Re: Big Brother BrE
- From: "Don Phillipson" <e925@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:33:04 -0400
"MC" <copespaz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:copespaz-6FCAD9.19165414062009@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'm a British expat who has lived in Canada since 1972.
Out of idle curiosity I started watching Big Brother UK and have become
hooked, not least because of the way the inmates speak BrE, innit.
I really don't believe anyone spoke BrE like this when I lived there. Of
course there were buzzwords and catchphrases, but this brand of
yoofspeak patois is like a whole different language, a kind of pidgin
English.
Consider the changes . . .
Up to the 1960s the main influences on language were:
1. More than a dozen ancient local accents and dialects
(e.g. London, West Country, Yorkshire, Scotland, etc.)
Most children grew up within a single language milieu:
but all boys encountered others when conscripted at
18 for 2 years military service.
2. BBC Radio which was deliberately oriented towards
RSP or "BBC English," maintained by a special committe
of linguistic arbiters.
2b. "Standard English" was reinforced by most schools,
which taught standard grammar (but rarely opposed
dominant local accents in speech.)
3. Hollywood films offered several varieties of American
English, all recognizably foreign.
Since the 1980s the norms of #2 have changed. The
BBC is no longer governed by "BBC English" and other
broadcasters offer a wider range of accent and perhaps
grammar. RSP is widely deplored by some people as
ipso facto either conservative or snobbish. Simultaneously
schools have changed their emphases on language,
notably teaching less grammar than formerly.
Britain has changed demographically by immigration
and the (globalized) mass media present a much larger
range of Englishes, e.g. including American "Black English,"
Indian, Jamaican and so on. Conscription has ended, so
that 18-year-olds are no longer relocated alone into a large
unfamiliar community that speaks in a variety of unfamiliar
regional accents.
My conjecture is that the linguistic milieu of Young England
has thus changed from multicoloured (kaleidoscopic)
towards the blended. As I recall the 1950s, the regional
accents heard during military service and the Hollywood
voices from the screen and the plummy BBC accent
from the radio did not blend and did not cause young
airmen from London, Scotland or Devon to speak much
differently from the way their parents spoke.
There are today just as many different linguistic
influences, probably more, and the walls separating
the familiar from the foreign have cracked (and in some
respects been deliberately dismantled, cf. the abolition
of grammar schools.) This means that the young
Briton no longer categorizes the Edward Heath/Margaret
Thatcher voices as "foreign" in social class, or the
voices of Hollywood entertainers as geographically
foreign. They sort of blend -- in a way that did not
happen in National Service training camps of the 1960s.
It seems like mixing paints. We used to live in a Seurat
world, of many differing brilliant spots, that we distinguished
up close however they appeared to blend when we stood
back: but if we pour all the paints into a single pot and stir, the
single resulting colour is monochrome and monotonous.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
.
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