British English

Fun Facts About English #92 – English Rhoticity

01/28/2021 by admin

Rhoticity in English is the pronunciation of the rhotic consonant /r/ by speakers of certain varieties of English. For example, in isolation, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, whereas a non-rhotic speaker “drops” the /r/ sound, pronouncing them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/.

English dialects that use a hard /r/ include South West England, Scotland, Ireland, and most of the United States and Canada. Non-rhotic dialects are found in England, Wales, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In the U.S., non-rhotic varieties depend on an array of factors such as region, age, social class, ethnicity, or the degree of formality when speaking.

In England, the loss of the hard /r/ began sporadically during the mid-15th century. By the mid-18th century, though /r/ was still pronounced in most environments, it was frequently dropped. By the early 19th century, the southern British standard was fully transformed into a non-rhotic variety. Colonization of countries like Australia and South Africa happened after England had become more fully non-rhotic.

In the British Council clip below, Shakespearean actor, Ben Crystal, presents two readings from the opening monologue of Romeo and Juliet – one in the accent of contemporary British English (Received Pronunciation), and the other in a simulated accent of Shakespeare’s day; the same accent that began arriving on North American shores in the early 1600s. Take special note of the hard /r/ in the latter. The comparisons begin around 1:40 in the six-minute clip.

During America’s early history as a nation, the loss of rhotic /r/ in British English influenced eastern and southern American port cities that still held close connections to England after the Revolutionary War. This caused America’s more established, upper-class pronunciation to become non-rhotic while the westward-expanding U.S. remained rhotic. Non-rhotic varieties are most apparent in the Boston, Rhode Island, and New York accents, as well as the southern accents of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Louisiana.

American non-rhotic varieties shouldn’t be mistaken for an accent known as the Trans-Atlantic or Mid-Atlantic accent; a largely cultivated manner of speaking most noticeable in Hollywood films during the 1930s and 40s. When one listens to the speech patterns of America’s old East Coast moneyed class – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, William F. Buckley, and Katharine Hepburn – it doesn’t sound like a typical American accent, but it’s not really British either. That’s because it’s fake. The “accent” or “diction” was taught in elite boarding schools and acting studios to affect a mix of American and non-rhotic British pronunciation. The result was a posh-sounding American accent no one naturally used unless “educated.”

After the Civil War, centers of wealth and political power shifted with fewer cultural connections to the old colonial and British elites. This included a cultural movement toward rhotic speech that accelerated after WWII. In the world of entertainment, the Trans-Atlantic accent fell out of popularity and film actors like Katharine Hepburn mysteriously lost their upper-class accents mid-career. This was also reflected in the national standard of radio and television where popular TV hosts like Johnny Carson hailed from the Midwest. In the eastern United States, the accent trend is reversing where rhoticism has re-asserted itself resulting in the cultural loss of distinctive accents familiar to many older Americans.

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in learning why Americans say /zee/ instead of /zed/ for the letter Z, how rebracketing changes a word’s pronunciation, or the history of Johnson’s Dictionary published in 1755.

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Fun Facts About English #86 – The English Language Academy

12/19/2020 by admin

Kinney Brothers Publishing English regulators language academies

To the chagrin of some and the pleasure of many, English is lacking in any authority to direct its ever-expanding use and lexicon. L’Académie Française, based in Paris, is in charge of overseeing the French language. For Spanish, there is the Real Academia Española. German has the Rat für Deutsche Rechtschreibung. There has never been an equivalent academy for the English language anywhere or at any time.

Historically, there have been a number of outspoken and clearly distressed men of letters who believed that English, with all its unruliness, desperately needed a formal academy.

In the mid-17th century, John Dryden, a poet laureate of England, chaired a committee to create such an academy. Unfortunately, as Dryden was attempting to organize, the Great Plague struck London. A year later, the Great Fire of London razed central parts of the city. These events resulted in an equally great exodus from the capital and any hope for an academy was lost.

In the 18th century, Jonathan Swift, best known for his prose satire, Gulliver’s Travels, lobbied the crown for an academy. He stated, “Our Language is extremely imperfect… its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions (and) in many Instances it offends against every Part of Grammar.” Queen Anne supported the idea but passed away before any formal decisions could be made.

In the U.S., a bill for the incorporation of a national language academy was introduced in congress in 1806 but was unsuccessful. During Quincy Adams’ presidency two decades later, an American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres was proposed and then abandoned after receiving little political or public support.

So… whatcha do?

Language references like the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and style guides such as the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage are what many people consider to be at least semi-authoritative. Dictionaries are generally descriptive in that they reflect the organic usage and evolution of English but don’t set out to dictate how the language is to be used. Style guides, on the other hand, are prescriptive; an approach that recommends how the language should be used when composing documents.

Style Guides

A style guide establishes standard style requirements to improve communication by ensuring consistency within a single document and across multiple documents. A style guide may set out standards in areas such as punctuation, capitalization, citing sources, formatting of numbers and dates, and table appearance. A guide may outline recommendations in language composition, visual composition, orthography, and typography. For academic and technical documents, users often reference guides for best practices in ethics such as authorship, research ethics, and disclosure. In pedagogy, users look for guidance in exposition and clarity, or compliance, both technical and regulatory. Of course, all this will depend on the register of the user.

Register, in a general sense, refers to the language used by a group of people who share similar work, research, or interests, and the degree of formality of the language used when creating documents. Document requirements, though they often overlap, will differ by necessity between different groups, such as doctors, lawyers, journalists, and scholars.

English language style guides Kinney Brothers Publishing

For British English, style guides such as H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage and Sir Ernest Gower’s Plain Words: A Guide to the Use of English are very influential. The Modern Humanities Research Association Style Guide (MHRA) is mainly for writing theses. Judith Butcher’s The Copyeditor’s Handbook is a reference guide for editors and those involved in preparing typescripts and illustrations for printing and publication.

In the U.S., The Associated Press (AP) Stylebook contains commonly accepted journalistic standards most U.S. newspapers, magazines, and broadcast writers use as their go-to style guide. The Chicago Manual of Style is used by writers, editors, and publishers in fiction and nonfiction and often put to use in the arts and humanities for academic papers. The Modern Language Association’s MLA Handbook is mostly suited to the academic world. The Elements of Style is a writer’s companion and considered to be the grandfather of all style guides.

For those looking for humorous and unapologetically opinionated voices on the English language, there are many authors more than willing to assert their preferences, bemoan the inadequacies of our current authorities, and thoroughly berate speakers of the language. They include the Dictionary of Disagreeable English: A Curmudgeon’s Compendium of Excruciatingly Correct Grammar, The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations: The Complete Opinionated Guide for the Careful Speaker, and Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (a popular book that was excoriated for its grammatical errors when first published).

For a fascinating look at the gargantuan effort of documenting a language, you may enjoy The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Defining the World: The Extraordinary Story of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary.

If you enjoyed this post, you may also be interested in reading why Pikes Peak is spelled without an apostrophe by law! Check out the reason the U.S. doesn’t have an official language or how English became the official language of the sea and air!

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Craft activities can be excellent hands-on learning tools! Whether you teach very young newcomers or secondary ESL students, Donald’s English Classroom has a variety of activities that your students are sure to enjoy. Check out the Seasons Tree Stand or House Activity Set for your younger students. For students learning community places, you’ll love using the Community Places Activity Set that includes game boards and flashcards. For older students, building Wall Maps are excellent activities to bring students together.

Fun Facts About English #79 – The Letter Z

10/24/2020 by admin

In most English-speaking countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Zambia, and Australia, the name of the letter Z is zed, pronounced /zɛd/. Zed takes its name via French and Latin from the Greek equivalent, zeta. In American English, its name is zee /ziː/. Zee is thought to have originated from a late 17th-century British dialect and influenced by the bee, cee, dee, ee pattern of much of the alphabet.

This British dialectical form was likely what the English Puritan minister and author, Thomas Lye [Leigh, Lee], was drawing from when he published his New Spelling Book in England in 1677; the full title of which is:

A New Spelling Book, Or, Reading and Spelling English Made Easie: Wherein All the Words of Our English Bible are Set Down in an Alphabetical Order and Divided Into Their Distinct Syllabls

At the time of its publishing, Britain was home to a variety of dialectical pronunciations of the letter Z that included zed, zod, zad, zard, ezod, izzard, and uzzard. Samuel Johnson, in his highly influential Dictionary of the English Language published in London in 1755, referenced izzard as the name of the letter. In King Lear, 150 years earlier, Shakespeare had used zed.

Beginning in the 1600s, zee and other British pronunciations made the voyage across the Atlantic to colonial America. By 1883, British historian, Edward Augustus Freeman, noted that zee was mainly found in (formerly Puritan) New England, while zed was the accepted form in the American South. Areas such as Philadelphia vacillated between the two. He also noted that not a few Americans still used izzard, a fact that tickled his British funny bone.

Nonetheless, by the 19th century, zee became firmly established in the U.S. with several important developments. New England born, Noah Webster, published his own American Spelling Book in 1794 with the letter “ze.” In 1828, Webster also published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language asserting the pronunciation of the letter Z as “zee.” Finally, “The Alphabet Song,” copyrighted in 1835 and published by Boston-based music publisher, Charles Bradlee, rhymed Z with “me.”

FYI: The tune of “The Alphabet Song” is based on the 18th-century French song “Ah, vous dirai-je, maman” and popularized by Mozart. The melody is also used in other children’s songs such as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.”

It’s worth noting that, like zee, Webster also defined the standards of American spelling for words like theater for theatre and honor for honour,” spellings that were not invented by Webster himself. These were spelling variants in use in the English language, including in Britain. Webster simply chose to institute one variation as a standard.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Britain was undergoing a similar change, namely a push-back against izzard and its variants. Sticking with the etymological legacy of its French origins (zéde), zed became enshrined as the proper name of the letter in British English.

Finally, it’s important to remember, unlike most major languages in the world, English has never had a regulatory body that governed its use – anywhere nor at any time. As for slinging tired arrows at the U.S. for its “unilateral” divergence from British English, let’s reflect on the idea that even today, in a country the size of Louisiana, England has over 40 dialects (compared to 24 in the whole U.S.) and a long legacy of myriad spelling and pronunciation variations. Over several centuries and 4000 miles apart, the notion of a culturally freeze-dried, correct language and orthography simply didn’t exist, on either side of the pond.

You might also be interested to learn why North Americans pronounce R differently than the British, why rooster is the preferred euphemism in American English, or why English has no language academy!

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Fun Facts About English #17 – Average Vocabulary Size

08/10/2019 by admin

Most experts believe that the English language has about one million words. Difficult to determine and not easy to agree on, the problem rests in defining what represents a discrete “word.” It’s important to remember that this number includes different forms of the same word, or lemmas, e.g., run, running, ran, plus archaic words not commonly used in modern English. The Oxford English Dictionary lists a mere 171,476 words that are in current use.

Besides word counting, for individuals there’s a distinction between receptive knowledge — referring to our passive vocabulary, and productive or active knowledge — words we use when speaking and writing. As a rule of thumb, our receptive vocabulary is at least twice the size of our productive vocabulary.

Studies show that the average native English speaker knows about 20,000 words with a university-educated person knowing around 40,000 words. When speaking and writing (emails, letters, notes, etc.) this goes down to about 5,000 very common words that are used repeatedly.

Building vocabulary skills is a priority for many native speakers and non-native learners of English alike. The benefits include social and professional mobility as well as cognitive improvement. If you teach English as a foreign language, or you’re looking to expand your horizons abroad, check out the article, How to Teach English to Kids, from IELTS Podcast, a company dedicated to helping ESL students improve their reading, writing, and speaking skills.

Try this Ghent University (Belgium) online to test to estimate your English vocabulary size. Good luck! If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in the history of American spelling bees, or how American and British English diverged over the centuries!

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Stories for Young Readers is a graded textbook series designed to extend students’ skills and interest in developing their ability to communicate in English. To learn more, visit Kinney Brothers Publishing or check out all the textbook downloads from Donald’s English Classroom.