the next village than the language of Paris. From one village and town to the next there is a chain or continuum.
Dialect chains are very common across the whole of Europe. One chain links all the dialects of German, Dutch and Flemish from Switzerland through Austria and Germany, to the Netherlands and Belgium, and there is another which links dialects of Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French and Italian. A Scandinavian chain links dialects of Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, so that Swedes and Norwegians in adjacent areas can communicate more easily than fellow-Swedes from southern and northern Sweden. The same kind of dialect chains are found throughout India and China. They illustrate very clearly the arbitrariness of the distinction between ‘language’ and ‘dialect’.
It is easy to see that if we try to defi ne what counts as German vs Dutch or Swedish vs Norwegian or Italian vs French using only linguistic features, the task will be fraught with problems. Where should we draw the boundaries between one dialect and the next, or one language and the next? The linguistic features overlap, and usage in one area merges into the next. Intelligibility is no help either. Most Norwegians claim they can understand Swedish, for instance, although two distinct languages are involved, while Chinese who speak only Cantonese cannot understand those who speak Mandarin, despite the fact that both are described as dialects of the Chinese language.
Example 6
Ming is an elderly woman who lives with her son in a rural village near the town of Yingde in Guangdong Province in southern China. The family grows vegetables for the local market. Ming speaks only her provincial dialect of Chinese, Cantonese. Last summer, Gong, an offi cial from Beijing in the north, visited her village to check on the level of rice and ginger production. Gong also spoke Chinese, but his dialect was Mandarin or putonghua . Ming could not understand a single word Gong said.
Languages are not purely linguistic entities. They serve social functions. In order to defi ne a language, it is important to look to its social and political functions, as well as its linguistic features. So a language can be thought of as a collection of dialects that are usually linguist- ically similar, used by different social groups who choose to say that they are speakers of one language which functions to unite and represent them to other groups. This defi nition is a sociolinguistic rather than a linguistic one: it includes all the linguistically very different Chinese dialects, which the Chinese defi ne as one language, while separating the languages of Scandinavia which are linguistically very similar, but politically quite distinct varieties.
Exercise 5
(a) Define the difference between a regional accent and a regional dialect.
(b) What do you think is the difference between a regional and a social dialect?
Answers at end of chapter
Social variation RP: a social accent
Example 7
Diana : Have you heard – Jonathan’s engaged to that northern girl – from Cumbria!
Reg : She may be northern but I assure you she is very acceptable. Her father is a lord, and a rich one at that! She has had the best education money can buy. Those traces of northern accent are fashionable these days my dear!
Figure 6.2 Social and regional accent variation
Source : From Peter Trudgill (1983) Sociolinguistics . Penguin: London. Page 42. Copyright © Peter Trudgill, 1974, 1983, 1995, 2000. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
In earlier centuries, you could tell where an English lord or lady came from by their regional form of English. But by the early twentieth century, a person who spoke with a regional accent in England was most unlikely to belong to the upper class. Upper-class people had an upper-class education, and that generally meant a public (i.e. private!) school where they learned to speak RP. RP stands not for ‘Real Posh’ (as suggested to me by a young friend), but rather for Received Pronunciation – the accent of the best educated and most prestigious members of English society. It is claimed that the label derives from the accent which was ‘received’ at the royal court, and it is sometimes identifi ed with ‘the Queen’s English’, although the accent used by Queen Elizabeth II, as portrayed so brilliantly by Helen Mirren in the movie The Queen , is a rather old-fashioned variety of RP.
RP was promoted by the BBC for decades. It is essentially a social accent not a regional one. Indeed, it conceals a speaker’s regional origins. This is nicely illustrated in fi gure 6.2 , the accent triangle.
As the triangle suggests, most linguistic variation will be found at the lowest socio- economic level where regional differences abound. Further up the social ladder the amount of observable variation reduces till one reaches the pinnacle of RP – an accent used by less than 5 per cent of the British population. So a linguist travelling round Britain may collect over a dozen different pronunciations of the word grass from the working-class people she meets in different regions. She will hear very much less variation from the lower-middle-class
and middle-class people. And, at least until recently, the upper classes would pronounce the word as [gra:s] wherever they came from in England. Things are changing, however, as the exchange in example 7 suggests.
Figure 6.2 captured the distribution of accents in England until recently. Today a more accurate diagram might have a somewhat fl atter top, suggesting accents other than RP can be heard amongst those who belong to the highest social class (see fi gure 6.3 on p. 141 ). In other speech communities, it is certainly possible to hear more than just one accent associated with the highest social group. Most well-educated Scots, Irish and Welsh speakers do not use RP, and there is more than one socially prestigious accent in these countries. And in ex-colonies of Britain such as Australia and Canada, other accents have displaced RP from its former position as the most admired accent of English. In fact, RP now tends to be perceived by many people as somewhat affected (or ‘real posh’!).
This kind of negative reaction to RP has also been reported in Britain, especially among young Londoners, many of whom use an accent popularly labeled ‘Estuary English’ when it fi rst attracted attention in the 1990s, because it is claimed to have developed along the Thames Estuary. Some have labelled it the ‘new RP’. In fact, like previous London-based linguistic innovations, features of this modern urban dialect are rapidly spreading both regionally and socially and it is a good illustration of the process of levelling . Levelling involves the reduction of dialect and/or accent variation, and the rapid spread of so-called ‘Estuary English’ has certainly reduced regional variation in a large area of the south of England. It shares many linguistic features with Cockney, another variety which delineates both a region and a social group, but speakers of ‘Estuary English’ don’t usually drop their aitches or use [f] at the begin- ning of the word ‘think’.
Social dialects
The stereotypical ‘dialect’ speaker is an elderly rural person who is all but unintelligible to modern city dwellers. But the term dialect has a wider meaning than this stereotype suggests.
Dialects are linguistic varieties which are distinguishable by their vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation; the speech of people from different social, as well as regional, groups may differ in these ways. Just as RP is a social accent, so standard English is a social dialect. It is the dialect used by well-educated English speakers throughout the world. It is the variety used for national news broadcasts and in print, and it is the variety generally taught in English-medium schools.