English in Great Britain since 1700

1. Explain the rise of Standard English pronunciation. What was its linguistic base and the vehicle of its introduction? What were the socio-historical circumstances?

- emerged in the mid-nineteenth century from the language of the boys at the elite private boarding schools of England

- the accent connected with the power and prestige of the speakers = the upper-class people => therefore Standart English pronunciation associated with competence and status

- thanks to its development and prominent position, it is often presented as reference accent = something which is associated with people from a fairly wide region and with people of high social class, seemingly accentless, = Received Pronunciation, also known as BBC English (as it was used in the radio-broadcasting from its beginnings in the 1920s)

- today modified and graudally displaced by Estuary English – London regional RP, a koineized form of English developing in London and its vicinity (the Thames Estuary and the lower Thames valley – e.g. Essex, northern Kent) - characterized by a mixture of features drawn from middle-class and working-class speech, spreading to other part of the Great Britain as well

2. Comment on the history of English spelling reforms. What and how were they trying to accomplish. What were their results

- Spelling conventions of ModE different from EModE
- The accepted changes were the following:
            - Lower case letters for all but proper nouns, adjectives and verbs (Britain, Welsh, Anglicize)
            - The “long” <ɾ> as in “ɾpeech” disappeared
            - The <k> at the ends of words like Teutonick disappeared too
- Variety of movements which wanted to change English ortography:
            - wanted the one-to-one relationship between phoneme and letters in the alphabet
            - alphabetic principle was more or less maintained (except for Pitman shorthand and Lodwick's Universal Alphabet)
- "New Spelling" by Simplified Spelling Society of Great Britain:
            - <k>  for /k/ sounds in all instances --> kanot, konsekraet, detrakt
            - /ð/ is spelled as <dh> as in dhis 
            - final <e> is dropped in words such as sens
- StE spelling gives preference to etymological spellings --> causes inter-linguistic intelligibility
- Scots spelling is similar to StE spelling but there are some Scottish conventions such as <ui> for fronted /(j)y/

3. What are the foundations of English codification? Contrast this with the situation of a different language.

• Why? Because of a desire to fix the language in its ideal state
• In 17th and 18th century, standard English was a part of nationalism which, with increasing levels of education, got into actual use
• Codification was largely a prescriptivist project to "purify the language" affecting areas of pronunciation, grammar, spelling and vocabulary
• It could be viewed as the elite imposing their language (and manners, which was believed to be connected) on others
• The expectation of everyone abiding to the standard caused two problems: the need to extend English to users of other languages (Welsh) and the misapprehension that standard English correlates with intelligence and, which was partially true, with higher education
• The prescribing of norm becomes more relevant as the language becomes more complex and has more aspirants to use its full potential
• Desire to know the standard created a tradition of books of grammar and orthoepy and dictionaries, such as Samuel Johnson's "A Dictionary of English Language"
• The dictionary used analogy and experience from renowned authors' work, nor as old as Chaucer, nor too recent
• The main concerns in forming the standard were for example the new terms in language due to the influence of colonies and immigrants, class, gender, ethnicity, age and region all becoming important factors to language which had to be contained, grammaticalization of certain areas
• At first there was a desire to make an academy (like it was the case of French) to take care of the language, but in the end the English relied on works of individual grammarians setting the standards
• That made the language at first open to regionalisms because of bias but that was gone by the end of 17th century