remodelling which so many writers predicted as they listened to the regionally unmarked tones which featured on the National Programme, Received Pronunciation instead remained - then as now - the accent of a minority (variously estimated as being used by between 3-5% of the population). Indeed, instead of Lloyd James’ transcendent vision of a nation united in a single accent by means of the socio-linguistic correctives of the BBC, we might note, in the summer of 2007, a striking scarcity of this particular object of desire. ‘Where are the gels who can talk proper and pirouette? ’, the Times asked on 23 July 2007, describing the BBC’s struggles ‘to find middle-class accents’ for the lead roles in a new production of Noel Streatfield’s classic novel Ballet Shoes which is set in 1930s London. ‘Producers no longer had time to play Professor Higgins to starlets’, it states; instead ‘Estuary English’ and, still worse, ‘mockney’ dominate the airwaves at the expense of RP. 7 References 1. Unpublished Files from the BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham: BBC WAC R34/ 252. A. Burrows, Memorandum. 5 March 1924. BBC WAC R34/ 252. C. Carpendale to Dr Miller Craig, 13 February 1924. BBC WAC R34/ 252. P. Eckersley to Mr Rice, 4 March 1924. Lynda Mugglestone 214 BBC WAC R34/ 252. W.G. Fuller to G.A. Lewis, ‘Memorandum on Programme Presentation and the Organisation of a Special Department’. BBC WAC R34/ 252. J.C.W. Reith. Memorandum to Station Directors. November 20 1924. BBC WAC R34/ 587.1. Announcers’ Lecture. 20 May 1925. BBC WAC S236/ 12. A. Burrows. ‘The Birth of Broadcasting in Britain’. 2. Other Sources: ‘A Novelist’s Thoughts on Broadcasting. A Special Interview with A.S.M. Hutchinson’. (1924). Radio Times January 4. 61. Archer, William (1924). ‘The Future of Wireless Drama’. Radio Times August 29. 418. ‘As She is Spoke’. (1926). North Mail and Newcastle Chronicle. July 16. ‘A B.B.C. Expert on Pronunciation’. (1927). Teaching World. September 21. Bridges, Robert (1913). A Tract on the Present State of English Pronunciation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Briggs, Asa (1961). The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Vol.1: The Birth of Broadcasting. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Briggs, Asa (1991). ‘Broadcasting in the North of England’. The Collected Essays of Asa Briggs: Serious Pursuits. Vol.III. Brighton: Harvester. 157-173. Burrows, Arthur (1923). ‘Would You Like to Broadcast? ’. Radio Times. October 26. 154. Burrows, Arthur (1924). The Story of Broadcasting. London: Cassell and Company. Craigie, William, and Onions, Charles (1933). A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles: Introduction, Supplement, and Bibliography. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Crissell, Andrew (2002). An Introductory History of British Broadcasting. 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Drinkwater, John (1924). ‘Reflections on Radio and Art’. Radio Times. September 12. 485-6. Eckersley, Peter (1941). The Power Behind the Microphone. London: J. Cape. Greenhalgh, Herbert (1925). ‘The Voice with a Smile. Work and Trials of the Radio Announcer’. Radio Times. July 10. 103. Kirk, E.V. (1923). ‘Broadcasting and the Child’. Radio Times December 28. 20. Jones, Daniel (1917). An English Pronouncing Dictionary (on Strictly Phonetic Principles). London: J.M. Dent. L.A.L.H. (1924). ‘”Listener” and “Listener-in”’. Radio Times. June 20. 27. L.C. (1924). ‘The Reward of Patience’. Radio Times. February 29. 390. Lewis, Cecil (1924). Broadcasting from Within. London: G. Newnes. Lloyd James, Arthur (1938). Our Spoken Language. London: T. Nelson. Matheson, Hilda (1933). Broadcasting. London: Thornton Butterworth. Mugglestone, Lynda (2007). ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise and Fall of the English Accent as a Social Symbol. 2nd (rev.) pbk. edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O.E. (1923). ‘Broadcasting Accent’. The Times October 29. 8. P.J. (1923). ‘A Few Questions’. Radio Times September 28. 12. de Poynton, Edward (1924). ‘”Words Killed by Wireless”: Is Radio Changing our Language? ’. Radio Times. December 26. 5. ‘Pure English by Wireless’. (1924). The Times. March 19. 15. le Queux, William (1924). ‘Announcers as Teachers’. In ‘Other People’s Opinions’. Radio Times. January 18. 151. Reith, John (1923). ‘What’s in the Air? ’. Radio Times. October 26. 138-9. Reith, John (1924a). ‘What’s In the Air? Oscillation: A Warning’. Radio Times. January 4. 42-3. Spoken English and the BBC 215 Reith, John (1924b). ‘Concerning Terminology’. Radio Times. May 16. 305-6. Reith, John (1924c). ‘A Broadcasting University’. Radio Times. June 1. 481. Reith, John (1924d). Broadcast over Britain. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Reith, John (1925). ‘A New Year Message to Listeners’. Radio Times. December 26. 1. Scholes, Percy (1923). ‘”Highbrows” and “Lowbrows”: A Frank Discussion’. Radio Times. December 14. 439. S.C.S. (1923). ‘Wireless as the “Elixir of Life”’. Radio Times. 163. Shaw, George Bernard (1916). Androcles and the Lion; Overruled; Pygmalion. London: Constable. ‘Speech Control’. (1927). Manchester Guardian. June 17. ‘The “Wireless Voice”’. (1922). The Times. April 22. 13. Ward, J.O. (2004). ‘Scholes, Percy Alfred (1877-1958)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (http: / / www.oxforddnb.com/ view/ article/ 35971). [Last accessed 31 July 2007]. Wells, J.C. (1994). ‘The Cockneyfication of RP? ’. In G. Melchers and N.-L. Johanneson (eds.) Non-Standard Varieties of Language. Stockholm. Almqvist and Wiksell. 198-205. ‘Where are the gels who can talk proper and pirouette? ’. (2007). The Times. July 23. 9. ‘Wireless Sets for Christmas: The New Hobby’. (1922). The Times. December 22. 7. Lynda Mugglestone University of Oxford United Kingdom Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Torsten Müller Football, Language and Linguistics Time-critical Utterances in Unplanned Spoken Language, Their Structures and Their Relation to Non-linguistic Situations and Events Language in Performance LiP This study presents a new approach to the analysis of spoken language. Its aims are threefold: to make systematic use of video material in order to demonstrate that the conditions under which language is produced are crucial for its structure. Secondly, to show that timing - the moment an utterance is made in relation to the event it describes - also shapes the linguistic output, and thirdly, to show that verbless structures are an integral part of spoken language. Their occurrence can be linked to specific extra-linguistic situations and event types. The data consists of English and German language live radio broadcasts of international football games and video material containing the corresponding T V footage to determine the extra-linguistic events that are referred to in the radio commentaries. Torsten Müller Football, Language and Linguistics Time-critical Utterances in Unplanned Spoken Language, Their Structures and Their Relation to Non-linguistic Situations and Events Language in Performance, Band 36 2007, 390 Seiten, 171 Tabellen, €[D] 78,00/ Sfr 123,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6356-9 AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Setting a Standard Early BBC Language Policy and the Advisory Committee on Spoken English Jürg Rainer Schwyter ‘Early days are crucial ones in either individual existence or corporate organisation. I repeat, we had no precedent. Almost everything depended upon the personality of those to whom, almost by chance, this service had been committed.’ (J.C.W. Reith, Broadcast over Britain, 1924, p. 24) It will be my aim in this contribution to describe - with the help of linguistic examples, historical BBC documents and articles from the BBC weekly magazine Radio Times - the language policy of the early BBC, or more specifically the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English 1926-1939, and also to give some impressions of the public’s reaction to that policy. I will concentrate on the early days, as ‘early days are crucial ones’, to quote Reith (1924: 24), but I hope it will also become clear that the influence of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English can still be felt today, whatever changes in language policy the BBC has introduced in more recent years. 1. Introduction The BBC or British Broadcasting Corporation has been an integral part of life in Britain and many other countries for over 85 years. It would be difficult to imagine our media landscape without the BBC and its numerous domestic radio and TV channels as well as its World Service, Internet sites and various satellite channels. In short, the BBC is a British institution par excellence - and not just when it comes to entertainment and reliable coverage of news items from around the globe, but also when it comes to Spoken English. ‘The influence of the Jürg Rainer Schwyter 218 1 Note that Lloyd James, in a paper entitled ‘The Spoken Word’ and published in 1936 in The Magazine of the English Association, speaks of ‘the so-called BBC English’ at which ‘armchair critics rail’ (on p. 60, R6/ 196/ 9; references beginning with ‘R6’ relate to various files from the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham, see References for details). BBC’, the social historian Asa Briggs wrote, ‘both on education and the pronunciation of “standard English” has been noticed by almost all the people who have described its work’ (1995a: 222). Burnley’s (1992: 298) comments in this respect are fairly typical: The rapid development in public broadcasting after about 1920 led in England and abroad to the establishment of BBC English as a de facto spoken standard. The standard, alternatively known as Received Pronunciation, is that of a social and educational élite, originally developed from the manner of speech approved by the nineteenth-century public schools, and concurrently by the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Interestingly enough, the term ‘BBC English’ originally had a rather negative connotation and was used ‘among regional BBC staff resentful of the better prospects of speakers with public-school accents’ (McArthur 1992: 109). 1 The fact that in the 1920s the two terms ‘BBC English’ and ‘public school accent’ were perceived as largely synonymous speaks volumes about the public image and composition of the early BBC. But before I proceed to give a brief account of the language policy of the early BBC, it will be necessary to clarify, from a linguistic point of view, what we mean by ‘Standard English’, ‘Spoken Standard’ and ‘Received Pronunciation’ - all terms used in a rather nonchalant way by the authors quoted above. We need to distinguish between Written and Spoken Standard English. In the written medium, according to Smith (1996), Standard English refers to a set of grammatical, lexical and also spelling rules, many of which were fixed by the prescriptive 18th-century grammar and dictionary writers; and Spoken Standard English, again as described by Smith, is a prestigious system of grammar and lexis which can be used by any speaker in communities where English is the first language, available for any register of language (as opposed to varieties which are often termed ‘restricted’ or ‘dialectal’). In the British Isles, it can be, but need not be, expressed in Received Pronunciation, a prestigious accent of English associated with, but not restricted to, the South-East of England. Thus it is possible to speak Standard English with a Scottish, Welsh, American or Yorkshire accent. (1996: 65) In other words, Spoken Standard English does not have a single accent associated with it. Much confusion therefore results, first, from including accent in any definition of Spoken Standard English, and secondly, from simply transferring the notion of fixity from Written Standard English to Spo- Setting a Standard 219 2 What is known as happY-tensing involves the replacement in word-final position of the lax vowel / / with the tense vowel / i: / in e.g. happy or city; both pronunciations, / / and / i: / , are now considered RP (Wells 1982: 294; Trudgill 2002: 175). As for again, Wells (1982: 295) includes its varying pronunciation in a list of ‘very common words […] having two or more rival forms in RP’, although he considers the pronunciation / gen/ ‘more usual’. The ‘rival forms’ of again were also discussed by the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English; see below, §3. 3 Trudgill (1999: 126-7; reprinted 2002: 168-9), however, has argued that - due to linguistic change and the spread of non-standard forms to the standard - Standard English is not totally discrete either. He illustrates this with the use of than as preposition, which is acceptable to most speakers of Standard English in e.g. He is bigger than me, but not (yet? ) in e.g. He is bigger than what I am. See Hughes, Trudgill and Watt (2005: 18-23) for further, regional and age-group, variation within the Standard English dialect (with respect to contracted negatives, indirect objects, participle forms following need and want, auxiliary versus full verb have, and a number of modals). 4 Wells (1982: 279-301) not only usefully distinguishes between varieties of RP, such as ‘mainstream RP’, ‘upper-crust’ or ‘U-RP’, ‘adoptive RP’ and ‘near RP’, but also discusses various types of variability within mainstream RP, thus proving Smith’s point. See also Hughes, Trudgill and Watt (2005: 39-41), who ‘speak of RP as a single accent’, but one with ‘significant variability within it’ (at 39). It is equally true, however, that ‘it takes only one non-RP feature [e.g. / h/ -dropping] for a speaker not to be a speaker of RP’; in that sense, ‘RP is a standard accent which has undergone, albeit implicitly rather than explicitly, codification’ (Trudgill 2002: 174). For a much stricter notion of RP as a ‘fully-fledged standard variety with a high degree of standardness’, that is ‘minimal variation in form’, see Altendorf (2003: 27-9). ken Standard English. For, as Carter (1999: 151-6) has pointed out, spoken discourse differs from written language in a number of ways, including backchannelling, false starts, hesitations, and, often overlooked, grammatical features such as left or right dislocations (‘The women in the audience, they all shouted’), ellipsis (‘Interesting, isn’t it? ’), and word-order (‘That’s what she said was the biggest shock’). If the two confusions are combined, the discrete ‘this or that’ of the Written Standard may well be extended to Received Pronunciation or RP. RP, however, is more gradient (for example realizational variabilities such as happY-tensing or lexical-incidential variation such as / gen/ versus / ge n/ all fall within RP 2 ) rather than a set of binary either-or rules (for example ‘I say’ is Standard, whereas ‘I says’ is not. 3 ) In fact, one of RP’s main characteristics, according to Smith (1996), is precisely that it is not a clear-cut set of fixed shibboleths, but rather what the nineteenthcentury scholar A.J. Ellis, who first described it, called ‘a sort of mean’: a kind of prestigious magnet of pronunciation towards which prestige-seeking accents tend. […] Received Pronunciation may be defined, therefore, as an abstraction, rather like the phoneme; individual speakers may produce utterances which tend towards or deviate from this ‘mean’. It is therefore perhaps better to consider Received Pronunciation in terms of focus rather than fixity; in other words, individual speakers tend to a greater or lesser extent to conform to Received Pronunciation usage, but no one of them can be said to demonstrate every characteristic of the accent. (1996: 65-6, my emphasis) 4 Jürg Rainer Schwyter 220 5 The ‘old regime’, however, was soon to end: on 1 January 1927 a Corporation was created for, initially, a period of ten years (for details, see Briggs 1995a: 297-371). 6 For other, literary, examples of this generally well-meaning, albeit - from a present-day point of view - patronizing attitude in early 20th-century Britain, see John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992). 7 ‘In addition to the Central Advisory Committee, each station has its own Local Education Advisory Committee, and in this way we have been able to secure the co-operation and interest of Local Education Authorities throughout England, Scotland and Wales’ (Reith 1924: 157). John Reith, the BBC’s first managing director, and his contemporaries were well aware of pronunciation variation among educated speakers of English. For this reason they set up the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English: to fix what had hitherto only been focused - that is nothing less than to create a ‘standard pronunciation’. 2. The Formation of the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English The BBC started life as the British Broadcasting Company (note: Company, not yet Corporation) in 1922. 5 From very early on the BBC was meant to be a tool not only to entertain, in the most positive sense, but also to educate ‘the great multitude’, namely by ‘carry[ing] into the greatest possible number of homes everything that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement’ (Reith 1924: 34). 6 ‘It followed naturally’, as Briggs (1995a: 218) has pointed out, ‘that genuine differences of opinion would be expressed about what constituted “the best”’. Reith not only reinforced the conception of the BBC as a public service by employing outside programme advisers and critics, but he also tried to solve any ‘differences of opinion’ by creating a ‘network of advisory committees which drew upon the services of experts in various fields’ (Briggs 1995a: 218-9). Examples of such advisory committees are the Religious Advisory Committee, the Musical Advisory Committee, the Children’s Hour Committee and the Women’s Advisory Committee (these two committees soon lapsed), and the Central Educational Advisory Committee. 7 One of the ‘offshoots’ of the Central Educational Advisory Committee, to which Reith himself attached the utmost importance, was the Advisory Committee on Spoken English, which was formed in 1926 (Briggs 1995a: 219-28). In fact, the language education aspect of the BBC was quite explicitly stated by Reith as early as 1924 in the chapter entitled ‘The King’s English’ of his famous Broadcast over Britain: I have heard it said that one can place a man socially and educationally from the first few dozen words he utters. There is a measure of truth in the state- Setting a Standard 221 8 William Le Queux (1864-1927) was a fairly well-known writer of thrillers and spy novels at the time, an ‘avid self-publicist’, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB 2004-7), who ‘wrote his way from obscurity to wealth and celebrity’. 9 Gimson (1984: 45), too, has commented on the English preoccupation to cultivate ‘for at least four centuries […] a concept of a form of pronunciation which has been considered more correct, desirable, acceptable or elegant than others.’ 10 Jean Aitchison (1997: 9) quotes Norman (Lord) Tebbit, a former Tory cabinet minister: ‘If you allow standards to slip to the stage where good English is no better than bad English, where people turn up filthy […] at school […] all those things tend to cause people to have no standards at all, and once you lose standards then there’s no imperative to stay out of crime.’ ment. It is certainly true that even the commonest and simplest words are subjected to horrible and grotesque abuse. One hears the most appalling travesties of vowel pronunciation. This is a matter in which broadcasting may be of immense assistance. […] No one would deny the great advantage of a standard pronunciation of the language, not only in theory, but in practice. Our responsibilities in this matter are obvious, since in talking to so vast a multitude, mistakes are likely to be promulgated to a much greater extent than was ever possible before. There is now presented to any who may require it, an opportunity of learning by example. (Reith 1924: 161-2, my emphasis) Judging from the press of those early years and the many ‘Letters to the Editor’ in the Radio Times, the public in general was quite happy with the idea that announcers could or should be their teachers, as this fairly typical voice from the same year as Reith’s Broadcast English, 1924, illustrates: Announcers as Teachers Happily for us, the officials of our Broadcasting Company have been well chosen, and are all educated and refined men and women, who use cultivated language to which it is a pleasure to listen. Unlike in America, the very tones of our own announcers’ voices are an indication of a background of education and culture. In America, it seems, one hears daily slips in grammar, faults in diction, and the mispronunciation of both English and foreign words. In England such slipshod broadcasting is unknown. We look upon our announcers as teachers. And they are. - William Le Queux in The Scots Pictorial (Radio Times, 18 January 1924) 8 Note the terms ‘educated’, ‘cultivated’ and so on in connection with language use. Such attitudes are a product of the 19th century, when ‘“[c]ulture”, “refinement”, status, and superiority were, according to popular belief, all able to be conveyed within the nuances of a variety of pronunciation’ (Mugglestone 2003: 258-9). 9 This confusion of speech and cultural and moral qualities can in fact still be found today. 10 Two additional points, however, should be made here. First, ‘the public image’ of the BBC was very much a male one, ‘drawn from upper-class or upper middle-class life’ (Briggs 1995a: 167). The broadcasters, ‘mostly young men’, were in ‘a large portion […] University undergraduates’ (Reith 1924: 37, Jürg Rainer Schwyter 222 11 Gimson (1994: 78-9) states that because the BBC used to recommend an RP pronunciation to its announcers ‘RP often became identified in the public mind with “BBC English”’. And in the latest edition of his English phonetics textbook, Roach (2000: vii, 3-4) has substituted the terms Received Pronunciation and RP, which he now considers ‘old-fashioned and misleading’ with BBC Pronunciation, as ‘BBC is the accent that has always been chosen by British teachers to teach to foreign learners, and it is the accent that has been most fully described and has been used as the basis for textbooks and pronouncing dictionaries.’ 51). Formality in all aspects was seen as absolutely crucial: for example, it was decided in 1925 that announcers ‘should be required to wear dinner jackets’ when on duty in the evening as ‘an act of courtesy to the artist’ (Briggs 1995a: 268); and, in their dinner jackets, they should speak ‘good English and without affectation’ (Reith 1924: 162). The most appropriate medium for this, it was agreed, was Public School Pronunciation - eventually Daniel Jones abandoned the term PSP and followed Wyld in using Received Pronunciation, a label first utilized by A.J. Ellis (Gimson 1984: 45; Strässler 2005) - as this accent ‘would convey a suitable sense of sobriety, impartiality, and impersonality’ (McArthur 1992: 110). Thus, as we have seen, the eventual equation of Public School Accent, BBC English and Received Pronunciation. 11 The second point is this: it may be asked whether in fact radio and TV can influence people’s speech behaviour and, if so, to what extent. Labov and Harris (1986: 20), for example, have claimed that ‘linguistic traits are not transmitted across group boundaries simply by exposure to other dialects in the mass media or [even] in schools’ - with the exception of a few self-conscious corrections, sometimes hypercorrections, in formal styles. Trudgill (1986: 39-41) explains why: as accommodation seems the most likely explanation for the spread of linguistic features from speaker to speaker, that is the conscious or unconscious convergence of a speaker to the speech of his/ her interlocutors, face-to-face contact is obviously a prerequisite for linguistic diffusion to take place. It is thus clear that ‘the electronic media are not very instrumental in the diffusion of linguistic innovations, in spite of widespread popular notions to the contrary’, a fact supported by ‘the geographical patterns associated with linguistic diffusion’: Were nationwide radio and television the major source of this diffusion, then the whole of Britain would be influenced by a particular innovation simultaneously. This of course is not what happens: London-based innovations reach Norwich before they reach Sheffield, and Sheffield before they reach Newcastle. (Trudgill 1986: 40) By contrast, neither the broader public nor Reith and his contemporaries at the BBC seem to have doubted the Company’s mission and success. Though Reith admitted that it was impossible to ‘compute in concrete terms’ the influence broadcasting would have on people’s pronunciation, he insisted Setting a Standard 223 12 Gimson (1994: 77-8) has justly remarked that ‘there have always been at any one time disparities between the speech sounds of the younger and older generations’ and that therefore ‘the speech of the young is traditionally characterized by the old as slovenly and debased.’ that ‘there is an influence, and a great one’: ‘children in particular have acquired the habit of copying the announcer’s articulation; this has been observed by their teachers’ (1924: 183, 162). On the one hand, then, Reith felt a great responsibility in this respect, particularly since, by the end of September 1924, the BBC already had 950,000 licence fee payers, calculated to represent an audience of ‘over four million’ and significantly advancing every month (Reith 1924: 81, 205). On the other hand, he was confronted with the problem already stated by A.J. Ellis and Henry Sweet, namely that ‘even among educated London speakers’ there are many words that ‘are pronounced with differences’; that, in short, there is quite considerable variation ‘from individual to individual, and more markedly from generation to generation’ (quoted by Mugglestone 2003: 259, 261). 12 These factors - combined with Reith’s firm belief in the possibility as well as necessity of fixing, of standardizing pronunciation - are very clearly reflected in the minutes from the preliminary meeting of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English, which took place at Savoy Hill on 25 June 1926: Mr. Reith explained that the British Broadcasting Company felt a great responsibility with regard to spoken English. Approximately half the population of the country was at one time or another listening to broadcast announcements, and it was realised from the outset that large numbers of people might take them as an example of how English should be spoken. The Company had at all their stations endeavoured to secure, and to a large extent had succeeded in securing, announcers who could be relied on to satisfy this responsibility, but it was becoming increasingly apparent that large numbers of words in common use were pronounced by educated people in entirely different ways, and in many cases it was practically impossible to say which was best. Further, in addition to the particular question of vowel sounds or accents in various words, there arose such general questions as the final and medial ‘r’ in southern English and various common usages by educated people which in some quarters might be regarded as being as wrong and unfortunate as the practices of (say) the Cockney. The Broadcasting Company felt that they should secure the most expert advice to the intent that, if possible, a standard form of pronunciation for doubtful words should be settled which would then be adopted at all Broadcasting Stations, and a ruling given as to whether such modern customs of educated people as those mentioned above should be accepted as justified and authorised, or whether the Broadcasting Company should by their powerful example endeavour to stem modern tendencies to inaccurate and slurred speech. (R6/ 201/ 1; my emphasis) Jürg Rainer Schwyter 224 13 Biographical information, unless stated otherwise, is taken from BBC-internal documents and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB 2004-7). 14 For a comprehensive account of Jones’s life and career, see Collins and Mees (1999); Strässler (2005) mainly focuses on Jones’s linguistics. Additionally, the apparent need ‘to stem modern tendencies’ is a clear reflection of what Jean Aitchison (2001: 13) has called a ‘vintage year’ view of language; or as Gimson put it a little more technically, ‘within RP, those habits of pronunciation that are most firmly established tend to be regarded as ‘correct’, whilst innovation tends to be stigmatized’ (1994: 80). The (undated) front page of the Advisory Committee’s minute book not only repeats the brief mission statement, but also illustrates what a most distinguished body this actually was: 13 The British Broadcasting Company, recognising their responsibility in setting a standard of spoken English, have appointed the following to act as an Advisory Committee: - Dr. Robert Bridges [a former physician, Poet Laureate since 1913 and a founder of the Society for Pure English; Bridges became chairman of the Advisory Committee]; Mr. Logan Pearsall Smith [a naturalised American literary scholar and essayist representing on the Committee the Society for Pure English, which he cofounded with Bridges and others in 1913]; Mr. G. Bernard Shaw [the famous Irish playwright, critic and polemicist, whose keen interest in phonetics and spelling reform was well known - not least through his hugely successful play Pygmalion with its almost one hundred sell-out performances between April and August 1914]; Mr. Daniel Jones [Professor of Phonetics at University College London, assistant secretary and later secretary of the International Phonetic Association, and compiler of the English Pronouncing Dictionary, first published in 1917]; 14 Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson [a well-known actor and theatre manager, who was not only ‘one of the most distinguished speakers of the British stage’ (Radio Times, 16 July 1926) but also ‘widely regarded as the finest Hamlet of his time’ (ODNB 2004-7)]; Mr. A. [Arthur] Lloyd James [a Welsh phonetician at the School of Oriental and African Studies and former pupil and colleague of Jones at UCL; Lloyd James had advised the BBC before and became the Advisory Committee’s honorary secretary]. The Company will refer to this Committee for advice on the pronunciation of new words or imports from foreign languages which are becoming acclimatised. The Committee will advise in respect of the London and Daventry stations, where the B.B.C. intend to maintain a standard of educated Southern English. It is not intended to impose this standard upon the Northern, Scottish or Irish stations. Pronunciations as adopted on the advice of the Committee will be Setting a Standard 225 15 Reith of course was a Scot, born in Kincardineshire and educated in Glasgow and Norfolk (ODNB 2004-7), but he did not serve on the Committee and certainly never participated in the day-to-day decisions on matters of pronunciation. made known to the Company’s official announcers in the Southern stations. (R6/ 201/ 1) What is interesting is not only the focus on the treatment of loan-words in English and the aim to maintain ‘a standard of educated Southern English’ - precisely the variety that, according to Henry Sweet’s 1881 Elementary Sounds of English, is ‘approximated to, all over Great Britain, by those who do not keep their local dialects’ (quoted by Mugglestone 2003: 258) - but above all the Committee’s self-imposed restriction to the London and Daventry stations. Whether this was out of respect for other regional varieties of English, golden-triangle centricity, the absence of a Scot on the Committee (at least in 1926), or a sense that everything north of Watford is a lost cause anyway, I leave up to the reader to decide; unfortunately the BBC files do not make clear how and when this decision had been reached. 15 The first official meeting of the Committee was held only ten days later, on 5 July 1926. Two points stand out from that meeting. First, the Committee put itself up as the BBC’s absolute authority in matters of what is referred to as ‘doubtful words’. The following resolution was unanimously carried, namely that in the case of doubtful words it is advisable for the B.B.C. to adopt a uniform pronunciation for use by announcers and other officials of the Company in their work, and that the Committee, after due consideration of derivations and traditional usages [note: ‘traditional usages’], will decide upon the term to be adopted. (R6/ 201/ 1) The aim was not only to achieve consistency, but to achieve it through a rather prescriptive approach, certainly for announcers and, once pronunciation had been successfully standardized, eventually for ‘most educated persons’ (see below, R6/ 196/ 1). With hindsight, though, it was acknowledged that acceptance of a standard as defined by the BBC could not be forced upon the public at large. A brief, undated summary of the history and function of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English (probably written shortly after the Committee’s suspension at the outbreak of the Second World War, as the past form is used throughout and references are made to publications as late as 1937) is quite explicit on these points: with the workings of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English the B.B.C. hoped to lay the foundations of a standard pronunciation which would eventually be common to most educated persons, although it emphasized from time to time that is [sic] published lists of words were for the guidance of B.B.C. announcers and other officials, and were not an attempt to dictate to the general public how it should speak, as was so often alleged. It Jürg Rainer Schwyter 226 16 The monophthongization process of, in this case, the triphthong in / ta d/ to / t : d/ is commonly referred to as smoothing (see Wells 1982: 238-42). was not suggested that the chosen pronunciations were the only ‘right’ ones. (R6/ 196/ 1) Secondly, at the first meeting a number of ‘general principles’ of pronunciation were agreed so that rules for announcers could be drawn up: Vowel sounds in accented syllables. The Committee agreed that it was desirable to oppose any tendency towards the increase of homophones in the language, and that the announcers should therefore be instructed to differentiate the vowel sounds in such groups of words as shaw, shore, sure; yore, your; tired, tarred, etc. Vowel sounds in unaccented syllables. The Chairman demonstrated that it is possible to give all vowels in unaccented syllables a flavour of their original character without unduly stressing the syllable containing them, and that indeed the matter was merely one of good or bad articulation, e.g. the slovenly speaker uses a single sound (represented by ‘eh’) for all vowels in unaccented syllables. He says parehdy, parehsite, Julieh, Ehphelieh, where the speaker with good articulation says parody, parasite, Julia and Ophelia. It was agreed that the announcers should attempt the differentiation of such vowel sounds, but without becoming stilted. Purity of Vowel sounds. The Committee were in agreement that all affectations such as compaoused, for composed, m’yah for mere, nem for name, which definitely prejudice the purity of vowel sounds, should be opposed. The ‘h’ in which, why, whale, etc. After some discussion it was decided that speakers of Southern English would find difficulty in pronouncing which, whale, why, white, etc. with the aspirated ‘w’, and that no definite principle could be determined in this case, although differentiation between which and witch, whale and wail, etc. should be recommended in order to avoid homophones. Untrilled final ‘r’ and ‘r’ between vowels. The possibility of pronouncing the ‘r’ in fire, tower, sure, hour, poor, etc. without trilling, was demonstrated. It was felt, however, that Southern English speakers having come to be unaware that such ‘r’s’ had any sound value whatever, would have considerable trouble in pronouncing an untrilled ‘r’. If that were so, it was agreed that the untrilled ‘r’ should be treated as a separate vowel, though not syllabic, e.g. tired to be pronounced tired, not tahd [i.e. no smoothing either]. 16 It was agreed that an attempt should be made to give the letter some sound value, however slight. Setting a Standard 227 The adoption of French ‘age’ sound into English. The Chairman proposed that the broad ‘a’ (of father) in such words as garage, mirage, rajah should be recognised, and that an attempt should be made to adopt the sound of the French ‘age’ into English, rather than to add to the list, already too long, of words ending in the sound ‘ehdge’. Agreement was not reached on these proposals, though it was later decided not to anglicise the word ‘garage’ as yet. Foreign words No definite rule was found possible as to the pronunciation of place names or of foreign words. It was agreed, however, that foreign words in common use should be Englished and that where their sounds approximated to English sounds the original sounds should be respected, e.g. chauffer [sic], and in proper names, Shoobert, but Mose-art, Reams (Rheims). (Minutes, 5 July 1926; R6/ 201/ 1; emphasis in the original) Subsequently, a BBC internal memo from Reith was sent to all station managers (‘Main and Relay’) with the minutes of the first meeting enclosed, adding: I shall be glad if you will make every endeavour to have the decisions of this Committee carried out by all station [sic] who announce or speak in any way at the microphone. I am not of course referring to outsiders or even to regular lecturers. We are only concerned with our own staff. There will of course be no difficulty with the pronunciation of the ‘r’ in Scotland. The ‘r’ should be pronounced but we would probably be quite unable to have Englishmen pronounce the ‘r’ without exaggeration and we wish to avoid stilted announcing even in an attempt to become more accurate. (17 July 1926, R6/ 196/ 1) That the Committee’s decisions were not followed by all announcers all the time is palpable; that there existed and exist pronunciation variations even within RP or near-RP is a linguistic fact. A BBC internal memo by the Programme Executive sent to ‘all regional and station directors’ almost three years after the Committee’s first official meeting, with a reprint of the ‘general principles’ enclosed, is ample testimony: ‘I should be glad if all members of your staff who appear before the microphone would study it [the reprint with the general principles] and if you would impress upon them the importance that is attached to the adoption throughout the Corporation of a universal method of pronunciation’ (7 March 1929; R6/ 196/ 3). In the next meeting (held on 8 November 1926) it was recognized that the spelling ‘eh’ for unstressed vowels was unsatisfactory in the light of the decision that vowels in unstressed syllables should have ‘a flavour of their original character’; ‘eh’ was therefore substituted by the mark ‘ ’ over the letter; however, it was decided not to use special type, i.e. the phonetic Jürg Rainer Schwyter 228 17 All the Committee’s rulings were, as a matter of routine, published in the Radio Times, whose letter pages at the time developed into a veritable forum for language prescriptivists and purists. alphabet, in order to make communication to the Press - and therefore the general public - as easy and straightforward as possible (R6/ 201/ 1). 17 It should be added here that it is not always easy to interpret the Committee’s ‘decisions’ without the use of phonetic script. While most of the exam- Fig. 1: Facsimile Radio Times, 23 July 1926 Setting a Standard 229 18 Thanks to Peter Trudgill and John Wells for their help on this point (25 April 2001, private communication). 19 See Mugglestone 2003 on homophones (114-15), aspirated w / hw/ (186-8), vocalization of / r/ (86-9), and linking and intrusive / r/ (91-4). 20 As late as 1981, Burchfield, in his BBC Guide, recommended to ‘avoid the intrusive r’, at least ‘in the formal presentation of the news or of other scripted speech’ (10), even though this is a well-known feature (be it categorical or variable) of non-rhotic accents (Wells 1982: 222-7). Hughes, Trudgill and Watt (2005: 46) equally consider intrusive / r/ as ‘very much a part of RP’, but they add that ‘careful speakers and speakers of adoptive RP may […] avoid it’. And Trudgill (2002: 174) lists intrusive / r/ among a number of ‘features which used not to be RP and now are RP’. ples on homophones, aspirated h, and so on, given in the ‘general principles’ are clear enough, this is not the case for the Advisory Committee transcriptions for composed and name. It is likely, however, that ‘compaoused’ is a rather bad attempt at showing fronting and ‘nem’ at showing a very narrow diphthong. Daniel Jones (1972: §162) discusses an ‘almost monophthongal E’ that ‘may often be observed in the speech of BBC announcers’. 18 From a linguistic point of view, it is quite remarkable that most of the pronunciation features drawn up in the Committee’s very first list of recommendations are not only ‘old friends’ going back to the 19th century, 19 but they still caused bouts of fierce controversy (or con troversy) in the early 20th century - in the press and amongst the Committee members themselves - at regular intervals. I therefore would like to briefly look at these contested pronunciation features in turn. There are dozens of letters addressed to the editor of the Radio Times complaining about the pronunciation of vowels in unstressed syllables (that is the shwa or even its elision), about the pronunciation of aspirated ‘wh’, of ‘r’ in all its forms from postvocalic to linking and intrusive, about the smoothing of triphthongs, and, of course, the treatment of foreign words. Here is an example of a letter dealing with four of those issues: Announcers’ English. […] The announcers seem to find a lot of difficulty with the letters ‘r’ and ‘h’. Why should a word ending in ‘er’ be pronounced as if it ended in ‘aw’ or ‘ah’? Why put in an ‘r’ when it isn’t there? Such vulgarisms as ‘Indiar’ and ‘Australiar rand Africa’ are painful. Why say ‘modden’ when the word is ‘modern’? […] We also heard that the King had been ‘weeled’ in a bath-chair, when - I suppose - the announcer meant ‘wheeled’. Also, is it the British Empire or the British Empiah? If the B.B.C. pronunciations in the above instances are the correct ones, then I apologize for my ignorance. If they are not correct, surely listeners are justified in saying so. - F.W.E. Wagner, Castletown Road, West Kensington. (Radio Times, 28 June 1929) 20 The ‘wh’ aspiration question, incidentally, triggered months of controversy in the Radio Times, with quotations ranging from the New English Dictionary Jürg Rainer Schwyter 230 21 Gimson (1984: 47) observed that ‘the phoneme / / as in white, […] although characterized as obsolescent by phoneticians a hundred years ago, was nevertheless often recommended as appropriate in more formal styles.’ 22 The previous recommendation was of course, as is stated among the ‘general principles’ from 1926, not to anglicize the pronunciation of garage (see above). (that is, the Oxford English Dictionary) to Anglo-Saxon. 21 And as for foreign words, decisions on the pronunciation of foreign names were questioned regularly, particularly by listeners with some knowledge of the country or language in question: I myself think the endeavour ultimately to make the pronunciation used by B.B.C. announcers the criterion an excellent one, particularly as we lack any official body to which appeals could be made. May I, therefore, as a musician, and one who has spent eight years in Austria - the home of Mozart - raise a protest against the mispronunciation of his name as given in your article, entitled ‘The King’s English’? It is, of course, impossible to put down phonetic equivalents in writing, but surely the German ‘z’ can be fairly adequately dealt with. A much more accurate rendering would be ‘Mo-tsart’, the accent falling on the first syllable. There seems to me to be no justification whatever for Anglicizing the name, since it has not become a household word. […] - Ernest Whitfield, 67, Finchley Road, St. John’s Wood, N.W.8. (Radio Times, 30 July 1926) Though Lloyd James called on his audience in a radio talk, broadcast on 29 November 1926, ‘to continue to take an interest in all the problems of our native tongue, and never to hesitate if they want the B.B.C. committee to consider any vexed question of pronunciation’, he continued with the following pronouncement on who has the last say on ‘foreign words’: Foreign words are a source of anxiety, and here the committee has one policy, which is, for better or worse, to anglicise as many as possible. Whether a foreign word has lived long enough among us to be given papers of naturalisation is for the committee to decide. (R6/ 196/ 1) It seems, to give just one example, that by late 1930 garage has been given its UK passport, as the minutes of the Committee’s tenth meeting record: ‘GARAGE: The committee substituted GÁRREDGE for their previous recommendation’. 22 However, hors d’oeuvre and kursaal, for example, were still to be pronounced ‘as in French’ and ‘as in German’ respectively (R6/ 201/ 1). Finally, as for giving the postvocalic / r/ ‘some sound value’, it was not until 1934 - more than eight years after the first official meeting - that the Committee finally realized that Southern announcers cannot treat the r sound in the Northern manner, and very few English born speakers give to the unaccented vowels the flavour that Mr. Bridges recommended. But the B.B.C. very definitely concerns itself with checking ultra-modern tendencies in the language, and in carrying out the Setting a Standard 231 23 Probably because ‘Zulojical Gardens’ was among the pronunciations ‘definitely recommended’, it took ten years and half a dozen letters from Professor Julian Huxley of the Zoological Society to have this curious decision changed. Huxley - who had himself joined the Committee in 1935 - described the original decision as not only ‘contrary to [his] experience’ but a ‘travesty’ (20 December 1935, R6/ 196/ 8; 2 March 1937, R6/ 196/ 10). Finally, in December 1937, ‘The pronunciation of the word zoological was emended from zoo-olójjical to ZO-OLÓJJICAL. The comment “but Zoo-lójjic l Gárdens was deleted’ (Minutes, 7 December 1937; R6/ 201/ 2). 24 The Committee’s recommendation is that of General or Mainstream rather than Refined or U-RP, as it is the latter, particularly among older speakers, that prefers / : / instead of / / (Gimson 1994: 108-9; Mugglestone 2003: 191; Hughes, Trudgill and Watt 2005: 49). injunctions of the Committee with regard to the so-called ‘purity’ of English vowels. (Minutes, Enclosure A; 20 September 1934; R6/ 201/ 2) This is, in fact, another important point about the working mechanisms of the Committee. In spite of the fact that ‘in many cases the recommendations of the Committee involve a dogmatic decision on points which might legitimately be argued, but to prevent confusion uniformity has to be attempted’ (Radio Times, 16 July 1926), the Committee actually increasingly sought the public’s views and, not infrequently, took some of the criticism on board, and from the later 1920s onwards showed an increasing willingness to change some of its earlier decisions. 3. A ‘Listening’ BBC? In the course of 1927, the Committee started drawing up its word-lists under two headings, one for words on which there was agreement, the other for words possibly to be revised later ‘in the light of criticism’: (a) Pronunciations definitely recommended (b) Pronunciations suggested The former are to be adopted by the announcers, for example zoology zoological zo-ology zo-olojical, but Zu-lojical Gardens. 23 The latter, the suggestions, will be constantly reviewed in later meetings, when they might be changed according to suggestions received, for example again The last syllable rhymes with either ‘rain’ or with ‘then’. The Committee suggests the latter pronunciation. cross This, with other words like ‘frost’, ‘cough’, ‘loss’, is pronounced either with a short vowel as in ‘boss’, or a long vowel as in ‘all’. The Committee suggests the former pronunciation. 24 Jürg Rainer Schwyter 232 Burchfield (1981: 10) equally advised BBC announcers to ‘avoid the use of the obsolescent -ors/ -orf sound in words like cross, loss and off.’ And seventy-five years after the Committee’s recommendation, Trudgill (2002: 174) even speaks of ‘the replacement of / : / by / / in the lexical set of lost, cloth, off’ in RP. 25 Only Jones (1977: s.v.) still lists the voiceless and the voiced variant of the alveolar fricative here; the Oxford English Dictionary (s.v.) as well as Chambers 21st Century Dictionary (1999: s.v.) and New Penguin English Dictionary (2000: s.v.) have / s/ . 26 The Oxford English Dictionary (s.v.) lists both pronunciations, as does Jones (1977: s.v.), though the latter still has the qualification ‘sometimes by players’ for the pronunciation / g f/ . By contrast, the more recent and more popular New Penguin English Dictionary (2000: s.v.) and Chambers 21st Century Dictionary (1999: s.v.) give only one variant, namely / l/ -retention, thus clearly indicating which pronunciation is the one most commonly used today. 27 In the letters page of the issue of July 30 1926, for example, two listeners questioned at least some of the Committee’s decisions on the pronunciation of place names, but one in particular, Edgar W. Wood, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, may well have given the Committee the idea of working on the matter. explosive Pronounced ‘explousiv’ and ‘explouziv’. No decision. 25 golf The pronunciation ‘goff’ is current in the South among players of the game. The Committee suggests the retention of the ‘l’ sound. 26 (Minutes, 26 May 1927; R6/ 201/ 1) The minutes of a meeting in the following year state that, after a lengthy discussion of ‘doubtful words […], it was decided that these pronunciations should be published in the “Radio Times”, and that readers should be invited to submit their views’ (29 November 1928; R6/ 201/ 1). And in 1930 the Committee even went so far as to regard all its decisions on pronunciation as ‘provisional and [to] be published as such in “The Radio Times”, being given as much publicity as possible’. Then ‘these provisional decisions should be reviewed at the following meeting, when they would be either confirmed as final, or altered in the light of criticism received’ (17 January 1930; R6/ 201/ 1). I should like to illustrate this new, pragmatic ‘listening BBC’ with two examples. The first concerns place names. The Committee decided as early as its meeting of 8 November 1926 to produce a pronouncing dictionary of English place names that would be ‘of service to general learning, and of practical use to the B.B.C.’ The need for such a dictionary arose as ‘it was difficult to obtain information about the pronunciation of small villages, hamlets, etc.’ This had apparently led to some mispronunciation by BBC announcers, which had in turn led to ‘adverse criticism in the country’ (R6/ 201/ 1). Interestingly enough, it was in various letters to the editor of the Radio Times that the issue was first raised. 27 Setting a Standard 233 Fig. 2: Facsimile Radio Times, 3 May 1929, p. 219 In the spring of 1927, ‘a card index of some nine hundred place names, with their pronunciations, had been compiled from information received from listeners in the country’. Reith suggested that the BBC should verify that information, so that announcers could be advised with confidence to consult the card index for the pronunciation of difficult place names (26 May 1927; R6/ 201/ 1). The minutes from the December meeting of 1927 record not only that the Station Director at Edinburgh requested information about the place name index - thereby clearly reflecting its usefulness - but also that the Committee did in fact verify every single entry in the index (1 December 1927; R6/ 201/ 1); this was done by writing a circular letter to educated people in ‘all villages the names of which were contained in the card index’, such as postmasters and country vicars, and asking them to confirm or correct a particular pronunciation (17 May 1928; R6/ 201/ 1). A staggering ‘1,946 letters had been sent out, of which [only] approximately 5 1/ 2% were unanswered’ (Minutes, 29 November 1928; R6/ 201/ 1). But the place name consultation process undoubtedly reached its climax in 1929 with a full-page appeal in the Radio Times by Lloyd James. He wrote that ‘several hundreds’ of letters had already been received about place names with unfamiliar pronunciations, ‘but more are required’ (Radio Times, 3 May 1929). The reactions were overwhelming, and three weeks later, the Radio Times had to publish the following statement: Pronunciations of Place Names. Mr. Lloyd James has received so many letters in reply to his request for placenames of strange pronunciation that he is unable to reply to them all individually. He promises, however, to communicate in due course with those correspondents who raised special points. A listener has taken exception to our spelling the local pronunciation of ‘Daventry’ as ‘Daintry’. This, she says, Jürg Rainer Schwyter 234 28 For an overview of the Broadcast English series of pamphlets see below, p. 239. should be ‘Dane-tree’. Daventry was the scene of the last stand of the Danes; and the town’s crest is a ‘Dane under a tree’. We thank her for this information, which was new to us. The next time we see a Dane under a tree anywhere, we shall think of Daventry. (‘Both Sides of the Microphone’; Radio Times, 24 May 1929) So should the place of the BBC station and transmitter in Northamptonshire be called ‘Daintree’ - its historical local pronunciation - or ‘Daventry’, its current spelling or ‘phonetic’ pronunciation? The question had in fact already arisen more than four years earlier, when Lloyd James had given a firm ruling: ‘The B.B.C. has, I think, sufficient authority to decide which pronunciation it will adopt. Let it be Daventry’ (Lloyd James to Reith, 21 July 1925; quoted by Briggs 1995a: 222). An undated report on the progress with respect to the Dictionary of Place Names (R6/ 196/ 1) states that 1,500 letters and postcards were received as a result of the appeal in the Radio Times and that an additional 1,778 new names had been added to the Register, ‘of which 1,400 appear to be suitable for inclusion in the pamphlet (the remainder being merely dialect pronunciations). This, with the 554 names already on the Register, makes a total of 1,954 names (England only) suitable for publication, if the replies from parsons and postmasters prove satisfactory.’ The Minutes of the seventh meeting of the Advisory Committee, held on 25 July 1929, record that the ‘question of alternative pronunciations was discussed’ and that ‘it was decided that one pronunciation only should be recommended for Announcers, but that accepted local pronunciations which are still in general use should be given in a separate column.’ This was an important novelty, even if only applied to place names, as all previous calls for alternative pronunciations had been rejected. It was further decided - and this is another sensible, far-reaching novelty - ‘that pronunciations should be given in phonetic script, but that a popular notation should also be given. It was suggested that the International Phonetic Script should be used’ (R6/ 201/ 1). Of course the main work was done by the Committee (and particularly a three-member sub-committee specifically set up for the purpose; it consisted of Daniel Jones, Lloyd James and J.C. Stobart, the Director of the Education Department (R6/ 201/ 1)), but the input from listeners and the general public should not be underestimated. The result was impressive. The pamphlet Broadcast English II: Recommendations to Announcers Regarding the Pronunciation of Some English Place Names, 28 published by the BBC in 1930, contained ‘some 1500 English names, a few Manx names, and one or two Welsh names from border counties’ (5), as well as an Introduction out- Setting a Standard 235 Fig. 3: Facsimile Broadcast English II (1930: 36) Jürg Rainer Schwyter 236 lining some general principles and explaining, in some detail, the ‘International Phonetic Alphabet as adopted for the representation of English pronunciation” (13). As for Daventry, therefore, both pronunciations were listed (phonetic script / modified spelling), first the current pronunciation which was recommended to announcers dæv ntri / dávventry, followed by the historical and local deintri / dáyntry (36). The second example I would like to give relates to the pronunciation of the words ski and margarine. In the first, 1928, edition of Broadcast English I: Recommendations to Announcers Regarding Certain Words of Doubtful Pronunciation, the pamphlet in which the Committee’s findings for words of general parlance were published, the word ski does not figure; but the Norwegian and Swedish pronunciation, where <sk> before front close vowels is pronounced / / , was common in English at the time (see Jones 1924, 1937: s.v., who in both editions gives / i: / first, followed by the less common alternative / ski: / in brackets). However, there was a constant stream of letters objecting to the pronunciation / i: / . Here is one from 1927: ‘Ski’ or ‘Shee’? Dear Sir, - Would it not be as well if the B.B.C. Advisory Committee on Spoken English gave attention to that vexed word ‘ski’? When broadcasting some time ago from the Plymouth Station, I was informed by the Announcer that, so far as he was aware, the accepted pronunciation was ‘shee’. If the Norwegian pronunciation be adopted, then presumably the Norwegian plural, without the final ‘s’ should also be used: which I venture to think would ultimately lead to confusion. In any case, since the word is almost universally called ‘ski’ on the Continent, where the sport actually takes place, is it not somewhat absurd for us in England to adopt the sound used by the minority in Scandinavia? […] F. McDermott, Tregoose, St Columb, Cornwall. (Radio Times, 16 September 1927) The ski question - the word was borrowed into English from Norwegian - is directly linked to the treatment of loan words in English and, therefore, the question, as Lloyd James put it, whether ‘a foreign word has lived long enough among us to be given papers of naturalisation’, i.e. to be ‘Englished’; that, he said, was ‘for the Committee to decide’. Of course there are no objective criteria of ‘long’ or even ‘common use’, the condition given in the 1926 ‘general principles’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (s.v.) there is an isolated early use of ski in English dating from 1755, but all the other early attestations are late 19th and early 20th century. But, after another three years of uncertainty, the Committee did decide: on 17 January 1930 the pronunciation ‘skee’ was adopted (R6/ 199/ 2), and on 7 February 1930 the Advisory Committee’s new findings were published in the Radio Times. This, however, was not the end of it. The complaints continued - now arguing for reinstatement of the pronunciation / i: / - and so did the discussion among Committee members. On 20 September 1934, the Committee there- Setting a Standard 237 29 ‘Half a Pound of “Marge”! The pronunciation of margarine, given in this week’s Radio Times should not be “marjareen”, but with a hard “g” margarine, as it derives from margariac acid, pronounced with the “g” hard. Marjareen has resulted in the awful contraction “Half-pound of Marje”. Dr. C. Gordon, Jersey.’ (Radio Times, 18 January 1928) 30 ‘The Secretary [Lloyd James] reported a letter received from Messrs. Unilever, Ltd., protesting against the Committee’s recommendation that the “g” in the word “margarine” should be soft, and urging that the form with the hard “g” was not only required by the derivation of the word, but was also in general use amongst educated speakers. After discussion the Committee decided that in view of the fact that the form MARJARINE was commonly used both by those who bought and those who sold the product there was not sufficient justification for reversing their previous recommendation. The Secretary was instructed to write to Messrs. Unilever to this effect.’ (Minutes, 7 December 1937; R6/ 201/ 2) fore accepted ‘SHEE to replace SKI’, that is, to ‘de-naturalize’ the loanword again, so to speak, and thus to reverse the previous reverse decision (R6/ 201/ 2). The pronunciation ‘shee’, therefore, found its way into the second as well as the third edition of Broadcast English I. The letter ‘g’ in the word margarine caused somewhat similar difficulties. Complaints ranged from letters in the Radio Times 29 to a letter to the Committee from Unilever, the producers of Flora margarine, giving various reasons why the word margarine should be pronounced with a ‘hard “g”’, and asking that the committee should reconsider their previous recommendation ‘marjareen’. 30 The colour-coded card index, which records the history of all the words discussed, lists margarine on a white card, which stands for ‘Ordinary words, included in 3rd edition of Broadcast English I’, and gives the following chronology: Dates discussed Comments 29.11.28 ‘mája reen’ 20.9.34 Altered to ‘marja reén’ [i.e. stress as in Jones 1924, 1937: s.v.; note, by the way, that in both editions Jones gives / d / as the preferred pronunciation, with / g/ in brackets as the less common alternative] 7.12.37 Word reconsidered at request of Unilever Ltd. (manufacturers of product), who suggested that g was required by derivation and usage. Committee did not feel justified in reversing previous recommendation. (R6/ 199/ 1) Although the consultation process was becoming more and more a two-way street, helped considerably, it has to be said, by the fact that the British public took an enormous interest in the BBC in general and English language issues in particular, the Committee was still somewhat reluctant to make the changes in pronunciation suggested by members of the public; time was to prove the Committee ‘wrong’ on ski and ‘right’ on margarine. As was the case with the place names, however, the Committee was surprisingly open when it came to the many words that listeners suggested to the BBC for a Jürg Rainer Schwyter 238 31 More specifically, the Committee received 27 letters relating to the pronunciation of the last name Joule, as in James Prescott Joule, the scientist (19 January 1933). Other letters were concerned with the words conduit and intuit. In the light of such correspondence, the Committee (30 November 1933) decided on the pronunciations ‘CÓNDEWIT’, ‘INTÉWIT’ and ‘JOOL’. And in 1936 (8 January) it was agreed that ‘the best method of obtaining opinions and suggestions from the general public would be to broadcast a request for assistance in a series of talks dealing with different aspects of the spoken language.’ (R6/ 201/ 1; R6/ 201/ 2) ‘ruling’; they received letters proposing everything from a list of ‘correct’ pronunciations of plant and flower names, chemical elements, the names of famous scientists or politicians to words relating to the Mount Everest expedition of 1931 - such as geographical and geological names (20 November 1931; R6/ 201/ 1). 31 In spite of such apparent ‘openness’ to suggestions and ‘pragmatism’ in terms of decisions, the BBC still was, in many respects, frightfully upperclass, public school and Oxbridge. In the letter pages of the Radio Times (12 February 1932) a listener (the playwright and biographer St John Ervine) asked the meaning of the word nesophile, which he had heard in a broadcast but could not find in any of the dictionaries. To which the ‘Broadcasters who made use of the word in their account of Mr. Compton Mackenzie’ replied, obviously tongue-in-cheek but nonetheless rather high-handedly: ‘We apologize with horrid humility for having gone one better than the best dictionary. Our only excuse is a classical education. We derive the word, which means simply an “island lover” from the Greek noun n ¯ esos “an island”, and the verb phileo “I love”. It is one which we have always used under the impression that it was supported by tradition.’ (In the actual reply, the Greek words are not transliterated, but in their original Greek script.) Excesses like these - patronizing though they were - should not, however, tarnish the larger picture, namely that from the late 1920s onwards the BBC had started to pay more and more attention to the public’s suggestions for place names and words to be discussed and, in some cases (e.g. the original, 1930, ruling on ski), to the public’s views on the pronunciation of individual words. It was also clear, however, that the Committee remained the final authority on pronunciation; to abandon that would have meant to deprive the Committee of its raison d’être. To recapitulate briefly: in its first dozen or so meetings, the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English achieved the following: - it drew up general pronunciation guidelines for announcers and newsreaders; - it drew up whole lists of words whose pronunciation was uncertain and made recommendations or suggestions for these; Setting a Standard 239 32 The minutes of 29 November 1928, that is immediately after the publication of Broadcast English I, record that ‘the attitude of the Press was, on the whole, favourable, and that the pamphlet had aroused considerable interest throughout the country’ (R6/ 201/ 1). 33 The final paragraph of the preface in the first edition was omitted and substituted with the following sentence in the second: ‘All the pronunciations contained in this booklet have been recorded on two ten-inch gramophone records which are published by the Linguaphone Institute’ (Minutes, 26 March 1931; R6/ 201/ 1). - it implemented the compilation of a card index for the pronunciation of place names; - it decided to publish its findings and, if necessary, revise them. The last two points - as we have already seen in the case of English place names - eventually led to the publication of a series of enormously popular pamphlets, entitled Broadcast English: 32 I. Recommendations to announcers regarding certain words of doubtful pronunciation (1st edn 1928; 2nd edn 1932; 3rd edn 1935; a fourth edition was planned in the course of 1938 but never published (Minutes, 28 June 1938; R6/ 201/ 2).) II. Recommendations to announcers regarding the pronunciation of some English place names (1930) III. Scottish place names (1932) IV. Welsh place names (1934) V. Northern Irish place names (1935) VI. Foreign place names (1937) VII. British family names and titles (1939) An additional booklet on foreign personal names and titles, although extensively discussed and worked on in the course of 1938, never saw the light of day; the main reason for its failure was the lack of sensible, consistent principles for the selection of names on a global scale (Minutes, 28 June 1938; R6/ 201/ 2). The pronunciations contained in the 2nd edition of Broadcast English I, by the way, were recorded and published by the Linguaphone Institute. 33 4. Changes and Suspension On the surface, the Advisory Committee on Spoken English continued its work - in a fashion broadly similar to that outlined here, that is discussing lists of words of doubtful pronunciation and publishing and revising the Broadcast English series - until its suspension at the beginning of the Second World War in 1939. Below the surface, however, there were various difficulties, conflicts and crises; as a result of these, two important and wide- Jürg Rainer Schwyter 240 34 The problems are outlined and enlargement is recommended in a seven-page document (most probably drawn up by Lloyd James) from the autumn of 1929. C.T. Onions, co-editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and reader in English philology at Oxford University, and Lascelles Abercrombie, a leading poet and at that time professor of English literature at Leeds, were invited to join the Committee (R6/ 196/ 3; ODNB 2004-7). The former eventually resigned under rather acrimonious circumstances (R6/ 196/ 4), the latter died in 1938 (Minutes, 8 December 1938; R6/ 201/ 2). 35 See e.g. BBC internal memo from Mary Somerville to Reith, dated 18 May 1934 (R6/ 196/ 5) or the minutes of the first meeting of the reconstituted Advisory Committee, held on 20 September 1934 (R6/ 201/ 2). 36 All biographical information, unless stated otherwise, has been taken from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB 2004-7). ranging sets of changes in policy and structure were implemented over the years. First, a kind of widening-up process: the accession of new members to the Committee came in two ‘waves’, the first of which was the result of the Committee’s first serious crisis in 1929, triggered mainly by the problem of irregular attendance of some members and decisions taken by majority voting in meetings where half of the members may have been absent. 34 The second, bigger ‘wave’ of enlargement took place in 1934 and led to the creation of a permanent specialist sub-committee whose paid members - Professors Daniel Jones, Lloyd James and Henry Cecil Kennedy Wyld, since 1920 Merton professor of English language at Oxford University, and Mr Harold Orton, a dialectologist from King’s College, Newcastle, and former pupil of Wyld (ODNB 2004-7) - would make recommendations before the word-lists were put before the full Committee. 35 After its reconstitution in 1934 and other, smaller, changes, the composition of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English, that is, the ‘main’ committee, looked as follows by the winter of 1938: besides Lloyd James (still the Committee’s Honorary Secretary), Daniel Jones, George Bernard Shaw, Logan Pearsall Smith, H.C.K. Wyld, and Harold Orton the membership consisted of 36 Professor George Gordon (Chairman) [a literary scholar, President of Magdalen College, Oxford and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University]; The Lady Cynthia Asquith [writer of memoirs and diaries; admired at the time primarily for her ‘unique blend of intelligence and playfulness’, social background and beauty; friendships with D.H. Lawrence, who depicted her in some of his works, and the playwright J.M. Barrie (ODNB 2004-7)]; The Lord David Cecil [a literary biographer and critic, former fellow of Wadham College, Oxford]; Sir Kenneth Clark [art historian, director of the National Gallery and surveyor of the king’s pictures]; Alistair Cooke [BBC Film Critic 1934-7, he was suggested by Lloyd James as he is ‘a very brilliant man who did English at Cambridge, got a Commonwealth Fellowship and did work on Dramatic Criticism for three years at Harvard and Setting a Standard 241 Fig. 4: Facsimile BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English Minutes, Enclosure B; 20 September 1934; R6/ 201/ 2 Jürg Rainer Schwyter 242 Yale. He is an excellent phonetician, and very familiar with modern educated American usage’ (Lloyd James to Reith, 31 March 1935; R6/ 196/ 7); Cooke’s weekly ‘Letter from America’ could be heard on the BBC until just before his death in March 2004]; Professor Julian S[orell] Huxley [zoologist, formerly professor of zoology at King’s College, London; Secretary of the Zoological Society, popular science writer]; F[rank] L[aurence] Lucas [author and classical scholar, fellow of King’s College, Cambridge]; P[ercy] H[ugh] B[everly] Lyon [Headmaster of Rugby School (Who Was Who 1991)]; Miss Rose Macaulay [novelist and essayist, Macaulay was also the author of Catchwords and Claptrap (1926), ‘which reflected the pleasure she derived from the English language and her insistence on verbal precision’ (ODNB 2004-7)]; Sir Edward Marsh (Representing Royal Society of Literature) [retired civil servant, who had closely worked with Winston Churchill in various Departments; patron of the arts, chairman of the Contemporary Art Society and council member of the Royal Society of Literature]; Emeritus Professor Sir H[erbert] J[ohn] C[lifford] Grierson [literary critic and scholar, formerly Professor of English at the universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh]; S[amuel] Ratcliffe [a journalist and lecturer, suggested by Shaw as he is ‘very sensitive to shades of pronunciation, and he does a lot of lecturing in America and comes up against all the differences between spoken English and Spoken American’ (19 June 1934; R6/ 196/ 5)]; Dr. I[vor] A[rmstrong] Richards [lecturer in English at Cambridge University, later professor at Harvard, well-known to linguists for his collaboration with C.K. Ogden on The Meaning of Meaning (1923) and, in the 1930s, on ‘Basic English’ (acronym for British American Scientific International Commercial)]; Dr. W[alter] W[ilson] Greg (Representing British Academy) [independent literary scholar and biographer, fellow of the British Academy since 1928]; The Rev. Canon H[arold] Costley-White (Representing English Association) [when nominated by the English Association, Costley-White was Headmaster of Westminster School; he later became Dean of Gloucester (Who Was Who 1979)]; Sir Kenneth R[alph] Barnes (Representing Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) [head of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, knighted in 1938 ‘at the insistence of George Bernard Shaw, a firm friend and generous benefactor’ (ODNB 2004-7)]. (Memo, 31 October 1938; R6/ 196/ 10) The second set of changes are of a more linguistic nature, namely the general introduction of the International Phonetic Alphabet (or IPA) in 1934, first used tentatively, as we saw, in the English place names booklet. As Lloyd James pointed out: Setting a Standard 243 37 The Advisory Committee Minutes of 30 November 1933, for example, report an exchange of letters between Lloyd James and Professor George Philip Krapp of Columbia University in New York. Krapp - the author not only of the two-volume The English Language in America (1925) but also of popular handbooks like A Comprehensive Guide to Good English (1927) (Garraty and Carnes 1999: 901-2) - approved of Lloyd James’s suggestion ‘that an American Advisory Committee on Pronunciation might be formed to act in conjunction with the B.B.C. Committee, so that one Committee might co-operate with the other in ascertaining general usage in debatable cases.’ In the same meeting it was further suggested that ‘in view of the introduction of Empire Broadcasting steps should be taken to obtain the co-operation of authorities on pronunciation in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada’ (R6/ 201/ 1). The early recommendation to record pronunciations only in the modified spelling system proved unsatisfactory, and a strictly phonetic pronunciation (using the International Phonetic Alphabet) was adopted in addition. This was first used in Broadcast English II. (Minutes of the first meeting of the reconstituted Committee, 20 September 1934; R6/ 201/ 2) This change is clearly connected with the creation of the specialist subcommittee; the presence of more linguists, as well as the Committee’s increased contact with academics from overseas, 37 scientists and scholars from other fields (such as law, music and art) not only helped to push through sensible measures like the use of the IPA, but also ‘ensured that the strict prescriptivism expressed by Reith in 1924 was to some extent mitigated’ (McArthur 1992: 110). Finally, in 1937, we see the suspension of regular publications of the Committee’s decisions, decisions often reached by majority voting as, frequently, several pronunciations were found to be ‘equally good’. A statement by R.C. Norman, the Chairman of Governors, to the main Committee reads: The Corporation […] now proposes that, since the public persistently misunderstands its motive in publishing a list of pronunciations recommended for the use of Announcers, it should no longer necessarily publish them in the ‘Radio Times’ and in the daily Press as a matter of routine. (Attached to the minutes, 29 January 1937; R6/ 201/ 2) Instead, the BBC would only ‘give private instruction to announcers’ based on the specialist members’ reports and comments by the main Committee. Shaw was first in expressing dissatisfaction with routine publication of the Committee’s findings in the Radio Times. A day after the third meeting of the reconstituted full Committee of 28 November 1935 - a meeting which must have been little less than disastrous, as ‘decision after decision’ was carried by a majority of one ‘and in three cases by the casting vote of the chairman’ - he wrote to Reith as a matter of urgency: ‘I must advise the Corporation to reconsider its practice of publishing lists of pronunciations certified as standard on the strength of majority decision by the Committee.’ To which he poignantly added in a follow-up letter: Jürg Rainer Schwyter 244 38 These and other changes (e.g. the creation of a sub-committee for the invention of new words) as well as their linguistic implications will be discussed in detail in chapters 3 and 4 of my forthcoming book, The BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, 1926-1939, and its Legacy. 39 For an excellent account of the BBC’s wartime preparations, see Briggs 1995b: chapter VI. The new Committee, so far, is a ghastly failure. It should be reconstituted with an age limit of 30, and a few taxi drivers on it. The young people just WON’T pronounce like the old dons; and Jones and James, who are in touch with the coming race, are distracted by the conflict. And then, are we to dictate to the mob, or allow the mob to dictate to us? (2 and 3 December 1935; R6/ 196/ 8) Not surprisingly, it was the author of Pygmalion who not only had a sense of linguistic reality but who also dared to confront some of the issues that lay at the heart of the Advisory Committee’s whole enterprise: that there is class and age variation; that therefore pronunciation would be difficult to fix; and finally, that actually very few people spoke RP or even wanted to speak RP. Modern estimates on the last point are somewhere around 3 to 5 per cent (Trudgill 2002: 171-2), though the percentage might have been a little higher in the 1930s, when, according to Milroy (1999: 186), the ‘accent requirement diffused downward’ to affect, for example, teachers and secretaries. Even so, RP was and is a minority accent. Shaw therefore recognized that anything beyond advising announcers on ‘place names and the like’ was doomed to fail. 38 The political clouds over Europe darkened fast, and at the outbreak of the Second World War the Advisory Committee on Spoken English was formally suspended, although Lloyd James had ‘made a strong request that [it] should continue its work’ (18 December 1939; R6/ 196/ 11). 39 However, it should be added here that the Committee had been running into the ground well before the War. This was due not only to a host of procedural difficulties, ranging from irregular attendance to near-resignations and deaths, but above all to differences of opinion between its more prescriptively and more descriptively minded members over the Committee’s purpose and function at large. The ‘validity’ of decisions reached by majority vote was also a constant problem, as illustrated by Shaw’s letter, particularly when such a vote went against the specialists’ recommendations, as was the question of generally admitting ‘alternative pronunciations’ - advocated by Wyld but rejected by Lloyd James, because ‘then a Committee is not necessary’ (29 March 1939; R6/ 196/ 11). With routine publication in the press suspended and research for and revision of the Broadcast English pamphlets firmly in the hands of Lloyd James and the other experts, the main Committee - a somewhat curious assemblage of language specialists on the one hand and pillars of (mostly English) society, but amateurs on matters linguistic nonetheless, on the other - had already become somewhat of an irrelevance in the latter half of the Setting a Standard 245 40 Note that Reith, who had created the ethos that led to the Committee’s formation, left the Corporation in 1938 and Lloyd James, not only the Committee’s honorary secretary but also its driving force, had suffered from ‘depressive insanity’ due to the ‘stress and anxieties of war’ and committed suicide in 1943 (ODNB 2004-7). 1930s; it met for the last time on 8 December 1938, a full nine months before the outbreak of the War (R6/ 291/ 2). Tellingly, it was not reactivated in 1945. 40 Instead, the BBC-internal Pronunciation Unit was eventually to emerge in the 1940s, with Daniel Jones as Chief Pronunciation Advisor, a role he kept until his death in 1967 (ODNB 2004-7). The Unit’s much reduced responsibility was and is ‘to give guidance to news-readers and announcers on the pronunciation of place and personal names’ (McArthur 1992: 110). Today, the BBC Pronunciation Research Unit, to use its full name, employs ‘three highly educated experts’ (‘Writeon’, BBC World Service, 17 February 2003, 18.45 GMT), whose primary concern still (and only) is consistent and accurate pronunciation - rather than the promotion of a particular accent or even a single pronunciation of common words with ‘rival forms’ - of place and personal names, names of drugs and diseases, planets, festivals, publications, and so on - in short, all types of proper names or phrases, from any language, that BBC staff need to say before the microphone (Catherine Sangster, BBC Pronunciation Research Unit, 18 November 2004, private communication; see also Sangster, this volume). To achieve that, they not only resort to their large database, the origins of which go back to the time of the Spoken English Advisory Committee, but they also consult a wide range of reference works as well as native speakers from the World Service and foreign embassies (Writeon, BBC World Service, 17 February 2003, 18.45 GMT). The database is now computerized and accessible online, complete with speech synthesiser, to all BBC staff; it contains over 200,000 entries and is regularly updated whenever new pronunciations are researched, a process which results in roughly 50-100 new entries per week (Catherine Sangster, BBC Pronunciation Research Unit, 18 November 2004, private communication). Ahead of the 2002 Football World Cup, for example, the Pronunciation Unit produced a special list in order to make sure that commentators knew how to pronounce not only the names of the 800 players, but also the place names of the various venues in Japan and South Korea (www.ananova.com/ news, 14 January 2002). Besides the daily list of news-related items, such special lists of pronunciations are prepared either ahead of major sporting and political events, or they may be ‘themed lists’ (e.g. composers’ names) (Catherine Sangster, BBC Pronunciation Research Unit, 18 November 2004, private communication). Roach (2000: 5) remarks with respect to the BBC’s ‘excellent Pronunciation Unit’ that ‘most people are not aware that it has no power to persuade broadcasters to use particular pronunciations: BBC broadcasters only use it Jürg Rainer Schwyter 246 41 Though in 1981, Burchfield still advised announcers to ‘be careful not to garble’ words like library or secretary (11). 42 Wells (1982: 296) lists merrily among various types of words ‘where RP speakers differ from one another, some using / / and some using / / .’ Twenty years on, Hughes, Trudgill and Watt (2005: 48) write that ‘in general, younger people are more likely to have / / , upperclass speakers are more likely to have / / .’ on an optional basis […].’ The role of the present-day BBC Pronunciation Research Unit therefore is to advise and recommend for the sake of accuracy and consistency, rather than to impose and prescribe in the name of a ‘standard form of pronunciation’. 5. Conclusion So, what can we conclude from all this? First, we noticed a strict and dogmatic prescriptivism; the original intention was not only to achieve consistency among BBC announcers and newsreaders but also to educate the public through notions of what was - or was not - ‘good and correct English’; in short, to find and define the ‘best’ pronunciation, to fix and diffuse it, and thus create a uniform standard. Then, more and more, we saw a kind of ‘listening BBC’, which regarded its decisions on pronunciation as largely provisional until proper feedback from an ever-larger circle of committee members, advisers and the public was received. Additionally, there was a slow but steady trend towards what could be called ‘linguistic professionalization’: the weight clearly shifted towards the specialist sub-committee; alternative pronunciations were admitted and eventually found to be ‘equally good’; the IPA was used routinely and the dogmatic press releases of the Committee’s rulings were stopped. Was it all a failure then? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the goals the Advisory Committee set out in its early mission statements - to fix and thus standardize spoken English by finding the ‘best’, ‘most correct’ pronunciation of ‘doubtful words’ and then, by the BBC’s ‘powerful example, endeavour to stem modern tendencies to inaccurate and slurred speech’ - simply could not be attained; phonology, as Lesley Milroy (1999: 173) has observed, is ‘particularly resistant to standardisation’. To give just one example, unstressed vowels: the Advisory Committee could neither stop ‘the loss of a post-tonic secondary stress in words such as territory, adversary, ceremony, with a consequent weakening of the vowel to / / and its frequent elision’ (Gimson 1984: 47) 41 nor prevent the change from / / to / / in weak syllables, particularly after / l/ and / r/ , as in angrily or merrily (Gimson 1994: 83, 99-100). 42 Language variation and change are undeniable facts, as is the focused Setting a Standard 247 43 As an example, Trudgill (2002: 177) noted that ‘RP now admits certain types of / t/ -glottaling which were formerly associated with local accents only’. 44 The link between accent and certain stereotypes has been amply documented, with RP consistently scoring high on factors relating to competence and status, such as intelligence, education, hard work, self-confidence, and ambition (Giles 1970 and 1971, quoted by Wells 1982: 30). The other side of the coin is that non-RP speakers may be systematically disadvantaged, particularly so in professional and institutional contexts (e.g. job interviews, education, medical consultations, and the law (Kalin 1982, quoted by Dixon et al. 2002: 162)). In a recent matched-guise study, Dixon et al. (2002: 162) found that a ‘suspect’ was ‘rated as significantly more guilty when he emplyed a Birmingham rather than a standard [RP] accent’. 45 A different, much shorter version of this paper was published in Locher and Strässler (2008) under the title ‘The BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English or How (not) to Construct a “Standard” Pronunciation’. Many thanks to the staff of the BBC Written Archives Centre in Caversham, particularly the ever-helpful and deeply knowledgeable Jeff Walden and Jacquie Kavanagh; to Jens Poulsen for competently and efficiently checking various sources in Zurich to which I did not have access in Lausanne; to Peter Trudgill, Catherine Sangster, Christian Mair, Kirsten Stirling and Anne-Laure Gex for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper; and above all to Peter Jackson, who not only very kindly and generously passed me his extensive research and archive work on the same topic, but whose careful proofreading of a near-final version also saved me from numerous errors and inaccuracies. (rather than fixed) nature of even a reference accent such as RP - something the Advisory Committee only eventually came to terms with. 43 It was not a failure in two other senses, however. First, the Advisory Committee played an important role in the emergence of a kind of ‘broadcast English’ or ‘broadcast style’ which - though allowing for some variability - nonetheless conveyed and still conveys a sense of ‘objectivity’ and ‘authority’ going far beyond the UK, particularly when it comes to news broadcasts. 44 The Advisory Committee’s influence can be felt up to this day (most clearly when it comes to the generally ‘correct’, and therefore respectful, treatment of domestic as well as foreign place and personal names). In this respect, the early and pioneering work of the BBC in defining a style appropriate for broadcasting may be seen as somewhat parallel to the influence of printing on the written language, though the analogy is of course only a superficial one and, for the reasons outlined in §1, therefore should not be pushed too far. And no, it was also not a failure in that it raised awareness of language issues among the population. True, every variation in pronunciation (or grammar for that matter) triggered and still triggers a flood of letters by the ‘language mavens’ (as Steven Pinker (1994: 370-403) has famously called them), but at the same time, the various discrepancies in pronunciation - be it between two newsreaders, be it between a newsreader’s pronunciation and our own - has made us think about notions such as ‘standard’, RP, and ‘correctness’ more than ever before. And this, I believe, is the other lasting legacy of John Reith and his BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English. 45 Jürg Rainer Schwyter 248 6. References 1. Unpublished files from the BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham: R6/ 196/ 1: Advisory Committee Spoken English, File 1, 1926-1927. R6/ 196/ 3: Advisory Committee Spoken English, File 3, 1929. R6/ 196/ 4: Advisory Committee Spoken English, File 4, 1930-1933. R6/ 196/ 5: Advisory Committee Spoken English, File 5, January-June 1934. R6/ 196/ 7: Advisory Committee Spoken English, File 7, January-June 1935. R6/ 196/ 8: Advisory Committee Spoken English, File 8, July-December 1935. R6/ 196/ 9: Advisory Committee Spoken English, File 9, 1936. R6/ 196/ 10: Advisory Committee Spoken English, File 10, 1937-1938. R6/ 196/ 11: Advisory Committee Spoken English, File 11, 1939-1943. R6/ 199/ 1: Advisory Committees, Spoken English Advisory Committee, Index of Words Discussed, Vol. 1: A-N. R6/ 199/ 2: Advisory Committees, Spoken English Advisory Committee, Index of Words Discussed, Vol. 2: O-Z, A-Z Index of Proper Names. R6/ 201/ 1: Advisory Committees, Spoken English Advisory Committee, Minute Book: 1926-1933. R6/ 201/ 2: Advisory Committees, Spoken English Advisory Committee, Minute Book: 1934-1938. 2. Broadcast English pamphlets: Broadcast English I: Recommendations to Announcers Regarding Certain Words of Doubtful Pronunciation. With an Introduction by A. Lloyd James. 1st edn 1928; 2nd edn 1932; 3rd edn 1935. Savoy Hill, London: The British Broadcasting Corporation. Broadcast English II: Recommendations to Announcers Regarding the Pronunciation of some English Place Names. Collected and Transcribed for the B.B.C. Advisory Committee on Spoken English by A. Lloyd James. 1930. Savoy Hill, London: The British Broadcasting Corporation. Broadcast English III: Recommendations to Announcers Regarding the Pronunciation of some Scottish Place Names. Collected and Transcribed for the B.B.C. Advisory Committee on Spoken English by A. Lloyd James. 1932. Savoy Hill, London: The British Broadcasting Corporation. Broadcast English IV: Recommendations to Announcers Regarding the Pronunciation of some Welsh Place Names. Collected and Transcribed for the B.B.C. Advisory Committee on Spoken English by A. Lloyd James. 1934. Savoy Hill, London: The British Broadcasting Corporation. Broadcast English V: Recommendations to Announcers Regarding the Pronunciation of some Irish Place Names. Collected and Transcribed for the B.B.C. Advisory Committee on Spoken English by A. Lloyd James. 1935. Broadcasting House, London: The British Broadcasting Corporation. Broadcast English VI: Recommendations to Announcers Regarding the Pronunciation of some Foreign Place Names. Collected and Transcribed for the B.B.C. Advisory Committee on Spoken English by A. Lloyd James. 1937. Broadcasting House, London: The British Broadcasting Corporation. Setting a Standard 249 Broadcast English VII: Recommendations to Announcers Regarding the Pronunciation of some British Family Names and Titles. Collected and Transcribed for the B.B.C. Advisory Committee on Spoken English by A. Lloyd James. 1939. Broadcasting House, London: The British Broadcasting Corporation. 3. Other sources: Aitchison, Jean (1997). The Language Web: The Power and Problem of Words. The 1996 BBC Reith Lectures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aitchison, Jean (2001). Language Change: Progress or Decay? 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Altendorf, Ulrike (2003). Estuary English: Levelling at the Interface of RP and South- Eastern British English. Language in Performance 29. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Briggs, Asa (1995a). The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Volume I: The Birth of Broadcasting 1896-1927. First published 1961, reissued 1995. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Briggs, Asa (1995b). The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom. Volume II: The Golden Age of Wireless 1927-1939. First published 1961, revised 1995. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burchfield, Robert (1981). The Spoken Word: A BBC Guide. London: British Broadcasting Corporation. Burnley, David (1992). The History of the English Language: A Source Book. London: Longman. Carey, John (1992). The Intellectuals and the Masses. London: Faber and Faber. Carter, Ronald (1999). ‘Standard Grammars, Spoken Grammars: Some Educational Implications.’ In: Tony Bex and Richard J. Watts (eds). Standard English: The Widening Debate. London: Routledge. 149-166. Chambers 21st Century Dictionary (1999). Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap. Collins, Beverly and Inger M. Mees (1999). The Real Professor Higgins: The Life and Career of Daniel Jones. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Dixon, John A. et al. (2002). ‘Accents of Guilt: Effects of Regional Accent, Race, and Crime Type on Attributions of Guilt’. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 21. 162-168. Garraty, John A. and Mark C. Carnes (eds) (1999). American National Biography. Volume 12. New York: Oxford University Press. Gimson, A.C. (1984). ‘The RP Accent’. In: Peter Trudgill (ed.). Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 45-54. Gimson, A.C. (1994). Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. 5th edition, revised by A. Cruttenden. London: Arnold. Hughes, Arthur, Peter Trudgill and Dominic Watt (2005). English Accents and Dialects: An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of English in the British Isles. 4th edition. London: Hodder Arnold. Jones, Daniel (1924 & 1937). English Pronouncing Dictionary. 2nd & 4th editions. London: Dent. Jones, Daniel (1972). The Pronunciation of English. 4th edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Daniel (1977). Everyman’s English Pronouncing Dictionary. 14th edition, extensively revised and edited by A.C. Gimson. London: Dent. Jürg Rainer Schwyter 250 Labov, William and Wendell A. Harris (1986). ‘De Facto Segregation of Black and White Vernaculars’. In: David Sankoff (ed.). Diversity and Diachrony. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1-24. Locher, Miriam and Jürg Strässler (eds) (2008). Standards and Norms in the English Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. McArthur, Tom (ed.) (1992). The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milroy, Lesley (1999). ‘Standard English and Language Ideology in Britain and the United States’. In: Tony Bex and Richard J. Watts (eds). Standard English: The Widening Debate. London: Routledge. 173-206. Mugglestone, Lynda (2003). ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. New Penguin English Dictionary (2000). London: Penguin. ODNB 2004-7 = The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography : http: / / www.oxforddnb.com, last accessed 11-13 July 2007. Oxford English Dictionary : http: / / www.oed.com, last accessed 11-13 July 2007. Pinker, Steven (1994). The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. New York: William Morrow & Co. Radio Times: 18 January 1924; 16 July 1926; 26 July 1926; 30 July 1926; 16 September 1927; 18 January 1928; 3 May 1929; 24 May 1929; 28 June 1929; 12 February 1932. Reith, J.C.W. (1924). Broadcast Over Britain. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Roach, Peter (2000). English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course. 3rd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schwyter, Jürg Rainer (forthcoming). The BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, 1926-1939, and its Legacy. Smith, Jeremy (1996). An Historical Study of English: Function, Form and Change. London: Routledge. Strässler, Jürg (2005). ‘Jones, Daniel’. In: S. Chapman and C. Routledge (eds). Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. s.v. Trudgill, Peter (1986). Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell. Trudgill, Peter (1999). ‘Standard English: What it Isn’t’. In: Tony Bex and Richard J. Watts (eds). Standard English: The Widening Debate. London: Routledge. 117-128. Trudgill, Peter (2002). Sociolinguistic Variation and Change. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wells, J.C. (1982). Accents of English. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Who Was Who (1967) vol. 5; (1979) vol. 6; (1991) vol. 8. London: Black. Writeon. BBC World Service. <www.ananova.com/ news>. [Last accessed 14 January 2002] Jürg Rainer Schwyter University of Lausanne Switzerland AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen The Work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit in the 21st Century Catherine Sangster After a brief account of its development in the latter half of the 20th century, this paper describes the BBC Pronunciation Unit as it operates today. The Unit’s remit and staff are discussed, and examples of its work are given. The key policies that guide its recommendations are set out, and its research sources and methods are described. Detailed descriptions of the pronunciation database, the BBC Modified Spelling and the Unit’s approach to issues of anglicization follow, and the paper concludes with a summary of the Unit’s other responsibilities. 1. About the BBC Pronunciation Unit The BBC Pronunciation Unit has an eminent predecessor in the form of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English (ACSE), which is discussed elsewhere in this issue. After the dissolution of the ACSE at the time of World War Two, the daily pronunciation advice work was taken over by linguists employed as full-time BBC staff, although former ACSE members Professors Arthur Lloyd James and Daniel Jones remained as Linguistic Advisers to the BBC until their deaths (Pointon 1988). The post-war Pronunciation Unit was staffed by modern languages graduates with phonetic training, and their work became increasingly focused on foreign pronunciations. Two of the longestserving members of the Unit over the fifty years which followed were Miss G.M. Miller and Mr. Graham Pointon. Initially the Pronunciation Unit was part of BBC Presentation, but it was later transferred to become part of the Information and Archives Department, which looks after all the BBC’s media assets and delivers them to programme-makers. This move was not only an administrative one, but also reflected the Unit’s new remit; rather than giving mandatory pronunciation Catherine Sangster 252 1 Unit staff are expected to hold the International Phonetic Association’s Certificate of Proficiency in the Phonetics of English; see http: / / www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/ courses/ ipaexam/ ipaexam.htm for details. 2 These policies were first published, and are set out in more detail, in British Broadcasting Corporation (1974). recommendations to announcers and newsreaders only, the Unit’s research and advice was now available to all parts of the BBC. In its current form, the Pronunciation Unit is staffed by three full-time pronunciation linguists, one of whom also takes a co-ordinating role. We are all trained phoneticians with additional skills in specific languages. As linguistics and phonetics have developed as academic disciplines over the past decades, it is now possible for us to find staff with extensive training and experience in these subjects as well as knowledge of modern languages. We have several criteria when searching for a new pronunciation linguist. We require a university degree in linguistics or phonetics, or in modern languages or English with a significant linguistics component, and we also look for further experience in academic or professional linguistic research such as a postgraduate degree. We require near-native fluency in at least one language besides English, and familiarity with a wide range of languages is an advantage. We require a thorough and practical knowledge of the IPA and its application in phonemic and phonetic transcription of all languages. 1 In addition, we require a set of more general skills such as excellent written and spoken English, a meticulous eye for detail, the ability to work under pressure and to agreed procedures, and good general knowledge, especially in the areas of music, geography and current affairs. The Unit’s remit, briefly stated, is to research and advise on the pronunciation of any words, names or phrases in any language required by anyone in the BBC. The aim is to collaborate with programme makers in ensuring that BBC broadcasts are accurate and consistent. In a typical day, we will advise on pronunciations for several BBC networks (in total, there are eleven radio stations, nine television channels and also online services) across several genres (news, drama, quizzes, factual programmes, music). The work, of course, consists not only of giving answers to queries, but of working out what those answers should be. 2. Policies This section summarises some of the general policies that the Unit applies in deciding which pronunciations we ought to recommend. 2 - For place names in English-speaking countries, we recommend a standardized version of the local pronunciation. The Work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit in the 21st Century 253 - For place names in non-English-speaking countries, we usually also recommend a standardized version of the local pronunciation. However, if there is an established English form of a place name such as Florence or Munich, then we recommend this rather than the local form Firenze or München (see Section 7 for more on established anglicizations). For place names which have sounds which would cause difficulties of production or comprehension, we devise an anglicized form which is as close as possible to the native pronunciation. - For people’s names, we recommend the pronunciation that the individual concerned prefers. If we cannot speak to people themselves, we ask family members or colleagues. In the case of personal names of people from non-English-speaking countries, as with place names, we consult native speakers and reference works, and devise an anglicized pronunciation which is as close as possible to the original. - If people’s names, place names or words are fictional and the intended language or etymology is unclear or itself fictional, we consult the author directly. If this is not possible, we talk to the agent or publisher or to serious fans. This sort of pronunciation challenge is especially common in the genres of fantasy and science fiction. - When it comes to specialist vocabulary - medical, pharmacological, zoological, botanical, etc. - we consult published sources and expert informants. - For words and phrases in languages other than English, we make recommendations based on our own linguistic knowledge, a wide range of reference works, and (in the case of living languages) consultation with native speakers and other experts. There is a great deal of variation in the contemporary pronunciation of English words, and it is not part of the Pronunciation Research Unit’s role to enforce particular pronunciations. We are happy, if asked, to offer advice on which pronunciations are more common or recommended. A brief digression is in order on this last point. Like our predecessors on the Advisory Committee on Spoken English, we are often asked to help out with ‘doubtful’ words which exist in English. It is important to differentiate here between accents and pronunciations. The concepts accent and pronunciation are often collapsed together in the popular perception, and much of our correspondence from the public is in fact concerned with complaints about broadcasters’ accents rather than their pronunciation. We would consider variation in the pronunciation of English words such as bath, nurse, square, cure, water, milk, brother to be a result of the speaker’s accent. Broadly, we do not concern ourselves with the way our broadcasters say these words. However, variation in the pronunciation of words such as kilometre, controversy, integral, cervical, research, schedule - words for which more than one Catherine Sangster 254 pronunciation is codified - does fall within our remit. We can advise broadcasters on which of two or more acceptable pronunciations is likely to be appropriate for their audience, and provide information about which pronunciation is more conservative, or might be interpreted as an Americanism. We do not insist that one particular version is used across the Corporation, although, ultimately, once we have given the appropriate linguistic information, it is an editorial decision. 3. Research Sources and Methods People often ask us how we find out which pronunciations to recommend. Assuming that a pronunciation has not already been researched and added to our database (see next Section), this is how we go about our research. We begin our research using the resources to be found within the Unit. We have a substantial library of pronunciation dictionaries, gazetteers, encyclopaedias and other reference books. We have extensive in-house notes on the phonologies and anglicization of many languages, and the Unit staff themselves possess a wide range of language fluencies and knowledge. It can sometimes also be useful to consult our own pronunciation database to look for similar entries. If the Unit’s resources are insufficient, we broaden the research and consider other sources within the BBC. The BBC broadcasts in many languages besides English. Within the UK, broadcasts are made in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Hindi/ Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali and Gujarati, while the BBC World Service broadcasts in thirty-two different languages worldwide. We are therefore fortunate to have many native speakers of these languages available to consult within the BBC. Other staff such as journalists working in monitoring and newsgathering can also help, and there is a useful intranet tool which allows all staff to circulate details of languages that they can speak. If the pronunciation is not in a foreign language but is fictional or specialist, we can also sometimes find help within the BBC. For example, the web team which looked after the (now discontinued) www.bbc.co.uk/ cult site were very helpful with pronunciations from Dr Who and Star Trek, needed for a quiz programme. Any input that we receive in this way is purely goodwill, in line with the BBC value of collaboration across the Corporation. Lastly, we consult certain external sources for pronunciation research. This includes embassies and high commissions, universities, museums and specialist libraries, and language units at other broadcasters. For some pronunciations - for example, the proprietary name of a new drug - it is best for us to be led by the press office of the relevant company. For actors’ and celebrities’ names, we generally consult their agents or representatives directly. We also use some approved online databases such as the U.S. The Work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit in the 21st Century 255 3 http: / / www.loc.gov/ nls/ other/ sayhow.html. Fig. 1: A typical database entry, ‘Lausanne’ Library of Congress’s guide to the names of public figures, 3 making the necessary adjustments for British English. Although we each carry out research on pronunciations individually, all but the most straightforward decisions are made collaboratively. Matters such as the relative reliability of sources and appropriate levels of anglicization are agreed within the team. Once a recommendation has been agreed upon, it is added to our pronunciation database. 4. Pronunciation Database From the days of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English, pronunciation recommendations were recorded on handwritten, and later typewritten, cards. In 1995 the information on the cards was all transferred to a computerized database used within the Unit. In 2001, an online service presenting information from this database was created, which allows BBC staff to access pronunciation advice at all times. In 2003, a synthesizer tool was added to this online service, so that users could hear the pronunciation aloud as well as reading it. In 2008, an overhaul project to transfer the database to a stable and up-to-date technology platform (from Visual Basic 6.0 to .NET3) and improve the functionality of the online service will be complete. The database, built up over the course of the last eighty years, now consists of over 200,000 entries. A typical database entry shows the head- Catherine Sangster 256 4 This system is described at http: / / www.bbc.co.uk/ blogs/ magazinemonitor/ phonetics.doc. word, the pronunciation written in BBC Modified Spelling (with keywords), a description, notes on the source of the pronunciation, an IPA transcription and a range of metadata. Histories of any controversies or changes in recommendation are also attached to entries. The online service does not present all of this information to our users. Only the headword, the pronunciation in Modified Spelling and the description are displayed, and the synthesizer ‘reads’ the Modified Spelling aloud. 5. Delivering our Advice Once we have carried out the necessary research, it is essential that we communicate our advice to our users in a way that is accurate and comprehensible. Advice is delivered in both spoken and written form. In addition to the synthesized pronunciations that can be heard via the online service, Unit staff often give live spoken advice. In general, such advice is given down the telephone, but we sometimes also create digital recordings and use them to supply spoken pronunciations as sound files. Written advice is generally supplied in electronic documents emailed to users, although we still occasionally send advice via fax or post. Written advice usually constitutes either a dedicated list of pronunciations tailored to a particular programme or broadcaster, or an existing document such as a script or a set of presentation details which we annotate with the required pronunciation advice in BBC Modified Spelling. The BBC Modified Spelling is a simple respelling system, based on a restricted set of English phonemes with a small number of frequently-occurring additional sounds. Stress is indicated with an acute accent - á - over the nucleus of the stressed syllable, and vowel reduction with a breve - a . Front rounded vowels are indicated with diaereses - ä -, and nasalized vowels with a following (ng). Underlining is used to distinguish the voiced dental fricative in this from the voiceless equivalent in thin, and the voiceless velar fricative in loch or palatal fricative in German ich from the affricate in church, and for special digraph characters zh (voiced alveolar fricative as in measure) and hl (alveolar lateral fricative as in Welsh llan). Rhoticity is reflected, and keywords are used to assist new users and to disambiguate ch, ö and ü, each of which are used to represent one of two sounds. Although written advice is generally delivered using the BBC Modified Spelling, we sometimes need to give pronunciation advice using a plain text format instead. 4 This is necessary when the pronunciation will be delivered to the end user via a plain text system such as a teleprompter, SMS or online The Work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit in the 21st Century 257 Fig. 2: The BBC Modified Spelling system messaging. BBC Modified Spelling is unsuitable in such cases because of its additional formatting. Our plain text system separates syllables with hyphens and capitalizes the stressed syllable. It is extremely similar to the respelling system used in Olausson and Sangster (2006). 6. Anglicization BBC broadcasters are not expected to be au fait with every sound and phonological rule of every language they use. When we make a recommendation, it is not supposed to be a super-accurate rendering of the original language; it is standardized and modified, designed for a speaker of English addressing an English-speaking audience. Many of our non-English pronun- Catherine Sangster 258 ciations are subject to a degree of anglicization by the very process of expressing them in the BBC Modified Spelling, because of the restricted phonological set used. Our general aim is to recommend pronunciations that are as close as possible to the native language in question, but they still need to flow naturally in an English broadcast, causing minimal problems of production (for the speaker) and perception (by the audience). Of course, we are able to coach individual users on more authentic pronunciations and other non-English phonemes such as clicks if this is required in a specific context, but in general, the limits of the BBC Modified Spelling are observed. This presents challenges when it comes to speech sounds which do not map neatly onto the sounds in the set available. One example of this would be the long front open vowel in Arabic (as in Osama bin Laden), for which we must choose between ‘aa’, giving a vowel of the right length but too far back, or ‘a’, which is closer to the right quality but too short. Another example would be the voiced velar fricative as in Dutch and Arabic; the closest available sounds are voiced velar stop (g) or voiceless velar fricative (ch), but choosing either requires a compromise on either voicing or manner of articulation. There are many similar challenges. Native speakers are consulted on which compromise they would prefer, but they do not always agree with one another. Cases like the above can be difficult to resolve, but we try to take a systematic approach, making sure we anglicize consistently. There is a second aspect to anglicization which we must consider carefully. This concerns English versions of proper names and loaned lexical items, which we refer to as established anglicizations. For instance, many names of foreign countries, rivers and cities have accepted English forms, either of both spelling and pronunciation (e.g. Warsaw for Polish Warszawa), or just of pronunciation (e.g. Paris). We always recommend that established anglicizations are used wherever they exist, as using a native pronunciation instead can confuse the listener, and may sound affected. These established anglicizations are codified in gazetteers, atlases and dictionaries, but they may change over time: Niger, Majorca, Basle, Cartagena, Zaragoza, and Ossetia are just some of the place names for which the Unit now makes recommendations closer to the native pronunciation rather than older anglicizations. Official spellings or transliterations of names can also change (e.g. Kolkata, Beijing) which can lead to further changes in established anglicized pronunciations. Less commonly, anglicization can apply to people’s names as well as place names. This is particularly common with high-profile people in the areas of international sport, show business and politics. We research the level of anglicization which a particular person prefers for their name before making recommendations on these names (e.g. Michael Schumacher, Roman Abramovitch). The Work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit in the 21st Century 259 This can be true not only of proper names but also of lexical items. Words and phrases in languages other than English often appear in an Englishlanguage context. Topics such as music, science and literature, food and drink, dance and sport provide many examples. When these words are treated as foreign, the Pronunciation Unit makes recommendations which are as close as possible to the original language, subject to the usual simplifications, as described in Section 2 above. However, when these words and phrases are taken into English, they are generally pronounced using only English sounds, and in such cases a more anglicized recommendation is more appropriate. For example, the French phrase trompe l’œil is usually pronounced ‘tromp loy’ in English, rather than with a more native pronunciation with nasalized and front rounded vowels. As with place names, these anglicizations can change over time. Words borrowed from other languages are often initially given foreign pronunciations, and then anglicizations become established: the relatively new addition sudoku is an excellent example of this. Conversely, as awareness of foreign languages and cultural sensitivity increases, more native-like pronunciations can emerge to replace more traditional anglicized forms. An example of this would be the title of the Spanish novel Don Quixote, which used to be anglicized to ‘don KWIK-sot’, but this is now felt to be rather dated; ‘don kee-HOH-ti’ is the anglicization we now recommend. As a whole, the level of anglicization within the BBC has decreased over the years as broadcasters and audiences have become more familiar with the sounds of foreign languages and the BBC has served an increasingly global audience. 7. Other Unit Responsibilities As well as carrying out research, maintaining the pronunciation database and responding to programme makers’ queries, we have a range of other responsibilities. We try to anticipate need for pronunciations and, to that end, we prepare targeted lists of pronunciations for particular groups of people within the BBC. Every day, we review prospective news stories and prepare an online Daily List of names, places and phrases which are likely to feature in the day’s news broadcasts across the BBC’s networks. This list is made available for download from our internal website and is widely used by newsreaders and announcers. It is prepared every morning and updated through the day. We also prepare themed lists for major sports events that the BBC is covering, such as Wimbledon, the World Cup, or similar, and for major news and political events such as the general elections or the war in Iraq. We compile a special list whenever one is requested; for example, we recently Catherine Sangster 260 5 http: / / www.bbc.co.uk/ complaints/ . compiled a list of Channel Island place names for BBC Radio Jersey. Again, these special lists are available to be downloaded internally, and digital or paper copies are also sent directly to the broadcasters concerned. In addition to preparing these lists, we are responsible for publicizing our service to encourage uptake within the BBC, and promoting the Unit and its work both within and beyond the BBC. This often involves outreach or training visits to particular areas of the Corporation, maintaining our relationships with areas that already use us, and building up new connections with areas that could perhaps use us more. From time to time, members of the Unit appear on BBC programmes to discuss matters of pronunciation, especially local radio and programmes which deal with audience complaints such as Radio 4’s Feedback or News24’s NewsWatch. On occasion, Unit staff have collaborated with Oxford University Press in editing and publishing reference books based on the Unit’s pronunciation database (Miller 1971; Pointon 1990; Olausson and Sangster 2006). We also deal more directly with audience feedback. A weekly digest is supplied to us by the BBC Information Department which summarizes all complaints received by telephone, email or post which relate to language or pronunciation. 5 If we feel it is appropriate, we may contact the programme makers concerned to ensure they are aware of the ways in which we could help them avoid such problems in the future. Although this central route for making complaints is available, we are still also written to directly by audience members who wish to discuss pronunciation matters. Popular concerns include stress placement, foreign names, geopolitical considerations, and broadcasters’ regional accents. We do respond to all letters received, although, given our small size and our other responsibilities, this cannot be our first priority. We have general managerial and secretarial support from BBC Information and Archives staff who work outside the Unit, but administrative matters such as recruitment and training of staff, document handling, performance management and library maintenance necessarily consume a certain amount of our time. Unit staff members each take responsibility for their individual professional development through monthly language study days and attendance at occasional seminars from phoneticians experts in a particular language. In conclusion, as the present contribution and others in this issue have shown, the Pronunciation Unit’s role and responsibilities have expanded considerably since the days of the ACSE which was its ancestor. The procedures and practices that we follow in the 21st century to carry out research and disseminate our recommendations would be very unfamiliar to our The Work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit in the 21st Century 261 predecessors, and some of our policies have altered and developed with the changing times. However, a fundamental belief in the importance of accurate pronunciation has been constant throughout the history of the Corporation, and the present-day Pronunciation Unit maintains this with pride. 8. References British Broadcasting Corporation (1974). BBC Pronunciation Policy and Practice. Welwyn Garden City: The Broadwater Press. Miller, G.M. (1971). BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Olausson, L. and Sangster, C. (2006). Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pointon, G. (1988). ‘The BBC and English Pronunciation’. English Today. 15: 8-12. Pointon, G. (1990). BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Catherine Sangster BBC Pronunciation Unit United Kingdom Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.francke.de · E-Mail: info@francke.de Do ‘bad guys’ in Hollywood movies necessarily speak ‘broken’ English? What happens when film characters switch between English, French, or even Serbian? Why does Hollywood show Mozart and his wife speaking American English? This study is based on a corpus of multilingual movie dialogues from 32 contemporary Hollywood thrillers, dramas and comedies. With an approach that draws on stylistics, critical discourse analysis and quantitative sociolinguistics, the author tests the claim that the movies reinforce stereotypes of foreigners, and contribute to ideologies of English-only monolingualism. Lukas Bleichenbacher Multilingualism in the Movies Hollywood Characters and Their Language Choices Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten, Band 135 2008, XIV, 236 Seiten, geb. €[D] 54,00 / SFr 91,00 ISBN 978-3-7720-8270-2 AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen The English of Broadcast News: When English is Not the First Language of the Audience Hamish Norbrook This paper will look at some of the issues surrounding the English of broadcast news from the point of view of both user and producer. It will refer to several frameworks derived from the teaching of English to speakers of other languages to argue that a greater knowledge of the needs of the non-native speaker could be beneficial to broadcasters. It will consider various initiatives that have been taken both to teach English through the language of the news and to help learners maintain their existing level of English, and - by way of exemplification - will also look briefly at the role of radio broadcasting in Africa. Finally, it will look forward to the effect on news English of new technology platforms including online and mobile, and the predicted increase in interactivity through blogs and vlogs, and will suggest two courses of action for future research on broadcast English. 1. Introduction: News is Important to Broadcasting Organisations - and to those Learning English In this paper I will be speaking to quite a large extent from personal experience, and will thus make use of the first person pronoun - both singular and, when referring to events involving colleagues, plural. I spent my career initially as a classroom teacher and later, for 30 years, in the BBC’s English language teaching unit and will thus sometimes refer to events which are otherwise unreported, but which may incite others to carry out further research. The news lies at the heart of the output of most broadcasting organisations. There are many reasons why non-native speakers of English should make their acquaintance with a station through its news bulletins. Perhaps the most important is their predictability - the structure of news bulletins Hamish Norbrook 264 remains constant whatever their length. There will be a top, highlighting the main points, a number of stories depending on the length of the bulletin, and sometimes a tail, summarising the main points. It is possible for learners to miss certain stories and yet be able to tune back into the bulletin at a point they will recognise, something that is far harder in a programme with a less predictable structure. The language, though including reports from different locations in a variety of accents, will be more controlled than in an unscripted discussion, and thus more predictable for the non-English speaker. Moreover, there is a considerable chance that over time learners will pick up specific aspects of ‘news vocabulary’. Several definitions and distinctions are necessary, starting with potentially controversial terms such as ‘non-native speaker of English’ or ‘non-English speaker’. Although a handy way of segmenting an audience, they are apt to cause confusion and, sometimes, offence. An alternative phrase, a speaker who does not have English as their ‘mother tongue’, has fallen into disuse. A seemingly more objective substitute for ‘native English’, ‘English as L1’, can also be criticised, for, though it attempts to define English as the first of several languages that speakers may have at their disposal, it provides only a diachronic view, referring back to the phase of first language acquisition. A globally mobile citizen may well ultimately adopt the language of the country where they finally settle: if proficient in it, even if not in all registers or modes, that new language could arguably be described as their ‘second L1’ (see Coulmas 1981 and the contributions in Singh 1998). Whatever the linguistic distinctions, international broadcasters will be interested primarily in whether they can reach a large audience in English, or whether they would be better advised to broadcast in a range of languages. Another distinction lies between, (1) ‘learners’, who are actively learning English, who will be discussed in Section 5, (2) those maintaining their existing level of English in an active fashion, for example by deliberately listening to broadcasts in English rather than their own language, and (3) those content to maintain such a level passively - by not avoiding English language broadcasts and web pages. A further term which needs explanation is ‘audience’. It was originally used for theatres, but appropriated first by radio, then by television, and now by new media - internet and mobile platforms (such as mobile phones and PDAs). Referring only to radio, it is conventional to refer to the audience as listeners. If watching television, they are viewers. If only accessing news via websites, they are users. The distinction between a ‘lean-forward’ (active) and ‘lean-back’ (passive) medium was initially used to differentiate internet (which requires intervention through a keyboard and mouse or touchpad) from radio and TV, where an On/ Off switch or simple remote control is sufficient. However, I would argue that for non-native speakers both radio and television present the linguistic requirement to engage actively. The English of Broadcast News 265 1 I am particularly grateful to Tony Cross and colleagues at the English Service of Radio France Internationale (RFI) for their help in preparing this paper. 2. Broadcasters, Language and Learners It can be easy to imagine that because of the technical complexity of the production process - involving recorders, studios and transmitters - the language of broadcasts is harder for the learner than that of books. This is not necessarily the case, since the first contact most learners have with a new language is in its spoken, not written, form. Handbooks for journalists stress that broadcast language - often referring to the news - should be seen as spoken language. Harriet Gilbert puts this precept succinctly into this amusing picture: All over the country, radio stations are dotted with writers talking to themselves at the keyboard, or standing in the corridor with eyebrows shooting all over the place and faces twisted into grimaces. If you can bring yourself to look that ridiculous […] you’ll have written a good script for radio. (Gilbert, quoted in Hicks 1998: 115) There is, admittedly, the irony that while our first experience of language is as speech, English may still be taught primarily as a written language, and that while some school leaving exams insist on a spoken element, others do not. The predictability of the structure of a news bulletin, as mentioned earlier, can help learners. Another scaffolding element lies in the most frequent lexical domains in bulletins. Volkmer (1999: 190), writing in the context of the way development issues are reported, compares broadcasting strategies by different types of news organisation (Public Service, Commercial), by different types of socio-political context (e.g. Post-communist Transition) and by type of event, including Conflict, Diplomacy, Festival/ Celebration and, intriguingly, Curiosity. Besides its insight into the content of bulletins, such a paradigm can be useful for learners in defining and limiting the amount of vocabulary required to understand the concepts. Most newsrooms in large broadcasting organisations will have a style guide to which journalists can refer at any time, and which will be mentioned in their induction to the station. It will codify general practice as well as issues specific to the station. Although potentially of interest to learners, style guides are very much in-house documents. By way of illustration, consider current practice at Radio France Internationale (RFI), the External Services of Radio France. 1 The English Service is one of 19 foreign language units within RFI, broadcasting in English mainly to Africa and the Far East. Their style guide, which starts from the premise that many of their listeners will not have English as their first language, has three parts. Hamish Norbrook 266 An introduction states the principles of writing for radio in general and for their listeners in particular. The first, and perhaps most important point, is that journalists should imagine that they are writing for just one person. The RFI guide also provides practical help on writing for the appropriate language level of their audience, stressing that a story, once written, should be read aloud before going to the studio. A sentence that may be perfectly comprehensible in print form may sound odd when spoken out loud - and thus distract the listener. The pause required to work out the meaning may cause the non-native speaker audience to lose the thread of the story. The RFI guide stresses also that political, cultural and historical references which are clear in one country may not be clear in another. Vocabulary ‘should be as simple as the meaning allows.’ The guide goes on to list specific points that may trip up journalists writing in a hurry. They include three main categories. The first covers house journalistic style, mentioning for example how to refer to culture-specific concepts like parliaments, conventionalised names of reference, such as international agencies, and place names like cities (‘Milan’, not ‘Milano’). The second combines language and journalism and includes the need for care when making time references. Only some African countries are in the same time zone as Paris, so it may be safer to say ‘earlier today’ than ‘this morning’. There is a special section on specific words such as ‘terrorist’, ‘extremist’ and ‘community’ whose interpretations may vary vastly depending on a listener’s own political or social point of view. Finally come a number of language and production points. Large numerals should be written out. It is much easier in a live broadcast to read ‘three million, eight thousand’ than ‘3,008,000’. Nongender-specific terms such as ‘synthetic’ rather than ‘man-made’ should be used. And the point about the inclusion of the sub-ordinating conjunction ‘that’, to be mentioned again in connection with the BBC Special English News in Section 5 below, is summarised memorably here in the phrase ‘Better to overthat than to underthat.’ The RFI style guide also contains appendices on a number of relevant topics including details of Arabic names, Chinese transliterations, the confusing Romanization of Asian languages and, since many of their journalists are bilingual in French and English, a reminder of the danger of ‘faux amis’, literally ‘false friends’. The French ‘actuellement’ means ‘at present’ in English, not ‘actually’; the French ‘assister’ means ‘to be present’, not ‘to help’. 3. The Ecosystem of the EFL Learner News organisations will also find it helpful to find out about those of their users who don’t have English as their first language. There exist plenty of sources of information, which can be trawled at various depths. The per- The English of Broadcast News 267 2 These are now integrated into the Common European Framework, the scaffold for much European language learning. For more detailed information, compare the Council of Europe’s web-pages, in particular http: / / www.coe.int/ t/ dg4/ linguistic/ CADRE_EN.asp. ceived needs of the English learner have over the past 50 years created a major global industry, involving a complex interdependent network of organisations including: - Universities (which, among other things, train higher level students, research effective teaching methods and develop new theories of teaching and learning); - Examination boards (which devise a range of exams for different ages, levels, skills and types of language); - Education authorities (which allocate resources and implement changes in technology and learning methods); - Private and public language schools; - Publishers and specialist authors; - Organisations for teachers of English - both international, such as IATEFL (the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language) and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and national, such as ETAS (the English Teachers Association of Switzerland); - National and international cultural organisations such as the British Council, and finally - Broadcasters who have experience in reaching a wide audience. International broadcasters may well find that their users share common language learning experiences - with, perhaps, an attendant world view - and can be categorised surprisingly easily in terms of language comprehension. If a programme cannot be understood by a viewer from one country whose language level is known, then it is unlikely that a viewer from a different country with the same fluency level will suddenly understand it. One example of the powerful cumulative effect of the different components in an English language teaching course came in the late 1980s and the1990s with the ‘Follow Me’ project. This multi-country, multi-organisation project was devised to help adult learners who had missed out on English at school. The Council of Europe had at the time, under the guidance of John Trim, brought out new functional/ notional language specifications - ‘Waystage’ and ‘Threshold Level’ 2 - which provided the first step to a syllabus devised by author and course designer Louis Alexander. Alexander’s syllabus consisted of a cyclical series of 10 themes, each one treated at greater depth in successive iterations. This flexible approach, enabling Hamish Norbrook 268 broadcasters to schedule programmes in blocks of ten, with a built-in element of revision, proved ideal for the 60 quarter hour TV and radio programmes made by the BBC, Bavarian Television (BR), North German Television (NDR) and other European broadcasters. Learners who followed only part of the series would nonetheless come away with a usable introduction to the language. Longman, the BBC and partner publishers produced classroom and self-study materials (books for students and teachers, audio, video). The German Adult Education Authority (the Deutscher Volkshochschulverband) and partner organisations trained teachers in the methodology of using the new audio-visual materials. Other broadcasters produced their own version of the radio and TV series, most notably China Central Television (CCTV). Their version, presented by Kathy Flower, reached a totally new audience. News organisations have at their disposal at least some points of reference for the type of prior exposure to English that their users may have had. For instance, one approach that broadcasters could usefully be aware of is ESP - English for Specific (or Special) Purposes. This formed the basis for an imaginative British Council sponsored project in Switzerland in 1998, the ‘ESP Anti-Conference’, which was carried on the BBC Learning English website, complete with video interviews. The concept of teaching frequent work-oriented elements of English to targeted groups of learners rather than the entire language to everyone may in part have come from excesses in the situational approach. It may be fine to teach general students to ask for information at the Post Office, to buy butter at the grocer’s, to suggest having a cup of coffee at the café. But if a group, say, of aeronautical engineers are working on a multi-national aircraft construction project, a different approach is needed - even if some of the underlying functional language is remarkably similar. At first sight, this ESP model has little to do with ‘Understanding the News’, which has tended to find itself allocated to the Language Skills section of ELT libraries. It is true that the relevant skills can be taught and tested easily in class. Typical exercises could include the following: Listening for gist: Summarise that 2 minute radio interview in three sentences. Listening for specific points: Who also attended the meeting with the Prime Minister? Extensive reading: Read these five news stories and place them in what you feel is their order of importance Non-verbal Communication - Viewing for paralinguistic features: Watch this TV clip and describe the official’s reaction when the reporter asked if he would resign. The English of Broadcast News 269 But ESP does focus well on aspects of broadcast English that can cause problems even for advanced learners, such as the presence of extended interpolations in live discussions. In pre-recorded items sentences can be edited - or simply re-recorded. In live broadcasts the speed of what is happening can occasionally trip up even the most experienced presenters. And, in the same way that French, Russian or Chinese aeronautical engineers will bring their own knowledge and experience to an international project where English is the working language, so viewers and listeners will approach an English medium bulletin with existing media skills - for instance, the ability to evaluate the relevance and reliability of individual items. The New Zealand journalist and sociolinguist Alan Bell (Bell 1991: 150) identified a number of areas of news language where problems of understanding can arise. One is the lack of correspondence between the narrative structure of a story and the time structure to which it relates. Using Labov’s narrative structure (abstract, orientation, evaluation, complicating action and resolution) he shows that the narrative sequence does not follow the actual temporal sequence. The reader, viewer or listener would intuitively be familiar with this journalistic convention from media in their own language. However, unless handled well, the precise arrangement of time references in English may cause a lack of total comprehension of the sequence of events for non-native speakers. 4. Objections to ‘Linguistic Imperialism’ Underlying the various influences mentioned in the previous section are two assumptions. The first relates to the practice of cultural diplomacy (maintaining national influence through means such as access to films and books at local cultural centres, and educational visits to the country in question.) It is the assumption that language forms a part of national identity, and that learning the language will create affective links with the country concerned. International broadcasters have taught many languages over the years, with varying levels of accompanying political messages. In the late 1930s, the Nazi regime in Germany broadcast radio lessons to Germans living outside the Reich whose grammar was felt to be faulty. The BBC has been broadcasting English language teaching lessons since 1939. A dedicated department has existed since 1943, known successively as the Central Unit, BBC English by Radio (and, later, BBC English by Radio and Television), BBC English (see Leitner 1989) and, currently, BBC Learning English. In the 1970s Radio RSA, the external services of the former apartheid government of South Africa, produced Afrikaans radio lessons with an overtly political message, justifying a white presence in Southern Africa. Radio Moscow and its successor organisations broadcast Russian lessons. Deutsche Welle has Hamish Norbrook 270 an excellent German teaching website and, somewhat more unexpectedly, since 1989 the Finnish broadcasting company YLE has been broadcasting ‘Nuntii Latini’ - the news in Latin. The second assumption is that the teaching of a language such as English will necessarily relegate the importance of other languages. The concept of ‘linguistic imperialism’, introduced by Phillipson (1992), warned of the dangers of a ‘centre - periphery’ model, where knowledge of English was seen as one way of preserving a power structure in a post-colonial world. Pennycook (1994) develops this exploration of the implications of the spread of English. The growth of the internet in the early 1990s led initially to the expectation that cyberspace would be mainly Anglophone. But, with the arrival of internet friendly fonts for languages requiring more than the basic Latin alphabet, sites for languages other than English grew, such as the radio station in western Nigeria which started putting up funeral orations in Yoruba. Traditionally given by a praise singer, families appreciated the fact that the oration now had a more permanent reality - which, admittedly, they had to pay for. Daniel Dor examines the linguistic consequences of globalization. He says that the internet (Dor 2004: 115) is indeed on the way to becoming a multilingual space - but that this does not necessarily bring with it the ideals of freedom of the early web users. The reason is mainly that ‘the agents of economic globalization have realised that adapting to local cultures and languages is a necessary component of staying competitive.’ 5. Using the News to Teach English Newspapers and journals have long been used in classrooms. Teachers enjoy asking students to explain the grammar points behind misleading, and quite possibly apocryphal, newspaper headlines such as ‘Giant waves down Queen Mary’s funnel’ (where Giant is an adjective rather than a noun); ‘General McArthur flies back to front’ (with front as a noun); and the geopolitical nuances of an alleged 19th century London newspaper headline, ‘Storm in Channel - Europe isolated’. More recently the Economist magazine carried a front cover with a picture of George Bush and Tony Blair and the caption ‘Axis of feeble’ (The Economist 13-19 May 2006) - a play on the phrase ‘Axis of evil’ providing interesting material for phonetics lecturers. Broadcast news too has been used for language teaching and improvement. Early experiments in the use of radio to teach French are related by Clark (1930) (see also Hendrix 1932, for consideration of passive acquisition). French language teaching based on news items from francophone television stations reached mainstream BBC television in the 1980s with The English of Broadcast News 271 ‘Téléjournal’, a series presented by Chantal Cüer explaining the language of French TV news stories. There can be a narrow dividing line between using news items to teach language, and broadcasting news stories using simplified language. In the 1960s the BBC’s English language teaching unit broadcast a dictation-speed news bulletin. A succession of news based programmes followed, including ‘News English’ (with explanations entirely in English) and ‘Current Affairs English’ (written in a ‘bilingual’ format with explanations in a variety of languages). Voice of America is well known for its ‘News in Special English’, which has been running since 1959. A team of specially trained journalists write stories using a core vocabulary of 1,500 words, available to listeners. Simple sentences containing one idea are read at around two thirds of normal speed. In 1989 the BBC World Service began broadcasting its own BBC News in Special English usually referred to by production staff as the Slow Speed News. (The VOA team were courteous, if surprised, when we let them know that a similar title to their own had been used.) The production involved three departments: Newsroom, which provided the bulletin and checked the adapted version, Presentation, which trained newsreaders to read at roughly three quarters of the normal speed, and the English language teaching unit, which simplified the language. This process was somewhat different to that used by VOA, in that lexical simplification by means of a defining vocabulary was not used; syntactic simplification was applied to existing news stories instead. A BBC English producer would go to Newsroom two hours before transmission, and be given the relevant bulletin by the sub-editor. The bulletin would then be ‘translated’ into simple English. The precise style of this translation depended to a large extent on the producer’s ‘native speaker ability’ to estimate which elements of the bulletin the listener would find hard. There was a time constraint - the bulletin had to be ready 15 minutes before transmission to allow the newsreader time to read it through and check with the BBC Pronunciation Unit if there were any unfamiliar words. These words were especially likely to be those of people and places that were either unfamiliar or had not previously featured in a story. I regularly came away from the transmission aware that there were phrases that I could have expressed better. While it was quite easy to divide long sentences or add relative pronouns, the need to maintain Newsroom guidelines meant that it was not always simple to make the kind of alterations that English language teachers would instinctively make to aid comprehension. As an example of the type of adaptation undertaken, here is a story from the BBC World Service1500 hours GMT bulletin of 16 September 1994, first in its original form. Hamish Norbrook 272 1. Officials from North Korea and the United States have ended several days of talks in Germany with North Koreans still refusing to bow to American pressure to buy nuclear reactors from South Korea. 2. Both sides described the talks as ‘full and frank’. 3. The Americans are pressing North Korea to replace its existing reactors, because they produce plutonium which could be used for nuclear weapons. 4. The head of the North Korean delegation, Kim Jong U, said the United States would have to finance the changeover, but his country reserved the right to find its own suppliers. [95 words] The BBC News in Special English (Slow News) version read as follows. 1. Officials from North Korea and the United States have ended several days of talks in Germany. 2. The North Korean officials still refuse to listen to American demands to buy nuclear reactors from South Korea. 3. Officials from both countries said that the talks were ‘full and frank’. 4. The Americans are insisting that North Korea replace its existing nuclear reactors, because they produce plutonium which could be used for nuclear weapons. 5. The head of the North Korean delegation, Kim Jong U, said that the United States would have to finance the changeover, but that North Korea felt it should be allowed to find its own suppliers. [104 words] The original first sentence has been split, dropping the ‘with … -ing’ construction, which, though quite common in bulletins, might be less familiar to nonnative listeners. The phrase ‘full and frank’ is a common euphemism for ‘acrimonious’ in the context of diplomatic talks. However, it was left unaltered, although it may have not been fully understood by the listener, as we had no proof that ‘acrimonious’ was the correct meaning in this case. In sentence 3/ 4 ‘pressing’ - which might have been understood in its literal sense - was changed to ‘insisting that North Korea replace’ - which in retrospect also poses problems. Informal testing of the Slow News bulletins at various times indicated that it was helpful to use ‘that’ after ‘say/ claim/ report’ - as mentioned earlier with reference to the RFI style guide. Also, in terms of presentation, some informal research into speed - one of the controllable variables - was carried out, and suggested that native speaker perceptions that the speed was too slow were not shared by non-native speakers. In terms of comprehension it seemed that chunking was important: not so much the length of pauses between sections, but where they were split up. Interpolations were a problem for speakers of Slavonic languages, while cultural references, perhaps more a problem for less experienced listeners, were explained where possible. The English of Broadcast News 273 This applied to abbreviations such as NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) and GCHQ (the UK’s Government Communication Headquarters) where either the organisation might be unfamiliar or its presentation as a word rather than individual letters could cause problems. It also concerned specifically UK based assumptions: for example, that the Prime Minister lives in ‘Number 10’ (10 Downing Street), which can be used as a metonymic reference to the Prime Minister. It is important to stress that these Slow News broadcasts always involved discussions with a Newsroom Sub-editor who had final say on the bulletin, which had to be judged as a straight bulletin as well as a way of teaching English or helping listeners maintain an existing level of English. As I have previously said, all journalists aim to write as clearly and as simply as possible. The stress here was on extending the base of the listenership to people who might not otherwise have tuned in to an English medium bulletin. In 1989 a detailed examination of the language of broadcast news bulletins occurred when the BBC joined with HarperCollins Publishers to produce the BBC English Dictionary. The lexicographical work was carried out at COBUILD (Collins Birmingham University International Language Database) under the direction of the late John Sinclair. COBUILD already had a large corpus of news material, primarily print-based. The BBC provided some 80 million additional words from the World Service Newsroom, with a further 9 million from National Public Radio, Washington (NPR). The language was not ‘spoken language’ in the pure sense of unscripted speech. Rather, it was written in the knowledge that it would be spoken into a microphone rather than typeset into a page in a newspaper. The 70,000 citations from the BBC content were compared with COBUILD’s existing news content and differences noted. The word ‘business’, for instance, appeared more frequently in the COBUILD corpus, but new senses arrived with the BBC data: ‘business as usual’, ‘do business with’, ‘the SDP is still in business’. ‘To marginalise’ appeared in the BBC, but not in COBUILD. There were differences in collocation for the word ‘zone’ between the BBC - ‘security zone’ - and COBUILD - ‘free trade zone’. The NPR data gave an insight into the English of American broadcast news. It was possible to trace the introduction of new phrases such as the military term ‘collateral damage’ (when troops or civilians are killed or wounded accidentally by their own side). Originally, NPR commented this phrase as ‘what the military refer to as collateral damage’. As the phrase became more widely used they reduced it to ‘”collateral damage”’ (the quotation marks indicating to the newsreader that the phrase was not in common use) and finally, as it was used more widely and also in metaphorically extended ways, with no quotation marks. The morphological productivity of American news English was much in evidence in other respects as well - from familiar noun verb conversion - ‘the scud impacted the Gulf’ - to less Hamish Norbrook 274 common back-formations, in this case from the noun attrition - ‘with all the air assets we have it will attrit a lot of the enemy’ and ‘with all of his losses he’s definitely being attritted’. In a review of The BBC English Dictionary for The Modern Language Journal Vol. 77 No. 3 Stephen Gaies (1993) notes the use of ‘ordinary English sentences’ - full sentence definitions - for collocations and restricted uses, such as one of the definitions for ‘succeed’: ‘If you succeed another person, you are the next person to have their job or position’ (BBC English Dictionary 1992: 1169). He also notes the absence of maps in the encyclopedic data. While their absence was in part due to cost and production factors, there was also the fact that the dictionary was being prepared at the time of the momentous political changes marking the break-up of the Soviet Union. New countries took some time to find precise English equivalents of their new names: Kyrgyzstan, for example, which for a time was also referred to as Kirgizia, Khirghizia and Kyrghizia (BBC English Dictionary 1992: 645). 6. Broadcasting in English in Africa Perhaps one of the most famous models for the representation of World Englishes has been proposed by B.B. Kachru (1982) in the form of three concentric circles: the inner circle refers to those countries where English is a native language (ENL) and the outer circle to those where English is a post-colonial second language (ESL); the expanding circle, finally, includes countries where English is a foreign language (EFL). The second circle, therefore, includes, among others, Anglophone countries in Africa, an important audience for international radio broadcasters. The impact of broadcasting generally, including educational broadcasting, is instructive (Wilson 1952, Norbrook and Ricketts 1997). Language policy in Africa has been revisited over the years (Schmied 1991), with different emphasis being placed on the need for a standard model of English appropriate for an African country, or on the use of a language or languages other than English. It might actually be better to say ‘standard models of English’, since one model (discussed at various times by experts such as Professors Ayo Banjo and Ayo Bamgbose; see Bamgbose 1991) envisages different varieties of English for use at local level (in the Nigerian context between a group of adjoining states), national level (for use in the civil service), regional level (with adjoining countries) and internationally. The administrative costs of language policy have directly affected broadcasters, as was pointed out by Apolo Nsibambi of Makere University (Nsibambi 1971) in his paper ‘Language Policy in Uganda: An Investigation into Costs and Politics.’ When Uganda achieved independence in 1962, he notes (1971: 62), ‘[…] Radio Uganda was broadcasting in English, Luganda, The English of Broadcast News 275 Runyoro/ Rutoro, Ateso and Lwo.’ In 1967 President Milton Obote added another ten languages. By 1969 yet more had been added, making a total of eighteen. Nsibambi, who became Prime Minister of Uganda in 1999, makes it clear that this was being done for political reasons - despite the excessive financial costs to Radio Uganda (1971: 64). He proposed a pragmatic solution, reducing the number of languages according to criteria including mutual intelligibility, population, utility, the past history of the linguistic situation and political factors. While most people have little choice over the language used in their working lives, multilingual authors can decide which language best fits what they want to say - and how the process of reaching the audience should work. A highly publicised such case is the Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (Pennycook 1994: 264), who after a distinguished literary career writing in English took the decision to write in his first language, Gikuyu, and then have his books translated. Other authors have chosen to retain the English language as a means of literary expression in order to reach as wide a national and internatioinal audience as possible. This was the decision taken by the Nigerian author Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed by the Nigerian authorities in 1995. He was a member of the Ogoni people in the Niger delta, a source of great oil wealth to Nigeria as a whole, but wealth which he argued had bypassed his own people. He had previously written a television series Basi and Company, which had specifically used English to get his message across. His sole novel, Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, which won an honourable mention in the 1987 Noma award for publishing in Africa, uses language which he describes as ‘rotten English’. It is a language that may not exist in reality precisely in this form but, made up as it is of elements taken from the linguistic landscape of contemporary Nigeria, captures both the leading character, forced to lead the life of a soldier, and the fractured nature of the Nigerian state at that time of the Biafran secessionist war. As Michael North puts it in his paper on Saro-Wiwa: ‘[…] to write in Khana, the language of the Ogoni people, would have made him unreadable to all but an infinitesimal handful of Nigerians’ (North 2001). With another Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, who became famous in 1956 with the publication of his first novel, Things Fall Apart, there is an interesting link between the language used by the author and broadcasting. Achebe’s path to becoming a writer was influenced by the time he spent as a talks writer in the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (Ezenwa-Ohaeto 1997). He later became Head of Talks for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (as the NBS had become), later still working as Controller of the Eastern region and Head of the Voice of Nigeria. Ezenwa-Ohaeto notes the influence that the spoken word had on Achebe: ‘He was preoccupied with what makes speech memorable and cultivated the difference between a “literary style” and a “spoken style”’ (1997: 57). Hamish Norbrook 276 3 Telefonrundspruch used to exist in all four linguistic regions of Switzerland and, among many others, also broadcast BBC ELT programmes; it was switched off in 1998. 7. New Technology Until a few years ago, when wireless technology became common and laptop users started hunting for hotspots in places such as airports and libraries, a computer internet connection was taken to be something that involved a phone line. A somewhat similar trajectory from wired to wireless had been followed 60 years previously by radio broadcasting in West Africa, as outlined by Head (1979: 39-44) and MacKay (1964: 1-5). Short wave radio transmissions were subject to sunspots and other atmospheric disturbances, and so an alternative distribution system known variously as ‘wired wireless’, ‘RDS - Radio Distribution System’ or ‘rediffusion’ was sometimes used to distribute BBC programmes originating in London to the colonies. When Sir Arnold Hodson became Governor of what was then the Gold Coast in 1934 he used experience he had gained developing RDS in the Falkland Islands six years earlier to launch a similar system. Such systems have been in use in many countries - Telefonrundspruch, in Switzerland, for example. 3 There were no locally originated programmes, and the quality of the English used in the linking announcements made by local technicians was criticised in 1938 by ‘unofficial’ (i.e. African) members of the Legislative Council. The technicians were soundly defended by Hodson (Head 1979: 43), and in due course locally originated programmes were produced throughout West Africa. Shortly after the Gold Coast became independent as Ghana, a book by Henry Swanzy (1958) appeared. It featured literary contributions in prose and verse to the Ghana Broadcasting System between 1955 and 1957, which are seen by Carrington (1959: 119) in a review of this book, as ‘the first appearance of a Ghanaian national literature.’ It is going too far to attribute Ghanaian literature to the introduction of radio. However, it was that shift from wired, relayed programmes from London to locally produced ones that caused the development in countries such as Nigeria of groups of broadcasters who could eloquently present ideas of a political as well as a literary nature (Mackay 1964: 10; see also Armour (1984) for the later period of 1946-1957 and Wilkinson (1972)). This national radiophonic eloquence was perhaps not entirely the intention of the Earl of Plymouth, who in 1936 had chaired a report into the future of broadcasting in the colonies which mentioned the indirect propaganda value to Britain of broadcasting to the colonies. There was no mention then that the colonies might broadcast back. In 2004 I gave a talk in Professor Schmied’s seminar at Chemnitz University on a mobile English learning project the BBC had been carrying out in China, and also on the News section of the BBC Learning English website. The English of Broadcast News 277 When setting up the original site in 1996 I had talked with the UK’s educational technology organisation, now known as BeCTA, about the kind of content that might be appropriate for the site. They had pointed out that the BBC was associated with news - and so a section explaining news language was started, called initially ‘Words, Words, Words’, later changing title to ‘Words in the News’. At first it appeared only in hypertext form. When it became possible to put streamed audio on the web we started taking an audio report from a BBC correspondent, selecting words we felt were difficult, providing a written explanation and also the audio of the word in isolation read at both slow and natural speed, with a short pause for repetition. This multimedia approach, using two senses, had proved successful in the past, with language courses including disks, cassettes, CDs or CD-ROMs. The internet made it possible once again, in this case free of charge. In many ways this was a similar model to the earlier BBC News in Special English, with the same snag of relying on native speaker intuition as to what bits of language might prove difficult and which might be useful to learn. Professor Schmied arranged for part of the seminar to be turned into a feedback session. Sample stories were examined, the language points selected and the explanations given commented on by an audience mainly consisting of students of English. The results showed that while those native speaker intuitions were to quite an extent valid, some items that had not been explained should have been, while the explanation of others was unnecessary; furthermore it appeared necessary to avoid the trap of making the explanation harder than the original item. This shows two things. First, that technology is changing fast - so broadcasters interested in language need to make decisions about possible future reactions of their audience. Second, that the important underlying questions about language and learning don’t necessarily alter all that much, and centre around understanding and the nature of any explanation provided. While broadcasters have always encouraged listener and viewer response, sometimes making programmes involving audience feedback, the internet changed the nature of the relationship, since everyone can now be their own publisher. The generic title for this content when used by broadcasters was initially ‘user generated content’; more recently, with the rise of sites such as MySpace and FaceBook, it is termed ‘social networking’. Either way, it can cause headaches for website owners. (There are perhaps some analogies with the change from rediffusion to locally originated broadcasts in Africa.) For the learner, the crucial points are that the language is not moderated and may not come from a native speaker. In 1997 an email based discussion group on the BBC Learning English website was started, enabling learners to chat (in a moderated, asynchronous way) about topics that interested them. In language learning terms, this was the equivalent in cyber-space of the ‘Language Discussion Circle’ of Hamish Norbrook 278 earlier days. The news provided the BBC discussion group with some topics for discussion. When international crises occurred, moderation could become hard but BBC guidelines were available for producers involved in moderation, and the group members were self regulating by sticking to discussion of the language involved in reporting events. Early on, a decision was taken not to correct the language used in the posts, though we sometimes emailed back to members suggesting they rephrase particular points. At one level this was a pragmatic decision: we had neither time nor the resources to correct every post. At another, an ethical decision was involved, despite the fact that it was at first sight incongruous for an English teaching website with the BBC label to carry posts with misspellings and faulty grammar. Changing the way in which non-native speakers express themselves can in some cases alter what they are trying to say. We were neither entirely in the role of teachers (complete with the html equivalent of red pens) nor of desk editors in a publishing house. As it turned out, several group members had a talent responding to pleas for linguistic help (apparent or otherwise) and one of them went on to start a firm teaching languages over the internet. Most broadcasters will not have exactly this problem of users expecting linguistic feedback. However, there is a massive growth in all forms of user originated content that has not gone through an editorial process, in other words, with reactive moderation, where users complain about the content of particular items rather than active moderation of everything. This may eventually cause problems for both their non-native-speaker audience and indeed for native speaker users not expecting to come across what some would doubtless call ‘rotten English’. Examples of this type of content include ‘World Cup Webcam’. During the 2006 football World Cup in Germany, fans viewing BBC World TV were invited to express their opinions live on television. All they needed was a webcam and a broadband connection. The personal experiences of a worker who had moved to Shanghai added greatly to the authentic tone of a BBC World Service series on emerging industrial giants. And many broadcasters have blogs (weblogs) and sometimes their video equivalent, vlogs (video weblogs), for individual programmes or for particular sections of their audience. As part of the collaboration with Chemnitz, Professor Schmied arranged for one of his research students, Katrin Uhlig, to come to the BBC and compare, from the perspective of a German speaking linguistics specialist, various strands of news output, including the language used in the coverage of the same story by various international broadcasters. One area of her work was particularly interesting in the light of the growth of user generated content: an analysis of posts by native and non-native speakers to a BBC Message Board dealing with current affairs issues. Her findings shed new light on the length of posts, which were often longer when written by non- The English of Broadcast News 279 native speakers, who also tended to address the author of the original post or the previous writer in the thread, and to give extended explanations for their opinions. Uhlig also considered register, with the informality of native speakers contrasting with the more formal style adopted by some non-native speaker groups. Whether these differences are due to age, familiarity with electronic communication or prior English language learning experience could not be determined. 8. How Can News Broadcasters Help Learners - and Themselves? In the introduction I mentioned two possible audiences for this paper: learners interested in using news broadcasts (in the widest sense) to maintain or improve their English, and broadcasters themselves. It is the broadcasters who have most to gain from a consideration of news language. Learners can always turn to other types of ‘authentic’ language in the media - sports, music and drama (including soap operas.) From all of these they will gain linguistic and also social insights. News broadcasters, however, are faced with a dilemma. Should they reach out to the growing ‘third circle’ of users who have English as a second or third language? Or should they aim at ‘native speaker’ comprehension? There are various shades in between. Good news writing has many of the characteristics of good writing for learners: clarity, concision and the goal of getting a message - a story - across. Context can be explained, as can extra-linguistic elements. Short interviews where complex language is used can be glossed in the surrounding announcements. On television and the web good visuals - whether photos or graphics - can help clarify complex stories. Style guides can lay down guidelines for journalists. Nonetheless, it is my contention that language remains one of the major controllable barriers to the uptake of broadcast news. How can this challenge be approached by broadcasters? First, by classifying what they are broadcasting, second, by analysing the language, and third, by changing what is written in such a way as to make it more accessible without oversimplifying it. There has been talk of the ‘dumbing down’ of television. No news organisation wants to be accused of producing ‘Mickey Mouse’ stories. Yet they all wish to increase the number of their listeners, viewers and website users. There is a further justification for making the news as comprehensible as possible. While access to accurate, impartial information is not as fundamental as the right to freedom, water or food, if societies want to develop, providing opportunities for all their citizens, it is important nevertheless. The 1945 constitution of UNESCO mandated it to ‘promote the free flow of ideas by word and image’. (Hargreaves and Thomas 2002) It is within this context that I propose the compilation of an international corpus of news English. (Obvi- Hamish Norbrook 280 ously I would hope that similar ones could be established for other languages.) Without an accurate analysis of what is actually happening across the media and across broadcasting organisations one cannot even hope to start defining what news English is. Documenting and investigating current developments in the language of news broadcasting by means of a corpus is in theory quite feasible if funding and policy problems can be overcome. Successful international cooperation has produced corpora designed for the study of regional variability in standard Englishes worldwide (ICE - the International Corpus of English) or the comparative study of learner English produced by students of diverse L1 background (ICLE - the International Corpus of Learner English). What has hampered the development of some corpora is access to a sufficient quantity of language. Broadcasters can supply this with no problem. In fact, one of the first problems in such a venture would actually be where to start the compilation, given the vast amount of possible data to include. As an example of one kind of phenomenon which I regard as particularly promising for detailed study, consider the treatment of the same material in different ways tracing for example the linguistic progress of an unedited audio interview through different stages: - after basic editing (involving non-editorial functions such as removing some hesitations, repetitions and false starts) - as broadcast on radio (after editorial intervention, such as altering the order of questions and shortening or omitting some answers) - as used in a news summary (language which is written to be spoken) - transferred to a web page, with appropriate accompanying image - transferred to a mobile platform, where concision is important. (adapted from the original print model in Bell 1991: 33-55) Other subsets of data meriting closer scrutiny could include the language used in various events as categorised by Volkmer (1999: 190), already quoted and discussed in Section 2 above. They could provide a basis for research and indeed publication - for instance an updated version of the minimal language used by VOA Special English - possibly influenced by ideas from the concept of English as an International Language. Traditional subsets such as financial, business and political English would also yield linguistic information. However, though practical linguistically, problems of a financial and policy nature abound. Few broadcasters would be happy to allow uncontrolled access to their content. Editorial misjudgements - not to mention typographical errors - would be displayed to all. One solution might be for groups of broadcasters to pool a sample of their output. As we found with the BBC English Dictionary, broadcasters can easily provide statistically representative samples. English language broadcasters within the European Broadcasting Union, the Asian Broadcasting Union, the Arab states Broadcasting The English of Broadcast News 281 4 I would like to thank the following for their help in the preparation of this paper: Andrew Thompson, Paul Scott and Caroline Dunton, BBC Learning English; Jeff Walden, BBC Written Archives Centre; Tony Cross, Radio France Internationale; Professor Dr. Josef Schmied, Chemnitz University. Union and the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association could be approached. Perhaps the most interesting international broadcaster to emerge in recent years is Al-Jazeera. With its main production centres in London, Dubai and Kuala Lumpur, those heard on it would probably provide an interesting cross-section of English across the globe. I will end with one further suggestion for research on radio and television broadcasts - the human voice. The quality of the language used by a station is important, but so too is the voice of the individual newsreader or presenter - and this is far harder to evaluate. There may be a high degree of agreement about who does - or does not - have ‘a good voice for broadcasting’. But few will be able to analyse what exactly is meant by that phrase. Musicians have been faced with similar questions about musical performance. In 1990 George Pratt (Pratt 1990) deconstructed the aural training of musicians, which concentrated traditionally on two main factors, pitch and rhythm. He argued that other elements of a more abstract and qualitative nature were also important and could be taught - elements such as timbre, texture and density, compass, range and tessitura, and dynamics and articulation. Developing and applying a corresponding range of elements to the voices of broadcasters might not lead to the discovery of the ideal newsreader but it could provide hope to those aspiring to become one. 4 9. References Armour, C. (1984). ‘The BBC and the Development of Broadcasting in British Colonial Africa 1946-1956’. African Affairs 83/ 332. 359-402. Bamgbose, Ayo (1991). Language and the Nation: The Language Question in Sub-Saharan Africa. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. BBC English Dictionary (1992), London: BBC English and Harper Collins. Bell, Alan (1991). The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell. Carrington, C.E. (1959) Review of “Voices of Ghana” by Henry Swanzy International Affairs 35/ I, Jan. 1959. Clark, T. (1930) ‘Teaching French over the Radio’. The French Review 3/ 4. Coulmas, Florian. 1981. ‘Introduction: The concept of native speaker’. In Florian Coulmas, ed. A Festschrift for Native Speaker. The Hague: Mouton. 1-25. Dor, Daniel. 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[Last accessed 24 August 2007] Hamish Norbrook Formely of the BBC’s ELT Department United Kingdom Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.francke.de · E-Mail: info@francke.de Introduction to English Linguistics ist eine praxisorientier te Grundlage für Einführungskurse in die englische Sprachwissenschaft, einschließlich der neuen Bachelor-Studiengänge. Sie finden hier gesichertes Basiswissen über: • die Geschichte der englischen Sprache; • die zentralen Arbeitsbereiche der Linguistik: Phonetik & Phonologie, Morphologie, Syntax, Semantik, Pragmatik und Soziolinguistik. „A student-friendly guide through the maze of linguistics. The volume gives a systematic overview of the major fields of linguist cs from phonology to sociolinguistics, discussing fundamental linguistic theories with clarity and ease.“ KULT_online „Das Buch ist sowohl zum Selbststudium als auch zur Wiederholung und Prüfungsvorbereitung bestens geeignet. Sehr empfohlen ...“ ekz-informationsdienst Markus Bieswanger / Annette Becker Introduction to English Linguistics UTB 2752 basics 2., aktualisierte Auflage 2008 239 Seiten, 150 Abbildungen und Tabellen €[D] 14,90/ SFR 26,00 ISBN 978-3-8252-2752-4 AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen New News Old News: A Sociophonetic Study of Spoken Australian English in News Broadcast Speech Jennifer Price The notion of language as a marker of identity is usefully explored in relation to news broadcast language. Newsreaders’ speech, like all spoken language, is subject to change over time, and radio and television bulletins have been recording this process for as long as the technology has allowed. Evidence of Australia’s evolution from colonial outpost to independent nation can be heard in the speech of its newsreaders, who in the mid 1940s began to move away from the RP accent that had been adopted along with the BBC model of broadcasting. This article presents some findings of research into those aspects of Australian newsreaders’ speech which indicate change most clearly, i.e. vowel quality and intonation. Instrumental analyses conducted on data collected from three speaker groups suggest that whereas vowels have clearly shifted away from RP-like accents towards ‘General’ and even ‘Broad’ accents of Australian English, American-sounding intonation patterns may be developing in the speech of certain commercial FM radio newsreaders, contrary to what is stated in the literature. Hearing an example of the ‘old’ Australian radio voice often causes us to laugh with disbelief and embarrassment, in the same way we view photographs of ourselves as teenagers in the family album. There would seem to be no connection between our past and present selves, yet the incontrovertible evidence is there before us. The ‘British’ sound that characterized Australian news bulletins in the 1950s has now vanished, and it is taken for granted that the majority of newsreaders speak with an accent identifying them as Australian. Yet for some 40 years after the advent of radio in Australia, broadcasting clung to the British model inherited from the BBC including its Received Pronunciation (RP) accent, while Australian English was dismissed as an inappropriate and inferior variety for this purpose. It was not Jennifer Price 286 until the 1970s that the colonial shackles were shed and audiences could hear something of themselves on the airwaves. It was finally time for the ‘Australianization’ of broadcasting, including news. The current research looks at how the sound of Australian newsreaders’ speech has changed since the 1950s. The two aspects of interest are those which tend to be most obvious auditorily, that is vowel quality and intonation, and attempts are made to support auditory impressions with instrumental analysis. This paper begins by tracing the evolution of the newsreaders’ accent from its RP origins to the present-day ‘General’ or ‘Broad’ (see below), and goes on to describe the relevant methodology, aims and initial results. The concept of ‘Standard English’ suggests the type of grammatical correctness that is usually associated with written rather than spoken language. Standard English is the variety that is taught in schools for example, and used for the writing of official and legal documents. Importantly, although a standard language has no inherently superior qualities it is perceived as being more correct, precise, pure and elegant than other dialects (Burridge 2004). Thus Standard English, with its lexical, syntactic and morphological guidelines, has become the benchmark for the ‘best’ form of the language, and its reinforcement within educational institutions has made it the gateway to higher social status. The aforementioned British model of broadcasting is closely aligned with the idea that there also exists a ‘correct’ way of speaking, or a spoken ‘standard’. The highest-prestige spoken realization of Standard English in Britain and its former Empire historically has been held to be RP. Contrary to other accents in England which identify speakers as originating from a specific region, RP is an accent linked to social class rather than geography which can be spoken all over the country. In the nineteenth century it became the accent of the public school elite, and it is still considered to be an ‘educated’ accent, used by an estimated 2% of the population. According to Wells (1982) it is typically spoken by barristers, stockbrokers and diplomats, although this description may now be somewhat out of date. Until the 1970s RP was also the mandatory accent for BBC announcers. Leitner (1980: 84) states that ‘RP had come to be used in the BBC quite naturally because the BBC was run by members of the upper middle and upper classes who were either RP speakers themselves or of one of the “socially acceptable” so-called national accents’, these being Scottish, Welsh or Irish. Moreover, the BBC would only employ people as announcers whose educational or professional background meant they were natural speakers of RP. Crystal claims RP was selected by the BBC because ‘it was a regionally “neutral” accent, and was thought to be more widely understood than any regional accent’ (1995: 365). However it happened, what Gimson (1970) refers to as the ‘general’ variety of RP became the accent that was used in British broadcasting, and this subsequently spawned the different branches of Australian news speech style that have developed over the past five New News Old News 287 decades (it is not the intention here to provide details of the phonemes comprising ‘general’ RP). To take a broader perspective for a moment, the origin of Australian English itself is a question that has divided scholars for some time. There is no single or straightforward explanation, with some believing London English was the ‘mother’ accent transported to the colony and others favouring the theory that a new dialect developed amongst the children during the early settlement years. The consensus nevertheless seems to be that Australian English originated in Australia. Unlike Britain, Australia does not yet have clearly defined regional variation, but there do exist socioeconomic indices in the form of three nondiscrete accents or sociolects which have traditionally been referred to as Cultivated, General and Broad. Cultivated most closely approximates RP, although the similarities are diminishing as both accents change over time. Only a small proportion of the Australian population has ever spoken with a Cultivated accent (Mitchell and Delbridge’s 1960s study calculated it to be 11%), and a subsequent study by Horvath (1985) found the numbers of General speakers were increasing. Cox (2006) states that by the end of the 1980s the General accent of Australian English had become the norm, especially for younger speakers. We know that language including accent is constantly evolving, and Harrington, Cox and Evans (1997), Cox (1998, 1999, 2006), and Cox and Palethorpe (2001) have shown that the vowels of Australian English have changed considerably since the 1960s. Broadcast language is interesting in that it not only has the capacity to reflect the speech of the wider community but it also employs different speech styles, particularly on commercial radio. It is in the commercial arena that obligations towards sponsors, not to mention the need to create an identifiable and appealing station style within the crowded media marketplace, push broadcasters to explore new linguistic territory. This results in stylistic change which can in turn influence intonation patterns and vowel quality. Thus archival news material can provide insight into how Australians wanted to present themselves at any given point in time. Somewhat like DNA frozen in tree sap, the news archives have been preserving evidence of Australia’s linguistic and stylistic genealogy for as long as the technology has made it possible. 1. ‘BBC’ Broadcasting in Australia Radio transmission began in Australia in 1924, with the Australian Broadcasting Commission as it was then known, being formally established in 1932. The ABC was modelled in most respects on the BBC (see Delbridge 1999; Leitner 1984; Pyvis 1993; Johnson 1988) and a decision had to be made as to what the official broadcast voice should be. Since the nation was Jennifer Price 288 still so firmly attached to its British heritage and there was very strong negative feeling towards the local accent, Australian English was not even considered. Whereas the BBC variety of RP was seen as the prestige model, Australian speech was criticized for being lazy and excessively nasal. Indeed many ABC announcers were either British or were BBC recruits. Delbridge quotes the then Chairman of the ABC, W.J. Cleary, as saying in 1941 ‘Every quest for announcers has revealed that the number of men most suitable have been Englishmen’ (1999: 262). Johnson notes that in the 1930s the ABC ‘pursued the BBC’s authoritative style and distanced manner in many of its programmes’ (1988: 121), and Kent states that ‘in the 1930s, newsreaders were usually Englishmen with wondrously rounded Home Counties vowels, who presented a news report as though they were reading the Ten Commandments with divine permission’ (1983: 129). Furthermore, in the same way the BBC took it upon itself to be the model for the masses, to improve their cultural awareness and to provide them with a correct linguistic reference, the ABC saw itself as the benchmark in broadcasting, and responsible for setting high standards. The ABC also modelled what was eventually called the Standing Committee on Spoken English, or SCOSE, on the BBC equivalent, its primary function being to provide a source of linguistic reference for ABC staff in relation to ‘all aspects of spoken and written English’ (ABC 2007). In the 1940s there seems to have been only one enthusiastic supporter of the home grown accent named Alexander Mitchell, an Australian scholar who was influenced by Daniel Jones while completing his PhD in London. Once back in Australia, Mitchell strongly promoted what he called the ‘educated’ variety of Australian English, and was instrumental in pushing for it to be heard on air. It was not until 1952 when Mitchell was Chairman of the SCOSE that it was thought ‘the ABC should make some departure from BBC practice and recognize Australian English’ (ABC 2007). One former Australian newsreader who clearly shared Mitchell’s views was James Dibble. Employed by the ABC in 1948, he was adamant he ‘never wanted to speak with a British-sounding accent’ (interview conducted 7/ 12/ 04). Another ABC announcer, the late Keith Glover, who commenced his career in 1947 in Brisbane, stated that this was a time when the ABC was specifically seeking voices which sounded Australian (interview conducted 14/ 7/ 04). Neither Dibble nor Glover could have been mistaken as British, though their accents would have conformed to the ‘educated’ variety of Australian English required by the ABC. However, Michael Charlton (another former announcer/ newsreader who was born in Australia and commenced his employment with the ABC in 1944) spoke with an accent that to the average ear would have been indistinguishable from RP. The reason he gave for this was that he was ‘brought up to speak well’ (interview conducted 25/ 8/ 05). This is evidence of the sense of the connection people still felt to New News Old News 289 their English roots in the 1940s and of a belief in RP as the standard, an attitude which has now all but disappeared. The immense social change that has taken place in Australia (and elsewhere) since the 1960s has meant the strength of the cultural link with Britain has weakened substantially, and this has been reflected in broadcast speech. The commercial media were not under the same constraints as the ABC of course, and were free to focus on the popular rather than the erudite. They experimented much more with programme formats and speech styles, but it seems everyone abandoned RP-like speech in newsreading at around the same time, and by the mid 1970s it was time to move away from the British inheritance for good. After a prolonged period of federal Liberal government in Australia, 1972 heralded the return of the Australian Labor Party. Blair suggests this particular ALP election campaign, branded with the slogan ‘It’s Time’, ‘either coincided with, or initiated, a shift in national consciousness’ characterized by a ‘heightened awareness of Australian cultural icons’ and ‘a greater acceptance of the Broad Australian accent’ (1993: 65-66). The mid- 1970s also saw the belated introduction of FM radio to Australia, and the subsequent granting of the first commercial FM licences in 1980 increased opportunities for stylistic change, the result of which is the youth-oriented, informal FM radio style of today. Much has been written about American women having been excluded from broadcasting (especially news) due to their voices being too highpitched or lacking in authority (see Hosley 1987; Sanders and Rock 1988; Marzolf 1977). As was the case in the United States, women only began to read the news in Australia towards the end of the 1970s - until then it had been a strictly male occupation. Crucially for this study, despite the fact that by the early 1980s it was no longer expected that newsreaders speak with RP-like accents, impressionistically it would seem the women continued to sound Cultivated in comparison with the men, who for the most part had already moved away from Cultivated towards General and even Broad. It should be noted that of all the newsreaders interviewed for this study only one stated that he had been asked to speak with an RP-like accent. Two or three said it was understood that one should do so, but this does not seem to have been official policy anywhere, even at the ABC. 2. Style in News Speech One of the difficulties of this research is working out what is specific to the general community’s speech, and what belongs to this particular population of newsreaders. To a certain extent they reflect each other. For instance, all the radio news directors interviewed said they wanted their newsreaders to speak in the ‘language’ of their audience (presumably to create feelings of Jennifer Price 290 solidarity and prevent them from switching to a rival station). This highlights the importance of style in speech analysis. In looking at vowel change in Australian broadcast speech it is impossible not to address the issues of technological and stylistic change as well. The end of RP-like accents in newsreading coincided with the introduction of a less impersonal and much less formal style of delivery. One Melbourne AM radio journalist credits Brian Whyte as being one of the people who introduced the informal, personalized news style into commercial AM radio, as is evident in this extract from one of Whyte’s bulletins at 2SM in Sydney from 1977: From next Monday people who want to go to the expense will be able to buy themselves the latest in telephones - the so-called touchphones, which have push buttons instead of a dial. Telecom says touchphones are easier to use, and you’re less likely to get wrong numbers, and I find that all very encouraging. Further to the subject of new technology, several of the middle-aged newsreaders who were interviewed mentioned having been trained by a voice coach in Melbourne whose lessons seem to have mainly concerned voice projection. Today with improved audio technology there is no need to speak with as much force for the voice to transmit clearly, something which has no doubt greatly assisted with the development of a less formal newsreading style. Part of the stiffness and authority of the early news sound was simply the effort required on the part of the newsreader to get the sound out in a way it could be heard and understood by the listener at home. Now there is far less voice training conducted, particularly in radio, and young graduates from journalism courses often find themselves imitating the style of their colleagues. The voice coaches interviewed stated that this has led to ‘bad habits’ including, once again, excessive nasality. Writing style must also be taken into account. Almost all participants in the study described the contemporary newsreading style as ‘conversational’, although the term appeared to have a rather general application when in fact it can only be said to characterize certain commercial FM stations. In order to be conversational, news must be specifically written that way, and features of informal speech such as flapping and utterance-final high rising terminal (HRT) then find their way quite easily into the youth-oriented commercial FM radio bulletins. The very short length of FM news (often between one and three minutes) is probably a further contributing factor to the use of HRT. Contrary to the AM radio news story comprising three or more sentences, frequently the FM radio equivalent will have only one or two, leading to a ‘listlike’ effect as the reader speeds through several stories. Competition between commercial FM stations has very likely facilitated the introduction of informality into newsreading insofar as the need for a seamless transition between programme and news bulletin (to avoid listener ‘drop-off’) has New News Old News 291 meant that newsreaders have gradually adopted a more relaxed and casual style in keeping with that of the programme hosts. To date HRT has not been a feature of television newsreading (whether the stations are commercial or not), nor of AM radio news presenters’ speech, which has not yet shifted as far from the ‘parent’ BBC style as that of their FM rivals. On the other hand, one very noticeable marker of the ‘old’ RP-like news voice, the tapped / r/ , has disappeared from all newsreading contexts. As far as the performative aspect of newsreading is concerned, all interviewees stated that although they did not modify their accent when on air they did endeavour to speak as clearly as possible. Thus in the speech of FM radio newsreaders we now find a sort of hyperarticulated ‘conversational’ speech style manifesting the General to Broad vowel quality used commonly in Australian society, along with exaggerated intonational patterns (to be discussed below). Although the intention is to communicate the news in a manner the audience will identify with, the end result does not in fact reflect the way people actually speak. 3. Previous Work on Australian English Following on from the large scale impressionistic study conducted by Mitchell and Delbridge in the early 1960s which subsequently classified the population as speakers of Cultivated, General or Broad accents, Bernard (1970) carried out the first serious acoustic analysis of Australian English vowels. Amongst other things he found that a phonetically lower onset of diphthongal movement for / e / was more likely to indicate a Broad accent, and Cultivated / i: / was characterized by more fronted and raised targets relative to Broad. Cox (1998), in reanalyzing Bernard’s data, found that two markers of a broader accent in Australian English were a retracted (rather than lowered) first target for / e / and a ‘marked onglide’ for / i: / . Figure 1 below illustrates the latter for one of the elderly speakers in this study. In the top spectrogram the second formant frequency (F2) is almost horizontal throughout the production of the 2 / i: / vowels (Cultivated accent), whereas in the re-read an obvious onglide can be seen via the greater curvature of F2 (slightly broader accent). In their 2001 synchronic and diachronic studies Cox and Palethorpe also showed evidence of a lowered first target of / e / , leading them to claim this is one of the changes in progress in Australian English. These studies were conducted on the citation form speech of adolescent or young adult males. Harrington et al. (1997), also using citation form speech, examined data across age ranges and gender and found that the first target of Cultivated / e / was significantly fronted relative to Broad and General in women, and relative to General in men. As far as / a / is concerned, Cox (1998) finds Jennifer Price 292 Fig. 1: Spectrograms of the words Egypt and key produced by elderly speaker E2 in 1951 (top) and 2005 (bottom). The second formant (F2) in the reread (bottom) shows a marked onglide in comparison with the original recording (top). Measurements are in Hz. increasing broadness to be characterized by a lowered and retracted first diphthong target, whereas Harrington et al. (1997) describe broader / a / as having a raised and retracted T1, the onset of the diphthong trajectory. 4. Research Aims and Methodology It was thought that a straightforward analysis of the broadcast speech of contemporary mainstream newsreaders from the most popular capital city stations might yield evidence of any new speech trends, particularly if some knowledge of the newsreaders’ background and training were also obtained. Somewhat unexpectedly, almost everyone contacted agreed to be interviewed with a view to discovering this information. In addition to providing New News Old News 293 these details, all speakers (being either current or former newsreaders) were asked to read a word list and extracts from contemporary and archival news bulletins so as to allow maximum options for analysis. Furthermore, the author was able to source archival bulletins for 25 of the 80 speakers interviewed. These participants were thus also asked to re-read transcribed excerpts of their own earlier broadcasts, effectively producing identical data over a time span of between 16 and 54 years. Not surprisingly this material promised to be the most interesting, and 3 speaker groups were selected for comparison, being 4 middle-aged males (referenced as ‘M’) and 4 middleaged females (‘W’) with archival footage from the 1980s, and 4 elderly males (‘E’) with archival bulletins broadcast between 1951 and 1965 (including James Dibble and Michael Charlton). Since an auditory analysis (i.e. analysis performed by close listening rather than instrumentally) suggested that the accent shift for / a / and / e / apparent in 2 of the 4 middle-aged female speakers was greater (i.e. further away from Cultivated) than for the 4 males of the same age, the first aim was to try and confirm via instrumental analysis whether this was so. The second was to see whether the elderly speakers would show the greatest change given the greater timespan between recordings, despite the fact that impressionistically they did not appear to have moved very far from the RP-like or ‘educated’ Australian accents of their 1950s recordings. At the time of writing, the study has not yet been completed, so only partial results will be reported here. All archival broadcasts for the 8 middle-aged men and women took place between 1979 and 1984 when the speakers were aged for the most part in their early 20s and they were in the early stages of their newsreading careers. The majority were approximately 45 years old at the time of the rerecording. The 4 elderly males were aged between 28 and 39 when they broadcast their original bulletins, and were between 79 and 82 when rerecorded. When re-reading the transcript of their original material speakers were instructed to do so in their habitual newsreading style, i.e. they were not asked to imitate the original recording, and it was not played to them beforehand. This directive was slightly more difficult for the retired newsreaders who did not have a ‘current’ style. A Rode S1 condenser microphone was used with an external Tascam US122 USB audio/ MIDI interface device to record directly onto a laptop computer at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz with 16 bit resolution. The archival material was variously supplied on VHS, DAT, audio cassettes and CD and was digitized using Sonic Foundry Sound Forge v.6 software at a sampling rate of 44.1kHz with 16 bit resolution. Some of the material was of limited duration and proved problematic in terms of the number of usable tokens it provided for analysis. A speech database was created using EMU software tools (see Cassidy and Harrington 2001). The study concentrates on the vowels which impressionistically appear to have shifted away from Cultivated between recordings, some of which have Jennifer Price 294 Fig. 2: Vowel chart for male speaker M4. Dotted lines indicate the original read (1983) and solid lines indicate the re-read (2006). ‘R’ denotes ‘re-read’. All measurements are in Hz. traditionally shown change in Australian English. Thus the focus is primarily on the monophthongs / æ/ , / e/ , / i: / , and the diphthongs / a / and / e / . To facilitate the annotation of the data, for each speaker all words containing for example / æ/ were edited together into a single sound file (therefore each speaker has one ‘/ æ/ ’ file for the original read and another for the re-read). In most cases primary stressed monophthongs and diphthongs were measured in the same words in each recording, but this was not always possible due to lack of formant frequency clarity, particularly with the female speakers. Vowels surrounded by nasals, liquids, rhotics and glides were excluded to avoid coarticulatory effects. Vowel charts were created by plotting the averaged first and second formant frequency measurements (F1 against F2). For reporting purposes significance is defined as p<.05 and trends as p<.10. 5. Results What became immediately apparent upon plotting the charts was the similarity in the overall shape of the vowel space for the majority of speakers for both recordings, as can be seen for this male speaker below (Figure 2). New News Old News 295 Fig. 3: Ellipse plots for the monophthongs (excluding / / ) for male speaker M4. All tokens followed by ‘1’ indicate the original read. Those followed by ‘2’ indicate the re-read. ‘X’ denotes the vowel space centroid. All measurements are in Hz. When all tokens for these vowels (excluding / / ) are represented in the vowel space, a high degree of overlap between the original and re-reads is evident (see Figure 3 below). Not surprisingly, this speaker displays almost no perceptible accent change. The correspondence in the vowel space between monophthong and diphthong realization was noted in Cox (1999) and Cox and Palethorpe (2001). Results of the current study also indicate that for many of the speakers certain diphthongs have shifted in parallel with their corresponding monophthongs (see Figure 4). For example male speaker M4 raises the first target of his / e / diphthong in the re-recording to the same extent as he raises / æ/ and / a: / (although in this instance none is statistically significant), and he produces it in the same location within the vowel space relative to / æ/ and / a: / as in his original recording. His second target is also realized approximately the same distance from / e/ in both reads, and as with the monophthongs he shows no perceptible change to this diphthong between record- Jennifer Price 296 Fig. 4: Vowel chart for male speaker M4 with his / e / diphthong superimposed on the monophthongal vowel space. Dotted lines indicate original read (1983) and solid lines the re-read (2006). ‘R’ denotes the re-read. ‘X’ indicates the vowel space centroid. All measurements are in Hz. ings. Thus the (relatively small) changes that have occurred apply to his vowel system as a whole, rather than to isolated parts of it. It is important to note that for General or Broad speakers of Australian English the first target (T1) of / e / is usually produced somewhere between / æ/ and / a: / , as is the case for male speaker M4 (above) in both the original and re-read. A Cultivated speaker produces T1 further towards the front of the vowel space, usually somewhere between / æ/ and / e/ , as evidenced by female speaker W4 in Figure 5 below. As may be expected given the fronted T1 in her re-read, she is one of the 2 females who does not show perceptually salient accent change over time. Her accent remains as Cultivated in 2006 as it was in 1982. One of the principal findings of Cox and Palethorpe (2001) was the lowering of / æ/ as a change occurring in Australian English. However in the current study 11 of the 12 speakers showed statistically significant raising in the vowel space of at least one monophthong, and for 6 speakers this included / æ/ (i.e. 3 of the elderly speakers, 2 of the females and 1 of the males). Only one female speaker (W1) showed non-significant but perceptually salient lowering of / æ/ . The phenomenon of raising was more striking for / e/ , with 4 elderly, 2 female and 2 male speakers displaying significantly lower frequencies for F1 (i.e. raising in the vowel space). Figure 6 (below) illustrates the changes to / e/ between the original read and the re-read for each speaker. The arrows indicate the direction of shift, with the start point representing the average New News Old News 297 Fig. 5: Vowel chart for female speaker W4 with her / e / diphthong superimposed on the monophthongal vowel space. Dotted lines indicate original read (1982) and solid lines the re-read (2006). ‘R’ denotes the re-read. All measurements are in Hz. Fig. 6: All speakers’ average vowel midpoints for / e/ . Arrows indicate direction of shift between original and re-reads. W=female speakers, M=male speakers, E=elderly speakers. Measurements are in Hz. Jennifer Price 298 Fig. 7: Vowel chart for female speaker W2 with her / a / diphthong superimposed on the monophthongal vowel space. Dotted lines indicate original read (1980) and solid lines the re-read (2005). ‘R’ denotes the re-read. ‘X’ indicates the vowel space centroid. All measurements are in Hz. F1/ F2 measurements (taken at the vowel mid-point) for the original read, and the end points representing the re-read. Female speaker W1, who displayed lowering of / æ/ also shows non-significant lowering of / e/ . Again she is the only speaker to do so. This unexpected phenomenon of raising in the vowel space was also apparent in the diphthongs. Female speaker W2 displays statistically significant F1 raising for the first target of her / a / diphthong (see Figure 7 below), yet to the ear her accent does not appear to have changed over the 25-year period, that is, she does not appear to have shifted away from Cultivated towards General. Similarly to the production of the first target of / e / mentioned earlier, the location of the first target of / a / relative to / a: / and / / gives us a clue as to accent type. Speakers with Cultivated accents tend to produce T1 closer to / a: / than / / , which is the case in both reads for female speaker W2 above. This is very clear for the original read of elderly speaker E2 (see Figure 8 below), perhaps not surprisingly so since in the 1950s the elderly speakers still had RP-like accents. However by the time of his re-read 54 years later he has shifted the production of his first target further back in the vowel space relative to / a: / , and upwards in the vowel space towards / / . This supports the definition of broader / a / relative to Cultivated given by Harring- New News Old News 299 Fig. 8: Vowel chart for elderly speaker E2 with his / a / diphthong superimposed on the monophthongal vowel space. Dotted lines indicate original read (1951) and solid lines the reread (2005). ‘R’ denotes the re-read. ‘X’ indicates the vowel space centroid. All measurements are in Hz. ton et al. (1997). Indeed, this speaker’s accent has moved away from the obviously Cultivated sound, although not nearly far enough to be classed as General. On the other hand male speaker M3 produces T1 for / a / closer to / / in both reads, and his accent could be described as General to Broad (see Figure 9 below). Similarly to female speaker W2, his accent does not appear to have changed over time. Since representing the vowel space in this way can provide an indication of a speaker’s accent type when the descriptions provided by Harrington et al. (1997) are used as a reference, it can also throw light on any accent change that has taken place between recordings. Impressionistically, female speaker W3 (Figure 10 below) sounds Cultivated in 1989 but by 2005 she appears to have shifted towards a General accent in her / e / diphthong, and this is reflected in the (significantly) retracted first and second targets for the re-read, in comparison with the original. Male speaker M1 (the only middle-aged male who sounds reasonably Cultivated in his original read but who has shifted firmly towards General by the time of his re-read) at first looks to have simply lowered the first target of / e / in the re-read relative to the original (see e R in Figure 11 below), but when the location of T1 in relation to the entire vowel space is taken into account it can be seen that in fact he displays lowering and retraction in the Jennifer Price 300 Fig. 9: Vowel chart for male speaker M3 with his / a / diphthong superimposed on the monophthongal vowel space. Dotted lines indicate original read (1984) and solid lines the reread (2006). ‘R’ denotes the re-read. ‘X’ indicates the vowel space centroid. All measurements are in Hz. Fig. 10: Vowel chart for female speaker W3 with her / e / diphthong superimposed on the monophthongal vowel space. Dotted lines indicate original read (1989) and solid lines the re-read (2005). ‘R’ denotes the re-read. ‘X’ indicates the vowel space centroid. All measurements are in Hz. New News Old News 301 Fig. 11: Vowel chart for male speaker M1 with his / e / diphthong superimposed on the monophthongal vowel space. Dotted lines indicate original read (1979) and solid lines the re-read (2005). ‘R’ denotes the re-read. ‘X’ indicates the vowel space centroid. All measurements are in Hz. re-read, with T1 being produced closer to / a / in the re-read than in the original. It would seem then that the initial auditory analysis and classification of these speakers’ accents has been able to be confirmed instrumentally. The results cited above appear to support the combined findings of the aforementioned researchers as regards the definitions of increasing broadness for / e / and / a / relative to Cultivated, and this despite the fact that citation form rather than connected speech data was examined. In the current data set, retraction alone, or in combination with either lowering for / e / or raising for / a / , would seem to be the key to accent shift for both these diphthongs. Regarding the question of whether the elderly speaker group would display the greatest change over time, quantitatively the elderly speakers do show a consistently higher percentage of monophthong and diphthong targets (with F1 and F2 measured separately) where the shifts within the vowel space between reads are statistically significant (see Tables 1 and 2 below). It should be noted firstly that these results include all the monophthongs and diphthongs analyzed, that is / i: , e, æ, , a: , , , u: , e , a , au, o / . Secondly, / i: / is treated here as a diphthong because of its onglide characteristic. The percentage of significant change for the elderly speakers’ monophthong targets (55.3%) is considerably higher than for both the females (25%) and the males (33.9%). The difference is not as great for the diphthong targets Jennifer Price 302 (33.7% for the elderly speakers as opposed to 25% for the females and 17.5% for the males). Speaker group Male Female Elderly m/ th targets showing sig. change (F1 or F2) 19 14 31 Total changes possible - m/ ths 56 56 56 % of m/ ths showing sig. change 33.9 25.0 55.3 d/ th targets (F1 or F2) showing sig. change 14 20 27 Total changes possible - d/ ths 80 80 80 % of d/ th targets showing sig. change 17.5 25.0 33.7 Table 1: Numbers of monophthong and diphthong targets showing statistically significant change between original recording and re-read, represented as a percentage of the total number of targets which potentially could show change. Note for the diphthongs F1 and F2 are measured independently of each other i.e. each target can have up to 2 significant changes. As can be seen in Table 2 below, when the monophthongs and diphthongs are added together the elderly speakers clearly show greater significant change (42.6% of the 136 F1 and F2 targets which potentially could show change) compared with the females (25%) and males (24.2%), and this despite the auditory analysis indicating less change for the elderly speaker group than either of the others. Speaker group Male Female Elderly Total m/ th + d/ th targets showing sig. change 33 34 58 Total changes possible for m/ th + d/ th targets 136 136 136 % of m/ th + d/ th targets showing sig. change 24.2 25 42.6 Table 2: Total numbers of monophthong and diphthong targets (with F1 and F2 measured independently) showing statistically significant change between recordings, represented as a percentage of the overall total number of possible changes. 6. Discussion One possible explanation for these findings may be that most of the shifts within the vowel space for the elderly speakers are not those which would normally result in accent broadening. For example for the elderly speakers there is a considerably higher proportion of both monophthong and diphthong targets showing statistically significant raising only (i.e. the raising is not associated with lowering or retraction) than for the males or females. New News Old News 303 Although these results are interesting, for several reasons they must be treated with caution. Firstly, as has been mentioned, movement within the vowel space must be looked at systemically rather than as individual targets in isolation. Secondly, change which is perceptually salient is not always reflected in the instrumental measurements (either due to an insufficient number of tokens for analysis which can influence the test results, or a result may be just outside the significance threshold). Thirdly, directional shift resulting in perceptually salient change for one speaker group may not produce similar results for another group due to the precise location of both F1 and F2 within the vowel space. A case in point is the F1 lowering of / i: / for the elderly speakers. Three of the four show statistically significant lowering, but it is only perceptually salient for one of them, and even then it could not be said that the speaker has shifted out of the Cultivated accent category. On the other hand, for one member of the male speaker group whose F1 measurement for / i: / in the original read is higher than the elderly speaker’s in terms of Hz (i.e. it is lower in the vowel space), non-significant lowering for the re-read results in audible accent broadening. Further instrumental analyses are therefore currently being undertaken in an attempt to elucidate the above findings in different ways. The unexpected incidence of F1 raising, however, remains a curious one. Several linguists have considered the physiological effects of ageing on the vocal tract as a factor in vowel variation (see Henton 1983; Harrington, Palethorpe and Watson 2000, 2005; Watson, Palethorpe and Harrington 2004; Harrington 2006). In addition, Bauer (1985) found lowering of F1 (i.e. higher F1 frequencies) in the connected speech of 3 RP-speakers rerecorded over a 20-year period, and he surmised this may be age-related. Since there was evidence of similar F1 lowering for / i: / in 3 of the 4 elderly speakers in the current study, Bauer’s findings prompted examination of the gerontological literature. Endres, Bambach and Flösser (1971) found lower formant frequency values (i.e. F1 raising) in the same 6 male and female speakers over a period of between 13 and 15 years for monophthongs including / i: / , / e/ and / æ/ and the diphthong / a / . Linville and Rens (2001) found lowering of average formant values across gender from young adulthood to old age, which they suggest might result from supraglottic vocal tract lengthening caused by lowering of the larynx. Linville and Fisher (1985) also found significant lowering of F1 and F2 for sustained phonation of / æ/ in elderly female speakers aged between 70 and 80, compared with younger speakers aged between 25 and 35. Liss, Weismer and Rosenbek (1990) noted that for / u/ , / a: / , / æ/ and / / the formant frequencies of 14 very old males (i.e. over the age of 87) demonstrated a centralizing tendency towards the formant measurements normally associated with / / . Finally Rastatter and Jacques (1990) and Rastatter, McGuire, Kalinowski and Stuart (1997) showed that F1 values for / i: / were significantly higher in elderly male speech Jennifer Price 304 than those of their younger counterparts in the environments of isolated vowel production and carrier sentences respectively. Thus when the F1 raising identified in the current study (as well as F1 lowering for / i: / in the case of the elderly males) is looked at in light of the above findings, it may be possible that both are a function of the physiological changes associated with the ageing process. For example elderly speaker E2’s vowel chart (see Figure 8 above) shows evidence of shift between recordings which would support several of the findings cited here, such as raised / e/ and / a / , and lowered / i: / . Overall the vowel space created by his re-read (solid black line) appears to have ‘shrunk’ in comparison with the original read, with the majority of the monophthongs moving in towards the centroid (i.e. centralizing in the manner described by Liss et al. (1990)). It would therefore appear that despite the small numbers of speakers in the current study, all manifestation of shift within the vowel space between recordings should be carefully examined with the gerontological findings in mind. 7. Intonation Finally, brief attention will be paid to intonation as a component of broadcast speech. As has been mentioned, Australia took quite some time to finally let go of England’s newsreading apron strings in terms of accent, but the concept of Australian linguistic ‘identity’ continues to evolve. Today the Australian viewer/ listener is constantly exposed to American culture in a more intense way than ever before, with mobile technology, cable television and the Internet facilitating access to it even further. Sussex (1995: 3) claims Americanisms are ‘strongly represented in the communicative vocabulary of everyday Australian English’, citing No way, OK, Great! and You’re kidding as examples. But as yet there appears to have been no suggestion that American English intonation patterns are being imported into Australian speech. Indeed, Sussex (1989: 159) states: ‘Intonation, rhythm, tessitura, vowel quality - all these remain apparently immune to North American infiltration’. At the same time he notes that Australian English has a ‘natural tendency […] to imitate dynamic, creative, prestige cultures’ (1995: 3). Media language would seem to be no exception, with set phrases such as up next and coming up after the break finding their way into almost all Australian commercial television news bulletins in recent years, no doubt imported along with the American talk show or breakfast television formats. With the emphasis on station identity and the growing celebrity status of radio personalities, commercial FM radio news has moved much further than its AM counterpart towards the conversational style mentioned earlier. It is in FM news where we observe the greatest departure from the more ‘serious’ and impartial style of news delivery which continues to characterize the New News Old News 305 mainstream AM stations. The AM style (which derives from the original BBC model) does not include utterance-final rising tunes, and is principally characterized by continuative utterance-medial low rises, and utterance-final falling tunes suggesting completeness and finality (see Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990). Commercial FM news, on the other hand, is notable for its broad pitch range (especially in female speakers) and the variety of rising tunes it employs. In spontaneous speech a syntactically declarative utterance which is terminated with the same rising tune normally associated with questioning has been labelled a ‘statement high rise’ or a ‘high rising terminal’ (HRT), and interpreted as either a floor holding device (see Horvath 1985; Guy et al. 1986) or as simply indicating there is more information to follow (see Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990). The increasing informality of the Australian broadcast style has no doubt facilitated the transfer of the HRT from spontaneous speech into the more youth oriented FM news genre in particular. Currently it is common for FM newsreaders to terminate a sentence or a news item with continuative rising tunes including HRTs rather than a falling tune. Standard Southern British English, General American English and Australian English are considered to have very similar intonational inventories, but different tune configurations may be employed by different varieties for the same purpose, an example being variation in the intonational contour of questions. Since there would currently appear to be anecdotal evidence but no quantitative study of ‘Americanized’ intonation in Australian speech, one of the aims of the present study is to determine whether tune types similar to those of American radio news can be identified in Australian FM news. The primary aim was to look at a distribution of tune types within their respective intonational systems, a particular focus being rising tunes and their associated functions. A secondary aim was to look at whether the ‘American sound’, if such is the case, may be associated with the sum of the intonational elements comprising utterances, rather than the phrase-final tunes alone. To date a corpus of 5 minutes each of one American radio newsreader and one Australian FM newsreader has been analyzed to compare the different tune types used, and it was found there was almost exactly the same number of rising tunes in each, which stylistically seemed to be employed for similar purposes such as announcing the weather report. For example in Figures 12 and 13 below the same phrase-final high onset (i.e. commencing high in the speaker’s pitch register) rising tunes can be identified for each speaker. The dotted lines trace the fundamental frequency or pitch. Even more interesting was the similarity in the overall intonational template. As is evident in Figures 14 and 15 below, early in each utterance (on the words allegations and controversy highlighted in bold on the pitch trace) Jennifer Price 306 Fig. 12: The F0 contour of the phrase-final high-onset high rise tune in the phrase and speaking of storms produced by the American speaker. Fig. 13: The F0 contour of the phrase-final high-onset high rise tune in the phrase checking Melbourne skies produced by the Australian speaker. New News Old News 307 after alle - gations they were trying to bribe the appeal judges Fig. 14: The F0 contour of the utterance after allegations they were trying to bribe the appeal judges, produced by the Australian speaker. to the controversy surrounding his top aide Karl Rove Fig. 15: The F0 contour of part of the utterance when it comes to the controversy surrounding his top aide Karl Rove, produced by the American speaker. there is a sharp rise in pitch to the highest part of each speaker’s range, followed by a fall within the same word. After a further slight fall the pitch is reset at approximately mid-level, from where it then continues to downstep before rising and falling to the lowest part of the speaker’s register at the final intonational phrase boundary. The phrase-final falls, while different in their realization (a rise-fall on a single word as opposed to a fall over two words), both rise from a point measuring approximately 200Hz in the speaker’s pitch range and reach a similar high point (307Hz for the Australian speaker and 320Hz for the American). To the ear these 2 phrases sound very alike, yet none of the individual features comprising each utterance could be described as inherently ‘American’. The speakers are simply using the same highly stylized intonational Jennifer Price 308 devices for informational focus, which together create a similar auditory impression. The ‘global’ newsreading style which initiated in the US is characterized by the use of hyperaccentuation, many and varied phrase-final rising tunes and an exaggerated pitch range, resulting in the overuse of focal prominence (such as in the words allegations and controversy). These features are also part of ordinary Australian discourse, but in news they are more frequent and more extreme, probably because time is limited and competition for audience attention is fierce. Certainly Australia has been importing American radio and television formats including news and current affairs for years, exposing consumers to the increasingly informal newsreading style which accompanies them, but whether it is in the process of ‘Americanizing’ news discourse is debatable. Perhaps Australian FM newsreaders are adopting aspects of an American model, either consciously or unconsciously, for the ‘hype’ factor which they perceive to be innovative or prestigious. 8. Conclusion To conclude, the BBC model of radio news broadcasting that Australia adopted 80 years ago has since splintered into a range of newsreading styles in radio and television which continue to evolve, along with general change taking place in society. The RP accent that accompanied the model has been subject to the same social influences, to the point where it now exists only in media archives. The closest living relative of RP in Australian English (i.e. the Cultivated accent) seems destined to suffer the same fate, at least in the domain of news, since the only remaining speakers seem to be a handful of women in television who are over the age of 40. All other presenters now speak with a General or even Broad accent. It is very probable that the retirement of these women will see the disappearance of Cultivated from Australian airwaves forever. It will be interesting to see what the eventual outcome will be in terms of intonation - although high rising terminal and other rising tunes have not yet migrated into the more conservative medium of television news, stylistically within another decade or two the situation could be quite different. Since Australian society is by nature less formal than its British ancestor, Australian broadcasters will no doubt continue to be susceptible to the types of news formats which are more conversational in style, and these are likely to be American. However, despite the fact that the stylistic parameters of Australian newsreading are being defined outside the country, this has not yet resulted in a loss of the clearly distinguishable Australian accent amongst presenters. For the time being the only exception seems to be commercial FM radio news, where the focus seems to have shifted somewhat from New News Old News 309 content to style, allowing a vaguely ‘American sounding’ intonation pattern into the mix. A story to be continued, as they say. 9. References ABC. 2007. A Word In Your Ear. <http: / / www.abc.net.au/ corp/ pubs/ iabc/ stories/ s635159.htm>. [Last accessed 13 June 2007] Bauer, L. (1985). ‘Tracing Phonetic Change in the Received Pronunciation of British English’. 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Jennifer Price Monash University Australia 1 I wish to thank Christian Mair, Jürg Schwyter, and Peter Trudgill for their fruitful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. Any remaining shortcoming, I acknowledge mine. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen “Broadcast Yourself! ” The Future of Broadcast English in an IT Age Didier Maillat This paper looks at Broadcast English in the changing landscape of 21st century mass media. It argues that Information Technology has radically affected human communication in a way that will durably and fundamentally have an effect on Broadcast English. With the Internet, broadcasting enters the realm of individual users, effectively bypassing the traditional, institutional gatekeepers. This article focuses on the impact that this radical technological change is likely to have on the internal variation of Broadcast English, on the one hand, and on the part that the Internet can be expected to play in the diffusion of linguistic innovation, on the other. 1. Introduction Broadcasting has been traditionally associated with two modern media: radio and television. 1 The advent of the Internet in the 1980s and its exponential development in the 1990s permitted the fast expansion of new broadcasting media such as online newspapers, online radio and TV channels. But whereas these new forms of broadcasting are just an extension of the existing - old - media, this progress was also, and more importantly, marked by the creation of a radically new form of public broadcasting that is no longer owned and managed by big corporations but by individuals. This revolution coincides with a democratisation of broadcasting through the massive multiplication of broadcasting sources. Didier Maillat 312 One of the central issues that this paper investigates is that of the effect on language of this new broadcasting landscape (see Baron 2000; Origgi 2006; Crystal 1997, 2001, 2004, 2006; Georgakopoulou 2005; Graddol 2006; Herring 1996; McArthur 1986; Mair 2006; Sarangi 2005; Stuart-Smith 2007b). This question can be envisaged from a variety of points of view. In particular, I will look at how these new conditions redefine the notion of broadcasting and consider the type of changes which follow from this. First and foremost, these changes affect the traditional role of broadcasters as gatekeepers ensuring standards of quality, in information content as in language. Beyond the imposition of the mediating presence of the computer in human communication, the Internet defines a new public medium that permits individual broadcasting. As Broadcast English escapes traditional gatekeeping, it enters a new paradigm of language change and variation. The second part of this paper will explore the ways in which the new communicative conditions determined by IT will affect the impact of the Internet on linguistic variation. Crucially, it is argued that the interactive nature of Internet-based communication will allow accommodation to take place between participants, thereby turning Broadcast English into an unprecedented vehicle of linguistic diffusion amongst emerging online communities of practice. 2. Broadcasting and the Internet Any discussion of the contribution that information technology has had on broadcasting and on broadcast English relies on the assumption that information technologies are germane to the classical notion of broadcasting. For example, McArthur establishes that broadcasting specifically involves ‘the electronic transmission of speech, music, and images for public consumption […]’ (1992: s.v.). Clearly, this general definition of broadcasting seems to apply straightforwardly to new forms of computer-mediated communication such as email, Internet, chats, blogs and podcasts, at least in a purely technological sense. Indeed, this is already envisaged by McArthur (1986, 1992) for instance when he groups together the old and new media as he posits four major technological shifts that have radically changed human communication as illustrated in Figure 1 below. However, although McArthur mentions the computer in the fourth shift to electronic media, he does not take into consideration another technological revolution involving the ways in which human beings and computers “interact,” namely the advent of the information highway. The impact that the Internet and the related computer-based applications had on the way humans communicate is of a magnitude at least as important “Broadcast Yourself! ” 313 Fig. 1: Technological changes that affected communication (after McArthur 1986: 4-8) Fig. 2: IT as the fifth major technological shift that affects communication as that of the invention of print. As Mugglestone (this volume) and Schwyter (this volume) point out, the BBC’s action when it defined a style for spoken broadcast (English) language was often compared to the steps taken by the early printers: the early and pioneering work of the BBC in defining a style appropriate for broadcasting may be seen as somewhat parallel to the influence of printing on the written language […]. (Schwyter: this volume) In fact, Mugglestone (this volume) shows how the founding fathers of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English were thoroughly convinced that their action resembled William Caxton’s introduction of print to the written language. In this respect, it is argued that the rapid development of Internetbased technologies itself constitutes the fifth and latest technological shift that has taken place to date. McArthur’s proposal could be extended as shown in Figure 2 if we were to integrate information technology as a communicative shift distinct from the actual device by means of which it has entered our lives, namely the computer. Crystal (2005: 519) goes in this Didier Maillat 314 2 This of course is true from a strictly linguistic perspective. The multimediality of the Internet ranges over a variety of content that extends beyond the strictly linguistic perspective taken here. direction when he proposes that language found on the Internet is so different that ‘it amounts to the arrival of a new medium - often called computermediated communication […].’ In the next section, Internet-based communication will be compared with the type of communication promoted by more traditional broadcast media through a range of specific IT-based features that fundamentally modified the way we communicate and in doing so took broadcasting to a new dimension. 3. A new public, written or spoken medium for the individual The implicit bias which underlies the standard view on broadcasting - the one which grounds the definition given above - is revealed quite clearly in a quotation from McArthur (1994: 163-4) where he writes that ‘[b]roadcasting often implicitly or explicitly serves to standardize forms of spoken language, much as printed matter promotes a standard written language […].’ In his view broadcasting concerns spoken language. Crucially, however, the Internet brought new possibilities to broadcasting. Two periods can be recognised in the short history of Internet. Originally, the Internet’s impact on the communicative context, through the technology known as hypertext, was such that the common implicit assumption relayed by McArthur could not be upheld any longer. IT had brought broadcasting to the written language. In the second period, thanks to an ever-increasing flow of the network, Internet evolved to be the first truly multimedia medium where information is conveyed and communication takes place through a combination of both written and spoken language. 2 That is to say that information technologies have effectively amalgamated written and spoken communication. Thus, following Schwyter’s insight, we would be justified in expecting the Internet to function as the first form of broadcasting to influence the written language, provided some institution or body takes up the part played by, particularly, the BBC for spoken language. 3.1 Public versus private discourse In relation to broadcasting, information technology has led to a far greater change than previous technological advances. The most important modification brought to human communication in the latest developments of Internet- “Broadcast Yourself! ” 315 3 This is the case with blogs, for instance, which can be updated online from one’s mobile phone at any time. related technologies was to have made the reception and the production of public discourse accessible to every connected person on this planet. As a consequence, the century-old boundary between public and private discourse has disappeared at least in its traditional form. Interestingly, Sarangi (2005) defines public discourse as ‘what goes under the generic rubric of “media discourse” and “political communication” as well as discourse in organisational and professional settings’; it contrasts with the ‘private realm (e.g., family, inter-personal, inner-self etc.)’. That is to say that the division between the public/ private realms combines topical considerations (‘political’, ‘inter-personal’) with a technical or medium-related dimension (‘media’, ‘inner-self’). Arguably, the Internet has induced such radical changes in the latter that a fundamental reassessment of the dichotomy is called for. Although not much can be said on the topical aspects, from a technical viewpoint, the Internet re-assigns the public and private spheres to such an extent that it almost renders the distinction void. Part of what makes public discourse public comes from the fact that it is a form of language which reaches out to a wide audience/ readership. Whereas prototypical private discourse is grounded on a one-to-one interaction, public discourse ranges over a variety of one-to-many communication situations. In the case of traditional broadcasting the capacity to produce public discourse and speak to the multitudes is the direct result of a technological advance, as McArthur pointed out. Crucially, the possibility of mastering and exploiting the communicative potential of traditional broadcasting technologies requires a level of technological expertise that leaves such power in the hands of only a few experts with enough financial support. The Internet, however, has irreversibly disrupted the traditional divide by allowing amateur individuals to produce public content, via language in particular, that can reach an extremely wide audience literally in a matter of minutes. 3 In Bourdieu’s terminology, the fifth technological shift argued for in these pages, namely the advent of information technologies, can be regarded as having deeply affected the conditions of access to resources which determine the structure of society (cf. Bourdieu’s (1982: 64) ‘capacité technique’) - where (public) discourse is one of these resources. The Internet has granted access to a resource - broadcasting - that had mostly been restricted to a socially established elite. The technological distance that separates public discourse from any individual speaker/ writer in industrialised countries has never been so short, as it depends essentially on owning a computer and being connected. Didier Maillat 316 This technological shift has had a crucial influence on the language marketplace as defined by Bourdieu and affects the very nature of Broadcast English. Crystal (2006: 404), who has been on the frontline of linguistic research on the Internet from the outset, states that ‘[p]roblably the most important linguistic effect of the Internet is the way it offers an unprecedented degree of written public presence to small-scale regional and social groups, and thus a vast potential for representing local identities.’ Effectively, the Internet makes public discourse accessible to individuals and non-institutional groups, thereby changing the very essence of Broadcast English. Crystal (2003: 403) writes that before the Internet, ‘[t]he vast majority of traditional writing has represented the language of public record and debate, as manifested in administrative, academic, and expository material (e.g. newspapers, ephemera),’ whereas now texts written by teenagers, marginalised groups, or texts written in regional dialects can achieve public presence. As a consequence, Broadcast English - in its written form initially - is no longer centrally produced, nor under the editorial supervision of some institution responsible for broadcasts. The Internet has brought live broadcasting facilities into every connected home. As we will see in Section 4, these new technological conditions radically modified the role played by the traditional gatekeepers of language, i.e. those who could ‘maintain the standard’ of Broadcast English. 3.2 Transient versus permanent Interestingly, it has been argued that the Internet does not offer true public visibility in the sense that even though an individual may be able to place her blog online in no time and produce public discourse, potentially addressing a wide audience, in effect there is very little chance that such a blog ever participates in public discourse as it will only reach a very small proportion of the potential addressees. In this view, writing a blog could be compared to someone addressing London by shouting at the top of her voice at Speakers’ corner in Hyde Park. Public discourse circulated via the Internet would therefore have a much more marginal influence than public discourse as it was generated by the traditional broadcast media. In this respect, a key element in identifying communication shifts in McArthur’s (1986) model is directly linked with the way the new technology redefines the possibilities of storing speech. In the case of the Internet, a new public space for written language appeared which offered permanent storage possibilities and, more importantly, which allowed permanent, immediate access. One of the fundamental changes brought to Broadcast English by information technologies lies in the possibility of producing a permanent form of broadcast discourse. Georgakopoulou (2005) contrasts this property of ‘permanence’ held by the Internet-stored texts with what she calls ‘tran- “Broadcast Yourself! ” 317 4 The most recent surveys on Internet usage show that in all countries the most visited websites are the search engines; those were Yahoo! and Google for the US in December 2007 (source: comScore at www.comscore.com/ press/ release.asp? press=2000, last accessed 5 February 2008) 5 www.thefatmanwalking.com, last accessed 31 January 2008. 6 Source: BBC-online at http: / / news.bbc.co.uk/ 2/ hi/ americas/ 4818036.stm, last accessed 30 January 2008. sience’ as it is found in the more traditional varieties of Broadcast English, such as radio broadcasts for instance. Thus, while public discourse on the Internet may not reach the same audience as a radio programme broadcast by the BBC, permanence prolongs the temporal extent of such discourse in a way that for Broadcast English is truly revolutionary. Moreover, permanence combined with search engines calls for a serious re-appraisal of the apparent limitation affecting the ‘visibility’ of Internet-based discourse. In fact, the idea of a limited effective publicity for Internet discourse is considerably weakened by the availability of search engines which most often constitute the starting point of a user’s path on the web. 4 The search engines ensure that an individual blog can become visible. By way of illustration, we could take the case of an American man who started telling of his journey across the United States as he walked from the west coast in California to New York City between April 2005 and May 2006. His personal site 5 consisted in a travel log and picture album of his trip. It attracted more and more viewers, peaking at around 700,000 hits per month, 6 as it received traditional media coverage in The Guardian, on CNN, BBC-News, etc. Structurally, or text-linguistically, this personal homepage functioned very much like a blog as it was updated regularly. From a linguistic perspective, the sheer number of hits received by such a site is a clear indication of the kind of audience an individual can eventually reach through the new medium. More importantly, though, it is the nature of the new written form of Broadcast English published online which is of interest. The Internet provides public presence to individuals, and small-scale social or marginalised groups: such groups would include linguisticallydefined communities. In the transcontinental hiker’s tale, we find a number of instances of informal and non-standard uses of English (including determiner use Tornado knocked the sign over! I think that it rusted the death; simplified spelling Sumptin ta do! ; prepositional phrases Outside of the teenagers throwing rocks at his tent last night, he has had nothing but well-wishers). Evidence of this sort indicates the kind of effect that the Internet can have on language itself as it provides public visibility - recall the 700,000 hits per month - to unedited linguistic material. The democratising effect of online publishing offers an unprecedented outlet to unmonitored forms of the language which Didier Maillat 318 7 Whereas audio recordings had been around for some time on the Internet (e.g. streaming audio content), the enormous success of the combination of iPods and iTunes speeded up the adoption of new ways to publish audio material on the web. 8 This property has also been likened by Sir Harold Evans, former editor of The Sunday Times, in an interview given on 14 July 2007 to The Wall Street Journal, to ‘a spurious megaphone’ (Varadarajan 2007). constitutes the fundamental change affecting public written English, as Crystal (2006: 404) emphasises when he writes that ‘[w]hat is especially interesting, from a linguistic point of view, is that most of this material will be unedited.’ While most aspects of the technological shift analysed in this section affect written language and have, as a consequence, called for a re-definition of Broadcast English, the latest developments in IT clearly show that not only the written form but also the spoken form of the language are affected by ‘the fifth technological shift’. In one of the most recent discussions of the linguistic impact of the Internet, Crystal (2006: 406), although he mainly envisages the modifications reshaping the written language, forecasts that ‘[a] spoken dimension of Internet use, supplementing the present graphic dimension, is in prospect.’ Indeed, what may have been a ‘prospect’ in 2006 is now a wellestablished language use over the Internet. The main driving force for this has been the rapid adoption of podcasts - quickly followed by videocasts - as a means of publishing spoken material through online portals such as iTunes and YouTube. 7 Obviously, what was true of personal homepages and blogs also applies to these new spoken forms which are also public, permanent and searchable. Chats have also evolved from a strictly written medium to a spoken form with the advent of Skype for instance. Interestingly, the importance of the tremendous effects generated by the publishing opportunities offered by the Internet was captured and expressed in its most concise form by the new medium itself: the slogan of one of the most active social sites (see Section 5 below), namely YouTube, is Broadcast Yourself. Nothing could capture more precisely the very spirit of the fifth technological shift outlined in the previous paragraphs, as they had to coin a new reflexive form for the verb broadcast in order to best represent what IT, in the shape of one of the latest technological advances it offers, brought to individual users of the language. A public medium, technically accessible to the experts and novices which offers permanent storage precisely opens the possibility for self-broadcasting. 8 This last argument shed some new light on the topic being discussed throughout this volume: Broadcast English. The obvious consequence of this shift is to increase dramatically the potential for variation that affects the broadcast variety of the language. Effectively, IT takes Broadcast English to a realm of individual variation. “Broadcast Yourself! ” 319 Where will we go from here? Having established the existence of a very recent technological shift in McArthur’s communication timeline, what kind of changes can we expect to affect the English language and Broadcast English in particular? In the remainder of this paper I will entertain three hypotheses. 4. The Next Gatekeepers The previous section showed how the new technological conditions opened the domain of public discourse through broadcast media to every connected individual. However, it could also be argued that while the technological possibility exists, institutions and corporations have gathered enough expertise and seduction power to guarantee that they will keep the strategic hold on broadcasting that they have secured over the last century. As he discussed the future of English in the late 1990s, Graddol (1997) referred to the various bodies which can exert some form of control over the language and specifically over the public variety of the language as the ‘gatekeeping agents’. In his opinion, the advent of the electronic media - McArthur’s fourth shift - had essentially cancelled the action of the gatekeepers. He wrote: But with increasing use of electronic communication much of the social and cultural effect of the stability of print has already been lost, along with central “gatekeeping” agents […]. (Graddol 1997: 56) Nevertheless, as it is shown in all the other contributions in this volume, a similar wish for control over the variety of English being broadcast has been very much part of the strategy of the traditional electronic media - radio and TV in particular. The very existence of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English and its contemporary successor, the BBC Pronunciation Unit, confirms this desire to establish some authority on language. The development of new conditions following the advent of IT and the fifth shift can however be regarded as the last straw in this movement against the institutional action towards the standardisation of Broadcast English that began with the fourth shift. Thus, Graddol speaks of a ‘destandardisation of English’ (1997: 57) as he describes the gradual fragmentation and ‘breakdown of gatekeeping and the shift of control to ordinary users, in turn leading to informal, vernacular or in-group language in public places’ (51). The inevitable side-effect of the rise of the individual would then be the loss of the language gatekeepers. The standpoint voiced here reflects an opinion that was held by a number of specialists who thought that the digital revolution brought by the Internet would be fatal to the traditional media. Negroponte predicted that ‘[t]he Didier Maillat 320 monolithic empires of mass media are dissolving into an array of cottage industries […]. Media barons of today will be grasping to hold onto their centralized empires tomorrow’ (Negroponte 1995: 57-8). Thus, the old gatekeepers of Broadcast English would disappear in the dissolution of traditional mass media. But as Henry Jenkins (2006), the director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, points out, the digital revolution did not in the end coincide with ‘a displacement of the old media by the new.’ Instead, we see a situation developing where there is convergence between the top-down processes typical of corporations and institutions and bottom-up processes shaped by consumer participation. For the question under scrutiny, this means that the trend towards an ever increasing individualisation of Broadcast English is accompanied by the more traditional top-down, centralised structures. Going back to the earlier example of www.thefatmanwalking.com, one should emphasise that even if an individual homepage reached public visibility and gathered such an audience, this is in great part due to the relaying of the information provided there through the programmes and websites of traditional broadcasting corporations such as, in this instance the BBC, the Guardian, and CNBC, among many others. This specific case, therefore, constitutes a very good example of the sort of interaction between two types of public discourse advocated by Jenkins (2006) as part of the convergence culture. This should not constitute such a surprise after all. In a medium dominated by individual voices, users will almost inevitably need to rely on some authority figure to pre-select and dig out for them content worth their attention in the billions of pages potentially accessible on the Internet. Eco (2006: 180) quite rightly emphasises that in an IT age where an exponentially growing number of pages are published every day, ‘[t]he only solution is that there appear authorities, external or internal to the Web, that constantly monitor what is found.’ Although, he calls these authorities filters, Eco effectively writes about the next generation of gatekeepers. In other words, the great democratisation movement initiated by the fifth technological shift will both lead to an individualisation of broadcast public discourse, thereby affecting the variability of Broadcast English, and it will simultaneously call for the recognition of some filtering authorities. In a discussion focusing on the future of Broadcast English, it would be interesting to find out who the next - Internet-based - language gatekeepers might be. A first answer to this question can be found in the behaviours of current users of the Internet. How do they interact with the new medium? As mentioned earlier, an indication of how the Internet is used by the online community on an everyday basis can be derived from the number of hits received by the various sites. In Switzerland, heavy and medium Internet users mention “Broadcast Yourself! ” 321 9 This statistic factors out emailing activities (Source: Office Fédéral de la Statistique (2007), Neuchâtel, Switzerland, available at http: / / www.bfs.admin.ch/ , last accessed 31 January 2008.). 10 Source: Alexa rankings, available at http: / / www.alexa.com, last accessed 31 January 2008. 11 Source: Alexa rankings, available at http: / / www.alexa.com, last accessed 31 January 2008. ‘using search engines’ as the most frequent activity they get involved in when browsing the web. 9 This figure has been increasing steadily (by more than 10%) between 2001 and 2006. The same tendency can be observed in the overall rankings of the most visited websites worldwide. The first position is regularly occupied by a search engine (Yahoo! on 31 January 2008) and several competitors are found in the top five (Windows Live and Google on 31 January 2008). 10 In other words, it looks as if search engines are used as entry points to the Web and function as the Internet’s gates as it were. Therefore, it could be said that the newest form of filtering or gatekeeping that is also responsible for indirectly ‘editing’ the content - including the language - found on the Internet, to come back to Crystal’s (2006) comment (see Section 3.2), lies in the algorithms used to rank the hits on any given query launched by a user. As we saw above, in the exponential surge of individual public discourse published through the Internet, the only guarantee that any individual voice reaches its audience depends on its ability to be retrieved by the search engines and obtain a high ranking on the (often very long) list of relevant pages. Strikingly, whereas the role of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English as guardian of a language standard was quite openly acknowledged and justified, the ranking algorithms are well-kept industrial secrets. Google, for instance, reassuringly claims that its ‘technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance. There is no human involvement or manipulation of results.’ Interestingly, the Google search engine, PageRank, originally uses cross-references between pages (i.e. hyperlinks) as one of the key factors to determine the relative importance of a page, and hence its rank. This means that the more often a page is cross-referenced by other sites the higher its ranking will be. Consequently, a page published as part of a big corporate site, such as the BBC’s, with complex internal cross-referencing, is given a head start in the race for public visibility, thereby ensuring that the next gatekeepers resemble the old ones. In this respect, it is quite revealing to observe that whereas the most visited site in the United Kingdom is the local version of the Google search engine which faithfully reflects the results obtained for the whole world, more importantly, visitors to this site also visit the BBC’s homepage often. 11 A second answer is found in the study by Broadbent and Cara (2006), who differentiate between different categories of Internet users modelled on research investigating the diffusion and adoption of technological innovation Didier Maillat 322 12 The graph is available at http: / / en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Image: DiffusionOfInnovation.png, last accessed 31 January 2008. in a population. Typically, a technological innovation - such as that induced by the fifth shift - will be adopted in stages by a given population which allows us to categorise successive groups of adopters following a normal distribution as shown below. Fig. 3: Diffusion of innovation through time (adapted from Rogers 2003) 12 Broadbent and Cara (2006: 163) argue that one can distinguish between naïve, light and expert users of the Internet. Of particular interest to them are the light users, who consist of early majority pragmatists and late majority conservatives. These light users constitute the current and largest wave of adopters who are now turning to the Internet in western countries. According to the research reported by Broadbent and Cara, once the first six months of initial discovery are passed the light users’ typical way of browsing the web revolves around six to seven sites. Moreover, these few sites will mostly be those of brick-and-mortar, well-established companies and, crucially, will also include the portal of their Internet provider (163-4). For this important group of users, the entry points - the gatekeepers - to the Internet will therefore be a portal, as well as the old big corporate groups. Unsurprisingly, the most visited search engines have started offering portal services that combine a search engine with a whole range of pre-selected content and online socialisation tools (email, blog, web albums; see for instance, the Yahoo! or MSN portals). However, if we believe Jenkins (2006), the future of Internet content will be based on a culture of convergence, bringing together decisions taken ‘in corporate boardrooms and in teenagers’ bedrooms.’ If we have now gained a better understanding of the next generation of gatekeepers ruling over the top-down structure of the Internet, there remains the question of the bottomup processes starting in teenagers’ bedrooms which will also - possibly to a much higher degree - shape Broadcast English. “Broadcast Yourself! ” 323 13 Heavy users surf the Internet ‘every day or almost every day’, they represent roughly 51% of the population (older than 14); while 12% of the population are medium users who surf ‘several times a week’ (Office Fédéral de la Statistique 2007). 5. The Internet and Social Network Theory The question of the next generation of gatekeepers may indeed be a misguided one. At stake here is the very notion of technological barrier that defines standard gatekeepers. For the action of the Advisory Committee on Spoken English to have any impact at all, it had to apply itself to a form of the language that reaches a wide audience (even if passively) and whose production is mostly in the hands of a technologically selected elite. Although the Internet offers a new form of broadcasting, it also renders this technological barrier inoperative, thereby potentially preventing any form of gatekeeping from taking place. In such a context, an interesting domain of linguistic investigation lies with the specific parameters and rules of language change governing over Internet-Broadcast English. What would these rules be? From a general perspective, the development of individual, unedited, public, broadcast texts and speeches is expected to lead to a gradual fragmentation of Broadcast English as more and more sites will be broadcasting non-standard messages to quote an expression coined by Crystal (2002). But beyond this first level of analysis lies another more important issue related to the dynamics of language variation both from an internal point of view between the many non-standard voices that compose Internet-Broadcast English, as well as from an external point of view between Internet- Broadcast English and other varieties of English. Referring to the nature of this new linguistic landscape, Crystal (2005: 522-3) describes it as ‘a volatile, unprecedented, unpredictable, and altogether fascinating linguistic situation.’ The evolution of Internet languages is closely linked with the way the Internet is used by speakers to communicate. In this respect, there are some interesting recent trends that should be mentioned. In the 2005 Swiss national census, one of the most relevant reported changes which affect the way the Internet is used by the population concerns the location from which the Internet is accessed. Whereas before 2000, most persons who accessed the web did so from their workplace, the trend was reversed in 2001 as more and more users surf the Internet from home, while the Internet usage at the workplace seems to have reached a plateau, as can be seen in Figure 4 below. As the report points out, this data unmistakably shows that the web is increasingly gaining ground in people’s private sphere and has become part of their everyday life like the traditional media. 13 Didier Maillat 324 14 Source: Office Fédéral de la Statistique (2007), Neuchâtel, Switzerland, available at http: / / www.bfs.admin.ch/ bfs/ portal/ fr/ index/ themen/ 16/ 04/ key/ approche_globale.indicator. 30106.301.html, last accessed 31 January 2008. 15 Source: comScore (2007), available at http: / / www.comscore.com/ press/ release.asp? press= 1555, last accessed 31 January 2008. 16 Source: Alexa rankings, available at http: / / www.alexa.com/ site/ ds/ top_sites? ts_mode= global&lang=none, last accessed on 31 January 2008. 17 Source: comScore, available at http: / / www.comscore.com/ press/ release.asp? press=1555, last accessed on 31 January 2008. Fig. 4: Use of Internet in Switzerland by location 14 A different indicator brings further support to the claim that a new stage has been reached in the communicative use of the Internet. In a recent survey of the most striking tendencies to have shaped the Internet in 2007, Bob Ivins, a senior executive at comScore, an international company that specialises in evaluating the world of IT, has issued a report in which he states that [d]uring the past year, social networking has really taken off globally […]. Literally hundreds of millions of people around the world are visiting social networking sites each month and many are doing so on a daily basis. It would appear that social networking is not a fad but rather an activity that is being woven into the very fabric of the global internet. 15 As a result, social networking websites represent the last category (in addition to search engines and portals) to really stand out on the list of the most visited websites worldwide. In the top ten, we find MySpace (5th), FaceBook (7th), Hi5(8th), Orkut (10th) 16 which gather a total of more than 218,500,000 users. 17 Crucially, while this recent sharp increase in the use of the Internet “Broadcast Yourself! ” 325 18 Source: comScore, available at http: / / www.comscore.com/ press/ release.asp? press=1801, last accessed on 31 January 2008. 19 Source: National Statistics Online, available at http: / / www.statistics.gov.uk/ statbase/ ssdataset.asp? vlnk=9664&More=Y, last accessed on 31 January 2008. as a base for social networking (270% over a year in the case of Facebook), and therefore, from a linguistic point of view, as a place for interactive communication, is interesting in its own right, it is even more striking to notice that it brings the Internet, and the languages spoken there, to a new dimension of social interaction which is truly part of people’s everyday life. The example of the UK is a case in point. An October 2007 analysis of social networking practices by comScore revealed that the United Kingdom was clearly leading the trend noticed above in Europe. British users of social networking sites spent an average 5.8 hours in August 2007 (against 3 hours for the whole of Europe). This figure can be further analysed into a group of heavy users (the top 20 percent of the social networking community who spend most time online), who spent more than 22 hours, and a group of medium users (the next 30 percent of the social networking community in terms of time spent online), who were occupied social-networking for almost 4 hours. We get a better understanding of the impact Internet-based social networking might have on communicative and linguistic practices if we say that medium users meet their online community once a month, while heavy users spend the equivalent of five evenings out (or in) with their online friends each month, i.e. more than once a week. For the latter especially, the amount of exposure, as well as contribution, to Internet Broadcast English is considerable. Finally, it would be grossly mistaken to underestimate the importance of this new speech community: in the United Kingdom there are almost five millions heavy users (4,971,000). 18 According to the latest estimates of the British Office for National Statistics, the urban area of Greater Manchester represents a population of 2.55 millions, while the population of (Greater) London is estimated to be around 7,512,400 residents. 19 In other words, a large - and ever increasing - portion of the population in the United Kingdom uses the Internet to interact socially and verbally, thereby actively contributing to the 21st century re-shaping of Broadcast English, and crucially expanding its degree of variability. A last piece of evidence will be brought to bear in this discussion of the bottom-up processes which affect Broadcast English as a consequence of the fifth technological shift. A new technology is taking social networking on the Internet to a whole new dimension through the development of online three-dimensional universes where users - or rather their avatars - can travel to meet, interact and communicate with other people. Second Life is Didier Maillat 326 20 Source: Linden Lab, available at http: / / s3.amazonaws.com/ static-secondlife-com/ economy/ stats_200801.xls, last accessed on 31 January 2008. 21 Source: Linden Lab, available at http: / / s3.amazonaws.com/ static-secondlife-com/ economy/ stats_200801.xls, last accessed on 31 January 2008. 22 Source: New York Times (31 March 2007), available at http: / / thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2007/ 03/ 31/ obama-is-first-in-their-second-life/ , last accessed on 31 January 2008. Note that there is also a dedicated space for the American presidential campaign where members can meet the candidates on MySpace (available at http: / / www.myspace.com/ election2008, last accessed on 31 January 2008), which shows that current political debates have entered both virtual communities like Second Life and social networks like MySpace. such a virtual world, created by its residents, which became accessible to the public in 2003. It is notoriously difficult to assess the exact numbers of residents actively participating in Second Life as one user may have several avatars and as a majority of registered users are not active in Second life, but a fairly reasonable estimate can be reached: two senior executives at Linden Lab, the firm which runs Second Life, evaluated the ratio of active users to the number of registered members to about 10 percent on two different occasions in 2007 (Terdiman 2007). The most recent statistics on Second Life usage, provided by Linden Lab, mention 12,240,161 registered members, hence 1.2 million virtual social actors worldwide. 20 Once again, beyond the sheer size of this sample population, it is the communicative practices applied to the new medium that are of particular interest. In January 2008, 543,574 active avatars totalled a staggering 28,143,718 hours of online Second Life activity which amounts to a monthly 51 hour average. In the United States, Second Life avatars spent on average more than 55 hours, while in Germany residents were connected for an average 2 hours every day to the virtual reality of this online world (62 hours in January 2008). 21 The relevance and success of this new online social space has been duly acknowledged by such institutions as Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, University College Dublin, and the University of Edinburgh, as they inaugurated their Second Life campuses. The Reuters news agency has a news centre in the virtual world. In this context, it is not surprising that the then presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy had a Second Life avatar during the French presidential campaign who attended several online, virtual rallies and press conferences, while American presidential candidate Barack Obama’s avatar appeared in Second Life on 31 March 2007. 22 Arguably, the excitement surrounding Second Life may have lost some of its original strength. However, beyond this specific example, what appears to be relevant in the context of this article is the availability and unquestionable success of a new form of computer-mediated communication which redefines the notion of linguistic interaction (both spoken and written) within the limits of virtual realities. Thus, beside the social environment of Second Life, other “Broadcast Yourself! ” 327 23 Interestingly, online gaming communities, such as World of Warcraft, attract many more participants than the virtual, social environment of Second Life. similar online communities interact in different virtual worlds, such as World of Warcraft for instance, to name only the most successful. 23 These examples show that the future of Broadcast English is intimately connected with a new form of online socialisation and communication. As Internet-based Broadcast English becomes the variety of English in which very large communities interact and social contacts are built and organised, the new variety is expected to evolve according to the principles of linguistic change, away from the standardising action of the gatekeepers. Effectively, if the bottom-up processes highlighted here continue to gain momentum, it will also considerably modify the dynamics between the Internet-broadcast variety and other varieties of English, as a consequence of the new social and communicative salience of media language. Thus, coming back to the earlier question of the internal and external parameters that will bear on the future of Broadcast English, I wish to put forward three hypotheses. The first hypothesis relayed by several linguists who have investigated the English used on the Internet is based on the opinion that one of the expected effects of IT is the ‘destandardisation of English’ (Graddol 1997: 57; see also Mair 2006: 186) echoed in the following comment by Crystal: Because the Internet is uncontrolled by the hierarchy of grammarians, lexicographers, publishers, printers, copy editors, and proof-readers who have traditionally established, disseminated, and controlled standard English […], it seems likely that we will see a much greater presence of informal written interaction than at any previous stage in the history of the language, and thus the rapid emergence and consolidation of usage - several of which will privilege non-standard forms. These new varieties are bound to achieve a more developed written representation than would ever have been possible before, and through the global reach of the Internet they may well extend their influence beyond their locality or country of origin. (2006: 404-5; my emphasis) In addition to the reinforcement of non-standard forms, the process described here will strengthen a tendency already identified for twentieth century English by Mair (2006: 187), who speaks of a ‘colloqualization’ of written English that brings a greater degree of informality in the written language. That is to say that the technological characteristics of IT described in Section 3 above - in particular through emails and chats - will speed up this phenomenon which originated in the nineteenth century (Mair 2006: 185, citing Biber 2003). A second hypothesis can be derived from the insights that were gained into the rapid development of worldwide online communities. From a theoreti- Didier Maillat 328 cal point of view, a good analytical vantage point is found in the models advocated for in social network theory. Milroy (1983) in her discussion of the influence of social networks on language argues that dense multiplex networks tend to have a normative influence on the language of its members towards an in-group vernacular. She writes that ‘multiplexity and density are conditions which often co-occur, and both increase the effectiveness of the network as a norm-enforcement mechanism’ (1983: 52). Loose (or spare) uniplex networks, on the other hand, do not offer the kind of conditions which allow to enforce a linguistic norm. Arguably, the type of social networks that online communities give rise to would be best described as loose and uniplex, as they bring together participants from different professional backgrounds, geographical regions, who are (typically) not relatives, who mostly - even exclusively - interact through their online activity. As far as language is concerned, the counterpart of this looser form of network, according to Milroy who cites Le Page (1979) is ‘linguistic diffuseness’ (1983: 182). In other words, according to this theoretical model, the kind of social networks found on the Internet are likely to constitute a vector of language change, since ‘a loosening of close-knit ties is likely to be associated with linguistic change’ (Milroy 1983: 176). Thus, if we take social networks like those we observed above as indicative of a developing trend in Internet usage, we would expect highly virtually mobile individuals to build numerous weak links in a mesh of online networks. For Milroy, such individuals would greatly contribute to the linguistic diffusion of innovation (1983: 201). Thus, if we assume, as it is suggested here, that the key to accommodation processes is the interactive use of language rather than the simultaneous physical presence of the participants, the Internet will act as a powerful catalyst for linguistic change. Interestingly, loose uniplex networks are linked to geographic mobility (Milroy 1983: 136-7). In this sense, it is not surprising that the Internet should lead to looser social structures as it offers the ultimate, most extreme form of geographic mobility. Linguistic diffuseness can, therefore, be regarded as a direct result of geographic dispersion which prevents any single localised variety from functioning as the norm. However, social network theorists also argue that in the absence of a localised norm, looser uniplex network structures, through facilitating language change, may ultimately set in motion the development of a new norm or new types of standardisation. In this view, the fifth technological shift would build on previous ‘processes of urbanization and industrialization […] to disperse traditional close-knit networks, and to accelerate linguistic standardization’ (Milroy 1983: 190). Notice that although the first and second hypotheses appear to point in opposite directions - toward de-standardisation and standardisation respectively - they are not incompatible as they focus on two different aspects of IT: whereas the specificities of the new “Broadcast Yourself! ” 329 24 See also the most recent language statistics published by Internet World Stats, available at http: / / www.Internetworldstats.com/ stats7.htm, last accessed 31 January 2008. medium allow the democratisation of public discourse, thereby providing a lot more public visibility to non-standard varieties than ever before, the social dispersion induced by online communities generates a context of heightened linguistic change and - arguably - convergence toward a standard in the new “communities of practice” the technology has made possible (see Eckert 2000, Wenger 1999). In a discussion of this apparent contradiction, Mair (2006: 186) is even more explicit as he names the specific variety which could act as the standard. [The Internet] ‘has not only been a powerful agent entrenching the globally dominant position of (standard) American English, the “default” language of the medium, but, above and beyond that, has provided unprecedented opportunities for the spread of lesser-known standard varieties and even stigmatized nonstandards. If we take the origin and the number of users connected to the Internet to be a good indication of the eligibility of a given variety as a standard, then indeed standard American English would be a strong candidate - in 2008 - to function as the norm for Internet-based Broadcast English. 24 However, it remains to be seen how various key factors will bear on this situation in the future. Graddol (2006: 44), for instance, points out that English has been steadily losing ground against the other languages as the language of the Internet. Moreover, although English still occupies the dominant position, the proportion of Internet users for whom English is not the native language increases rapidly. Crucially, it is not clear how this particular population will position itself in the selection of a linguistic norm for Broadcast English. Finally, an even more relevant proviso comes from social network theory itself which warns that the model ‘cannot easily handle socially and geographically mobile speakers whose personal network ties are not predominantly dense or multiplex’ (Milroy 1983: 198). 6. Conclusion: the impact of Internet-based Broadcast English The third and last hypothesis considers one particular issue related to the external influence of Broadcast English on other varieties of English. In a recent report on the impact that the TV series East Enders has on the phonology of the English spoken by 36 Glasgow youths, Stuart-Smith (2007a, 2007b) sums up the very widely held view amongst sociolinguists that broadcast varieties can only have an indirect influence on language variation (through lexical innovations, awareness of variation, or language attitudes). Didier Maillat 330 She writes that ‘[t]he consensus seems to be that since we cannot interact with television characters in the same way as with our friends, neighbours and workmates, television dialects are unlikely to affect our own speech’ (Stuart-Smith 2007a: 3). Thus, Trudgill (1986) writes that the electronic media are not very instrumental in the diffusion of linguistic innovations, in spite of widespread popular notions to the contrary. The point about the TV set is that people, however much they watch and listen to it, do not talk to it (and even if they do, it cannot hear them! ), with the result that no accommodation takes place. (40) Traditionally, the main argument against the possibility of the media impinging on language change revolves around the absence of actual face-to-face interaction between e.g. the radio show host and the audience. As Stuart- Smith (2007a: 1) emphasises, ‘a key process of language change is diffusion, or the spreading of linguistic innovations across geographical regions’. In order for diffusion to take place, one speaker must modify, i.e. accommodate, her speech to that of her interlocutor (see Trudgill 1986, Chambers 1998). Without face-to-face interaction, accommodation cannot occur which prevents the diffusion of linguistic innovations. The fifth technological shift dramatically changes the situation as it brings an element of interaction in the form of communication mediated through the Internet. While this does not constitute an instance of face-to-face interaction in a strict sense, it certainly provides an appropriate communicative framework in which participants interact and can accommodate to each other’s speech (e.g. FaceBook dialogues, both spoken or written, or chats). In fact, even though standard accounts posit that linguistic diffusion through accommodation requires face-to-face interaction, early research on this phenomenon proposed a simpler condition for accommodation which only involves interaction. For instance, some strong empirical support for this view can be found in the work of prominent precursors in accommodation theory: Giles and Powesland (1975: 163) mention empirical work where accommodation is shown to take place in the speech of subjects exposed to some recorded input. These findings are also echoed in earlier work by Webb (quoted in Giles and Powesland 1975: 150) using tape-recorded stimuli. In other words, accommodation does not depend on physical co-presence, but on the interactive nature of the communicative exchange between participants; a situation that the fifth technological shift has brought into our lives. Thus, if I am right in arguing that the inherent interactivity of IT radically changes the nature of the relationship between speakers and Broadcast English, it follows that Broadcast English should now be regarded as a new factor in the dynamics of language variation and change. A legitimate question to ask in this context would therefore be ‘how influential could Broadcast English be then? ’. “Broadcast Yourself! ” 331 Once again, linguistic theory can give us some clear indications on the kind of answer to bring to this question. According to Trudgill (1986), two fundamental parameters enter the equation of his model for diffusion. The first factor is demographic. Trudgill argues that ‘the larger the population of a city, the more likely an individual from elsewhere is to come into contact with a speaker from that city’ (1986: 39-40). As we saw in Section 5, the combined population of social networking sites is twice as big as that of the Greater Manchester area. Even if we were to distinguish the various communities attached to the different social networks, the demographic weight of the Internet in a revised model of linguistic change is therefore considerable. The Internet would effectively be the first broadcast medium to allow accommodation to take place via its channel and function as a proportionally powerful vehicle of diffusion, while Internet-based Broadcast English - both written and spoken - would constitute the variety that rides this technological tide. The application of the second factor to the new conditions determined by IT turns out to be even more interesting, and puzzling too. Trudgill explains about this second factor, which he calls geographical, that ‘other things being equal and transport patterns permitting, people on average come into contact most often with people who live closest to them and least often with people who live furthest away’ (1986: 39). If the general, very marked drift noted in the previous section reveals itself to be more than a craze, then the geographical dispersion of the online communities reviewed above will call for a complete re-appraisal of the mechanisms governing linguistic change. Essentially, online social networks offer the unprecedented possibility to have extremely large communities that are geographically disjoint. Effectively, the Internet creates a new geographical dimension, that of the web, the epitome of which is a virtual world like Second Life, which can cancel real-life geographical distance and redefine the map of language contact. To conclude, the combined effects of IT on the diffusion model, as well as on the internal variation of Broadcast English mentioned earlier, converge to create the perfect vector of linguistic change: a diffuse variety endorsed by a very large, non-normative community that is geographically dispersed. This of course is quite a surprise if one considers the birth certificate of Broadcast English established by the Advisory Committee on Spoken English. While it remains to be seen to what extent other factors will come to bear on the scenario pictured here, I hope to have shown that through IT, Broadcast English has entered an age of both radical changes and irresistible linguistic importance. Didier Maillat 332 7. References Baron, N.S. (2000). Alphabet to Email: How Written English Evolved and Where It’s Heading. London: Routledge. Broadbent, Stefana and Cara, Francesco (2006). ‘New Architectures of Information’. In Gloria Origgi (ed.). Text-E: Text in the Age of the Internet. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 162-171. Burns, Anne and Coffin, Caroline (2000). Analysing English in a Global Context: A Reader. London: Routledge. Chambers, Jack (1998). ‘TV Makes People Sound the Same’. In L. Bauer and P. Trudgill (eds). Language Myths. New York: Penguin. 123-31. Crowley, T. (2003). Standard English and the Politics of Language. New York: Palgrave. Crystal, David (1997). English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David (2001). Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David (2003). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David (2004). The Language Revolution. Cambridge: Polity. Crystal, David (2005). The Stories of English. London: Penguin. Crystal, David (2006). ‘Into the Twenty-First Century’. In Lynda Mugglestone (ed.). The Oxford History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 394-413. Eckert, Penelope (2000). Language Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High. Malden, Mass.; Oxford: Blackwell. Eco, Umberto (2006). ‘Authors and Authority’. In Gloria Origgi (ed.). Text-E: Text in the Age of the Internet. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 179-189. Georgakopoulou, Anna (2005). ‘Computer-Mediated Communication’. In Online Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Goodman, Sharon and Graddol, David (1996). Redesigning English: New Texts, New Identities. London: Routledge. Graddol, David. (1997). The Future of English? The British Council. http: / / www.britishcouncil. org/ learning-elt-future.pdf. [Last accessed 31 January 2008] Graddol, David (2006). English Next: Why Global English May Mean the End of ‘English as a Foreign Language’ English. The British Council. http: / / www.britishcouncil.org/ learning-research-english-next.pdf. [Last accessed 31 January 2008] Graddol, David, Leith, Dick and Swann, J. (1996). English: History, Diversity and Change. London: Routledge. Herring, Susan C. (1996). Computer-Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Jenkins, Henry (2006). ‘Welcome to Convergence Culture - Consumer Participation & Branded Entertainment’. Stanford Humanities Center. Stanford: Stanford University. Kerswill, Paul (2003). ‘Dialect Levelling and Geographical Diffusion in British English’. In David Britain and Jenny Cheshire (eds). Social Dialectology: In Honour of Peter Trudgill. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 223-243. Mair, Christian (2006). Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation, and Standardization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McArthur, Tom (1986). Worlds of Reference: Lexicography, Learning and Language from the Clay Tablet to the Computer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. “Broadcast Yourself! ” 333 McArthur, Tom (ed.) (1992). The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milroy, James and Milroy, Lesley (1991). Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English. London: Routledge. Milroy, Lesley (1987). Language and Social Networks. Oxford, UK; New York, NY, USA: B. Blackwell. Mugglestone, Lynda (1995). ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mugglestone, Lynda (ed.) (2006). The Oxford History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Negroponte, Nicolas (1995). Being Digital. New York: Knopf. Office fédéral de la statistique (2007). Les Indicateurs de la Société d’Information en Suisse. Neuchâtel: OFS. Origgi, Gloria (2006). Text-E: Text in the Age of the Internet. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pennycook, Alastair (2007). Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London: Routledge. Rogers, E.M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press. Rubdy, Rani and Saraceni, Mario (2006). English in the World: Global Rules, Global Roles. London: Continuum. Sarangi, Srikant (2005). ‘Public Discourse’. In Online Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Stuart-Smith, Jane (2007a). ‘Some Data on Television as a Factor in Accent Change’. Ms. Glasgow: University of Glasgow. 1-12. Stuart-Smith, Jane (2007b). ‘The Influence of the Media’. In C. Llamas, P. Stockwell and L. Mullany (eds.). The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics. London: Routledge. Terdiman, Daniel (2007). ‘Counting the real “Second Life” Population’. http: / / www. news.com/ Counting-the-real-Second-Life-population/ 2100-1043_3-6146943.html. [Last accessed 31 January 2008] Trudgill, Peter (1986). Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell. Trudgill, Peter (2000). Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society. London: Penguin. Varadarajan, Tunku (2007). ‘Happy Blogiversary’. In The Wall Street Journal, 14 July 2007, http: / / online.wsj.com/ article/ SB118436667045766268.html? mod=home_we_ banner_left. [Last accessed 31 January 2008] Wenger, Etienne (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Didier Maillat University of Fribourg Switzerland Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de In times of political and economic globalisation proficiency in the English language has developed into a key competence. The supremacy of English has also manifested itself in academic communication; research and teaching across all disciplines are becoming more and more anglophone. Consequently, academia and the English language as a medium of academic discourse are faced with new challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, the spread of English entails the risk of Anglo-American dominance in cultural and scientific realms leading to disadvantages for non-native speakers of English. On the other hand, English as a common lingua franca is able to function as a catalyst for international cooperation in research and teaching. The articles in this bilingual (German/ English) anthology focus on discussing the advantages and disadvantages of an increasing anglophony in academia. Claus Gnutzmann (ed.) English in Academia Catalyst or Barrier? 2008, 183 Seiten, €[D] 48,00/ SFr 81,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6341-5 AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 33 (2008) Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Reviews Wagner, Manuela, First Steps to Communication: A Pragmatic Analysis. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2006. Eva Maria Eberl The appearance of this volume, which is, to quote the back cover, “an important contribution to our understanding of communicative development”, will be welcomed by everybody interested in the emergence of language in infants. Manuela Wagner presents an up-to-date account of research into the pragmatics of preverbal communication and the subsequent transition of the infants to spoken language. The readers are given a broad picture, ranging from communicative intents to pragmatic and perceptual issues in early language development. The first section of the book provides an overview of important literature on the different stages that preverbal children go through on their way to language. It introduces theories on prelinguistic communicative tools such as eye-gaze and joint visual attention, as well as theories on the role of maternal input for the infant’s language acquisition process. The “continuity-discontinuity” issue is presented: does preverbal communicative development gradually lead to verbal language or are there larger equilibrial stages from which the infants abruptly move on to the next. The specific framework for the experiments was set by two studies that were conducted at the Max-Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, where communicative interactions of mothers and infants of various age groups (ranging from 6 months to 24 months) were analyzed. The first study investigated the number and nature of speech acts and interchange-speech act combinations of the children in the different age groups. Furthermore, the proportion of interpretable and uninterpretable communicative intents, the proportion of nonverbal and verbal speech acts, and the proportion of mother and child turns in the different age groups, were examined. Regarding child-directed-speech, the study looked at how and whether at all mothers adapt their communicative repertoire to their infants. The cross-sectional studies used the so-called Inventory of Communicative Acts- Abridged (INCA-A Coding Scheme; Ninio, Snow, Pan, and Rollins 1994) to define the pragmatic framework for the data analysis. The INCA-A Coding Scheme is a powerful tool for detecting communicative intents and behavior of infants at the beginning of Reviews 336 their linguistic development. It includes categories such as greeting on meeting or parting, showing attentiveness, directing hearer attention for objects and persons, discussing a joint focus of attention, discussing the nonpresent, negotiating possession of objects, demanding clarification of verbal communication or of action, and many more. Wagner and her colleagues first applied the INCA-A Coding Scheme to infants as young as 6 months of age and included a new category, ‘precursors to communicative intents’ (see explanation below), in the transcriptions. The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES; MacWhinney 2000) was used for the transcription of the data and was expanded to include nonverbal communicative behaviors such as eye gaze and pointing. The discussion of study one revealed that with age, infants use a larger repertoire of interchanges, speech acts, and interchange-speech acts. Older infants were usually easier to understand and displayed more sophisticated use of communicative acts. Regarding maternal communication strategies, the study showed that mothers fine-tune their communicative input to match the infant’s linguistic stage. Mothers displayed more attentiveness with younger infants and directed the infant’s attention more often to a joint focus of attention than they did with older children. Mothers also talked more with younger children as a way to verbally accompany the infant’s activities. In addition to scaffolding the infant’s behavior verbally, mothers also provided perceptual support by putting objects on easy display for the infant. With older children, mothers were shown to use more varied speech acts, including questions, and an increase in many INCA-A classes, e.g. discussing a joint focus of attention and directing the hearer’s attention, was noted. Highly directive speech on the parents’ part (e.g. attracting and redirecting the infant’s attention) is very useful for scaffolding a more meaningful communication that teaches the infant when to take a turn in the conversation and what to attend to. In the older age groups, mothers tended to more often ask for clarification of communication. In the first study, Wagner found that the youngest age group (6 months) seemed to be more communicatively active than the coding results suggested. This led to a follow-up study in which the data from study one was reanalyzed and PCAs - Precursors to Communicative Acts - were introduced. PCAs are defined as communicative behaviors in which infants try to participate in the conversation but do not fulfill all the requirements for intentional communicative acts (see p. 168). Study two was specifically designed to detect early and subtle attempts of the very young infant to participate in communicative exchange. PCAs proved to be a useful category to define nonverbal communicative strategies of very young infants, and showed that at 6 months of age, children already start to willfully engage in communication. Wagner was able to show that joint visual attention can be achieved with infants as young as six months, contrary to earlier claims (e.g. Tomasello 1995, note, however, the different definition of joint visual attention) that placed this ability at the end of the first year. Wagner proposes to solve the problem with a “processoriented view” that connects joint visual attention and verbal communication through the identification of distinct mechanisms of early linguistic development. From this perspective, it is possible to show the developmental and socio-cognitive relationship between precursors to communicative acts and joint visual attention. The study of very early communicative acts can provide answers to the debate over continuity versus discontinuity in early communicative development. There has Reviews 337 been a controversy over whether preverbal communicative acts gradually become verbal communicative acts (e.g. Piaget 1952, 1954) or whether the different communicative acts constitute separate equilibria (Chomsky 1975, Lenneberg 1967). Wagner’s study reveals that when children start to combine precursors to communicative acts, they express early communicative intents. Furthermore, communicative exchanges that are expressed nonverbally by very young infants were shown to be expressed verbally by older age groups. These two hypotheses strongly favor the continuity hypothesis. While Wagner realizes the limitations of a cross-sectional study in investigating early communicative development and argues for longitudinal studies, her findings are an important contribution to the field of preverbal communicative development. Longitudinal studies also enable the early detection of communicative disorders in atypical preverbal development. The book is well produced and structured and is accessible even for non-specialists in the field of prelinguistic development. Many tables and diagrams guide us through the sections and present the experimental results in a clear way. The pictures and quotes (from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) are well selected to fit the contexts and highlight the gist of each chapter. The book can be highly recommended to readers looking for a detailed critical account of theories on early communicative development and new experimental findings enriching this exciting area of research. References: Chomsky, N. (1975). Reflections on Language. New York: Pantheon Books. Lenneberg, E. (1967). The Biological Foundations of Language. New York et al.: Wiley & Sons. MacWhinney, B. (2000, 3 rd edition). The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Ninio, A., Snow, C., Pan, B.A., and Rollins, P.R. (1994). “Classifying Communicative Acts in Children’s Interactions”. Journal of Communication Disorders 27. 158-187. Piaget, J. (1952). The Origins of Intelligence in Children. New York: Norton Press. Piaget, J. (1954). The Construction of Reality in the Child. New York: Norton Press. Tomasello, M. (1995). “Joint Visual Attention as Social Cognition”. In: Moore, C., and Dunham P.J. (eds.). Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Eva Maria Eberl Institut für Anglistik Universität Graz Reviews 338 John Holm and Peter L. Patrick (eds.), Comparative Creole Syntax: Parallel Outlines of 18 Creole Grammars. (Westminster Creolistics Series 7). London: Battlebridge, 2007. Dagmar Deuber “All creolists”, as Mark Sebba once remarked (1997: viii), “owe a debt to John Holm, for his encyclopedic volumes, which represent the mass of our knowledge about pidgins and creoles”. He was referring to Holm (1988-89), two volumes which have provided Creolists with an overview of theoretical developments in the field and of structural features specifically of the Atlantic Creoles (volume 1), as well as a comprehensive survey of Pidgins and Creoles around the world focusing on their history and social status (volume 2). The present volume, in whose compilation Holm was joined by Peter Patrick as co-editor in 1999, has grown out of Holm’s work on the survey of the syntax of the Atlantic Creoles in Holm (1988-89, volume 1), as he explains in the Introduction (p.v). The syntactic similarities between the Atlantic Creoles have been much discussed in the perennial debate about the role of substrates versus universals in the genesis of Creoles. However, the discussion has suffered from a lack of comparable and easily accessible data on a range of Creoles with different lexical source languages. A systematic survey of the syntax of different Creoles is also needed to address other important issues in Creolistics, for example, as Holm mentions in the Introduction (p. xi), the typological status of Creoles and their structural relationship to their superstrates. The present volume makes an important contribution in the area of comparative descriptive work on Creole syntax. While the coverage is not comprehensive, as in Holm’s socio-historically oriented volume (1988-89, volume 2), the varieties included are a well-chosen set which appropriately represents the range and diversity of Creoles. The cover quite ingeniously shows the scope and focus of the volume at a glance. It consists of a map of the world split between the front and back cover, with the countries in which the 18 Creoles in question are spoken highlighted. Atlantic Creoles, the focus of the book with 12 varieties, appear on the front cover. On the back cover, one can see the broad geographical spread of the six non-Atlantic Creoles included, from East Africa to the Pacific. A glance at the table of contents (p. iii) makes immediately apparent that the Creoles chosen are a diverse set not only in terms of their geographical locations but also in terms of their lexical source languages, as chapter headings give the names of the Creoles as well as their lexical affiliations. Most of the varieties have European lexifiers, but two varieties based on non-European languages are also included: Nubi (Creole Arabic) and Nagamese (restructured Assamese). Among European-lexifier Creoles, the Iberian group is quite well represented in the volume, with a total of seven varieties: three West African Portuguese-based Creoles (Angolar, Cape Verdean and Guinea-Bissau), Korlai Creole Portuguese (India), Palenquero, Papiamentu and Zamboangueño, a variety of Philippine Creole Spanish. The small group of Dutch-based Creoles is represented by Berbice Dutch and Negerhollands. The two largest groups of European-lexifier Creoles, those based on French and on Reviews 339 1 Although not set out as a systematic comparative chapter like the one on Cape Verdean and Guinea-Bissau, the chapter on Angolar, one of three Portuguese-based Creoles spoken on S-o Tomé and Príncipe, also offers considerable comparative information on S-otomense. English, are not especially prominent in this volume, with three French-based Creoles (Dominican, Haitian and Seychellois) and four English-based ones (Jamaican Patwa, Krio, Ndyuka, and Tok Pisin) included. This, however, seems justified, since these groups include some of the most well-researched varieties and have figured prominently in the large body of literature in Creolistics which has grown up in the last decades. Thus, for the Creolist reader the volume strikes a good balance between the very prominent varieties and those which are less well known and have been less often considered. Anglicists may find that for their purposes, the volume is nicely complemented by volume 2 (Morphology and Syntax) of the Handbook of Varieties of English (Kortmann and Schneider 2004), which covers most of the English-based Creoles and Pidgins listed by Holm (1988-89, volume 2), though some appear only in overviews for a country or region. The Handbook of Varieties of English overlaps with the present volume in that both have chapters on Jamaican Patwa and Tok Pisin (with the chapters on Jamaican Patwa both written by Peter Patrick), but the Handbook does not have a separate chapter on Ndyuka and, importantly, does not cover Krio, the West African Creole which seems to have played a pivotal role in the development of the different varieties of West African Pidgin English (cf. Huber 1999). The book contains separate chapters on each variety (arranged in alphabetical order) except the closely related Portuguese Creoles of Cape Verde and Guinea- Bissau, of which a comparative description is given in a single chapter. 1 Many of the authors are (near-)native speakers of the varieties in question and/ or have done extensive fieldwork on them. Several chapters originally written by doctoral students working with John Holm have been revised in collaboration with leading experts on the respective Creoles, which has resulted in some co-authored contributions. The Introduction is written by John Holm (pp. v-xi), with a shorter addition by Peter Patrick (pp. xi-xii). All chapters closely follow a common structure. An introductory section provides background information on the history and current sociolinguistic status of the Creole(s). The main part of each chapter treats the same set of grammatical features, close to 100 in total. These are organized into twenty sections with several subsections each; a common numbering system facilitates comparisons. Subsections contain a discussion of the feature in question as well as examples (with word-byword glosses as well as English translations), if the feature is attested. Summaries of the occurrence of features are given at the end of each of the twenty sections. In these, the features dealt with in the different subsections are marked as attested (“+”), rare (“R”), known to be absent (“0”), or, if there is no information, “? ”. Some - but not all - chapters also have a brief conclusion addressing such questions as the possible origins of the structures reported. The references sections will be useful for those seeking further information on specific varieties. A brief note on the author(s) is also given at the end of each chapter. Reviews 340 The selection of features in the volume, more than the selection of varieties, reflects its origin in Holm’s comparative work on the Atlantic Creoles. As he explains in the Introduction (pp. vi, xi), they are mainly features which distinguish the Atlantic Creoles from their lexical source languages and include some which have been referred to as typical Creole features, though research on their actual occurrence in Creoles worldwide has been limited. The great advantage of the design of the volume is that it makes it possible to systematically trace the occurrence of such features - e.g. relevance of the stative/ non-stative distinction to the interpretation of unmarked verbs, preverbal markers for anterior tense and various aspectual categories, adjectival verbs, and serial verbs - in a broad selection of Atlantic Creoles, as well as several non-Atlantic ones. On the other hand, the rigid structure may appear somewhat of a straightjacket for varieties which differ substantially from what Armin Schwegler and Kate Green in their contribution on Palenquero refer to as “the (old) Atlantic Creole typological model” (p. 304). For example, the only word order feature included is “Word order: questions SVO” (in section 20 “Miscellaneous”), but this seems irrelevant or misleading where a variety does not have a basic SVO word order, which is the case in Korlai Creole Portuguese (transitioning from SVO to SOV under the influence of Marathi), as well as in Nagamese (SOV) and Zamboangueño (VSO). However, this problem is mainly apparent in the summaries, as the text allows the authors enough freedom to accommodate such special features. Even in the case of the Atlantic Creoles the summaries are more helpful in some cases than in others, depending on the complexity of the area of syntax in question. One of the more straightforward cases are the different types of serial verb constructions, whose occurrence or non-occurrence can be easily captured in a summary table. A more complex case are unmarked verbs: the majority of varieties, both among the Atlantic and non-Atlantic ones, have a “+” for all four features in this section, namely “statives with non-past reference”, “statives with past reference”, “non-statives with past references” and “non-statives with non-past reference”, but this masks major differences between varieties conforming to the Atlantic model, where unmarked verbs are frequent and their default interpretation as non-past or past depends on whether they are stative or non-stative, and varieties where this does not apply, such as, among the Atlantic Creoles, Berbice Dutch. In spite of their limitations, however, the summaries are a helpful feature of the book, if they are used with the necessary degree of caution, and can provide a good starting-point for more detailed comparisons. By giving fairly comprehensive syntactic overviews rather than addressing selected features, the chapters often highlight the complexity of questions such as that of the genesis of Creoles. For example, in his conclusion to the chapter on Haitian Creole, Michel DeGraff mentions features with African origins, others which reflect French influence, and a third group of features which are less obviously related to the substrates or superstrate but show “unsurprising parallels with more general patterns of so-called gradual language change and of language creation via language acquisition” (p. 123). If individual contributions highlight such complexities, this is even more true of the volume as a whole, as it includes not only varieties like Haitian Creole, Jamaican Patwa, or Krio, which represent the Atlantic model quite well, but also other Atlantic Creoles such as, notably, Palenquero, which diverge from the model in important respects, and, besides, non-Atlantic Creoles which show a number of important Reviews 341 resemblances to the typical Atlantic ones (e.g. Tok Pisin, where Nicholas Faraclas emphasizes the importance of substrate influence on the features which happen to be shared with Atlantic Creoles) as well as others such as Nagamese or Zamboangueño, where resemblances to Atlantic Creoles are fewer. With its excellent selection of varieties, rich data and, overall, well thought-out design, this will become an important reference work in Creolistics, and Creolists owe a further debt to John Holm for having taken the initiative. Many will share the editors’ hope that it will lead to even more systematic comparisons of Creole syntax (p. xi), but the present volume already offers much information which should be exploited to the fullest. References Holm, John (1988-89). Pidgins and Creoles. 2 vols. Cambridge: CUP. Huber, Magnus (1999). Ghanaian Pidgin English in Its West African Context: A Sociohistorical and Structural Analysis. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Kortmann, Bernd and Edgar W. Schneider (eds.) (2004). A Handbook of Varieties of English. 2 vols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sebba, Mark (1997). Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Dagmar Deuber Englisches Seminar Universität Freiburg Christina Sanchez, Consociation and Dissociation. An Empirical Study of Word-Family Integration in English and German. (Language in Performance 37). Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2008. Alwin Fill When Ferdinand de Saussure established his principle of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, he admitted that some words show only “degrees of arbitrariness” and are at least “relatively motivated”. In 1946, Walter von Wartburg wrote of the different formal realizations of semantically related concepts, as in aveugle (blind) vs. cécité (blindness). In the French translation of Wartburg’s work, this phenomenon was named ‘dissociation’, a term which gained recognition and wide acceptance through Ernst Leisi’s Das heutige Englisch (first edition 1955), at least in the German speaking world. Leisi’s hypothesis was that English and French have mainly dissociated, German and Italian chiefly ‘consociated’ vocabularies. This was rarely drawn into question, but has rather become a classic statement, particularly concerning English Reviews 342 and German, a statement which has also found its way into language teaching textbooks. Examples such as town vs. urban or king vs. royal and regal have for a long time been an integral part of English vocabulary teaching in schools and university courses. Christina Sanchez, in chapter 1 of her book, meticulously traces the history and the slightly different uses of the terms ‘consociation’ and ‘dissociation’ - a task long overdue. Then (chapter 2) she clarifies her own use of the terms, as well as their relation with ‘motivation’/ ’motivatability’ (Sanchez’ preferred term), ‘transparency’ and ‘expandability’. For Sanchez, words are consociated if “integrated into a synchronic, language-immanent, morpho-semantically related word family” (pp. 37 f.). Consociation is ‘bidirectional’, which means that both analyzability and expandability can make a word consociated. Of the many models of ‘motivation’ (shown in a diagram on p. 39), ‘morpho-semantic’ motivation (i.e. morphological and semantic analyzability) is most relevant for Sanchez’ study. The term ‘transparency’ is reserved for mere morphological analyzability (e.g. of idiomatized words such as understand). A concept complementary to analyzability is ‘expandability’, which comprises both derivation and compounding: thus discipline is consociated because it can be expanded into disciplined and self-discipline. (Here Sanchez’ terminology is not entirely happy, because while admitting that theoretically every word is expandable, for her study she can accept only “words attested in the contemporary language” as the results of expandability, p. 61). Sanchez summarizes her terminology as follows (p. 69): “A word is dissociated if it is neither motivatable nor expandable. Consociation, by contrast, is the fact that a word can be either analysed into motivating constituents or expanded or both.” The main part of the book is devoted to testing Leisi’s hypothesis that “the English and the German language behave differently with respect to their words’ integration into word families” (p. 73), and more precisely to looking at whether it is true that the German vocabulary, because of its chiefly Germanic origin, is more consociated than the English with its Germanic and Romance origins. In contrast to authors writing in the 1980s and before, Sanchez has powerful computer tools at her disposal. In particular, she uses the British National Corpus (100 million words) for English, and for German the roughly equivalent Core Corpus of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (a publicly accessible and balanced core of the project Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache des 20. Jahrhunderts, DWDS). The two corpora are shown by Sanchez to be sufficiently comparable (in size, proportion of fictional texts, newspaper texts and scientific texts), although the lack of spoken data in the German corpus and the different time spans of the corpora (BNC mainly 1975-1993, DWDS 20 th century as a whole) are admitted to be drawbacks for a precise comparison. Sanchez delimits her study to the most frequent 2,500 words (in both English and German). She includes content words and form words, but excludes acronyms (USA), abbreviations (St.) and proper names. Her very frank and detailed discussion of the decisions she had to take concerning specific categories shows the many questions a computer-assisted (and any other) analysis of complex words poses: how are words derived from numbers to be treated (Dreier)? How should one deal with the words for the days of the week? Or ‘national adjectives’ (Griechisch), and anglicisms in German? Finally, she arrives at twelve types of ‘partial motivatability’. Reviews 343 Thus distribution is only partially motivated from distribute and -ion “due to differences in spelling and pronunciation”, computer from compute and -er “due to constituents that are diasystematically marked in the dictionaries used” (p. 94). It may be acceptable that “synchronic etymological competence is given priority over linguistic correctness”, but this principle somewhat disturbingly leads to the postulation of an agentive suffix -er in father and mother (and German Vater), while brother, sister and Mutter are treated as unmotivatable (p. 98). At this point, it seems justified to ask whether “the analyst’s intuition” (p. 99) should not have been supplemented by the results of informant questioning. To investigate expandability, the author uses a number of monolingual dictionaries and, in order to do justice to the possibility of neologisms, this procedure was supplemented by a search in the corpora. The internet, although the largest possible source, was rejected on various grounds (see the interesting list of reasons for this decision on p. 107). The many parameters introduced by Sanchez would have yielded a vast number of data concerning the comparison between English and German simplex and complex words. Sanchez therefore wisely restricts herself to presenting only a selection of the results. These are given separately for the English and the German corpora in the form of tables (all in all there are 123), which, because of the many “fine-grained distinctions” (p. 151), in some cases extend over several pages. In the tables, the use of the terms ‘tokens’ and ‘types’ is somewhat confusing and does not always agree with common usage. Perhaps it would have been better to make a three-fold distinction such as the following: types (e.g. the suffix -al), representatives (all the adjective types in the corpus ending in -al), and tokens (all the occurrences of these adjectives). In a final section of this chapter, the most important results for English are contrasted with those for German. It turns out that motivatability is indeed higher in German, but by a rather narrow margin: 66.52% of the German words show motivatability (including the different types of partial motivatability); 5.32% are transparent (with no semantic motivation), while only 28.16% are totally unmotivated. For English, the figures are 59.60% for motivation vs. 4.40% for transparency and 36.00% for total lack of motivation (table 105, p. 223). At first, this seems to confirm traditional views, particularly since in German it is the Germanic vocabulary (68.25%), in English the Romance one (63.32%) which provides the majority of motivated words. However, the picture is different when we take expandability into account. According to Sanchez’ figures, English leads here (by 40.12 to 32.64), so that when both directions of consociation are considered, English appears to show a marginally higher degree of consociation than German (p. 230, table 116). Sanchez then sets her results against eight hypotheses which express traditional views about motivation, etymological origin of motivated words, expandability and overall consociation. Some of these hypotheses are confirmed by her data (see previous paragraph); however, the most important one, viz. that English is an essentially dissociated language, is disproved. Particularly if both directions of word family integration are considered, “the English vocabulary does not tend towards dissociation but rather towards consociation - at least in the highest frequency ranges” (p. 237). As compared with previous quantitative studies carried out without the aid of computers, Sanchez’ results make out English to be much more similar to Reviews 344 German as far as consociation is concerned (pp. 246-251). Even alternative approaches to her data (shown in a separate section, pp. 241-245) would not change this overall picture. In the last chapter of the book, the effect of consociation and dissociation on the mental lexicon is discussed, and in particular their effect on language learning processes. After considering a number of studies on this topic, Sanchez arrives at the conclusion that “both motivatability and expandability […] may have a certain degree of influence on the acquisition, storage, comprehension and production of vocabulary items” (p. 279). In order to make use of this influence in a positive way, language learners should be made aware of analyzability, and, moreover, “morphological decomposition can be recommended as a highly effective vocabulary learning strategy” (p. 278). On the whole, Sanchez’ book, the first work using corpus linguistics on word family integration in English and German, can be recommended as a thoroughly researched and very detailed study containing many ideas for future research. If one accepts her theoretical distinctions, her data (which are accessible independently of the book) seem reliable and her results dependable. A particularly striking feature is the frankness with which problems encountered in the project are discussed. In a separate section (pp. 251-258), Sanchez points out the limitations of her study (including researcher-specific ones such as her “awareness of a subconscious bias towards English”). Putting aside the points concerning terminology criticized above, the book can be praised as a study which throws new light on English German vocabulary contrasts. Alwin Fill Department of English Graz University Notes on Editors and Contributors D IDIER M AILLAT currently works at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland where he is Associate Professor of English Linguistics. He studied in Lausanne and received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2004. His research focuses on pragmatics, and its interface with cognition and second language acquisition. In his recent publications he has looked at the influence of the media (e.g. advertising, computer-mediated communication) on language and language use in particular. C HRISTIAN M AIR was appointed, in 1990, to a Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Freiburg in Germany, where he has been involved in the compilation of several computer corpora. His research over the past two decades has focussed on the corpus-based description of modern Englishes world-wide and resulted in the publication of more than 60 scholarly articles as well as several monographs (among them Infinitival Clauses in English: A Study of Syntax in Discourse and Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation, and Standardization, both by CUP). In addition he has written two popular textbooks - Englisch für Anglisten (Stauffenburg) and Bachelor- Wissen: English Linguistics (Narr) - and revised Ernst Leisi’s classic Das heutige Englisch for the 8th edition (Winter). L YNDA M UGGLESTONE is Professor of History of English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. She has published widely on language in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Recent books include Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest (Oxford), ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol, 2nd ed. (Oxford), Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (Yale), and The Oxford History of English (Oxford). Notes on Editors and Contributors 346 Educated partly in Nigeria, H AMISH N ORBROOK obtained a degree in English from Aberdeen University before returning to Africa to teach. He then worked for over 30 years in the BBC’s English language teaching department, writing and producing radio series such as Pedagogical Pop and Spoken Science, working on television series including Follow Me, and specialising in the use of video in the classroom. In 1989 he helped start the BBC’s News in Special English, after which he worked as Editorial Coordinator of the BBC English Dictionary. In 1996 he launched the BBC’s English language teaching website. J ENNIFER P RICE is currently a PhD candidate in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Her primary interest lies in accent change over time, and she is currently exploring the changes that have occurred in the speech of Australian newsreaders over a 50-year period (focusing primarily on vowel quality but also on intonation patterns). C ATHERINE S ANGSTER is the co-ordinator of the BBC Pronunciation Unit, and one of its three pronunciation linguists. She is co-editor of the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation, and enjoys writing and teaching about language whenever opportunities arise. She studied at the Universities of Oxford, Leeds and Massachusetts, and her 2002 doctoral thesis was a sociophonetic study of interand intra-speaker variation in Liverpool English. J ÜRG R AINER S CHWYTER studied in Zurich, Philadelphia and Cambridge and is currently Professor of English Linguistics and Chairman of the English Department at the University of Lausanne. His research interests include historical linguistics, legal English past and present, general stylistics, and questions of standardisation. He is the author of Old English Legal Language (Odense) and co-editor of the Swiss Studies in English series (Francke). Administrative duties permitting, he is researching a book on the language policy and practices of the early BBC. Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de This book is a compact and easy-to-use introduction to English linguistics which is tailored to the needs of students of English at German, Austrian and Swiss universities, contains graded exercises to motivate students to carr y out independent research, and bridges the gap between linguistics and the literary and cultural-studies components of the typical BA in English Studies bachelor-wissen English Linguistics goes beyond the usual introduction in offering accompanying web resources which provide additional material and multi-media illustration. Christian Mair English Linguistics An Introduction bachelor-wissen 2008, 272 Seiten, €[D] 14,90 / Sfr 27,90 ISBN 978-3-8233-6393-4 Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG Postfach 25 60 · D-72015 Tübingen · Fax (0 7071) 97 97-11 Internet: www.narr.de · E-Mail: info@narr.de This introduction to linguistics is especially designed for students of English with a German-speaking background. It concentrates on the traditional core areas of linguistics without neglecting interdisciplinar y and applied branches. For this 4th, revised edition all chapters were updated and supplemented with historical content, and a chapter on the history of the English language was added. New: the comprehensive online-glossar y and online-exercises. „Gut verständlicher, instruktiver und teilweise auch recht detaillierter Einblick in fast alle wichtigen Gebiete und Disziplinen der Linguistik“ Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Paul Georg Meyer et al. Descriptive English Linguistics An Introduction narr studienbücher 4., überarb. und erw. Auflage 2008 XX, 375 Seiten, zahlreiche Abb. und Tab., €[D] 22,90/ SFr 41,00 ISBN 978-3-8233-6400-9