Arrival in America

Sir Walter Raleigh, who had this farm in Devon, rolled his Devonshire rs to his dying day. His speech was actually parodied by Shakespeare but he was a typical Elizabethan, renewed as a poet, statesman and explorer. The sort of man people like to gossip about. And he was the first to take English to the unchartered shores of the New World.

A settlement was established at a place they called Roanoke, after a local Indian expression.

Many of the Virginians, who lived in Jamestown and settled in colonies like Maryland and the Carolinas, would have had strong West Country tones like Walter Raleigh. Their distinctive burr became a fundamental characteristic of much American English. Here and there in isolated communities on the East Coast you ca still catch the sound of those lost voices.

Australia arrival- part 1

 The speech of London and neighbouring counties, like Essex and Middlesex was sent into a remote exile when England’s petty criminals were shipped as convicts to the penal colony of New South Wales.

Old unseaworthy ships, often dismasted, were moored in the rivers and estuaries and became floating prisons for people sentenced to transportation. They housed the petty criminals of industrial England before the long sea voyage to the penal colonies for Australia. There were many English voices on board but the predominant one was from the London area. In fact, Cockneys accounted for more than one third of the original generation of Australians.

The first penal settlements in Australia were in Sidney and near Hobart in Tasmania. The convicts new home was strange and exotic. Like the first settlers in America, they borrowed words from the native Aborigines to describe thins they had never seen before like the “coolibah” tree and the “boomerang”, “billabong” (a waterhole), and “corroboree” (a gathering), and places names like “Wogawoga”, “Woolamaloo” and “Woomera”. The convicts also adopted aborigine words like “kangaroo”, “wallaby”, “bandicoot”, “budgerigar”, “wombat”, “koala” and “dingo”. Convicts and aborigines meeting for the first time communicated in pidgin English. The Australism “walkabout” is an early example of pidgin English Down Under.

Among the convicts the first visitors to Australia noticed the dominating tones of London English, Australian linguist, Professor John Bernard: the greatest number came from London and the counties around it, so naturally there is a big influence into Australian English from London forms of speech. This is most evident in the pronunciation. You have the broad “a” sound, which probably belongs in both dialects and you do have some words and some word patterns like rhyming slang.

The first Australians invented theirs own rhyming slang “ducks and geese” for police and a “Captain cook” for a look.

Manifestos of the First Fleet showed that convicts came from every county of England, Ireland and Scotland and so many of the words Australians think are Australian are in fact county words from GB. Words like “cobber and wowser”. Wowser, meaning a killjoy, came from the rural north. Cobber, meaning a friend came from Suffolk. Larrikin a youth- from Warwichshire. Billy as in billycan from Scotland, and barracking, rowdy encouragement, and a corker a very good thing from Ireland.

The bulk of the early Europeans in Australia were convicts who brought with them the “flash language”, a highly developed jargon which the criminal classes used and the people who were not quite criminal but had been convicted, learnt on the ships. The consequence was that there was an early complaint from the magistrates that they couldn’t understand what they said in the court. Flash Jim Box, who managed to get transported 3 times in 1812 wrote a short vocabulary of the flash language ostensibly to help magistrates.

Australia arrival- part 2

With their ticket to leave, released convicts joined the pioneering free emigrants, drovers, stockmen and grazers in the blush or the outback. With them went flash talk, words like swag and swagman.

The first squatters established huge sheep farms known as stations, where words like jumbuck (sheep) and tucker (food) gave a distinctive flavour to Australian English.

George Hawker’s ancestors were army officers who settled in Bungaree, north of Adelaide. Like the majority of Australian settlers they came out as free colonists but they quickly picked up the convicts Australian vocabulary and accent.

In Australia, unlike England or America, from Perth to Sidney, there is only one kind of accent, Australia is the most classless form of English in the world, part Cockney, part Irish, part Standard English. It has a proud and egalitarian toughness.

What’s more, judge by speech alone, workers and bosses, sheep shearers and property owners are all virtually indistinguishable.

The Highlands and Islands of Scotland: Celtic culture and Gaelic Language.

Since the 18th century, Scottish Gelic has been driven almost to extinction. It survives on remote islands like Barra in the Outer Hebrides.

Outsiderc, „people without the Island“ as the locals say, often think the Highlanders sound Irish.

In fact, much of the Highland culture does come from Ireland, the kilt, the bagpipes, even the Irish surname prefix, mac.

And on Barra, the old Highland game of shinty, very like the Irish sport, hurling is taught by the local priest, Father Colin MacInness: „ When we here a Gaelic speakers speaking in English, he would more resemble Irish because the source is the same as regard the Irishmen asi t is for the Higlander/Islander, that is gaelic. And it has the same rhythm and very often similarity of construction and so on. The English spoken here is a beautiful sweet sounding, rolling, soft type of EnglishIt is a very comforting sound compared with the wiskied, fast moving accents you get from the cities and towns.

The people of Barra speak Gaelic as freely as English but their language faces extinction.It is in remote place like Barra that you can see the wounds inflected by world English on a traditional local culture.

Our spirit in the Highlands and Islands is something superbly, supremely ours. We are, like all minority group, a small freshwater loch being invaded by a huge ocean and we are authentically Celtic, Gaelic and have a distinct culture which has contributed a lot in the past and I am sure will contribute a lot of our future. 

Gaelic is their ancestral tongue but even here when the game gets exciting, they drop into English.

RP English up to second World War

Varieties of English are as old as the language itself, in fact the idea of  a correct or proper way to speak is surprisingly recent. There is such an idea of course; it is often referred to as the Queen’s English, BBC English or Oxford English or public school English.

Public school English is barely a hundred years old. It first echoed round of the playing fields of school like Eton, Harrow and Winchester. In Victorian England these boarding schools took boys from many backgrounds and gave them the same accent.

You had a kind of unnatural segregation of a subset of people of the country the very people who are going to become the most powerful. Because of the position of power they were the basis of imitation, they were eminent and eminently imitable, as it were.

The presumed superiority of this accent lingers. Research in Britain shows that people using this accent are thought more intelligent, trustworthy, even better looking. Its influence is declining but the inculcation of public school English still goes on in schools like in Winchester.

Undoubtedly, the English public schools have set and enormous influence on the dissemination of one variety of English Received Standard, BBC English... but its only spoken by one in 50 people in this country, something of that sort.

The inventions of the wireless turned public school English into BBC English. The radio did for the spoken language what printing had done for the written. Listeners could hear for the first time a definitive English speech, the voice of information, culture and the west end stage in accents that now seems as outdated as the clothes.

World war 2 was the finest hour for BBC English, the voice of Britain resounding with authority and defiance.

Shakespeare 

 
Queen Elizabeth the 1st and her successor, James, reigned for about 70 years during that time the English Language reached heights that have inspired u sever since and even contemporaries marvelled at. For the English that was a time of national triumph. They were as proud of their words as they were of defying the Pope or defeating the Spanish Armada.
 Sir Phillip Sydney, the poet and soldier, spoke for his countrymen when he wrote: „ for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceit of the mind English hath it equally with any other tongue in the world.“ To describe this “brave new world“of discovery and invention. The self – confident English vernacular borrowed a staggering total of 12.000 new words. Men of letters like Sir Thomas More looked back to classical models for hundreds of Latin words like active, communicate, education. Men of science, like Sir Francis Bacon, took their inspiration from the Greek and introduced terms like thermometer, pneumonia, skeleton, encyclopaedia.
And there was one writer whose work lies at the heart of the Elizabethan miracle, whom Johnson singled out for what he called his mastery of the diction of common life, or, as we would put it, everyday speech and, of course, that was William Shakespeare. There are many legends but almost nothing certain is known about the greatest writer in our story.
He was born here in Stratford on Avon, deep in the English countryside. He was educated at the local grammar school. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway, who lived here, and they had two children. In his twenties he left all this behind and appeared as an actor in London where he wrote poems and 37 plays. In late middle age he returned to Stratford as a a successful gentleman of means and built a large house. Only his knot garden remains.  Today Stratford is a Mecca for Shakespeare lovers, actors and audience alike, throughout the world.
Penny Downey has come from Australia to play Titania in a Royal Shakespeare company interpretation of A Midsummer Nights Dream.
As well as such high-flown imagery, Shakespeare’s poetry, rich with the vocabulary of his native Warwickshire, reflects his country origins, terms like ballow meaning a cudgel, honey-stalks for red clover, mobled, a local word for muffled, and gleek, meaning to sing.
Shakespeare’s language ranges from the russet yeas and nays of fools and rustics like Bottom the weaver, here to the „taffeta phrases, silken terms precise“ of kings and fairies.
His plays have every kind of spoken English; pidgin with Caloban, philosophical with Hamlet, bawdy with Falstaff, heroic with Henry V, and pastoral-lyrical with Titania. For many years, one of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s leading directors was John Barton.  
"My obsession with Shakespeare has to do with so many elements and I hate in a way to talk about it because it’s whole of those elements that I love but it’s partly, obviously, his sense of character, it’s partly his sense of dramatic situation and very much his story . But perhaps in the end, above all, and what first drew to him is his language.”
Sir Peter Hall, formerly with the Royal Shakespeare Company, now directs the National Theatre. Shakespeare is the most comprehensive genius in terms of sensibility and understanding of humanity and the greatest writer, he had the greatest menas of expressing that breadth of anyone I have ever encountered. It needs saying, it needs saying regularly but it’s true.  
It is impossible to quantify the relationship between the development of the language and a writer of genius like Shakespeare.
But this, the First Folio of his plays, the suorce for scores of Shakespearian wods and phrases, had a direct influence on every one of us who speaks English today.
He had an inexhaustible passion for words. He has the largest vocabulary of any writer of English, approximately 34,000 words, which is about double what an educated person uses today in their lifetime.
In one famous passage, Shakespeare uses just two words from his prodigioud vocabulary with arresting boldness. The murderer, Macbeth, laments that the blood on his hands would stain even the ocean ..... As well as multitudinous and incarnadinethe long list of new words and uses that gained currency from the folio include: accomodation, premeditated, assassination, submerged and obscene.  
In Loves Labours Lost he could almost have been writing his own epitaph when he describes Don Armado as a man of „fire-new words“.
I think it’s no accident that Shakespeare spelt his own name by a whole variety of ways, I mean spelling was mater of taste. As part of that freedom I think we should see the fact that you can invent words. Shakespeare invented more words than anybody who’s ever lived. And no-one apparently ever commented on that ah the time. It just was a fact. So, there was an enormous sense of freedom, creative freedom.
The actors who spoke his lines also found him playing with the grammar of English. Nouns could become verbs. In Measure for Measure he writes that “ Lord Angelo dukes it well in his absence“ For Hamlet, the student prince, he writes “out-herods Herod“. In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses say. “he pageants us“  But, above all, Shakespeare gave the London audiences, who flocked to his plays at the Globe, a wealth of quotable quotes. One play alone is a thesaurus of phrases that have become almost clichés. –> To the manner born ; The time is out of join; More mater with less art...

The Bible
 

This golden age also saw a publication that has probably had an even greater influence than Shakespeare’s First Folio on the language of ordinary people. The translation of the bible into English of the Authorized Version. Here at last was the word of God, expressed in terms that everyone could understand.

“Bring hither the fatter calf and kill it”. 

“Lord, now let us thou, thy servant depart in peace, according to thy world”.

“Physician, heal thy self”. 

“For many are called but few are chosen”.

“All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword”. 

Where Shakespeare drew on his teeming vocabulary of 34,000 words, the new translation achieved the majestic of its prose with barely 8,000.

Sir John Gielgud, actor. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

Its an interesting reflection on the state of the language that the poetry from the Authorized Version came not from a single writer but from a committee, some of whom worked here, at the University of Cambridge. One of the translators was a certain John Bois, a fellow of St. Johns College here in Cambridge. A brilliant scholar, he and 5 colleagues, spent most of the year, 1610 refining and revising the final draft. Their brief, to make the King James’ Bible not only read well in English but sound well, a quality for which it is revered to this day. Lets compare a passage in Henry VIII’s Great Bible with one in the King James’ Version. The Great Bible in chapter 12 of Ecclesiastes, the preacher says: Or ever the sliver lace be take away, or the gold band be broke, or the pot be broke at the well and wheel upon the cistern, then shall the dust be turned again unto earth from whence it came and the spirit shall return unto God which gave it. All is but vanity saith the preacher, all is but plain vanity. And the King James makes that into: Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the gold bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern: Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. Vanity of Vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity. And I think you can see from that comparison that not only is the King James’ Version clearer, but a good deal more poetic. 

In the beginning was the word, and that word was with God and the word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him: and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life: and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness: and the darkness comprehend it not.

Contemporary with the King James’ Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, expresses the rites of passage in the English Church, from the cradle to the grave:  “renounce the devil and all his works”,  “give us this day our daily bread”,  “with this ring I thee wed”,  earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes”