Pronouncements

Almost all of us would have had occasion to smile when somebody else mispronounces some English word or name. Similarly, most of us would have been at the receiving end at least once. The fictional Prof.Higgins claimed to be able to pinpoint – on the basis of your accent - which part of London you belonged to within a street or two. He also lamented the fact that the English a) don’t care about pronunciation unlike the French, and b) use it to reinforce social class. The French certainly do care more – but are hardly exempt from regional and class variations. Of course, it helps that French is more logical in its pronunciation patterns than the eccentric English language.

Additionally, English is spoken by a much larger number of people than is French, because the former had more colonies. Naturally, this leads to increased diversity. This point was driven home to me when I first visited the US as a child. I remember I had an argument in class with the ‘English’ teacher: I was adamant that that the only correct pronunciation was the English one. She countered that a huge number of Americans spoke with a distinctive accent – and this accent would, thus, have to be regarded as equally valid. My argument was in line with Prof.Higgins who said that ‘there are places where English completely disappears: In America they haven’t used it for years!” Higgins also deplored – within England – ‘the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue’. He still has a point if the speech is inarticulate and unclear, since that detracts from communication. But the problem with that argument is that your understanding is partly shaped by your preconceived expectations. Somebody who speaks differently is automatically more difficult to understand – but that cuts both ways, as my American English teacher would have argued.

Today, older if no wiser, I would not be able to so clearly state a preference for the English accent as the only ‘true’ or ‘original’ one. My Fair Lady made the existence of alternatives quite clear – even if Prof.Higgins plumps for the clarity of an upper-class British accent. Much later, I heard the charming duet sung by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald: “You say pot-a-to and I say pot-ah-to...” This song implies that two ways exist to say each word, and that a process of negotiation may result to decide which one ‘wins’. Or one could hope for peaceful co-existence... And we haven’t even discussed the shades of various Indian, Pakistani, Australian, Canadian, South African etc accents – and the combinations thereof e.g. the Bihari-American accent to name just one interesting variant. And the Oxford dictionary even prescribes the way a French word should be pronounced by an English speaker...

Restricting ourselves to the so-called English accent, the question remains: is there such a thing as ‘correct’ pronunciation? There must be some common factor: we can’t have everybody saying each word differently, since communication would be impossible. (Although they do: e.g. in Yorkshire and Cornwall accents are distinctly different). Most individuals who have a working knowledge of English have a core vocabulary of around a thousand words, regardless of whether they are non-English speakers or just highly nonverbal, reticent persons. Then there is the age factor: a study showed that the average 40-year old has a vocabulary of around three times that of the average 20-year old. Does that mean that we should revere elders in our society for their mastery of language, if for no other reason? English has also borrowed words from many countries - thanks to its colonial past - many of which are no longer used.

Undoubtedly there are also fashions: words come and go, enjoying a brief currency. Today’s latest invention is tomorrow’s cliché, and is relegated to ancient history the next day. Who cares today about the correct way to say: ‘rattan’? Other than a small minority of people that sit in rattan chairs or sell them to others. Who shall speak long-dead words, their corpses putrefying in unopened dictionaries?

Then there are many words that are specialized jargon that few lay people will – with luck - ever come in touch with e.g. medical or scientific terminology. These words draw upon linguistic heritages from the Greeks and the Romans, like twin backbones, that are no longer required for the large majority of today’s school children.

In the 1950’s, C.P.Snow propounded his Two Cultures theory, in which he argued that scientists/engineers and artists/writers live in two exclusive worlds and don’t talk to each other. I recall that my English teacher in high school – whose name happened to be Mr.Englander – once complained that he had just picked up a science journal and tried to read it: it was definitely in English, but he could not grasp the meaning of the text! Since then, the fragmentation of culture has, if at all, accelerated. Even within science and technology there are many tribes who are happy to be unaware of each other’s existence, let alone thinking. We no longer have a Renaissance Man (or Woman) who can straddle all the fields of knowledge. Instead, we have chieftains who lord it over their respective fiefdoms. And shall these pigmies rule our thoughts?

The substantive point is that there are many words – in fact, the large majority of the million-odd English words - that are not in common use, and are literally unheard-of outside the halls of academe. (A very well-educated adult may know at most 50,000 words). Only a minuscule minority of the population would ever speak these words in a lifetime without stumbling – as though they were foreign exotica. The province of professors, indeed! So, are we to rely upon a few professors in Oxbridge and/or Harvard/Yale to arbitrate the correct pronunciation of the vast majority of words? Or the engineers and scientists who decide, in their own idiosyncratic ways, to name things the way they please?

The lingo of the stockbroker is very different from that of the deep sea driller or the cowboy. The advantage of all this fragmentation, however, is that the people who create new words are everywhere, in every profession, at every social ‘level’. We no longer completely depend upon a priesthood of knowledge creators residing in a handful of universities. Today the whole world is interconnected by the Internet, and English spoken in a myriad of ways. We still manage to communicate with each other. Ideas from one language are adopted by another: in this respect English continues to be the most prolific, if not avaricious, creator and adopter of words and even ideas. However, this dominant position may soon be challenged with the further broadening of the Internet to include widely-spoken languages such as Chinese and Hindi.

The question of comprehension might be more serious than is apparent. What prevented American and English from becoming two different languages? If the Americans and the British had stopped talking to each other and gone their separate ways, English might well have fissioned in two. Partly this did not happen because the language is written and because common historical factors prevailed over fissiparous tendencies. Increasing travel and communication also helped to maintain the status quo. An American who goes to live in the U.K. will suffer mild cultural shock – like having to call an elevator a lift – but nothing like what happens if (s)he were to go to France!

The Internet (via Google) has become the fact-checker of first resort, settling most arguments that would have (in bygone days) meandered on forever. However, even the All-Knowing Internet can only reflect the existing divides in societies. This also extends to matters of controversial pronunciation. One might have thought that homogenized, multinational, mass media would have smoothed out all these linguistic wrinkles, but even the hallowed BBC has succumbed to plurality: it showcases a variety of British accents, other than the fabled (if endangered) Oxbridge accent. People stubbornly hang on to their accents, their imagined (if not imaginary) identity markers, regardless of all the Internet resources that presume to tell them how to say what. But the Internet has helped: it has replaced the bulky multi-volume dictionaries of yore... and just in time, too, since the number of English words has crossed a million long ago (unlike the French Academy which insists only on linguistic purity and has barely reconciled itself to a hundred thousand words).

Despite the growing intercontinental digital rift, the Internet will go on democratizing languages and diversity shall prevail over hegemonistic tendencies. The Internet acts as an agent to resist totalitarianism: no one has a monopoly on the Truth; the best you can hope for is a franchise. While we cannot let loose anarchy and let everyone pronounce every word every which way (‘Who is to be the master?’ asked Humpty Dumpty), we may yet relax the grip of Oxbridge cabals. We do not expect class wars to end forthwith, nor that xenophobia will die, but a multitude of world views and accents will contend noisily while shaping the colo(u)rful mosaic of the future. Meanwhile, go ahead, refuse to spell it as Worcestershire, write is as Woostershire, and say it the same way. As Prof.Higgins may have dimly anticipated, English no longer belongs just to the English - let alone to the Oxbridge professors.