Showing posts with label dialect. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dialect. Show all posts

crescent

Jul 17, 2022

 Reader Sam Fox wrote in with the question:

I am an American, a Midwesterner all my life, though I have traveled quite a bit..  

On a recent visit to London I was surprised to hear the word “crescent” in the tube stop Mornington Crescent pronounced with a z rather than s.  I think I heard other examples of unexected intervocalic voicing.  Is this something you have noticed?

I have noticed it, particularly since I've had the word crescent is in my address. But I was surprised to find that UK dictionaries don't seem to agree about it at all.


In the /s/ camp:

  • The Oxford English Dictionary (a historical dictionary) [first picture]

  • Google [picture 2] 
  • Cambridge 

  • And all of the American dictionaries (Merriam-Webster, Webster's New World, Dictionary.com, American Heritage)


In the /z/ camp:    
  • Lexico (which comes from the people at Oxford Dictionaries) 
  • Macmillan (picture 3)



And presenting both, always with /z/ as the second option::
  • Collins, in both their English dictionary and in the COBUILD (learner's) dictionary. (picture 4)
  • Longman



Since the OED has only the /s/ and since /s/ > /z/ between vowels is the more likely phonological process, we can assume that the /z/ is somewhat new compared to the /s/, and so it's particularly interesting that two of the British sources only have the /z/. If anyone in the US says it with a /z/, I don't know about them. So we can say that this /z/ is a BrE pronunciation, but not the BrE pronunciation. (When it comes to pronunciation, there's probably next to nothing that one can count as the BrE.)

So how prevalent is the /z/ in the UK?  And who says it?

I listened to more than 50 examples on YouGlish, discounting a few along the way because they were the same person again or the person seemed not to have a UK accent. Of the 47 I counted, 23 had /z/, 23 had /s/, and one, by Alan Bennett, I just couldn't tell. So the dictionaries that have both seem to have good reason for it. 

At first, I was getting mostly /s/ and I thought that it was because there were a lot of 'posh' voices giving lectures about the Fertile Crescent. But as I went on, it became clear how varied the speakers who say /s/ or /z/ are. Both were said by young and old. Both were said by fancily educated people. There were a couple of Scottish voices that said /s/, but other than that it felt like both /s/ and /z/ were hearable around much of England. Among the /z/-sayers were Professor Brian Cox (from near Manchester, in his 50s) and Jeremy Paxman (in his 70s, born in Leeds but raised in Hampshire and sounding very much like his Cambridge education). I wonder if there are any dialectologists out there who could give us a bit more insight about whether this /z/ is particularly associated with one place or another? It doesn't seem to be a variation that was captured in the Cambridge Dialect App. 

Going beyond crescent, there are other spelled-s-pronounced-/z/ cases that contrast between AmE and some BrE speakers. The Accent Eraser*  site lists these ones, a couple of which I've written about before (see links).
  • Eraser
  • Blouse
  • Diagnose
  • Greasy**
  • Opposite
  • Resource
  • Vase
  • Mimosa
  • Crescent
  • Joseph (click on the link to see a lot more personal names with this difference)
These are lexical pronunciations—that is, speakers just learn to pronounce the word that way on a word-by-word basis, rather than a rule-based pronunciation, where the pronunciation is 'conditioned' by its pronunciation environment and it happens to all words that contain that environment. We can tell this isn't a phonologically conditioned variant because fleecy, which has an /s/ sound between the same vowels as in greasy, is never "fleezy". There's nothing these words have in common that makes them all go toward the same pronunciation—some are between vowels (a place where it's easy for consonants to take on voicing), but others are word-final. Some may have been pushed toward /z/-ness due to their similarity with other /z/-pronounced words: greasy–easy, resource–resort, and the like. 

My intuition about them is that they're very irregular across people. I just played a 'guess the word' game with my south-London-born spouse (50s), and he used /z/ for all of these except greasy and opposite, for which he used /s/. Who knows why?

I haven't got the time now to see how regular dictionaries are about their representations of these, but it strikes me that this would make a nice little undergraduate student project!

*Eek! "Accent erasing" is not something a linguist likes to endorse—you can be an accent replacer, but not an accent eraser.

** Forgot to mention: you do hear greasy with a /z/ in AmE. I think of it as southern, someone on Twitter said they think of it as midlands, but a friend from my northeastern hometown says it, so it's kind of irregular too.

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off of, redux

Nov 19, 2020
I’ve written about off of on this blog before, in reaction to British complaints about it as a horrid Americanism. In my day job, I’m writing about it again from different angles, so I was thrilled to see that some researchers in Helsinki and Stockholm have undertaken much more wide-ranging and in-depth research about it than has ever been attempted: 
 
Vartiainen, Turo, and Mikko Höglund. 2020. How to make new use of existing resources: tracing the history of geographical variation of off of. American Speech 95: 408–40. 
 
Their paper, as the title hints at, is very much about getting around the problems of studying the history of and variation within the English language, given the impoverished nature of the data we have. There’s lots of English out there, but it’s not always easy to get a balanced view of it. For example, it’s not enough to know where a work was published, you need to know where its author was from. For another example, if all the evidence you have from Sussex is from farmers and all that you have from Yorkshire is from school teachers, then your regionality conclusions are going to be tarnished by other contrasts. Sometimes data sets give this info. More often you either have to go hunting for it and/or the information doesn't exist.

Vartiainen and Höglund have come to their conclusions by triangulating evidence from a number of corpora, each with their own limitations, but together rather convincing. At one chronological end, they’re using the Early English Books Online (EEBO, 1470s–1690s) corpus and, at the other end, a corpus that is updated daily in the present, News on the Web (from which they only use regional UK news sources). They’ve also included a range of sources for American English.  
 
Off of only really takes off in the 17th century. (I won’t go into why that’s so interesting because I have to save things for my book!) In the 19th century, prescriptivists start saying how horrible it is. British prescriptivists have been more damning of it (“vulgarly superfluous”, “a Cockneyism and incorrect”), but American style guides advise against it too (“much inferior to off without the preposition”). The authors suggest that prescriptive attitudes have colo(u)red linguistic description of the term, and there’s pretty clear evidence of this, I’d say, in a lot of the British writing about it, where off of is presented as something from America. Huddleston and Pullum’s (generally excellent) Cambridge Grammar of the English Language claims off of is only used in AmE. Vartiainen and Höglund show that this just isn’t true, and moreover it never was.  
 
Off of originates in England and has consistently been used there. What’s striking is how regional it’s stayed. Here are their maps of where it was most used before 1700 and in the 21st century. It is very much a southern thing.
 

 
This gives a big clue about the presence of off of in AmE: 
Importantly, much of the EEBO data predates the Great Puritan Migration to America that took place between 1620 and 1640 (…). Considering that many of the early colonies were founded by people from East Anglia (…), it is likely that they took this form with them. (p. 428) 
They go on to cite examples of off of in the Salem Witchcraft Trials: 
Since then, off of use declined in the US until the 1970s, when it started to go up—possibly as a result of a general tendency toward(s) colloquiali{s/z}ation in written English. It remains mostly a spoken form but has been on the increase in edited text like magazines and newspapers (though not in academic texts). 
…the older generations may have noticed the increased frequency of off of in public texts (a recency effect), while the younger generations may be sensitive to the form’s high frequency in American English when compared to the other varieties of English. (p. 428) 
While it’s certainly possible that the off of surge in AmE could affect current BrE, the evidence from the British data is that it has always been used there. If AmE is having an effect, perhaps it’s just providing a kind of linguistic mirror that makes the form feel less non-standard to those who are already hearing and/or using it in their regional Englishes. The authors conclude that: 
…when it comes to regional variation, we have seen that off of is frequently attested in so many parts of England that the whole idea of its being a “regional form” should be questioned. Indeed, based on the results of this study it would seem that in many cases the perceptions that British speakers have of their avoidance of off of [as a regional and/or American form] are due to highly entrenched prescriptive attitudes instead of their actual usage patterns, although we have no doubt that the form is rare enough in some regions, particularly in the West and Northwest of England, to genuinely affect acceptability judgments. (pp. 434–5) 
There remain problems in making direct comparisons of English from different times and places. For example, the AmE corpora include no casual conversation, but the BrE data do. The authors therefore have to be cautious in comparing rates of usage in the two countries, There is some indication that off of is far more widespread in AmE than in other Englishes. In the GloWBE corpus of web-based English (written, but often not as formal as published English), AmE has 26.2 off of per million words versus 21.5 in Canadian English and 8.7 in British. (That data set has not seen the same care as their main data sets, though. It may contain false hits,  probably contains duplications and can’t give a regional picture.) 
 
The paper includes research on the variants offen and offa. I won’t cover them here, but just mention them to say: oh it’s all so complex and transatlantic. 
 
In all, a fascinating read for someone who’s always thinking about function words and transatlantic linguistic comparisons. (That’s me!) I thank the authors for it and American Speech for publishing it. 
 

Related reading 
If you're interested in out of, it's covered at the original off of post. You're welcome to leave comments there and keep that conversation going.

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Are these British expressions British?

Jun 10, 2015
It seems to happen once a week that I'm talking or listening to someone and some interesting new combination of morphemes (meaningful word-parts) is uttered. The conversation will go something like this:
A:  Ooh, this cake has real taste-itude. 
B: Ha! Taste-itude, is that even a word?
Lynne: It is now.
People are saying it, people are understanding it. It's made out of morphemes and it's not a phrase. It's a word. It might not be a word that's going anywhere, but it's a word. And I'd go so far as to say it's an English word, since it's made of English word-parts according to English rules, pronounced with English sounds, and understood by English speakers.

Recently someone on Twitter took me to task for giving BrE versus AmE uses of tortilla as my Difference of the Day, protesting that tortilla isn't even an English word; that the difference is between European and Mexican Spanish, not British and American English. My response was: yes, the word(s) came from those Spanishes, but you can find tortilla in English dictionaries and how English speakers use tortilla can differ from how Spanish speakers use it. So, is tortilla an English word? It is now.

This isn't to say that any non-English word in an English sentence automatically becomes English. If I wrote "My favo(u)rite Swedish institution is fika, the social coffee break", a lexicographer would look at it and say: we don't need to put fika in our English dictionary because (a) it's been marked as foreign (with italics), (b) the writer felt the need to define it, indicating that it's unfamiliar in English, and (c) it describes something in another non-English-speaking culture. When the glorious time comes that English-speaking cultures embrace fika, we'll say things like "I'm just going to fika with Jo. Care to join us?" and the lexicographers will put it in English dictionaries.

All of this is preamble to thinking about what a "British word" is and what happens when an American word "becomes British". When words/meanings/expressions move from one dialect to another, it's not so easy to tell that they're foreign, because we don't tend to get those markers of 'foreignness' that we got in the fika example. The words are generally made out of English parts, and often their meaning is recoverable from the context. If we say that an American expression has 'become British' (or the reverse--but let's stick with one scenario) we could mean:
  • the expression has become less specific to America, and therefore British people say it as well as American people because it is now 'general English'.
  • the expression used to be American, but now British people say it and Americans don't. Thus, it is not 'general English', but 'British English'. 
This kind of thing has come up on the blog before when British media have distributed complaints about "Americanisms" coming to Britain, and people like me point out "Many of your so-called 'Americanisms' came from Britain, but the British forgot about them". (A nice example of that is now-AmE expiration versus more-recent-BrE expiry.)

This week, we can analy{s/z}e whether the same happens when Americans talk about Britishisms. (Of course, what's different is that Americans are likely say "That's so cute! I'm going to start saying that!" rather than "Those people are ruining our language with these silly expressions!")
Here's a list of "British expressions" that has been going (a)round the web:



Like many things on the interwebs, there's no source-citing here. Judging from the 'we say' at zed, it's by an American who knows a bit about Britain. Some of the translations are fairly poor and some of it is fairly dated (chap illustrates both these charges).

What struck me about the list was that I was pretty sure that some of these were American English (originally, if not currently). And at least one I knew to be an Australianism. So, since I have finished my external-examining (it's a British academic thing, and it's a lot of work), I am celebrating by looking into all the items on the list. I won't bother to say "yes, that's originally British" about the majority that are. (Some of them have been discussed already on this blog; you can use the search box on the right to look for them.) But let's think about the ones that aren't.


(the) bee's knees This is 1920s American slang, and as far as I can tell it has never been more popular in the UK than the US. Yes, some British people say it, but Americans are saying it more. And whoever is saying it, they're probably elderly or affecting a vintage style.

know your onions Another old US phrase (the first two OED citations - 1908 and 1922 - are American; first British one comes in 1958). It is definitely used more in the UK now than in the US. World Wide Words has a nice post on it.

wicked to mean 'good, cool' is something that may have been re-invented in the UK (negative words have a way of being made positive in slangs), but it was certainly something I said in the 1980s in the US, earlier than it was being used in UK. OED lists it as 'orig. U.S.' and cites F. Scott Fitzgerald for its first recorded use:
1920   F. S. Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise i. iii. 119   ‘Tell 'em to play “Admiration”!’ shouted Sloane... ‘Phoebe and I are going to shake a wicked calf.’
(a) tad To quote the OED: "colloq. (orig. and chiefly N. Amer.)." The 'chiefly' there is out-of-date; it's well used in BrE now (new ways of achieving understatement are always helpful in BrE). But it's never gone out of use in AmE, so its presence on the list is a puzzle.

(a) shambles To mean 'a scene of disorder or devastation', the OED says 'orig. U.S.' And yet it is in the list twice. (It is used more in the UK, but it's not unused in the US.)

skive Now, I've written about this word before (great word--didn't know it before coming to the UK), but in doing so I failed to mention that it started out in America, seemingly derived from French esquiver. Again, from the OED:
 1. intr. U.S. College slang. At the University of Notre Dame: to leave the college campus without permission. Also in extended use with reference to other disciplinary matters. Freq. with away, out, etc. Cf. skiver n.3 1. Now disused.
 2. trans. orig. U.S. College slang. To avoid (work or a duty) by leaving or being absent; (now) esp. to play truant from (school). Now chiefly Brit. colloq.
nosh comes from Yiddish and is "Originally: to nibble a snack, delicacy, etc. (chiefly N. Amer.)" (OED). Nowadays, in BrE it refers any food, not just a snack or delicacy. Use of the word in the US is particularly New-Yorkish (as Yiddish-derived words often are), and the verb is not used so much in BrE.

uni Here's the Australianism. BrE speakers above a certain age will tell you it came into Britain through the soap opera Neighbours in the 1980s. BrE speakers of university age now probably have no idea it came from Australia. It is used a lot in the UK.


So, about 12% of the lists are expressions used by the British, but not invented by the British. So, they're British expressions in the sense that British people say them.

Some are not invented by the British and not exclusively said by the British. Seems a bit odd to call those ones British expressions.

These not-so-British expressions on the list probably indicate that the writer fell into an old trap: if you don't know an expression and then you hear someone with a different accent say it, it's easy to conclude that the expression is a regionalism that is particular to people with that accent. I fall into the trap too, like when I assumed station stop was a Britishism because I had only heard it in Britain (but then, I take trains more in Britain).  It's our duty as people who care about language to try to resist those easy conclusions, because we have to admit that our individual experience of vocabulary is an imperfect, biased, and ahistorical view of the language.

The other problem with the phrase British expressions (and one that plagues this blog) is what's "British enough" to be British. For something to be called a British expression is it enough that it is used in Britain? Is a Yorkshireism or a bit of slang from Multicultural London English a British expression? Or, for an expression to be British does it have to be used across the whole country (or at least the whole island)?

So, what do you think: should we call the originally-not-British items on this list British expressions? The next time a British person says Can I get a latte? and someone else says "That's not British!" should we say "It is now!"



Postscript: I just can't resist mentioning what I've learn{ed/t} about a British-British item on the list:

arse-over-tit is British through and through, but it was originally arse-over-tip. Its current form lends support to my belief that British English will find any excuse to say tit as often as possible.

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accent attitudes

Jun 11, 2011
A while ago, I coined the term AVIC ('American Verbal Inferiority Complex'), to refer to an American tendency to find British English (or at least standard English English) superior to their own way of speaking.  Having done a bit of reading about accent attitudes this week, I'm wondering whether AVIC is on its way out, perhaps mostly found in older generations.  Here's what I found:

In 1985 (see references below), Stewart et al. published a study for which American subjects had been asked to rate the social status of people with standard American or standard British accents. They found that:

speakers of British English were assigned higher social status than speakers of the respondents’ own (American) accent, even though British speech was considered less intelligible and aroused more discomfort. For American listeners, this finding contrasts with their reactions to other ethnic accents (p. 103)
But that was more than 25 years ago. And just 10 years ago, Bayard et al. (2001) found that American accents were more positively evaluated in New Zealand and Australia, and America. Here's their graph showing the reactions to accents in their sample of Cleveland University students:



You might not be able to read the graph, but that dotted line at the top represents the North American accent, as spoken by a woman. Below that is North American male. Leaving third place to....Australian men! Yes, the English accent (as spoken by a man) is way down in 4th place now.

But my favo(u)rite graph of the ones I've come across is this one, from the undergraduate research journal at Brigham Young University. It shows the results of asking Brigham Young students to rate the intelligence of people with different accents.




The main significant effect found in this study was that people who'd lived at least three months outside the US rated the English accent significantly lower than people who'd only lived in the US. In fact, Americans who had not lived abroad considered the English-accented person to be much more intelligent than themselves, but the people who had lived abroad rated the standard American accent more intelligent than the standard English one.  My preferred way of interpreting this (a bit tongue-in-cheek) is that Americans are happy to rate the English as more intelligent than themselves up until they actually start meeting and talking to the English.

Better Half often complains that while he was treated like a god (the god of what, I don't know) when he first went to live and work in the US in the early 1990s, nowadays he's "nothing special" when we go to the States. He attributed this to New York City being overrun by the British, particularly when the pound was much, much stronger than the dollar. But I think he also finds it to be true when we're away from the big city where British people tend to travel. So, perhaps this is a symptom of a general trend for (standard-AmE-speaking) Americans to have more dialectal self-esteem than they used to.  You're welcome to speculate on the reasons for this in the comments--provided that you aren't too rude.


Any other business
  1. Thanks and more thanks to all of you who voted for SbaCL and my @lynneguist Twitter feed in the Lexiophiles/bab.la Top Language Lovers for 2011.  I'm grateful/flabbergasted/proud to see Separated by a Common Language ranked 5th among Language Professional Blogs (and 37th overall) and @lynneguist ranked 2nd in the Twitter category and 4th overall. Big, big thank-yous to all who had a hand in that!
  2. Thanks again for your help in locating instances of Dialect Fail and Dialect Success in transatlantic novel-writing. The Brighton Book Festival talk ('Whose Language is it Anyway?') was a success, in no small part because of your helpful suggestions.
  3. Before you ask, that talk is not available on video--but I'm very happy to give it in other venues. Please email me if you're interested! Talks (with audio publisher/video producer Better Half) are underway to recreate parts of my Lynneguist talks in snazzy podcast form. No release dates have been imagined yet, but you know I'll tell you when they're available.
  4. I had some interesting comments from English teachers (both school teachers and language-school ESL teachers) after the talk--they'd learn{ed/t} that some of their closely held beliefs about English were fictions, and thought that their colleagues would have benefited from the talk as well.  So, that got me thinking that it might be good to do some workshops with teachers on American/British differences, standards and prejudices. (It might also be useful to do them with publishers/editors, perhaps.) If there are any schools out there who might like to be guinea pigs for such a thing, please get in touch!



References:


Anderson, S. et al. (2007) How accents affect perception of intelligence. Intuition 3:5–11.

Bayard, D., A. Weatherall, C. Gallois, and J. Pittam (2001) Pax Americana? Accent attitudinal evaluations in New Zealand, Australia, and America. Journal of Sociolinguistics 5:22–49.

Stewart, MA, EB Ryan, and H Giles (1985) Accent and social class effects on status and solidarity evaluations. Personality and  Social Psychology Bulletin 11:98–105.
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Dialect success in books -- your help?

May 31, 2011
Because of the cruelty that is 'marking season' (AmE prefers grading over marking), I am unable to do a 'real' post at the moment--but I'd like to follow up on the last one, which opened with
I'm giving a talk called Whose Language Is It Anyway? at the first Brighton Book Festival ("Bookstock") on 9 June (click the Whose... link for details). Since it's a book festival, I'd like talk about some books.
...and then asked for examples of bad AmE dialect representation in works by UK authors and vice versa.  Thanks to everyone whose given suggestions in the comments at that post--please feel free to add more there.

Having so much evidence of poor dialect writing is useful, but a little depressing. So, I ask you avid book-readers: can you think of any authors who switch dialects with real skill?  (It might be their editors doing the heavy lifting, but still...let's try to find some examples that give some hope.)

Thanks in advance for anything you can offer me!  And if you're in/near Brighton, do come along for the talk--it'd be lovely to meet you!
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Not One-Off Britishisms

Mar 21, 2011
I don't usually review other websites here, and I don't really want to start now. But I'd be interested to read what you think of Ben Yagoda's site Not One-Off Britishisms.

Yagoda is a journalism professor at the University of Delaware and author of many things. I first became aware of his worries about BrEisms in AmE in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education called "The Elements of Clunk." There he bemoaned "a whole new strain of bad student writing."* To quote from that:
Another manifestation [of clunky student writing] is a boom in Britishisms: not only the weirdly popular "amongst," but also "amidst," "whilst"—I actually have gotten that more than once in assignments—and "oftentimes." (In a parallel move, the stretched-out and unpleasant "off-ten" has become a vogue pronunciation among youth, as has "eye-ther.") In spelling, "grey" has taken over from the previously standard "gray." I haven't seen "labour" yet, but the day is young.
Not One-Off Britishisms is kind of a blog, but what it is really...well, I'll let Yagoda explain. From the sidebar at the site:
Over the last decade or so, an alarming number of traditionally British expressions have found their way into the American vocabulary. This page offers a growing list of Britishisms that have been widely adopted in the U.S.–that is, they are not “one-offs.”  Each entry offers a definition/American equivalent, followed by quotes representing the first and most recent American usages I’ve found.
Some entries include a link to a Google Ngram. This is a nifty tool that allows you to search for the frequency with which a word or phrase was used year to year. The link provided here compares the use of the Britishism and the traditional U.S. equivalent in the “American English” corpus between 1990 and 2008, with a “smoothing” level of 0. (Don’t ask.) In some cases–e.g., advert, bits–Ngram data is not applicable because the word or phrase can be used in two or more different ways.
For each entry, readers are ask to vote on their opinion of the Britishism in an American context. By “over the top,” I mean that the word or phrase (still) comes off as mannered or affected. In my humble opinion, the key factor in this is whether there’s an equally good American equivalent. [...]

Yagoda's project is a perfect (although not as loud) counterpoint to the oft-heard British complaint that Americanisms "permeate, pervade and pollute British English" (Hardeep Singh Kohli, Sunday Times, 7 Nov 08--and if you like that one, I can give you plenty more), and it gives me some comfort to know that not every American is a victim of American Verbal Inferiority Complex.


Now, the longer I live in the UK (it's been more than 11 years now), the more out-of-touch I am with what Americans (other than my nearest and dearest) are saying--but some of the BrEisms that Yagoda picks out as "widely adopted" strike me as not so. For one thing, some of them are things that Americans have sent me puzzled emails about. For another, the sources Yagoda cites are very often New Yorkers, if not The New Yorker, and most come from the NY-DC corridor. The Google Ngrams show general trends in publishing, but I would be willing to bet that a fair number of US-published books are written by New Yorkers, if not British expats. I'm having a hard time finding out how many of the 685,000 British expats in the US are in New York, but many commentators seem to agree with  A.A. Gill that "The British have colonized Manhattan". And an awful lot of them seem to be in publishing. So, it could be a trend in a certain milieu. But if you're watching FOX** instead of reading Vanity Fair, it might not affect you too much. I'm not saying that all the BrEisms are coming from UK expats; I have no trouble believing that Americans in their milieu are easily influenced by chic-sounding British words. And if that continues, those words may make their way into general American English. But my impression from non-NYCers is that these words are far from "widely adopted."

There's also much reason to be suspicious of the Ngram data. Looking at the first ten 2007-08 sources for chat show in the Ngram that Yagoda presents, one finds that four are about British television (I haven't bothered to look into their authors' backgrounds), two are from Cambridge University Press dictionaries (offering it as a synonym for AmE talk show), one is by an Oxford-educated professor in the US (possibly UK-born) , and two are by (orig. AmE in this sense) faculty at UK universities whose university webpages show no educational experience outside the UK. So that's 90% that seem to be appropriately British in the American English "corpus". The remaining one is by a Brooklyn-born journalist who lives in Washington, DC.

On the other hand, if you look at the relationship between chat show and talk show in British English using an Ngram, you'll see that AmE talk show has overtaken chat show in the UK (supposedly) in the same period. And looking at the data comparatively in the allegedly AmE books, chat show barely figures in comparison to talk show.

I also note that some of the things that Yagoda mentions in the Chronicle article have been in variation in AmE for a long time--for example, the pronunciation of either. And his description of often sounds like how I started pronouncing it as a child. Can we conclude that recent fashions from them are due to British influence? Are Americans even aware of these as being "more British"? (He goes in that article to try to tar the spelling advisor with the British brush--until he discovers that it's regarded as an AmEism. Click on the link for my discussion of it.)

So, in the end, I think it's the kind of site that would interest readers of this blog and so I point it out and hope you'll visit it (particularly if you're American). But I'd also like your feedback on whether you think that the "Britishisms" that Yagoda notices are indeed widespread in AmE.

As a final note--why Britishisms?  What's wrong with the good old word Briticism? I give you the Ngram for American English:



Britishism (red) has outnumbered Briticism (blue) only since 1990.  As long as we have a good old standard word for it, why use a new one?  (And no, it doesn't seem to be because of the British people in NY.)



* In hono(u)r of Yagoda, I'm using American punctuation, rather than my usual indecisive mishmash.
** Please, stop.
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belly and tummy

Oct 30, 2010
I picked up a free copy of the Financial Times's FT Magazine in the airport, and was interested to read this bit in an article about body-part names and communication between doctors and patients.

Technically speaking, the anatomical structure the consultant was looking at was the abdomen, which is schematically divided by doctors into a three-by-three grid. From top right to bottom left the squares are named: right upper quadrant, epigastric, left upper quadrant, right flank, umbilicus, left flank, right iliac fossa, hypogastric, left iliac fossa. The organs are clustered in each square – the liver and the gallbladder reside in RUQ, for example. When a patient has RIF pain, you know to think of appendicitis.

But what doctors in England haven’t quite solved yet is how I should ask you to show me this space. The medical word, “abdomen”, is not used by many people. But “stomach” is factually wrong. (Your stomach – LUQ – is the springy bag in which your food first lands to be churned before it continues on through your intestine; most “stomach ache” is felt nowhere near the real stomach – what most people point to is their umbilicus, underneath which lies the small bowel.) “Belly” is American. “Tummy” is a nursery term, but English doctors use it in parallel with the anatomical terms. You learn to say “poo” for faeces, too. But if questions such as “Have you had your bowels open?” and “Have you passed any stool?” are met with blankness, there is not much alternative.

Belly is American?  That didn't sit right with me, as if a doctor asked me to show her my belly, I'd find it very strange--though I might suspect that the doctor spoke a different dialect from mine. I use tummy (or the anatomically-incorrect stomach).  To me, belly particularly signals a round tummy--hence (orig. AmE) beer belly.  Babies have bellies, Buddha statues have bellies, I have a belly--but let's not go there. One also hears people saying, typically while pinching more than an inch, I'm getting a belly.  In all these uses, it's not the same as tummy or non-technical stomach.  It describes a paunch (which, incidentally, used to just mean 'abdomen', without the negative connotations), but with rounder connotations.

The doctor writing in the magazine is not alone in this assumption that belly is American.  In fact, this amateur (and very defensive about it, while not trying very hard*) BrE/AmE word-lister assumes that tummy is exclusively BrE.

But, while I had my doubts about the BrE/AmE tummy/belly divide, I've often heard tummy-button in the UK (though mostly from antipodean yoga/Pilates instructors), and never in the US. So, I decided to check it out.

First, the history. Belly goes all the way back to Old English, where it originally meant a bag, but from at least as early as the 13th century, it's used to mean a human or animal stomach and from at least the 14th century, it's used for the abdomen.  So, it certainly did not originate in AmE.  Tummy (a baby-talk simplification of stomach), in contrast, is only seen in print from the 19th century.


Next, the usage.  I looked up stomach, belly, and tummy in British and American corpora of writing and speech, and calculated the percentage of the total number of instances of any of those words that was represented by any one of those words. Here are my results:

corpusstomachbellytummy
BNC BrE 70%20%10%
COCA AmE      63%33%4%

From this we can tell (a) belly is used quite a bit in BrE as well as AmE, and tummy is more frequent in BrE than AmE.  I don't think this can just be due to differences in formality across the corpora, since if the AmE corpus had more formal writing in it, we'd expect the stomach percentage to be higher.

Now, within belly in either corpus, many instances do not refer literally to human abdomens.  There are lots of instances of idioms like in the belly of the beast or a fire in one's belly.  There are also lots of belly-dancing.  To see whether the AmE bellies might be more specifically fat tummies, I looked at paunch, to see if AmE didn't need it as much--but that's not the case. In both corpora, paunch occurs between 5 and 6 times per million words.

As for the hypothesis that belly is more 'round', I note that I and my UK friends do say I'm getting/I've got a bit of a tummy, but looking in the corpora, there are a couple of instances of get/getting/got a belly in each corpus but tummy only occurs in that context in the AmE corpus.  So, in BrE, belly is used for the 'rounded abdomen' meaning, just as in AmE, and AmE uses tummy in that context too.

What about bellybutton and tummy-button? OED has the former dated to the 19th century, but the latter only in the mid-20th century.  COCA has zero instances of tummy-button, tummybutton, or tummy button.  BNC has just one.  Belly(-)button seems to be the default colloquialism for 'navel' in either dialect. In a strange turn of orthography, the joined-up bellybutton is by far the most common spelling in the BNC, but two-word belly button is very strongly the favo(u)red spelling in COCA.  This is in contrast to another observation that I've made here, that AmE joins up compound words in writing more readily than BrE does.  In that post, I noted that the Shorter Oxford Dictionary recommends pot belly, while the American Heritage Dictionary likes potbelly.

I'm writing this in the Helsinki airport, so am limited to dialect resources that are on-line--and I'm not finding them to be helpful at the moment. While the evidence does show American English using belly much more than modern British English, I still have the feeling that there is some  regional variation at work here, since it's not a word that I would use for a human abdomen outside the 'paunchy' and 'baby' experiences.  But that's my western New York State perspective.  How would you feel if your doctor asked to look at your belly? (Don't forget to tell us where you're from!)

 

*In discouraging corrections to his list, he says 'life is too short to worry'--about accuracy, presumably.  Life is also too short to spend on writing word lists without caring to do it right, I'd say.
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language play--not getting it

Apr 17, 2008
It's come up before on this blog that it sometimes happens that people will see an error or non-standardism in English, spoken or written by a speaker of another dialect, and assume that that way of saying/writing is standard in the other dialect. It's a shame, though, when such 'errors' are intentionally non-standard, because then the assumption that it's "just a different dialect" leads the assumer to miss some nuance of the communication. For instance, sometimes I'll say to Better Half, Ya done good. By putting it into a non-standard dialect (and not a dialect that I speak), I'm trying to add a bit of light-hearted affection to the compliment--something that's not communicated by You did well. Better Half knows enough about AmE to get this, but if I said it to a student, they might assume that that's part of the standard dialect that I usually speak and not get that I was trying to build rapport.

Anyhow, a nice example of this 'assuming it's standard' behavio(u)r came up on recently on the (AmE) copy-/(BrE)sub-editors' blog The Engine Room. There, blogger JD admitted to having believed until recently that Americans spell cemetery "sematary" because of the spelling in the title of the Stephen King book, Pet Sematary. In the book, one is supposed to understand that it's misspelt because children wrote the "cemetery's" sign.

That reminds me of being informed by BrE speakers that "thru is the American spelling of through". No, it's not. It's an abbreviated spelling form that is used mainly on signs (or painted on a road surface), and thus it's become the typical way of spelling it in drive-thru. You won't see thru replacing through in American newspaper articles (though it might be handy for an occasional headline--but I cannot recall seeing it in any) or novels--and you'd better not use it in essays for school/college/university.

Do you have any stories of misunderstood intentions due to "it must be the way they say it in American/British English" assumptions?
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high tea

Mar 4, 2008
My reasons for not posting in more than a week form a list that is even more boring than long. My need to say that, in the egotistical hope that someone cares, is even more pathetic than it is banal.

But one of those reasons is that my parents are visiting, having come to meet their newest granddaughter, Grover. And visits from Americans are always good for a fresh supply of linguistic gaffes and confusions. My dear mom, for example, demonstrated a widespread American misapprehension of a British term when she informed me that she went to high tea at my nephew's school on Valentine's Day. Knowing that she was referring to something more like a tea party with tea or other drinks and some sort of baked good, and being the obnoxious daughter that I am, I replied, "No, you didn't."

The website What's Cooking America works hard to disabuse my fellow Americans of that misunderstanding:
Most people [i.e. Americans] refer to afternoon tea as high tea because they think it sounds regal and lofty, when in all actuality, high tea, or "meat tea" is dinner. High tea, in Britain, at any rate, tends to be on the heavier side. American hotels and tea rooms, on the other hand, continue to misunderstand and offer tidbits of fancy pastries and cakes on delicate china when they offer a "high tea."
What the hotels (and my nephew's school) are offering is actually low tea, more commonly (in my experience) referred to as afternoon tea. A particular subcategory of afternoon tea is the cream tea, which involves tea and scones with clotted cream and (almost always strawberry) jam. (We've booked a cream tea after Grover's naming ceremony on Sunday, which seems a little unfair, as she's not yet on solid foods--or even tea, for that matter.) My mother keeps asking if people 'still' have afternoon tea, and I reply "people will take a tea break, like a coffee break', and she'll say that she means do they have cucumber sandwiches and scones and so forth. (My mother seems to be jealous of any culture that fits an extra meal into the day.) Better Half and I have to explain that eating cucumber sandwiches in the afternoon is not something that the masses ever did much.

Back to high tea: I've never heard a British person use the term. They say things like I have to get home and make the children's tea, by which they mean their evening meal. In my experience, tea, when referring to a meal, is used by my friends mostly to refer to simple meals they make for their children or themselves in the early evening; a dinner party, for example, would not be referred to as tea.

Now, we could get into the different uses of other meal terms like dinner and lunch and supper in the two countries--except that there's so much variation in meal names within each country that anything I could say from my own experience would be only a small bit of the picture. In the US, the use of meal names varies mostly by region (and, I'd suspect, by age). (See these maps for some info.) In the UK, there is a heavy social class element involved--so that Nancy Mitford, in classifying some turns of phrase as U ('upper class') or non-U, claims that calling the midday meal dinner is non-U, while calling it luncheon is U.

In fact, reader Paula wrote in the summer asking for coverage of an aspect of the meal-name problem:
Here in my area of North Carolina(US) we still use "dinner" to describe the noon meal. When I visited Australia and New Zealand, they also used "dinner", which made me feel right at home. The poor little Northern US children that traveled with us were quite confused since they thought "dinner" was the evening meal, lol.
How about it, how common is the word "dinner" now when "lunch" seems to be used more and more.
...and I've been avoiding the question ever since. So feel free to weigh in on the matter in the comments!
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scoff and scarf

Feb 4, 2008
I found myself doing something that I take others to task for: assuming that a usage that differs from my own is 'wrong'. Well, at least I had the good sense to look it up before blogging about it. You see, I was reading along (belatedly as ever) in the 22/29 December 2007 issue of New Scientist, in an article titled 'Death by chocolate' by Claire Ainsworth, and I came across this sentence:
If you're reading this after scoffing your fifteenth chocolate Santa, don't panic: we humans have been safely enjoying the beans of the cacao plant, Theobroma cacao, for millennia.
I wonder how many other readers would find the use of the verb scoff strange here. I only know scoff as meaning 'to deride, mock', and so I assumed that what had happened here was that a BrE-speaking author or (BrE) subeditor/(AmE) copy editor had misspelt the verb to scarf because in their dialect, the /r/ wouldn't be pronounced--and so if they'd not seen the word written down before, they might reason that it's really scoff--a familiar verb that is also onomatopoetic for the action of whipping food into one's mouth. (Some linguists call such errors--where an unfamiliar word is replaced with something that seems to 'make more sense'--eggcorns.)

Except that my reasoning is completely backward. It's fairly frequent that, when faced with two versions of a word, people believe that the version that they came across first is the older version. But, of course, the world doesn't work that way. The OED records scoff as meaning 'devour' from 1846, and lists it as 'slang and dialectal'. Another version of the word, scaff is dated back to 1797, and a slang dictionary records the variant scorf in 1864. On the other hand, the OED doesn't have documentation of AmE scarf until the 1960s. (Though others have found it as early as 1938.) So, instead of an 'r' being lost by speakers of a BrE non-rhotic dialect, we probably have speakers of an AmE dialect (probably one of the non-rhotic ones) inserting an 'r' in the spelling of the word.

The 'eating' meaning of scoff is not particular to BrE--it's used in AmE too, though not by me. (And, of course, the unrelated 'deride' meaning of scoff and the 'neckwear' meaning of scarf are both dialect-neutral and unrelated to the 'eating' homonyms.)

I would have known all this earlier had I not been on my honeymoon in August when the issue was raised and discussed on the American Dialect Society e-mail discussion list. Once again, my personal life interferes with my quest for know-it-all-dom.
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She gave it me

Dec 23, 2007
Perhaps because it's the season of giving, I've been noticing more often the BrE use of constructions like She gave it me where in my native AmE dialect I'd have to say She gave it to me or She gave me it. The last two examples are frequently discussed in linguistic theory, under the title of "Dative Alternation". So, let's start with a little terminology, just for terminology's sake.

In sentences like these, the three nouns (or pronouns, in these cases) play different semantic roles, which correspond to grammatical positions and grammatical cases in the sentences:
She is semantically the 'giver' or the 'agent (of giving)'. Grammatically, it is the subject of the sentence and in subjective (or 'nominative') case (i.e. it is she not her).

It is the 'given' or the 'patient' or 'theme' (depending on whose terminology you use) in these sentences; it is the thing that is affected/moved by the giving action. It is in accusative case, although in English, the form of it is no different in the nominative or accusative (or dative, for that matter). Grammatically speaking, it is the direct object [DO] of the sentence.

Me is the 'givee' or the 'goal' in these sentences--it's where the patient 'it' ends up at the conclusion of the described action. We say it's in the dative case, although there is no formal marking on the pronoun that distinguishes the accusative from the dative forms of pronouns in modern English (so accusative and dative can be collectively called 'objective' case in English). Grammatically, it is the indirect object [IO] of the sentence when it doesn't have the to with it, and it is the object of the preposition to when the to is there (although for various reasons, many grammarians call it the 'indirect object' with or without the to).
The thing to know about case in English is that noun case was marked in Old English, with five cases distinguished and case marking on nouns as well as pronouns. But Modern English has very little case marking--and that which it has is concentrated in the pronoun system (e.g. I versus me and my). Because Modern English doesn't mark case on regular nouns and only distinguishes subjective (nominative), objective (accusative/dative) and genitive (possessive) on pronouns, we rely on word order to let us know which semantic roles and grammatical relations the nouns are serving. On the other hand, languages that have more robust case systems (like German or Latin) allow for much freer word order. Here's what Everything2.com says about Old English dative:
Dative: The dative case is the indirect object of the sentence. The indirect object is anything that is benefited by an action, best translated as 'to' or 'for'. For example, in the sentence "I gave the keys to Alex," or more realistically, "I gave Alex the keys," 'Alex' would be in the dative case, without a preposition. It's important to note that, although in modern English the word order rules for indirect objects are quite strict (you can't say "I gave to Alex the keys," or "I gave the keys Alex"), this is not true by any means in Old English. The indirect object is clear no matter where it is in the sentence because of inflection, and thus the dative was frequently shuffled around as need dictated. Like the accusative, the dative was used with prepositions, mostly abstract, non-movemental (similarly to modern German).
In discussing Modern English, linguists write a lot about 'dative alternation', by which they typically mean the possibility of saying either:
She gave me it. or She gave it to me.
But I've seen a lot less written about She gave it me, or similar things like
About a week and a half ago I lost my new bluetooth headset. I was gutted, my wife had just bought it me as a Xmas present and I had lost it. [The Orange Place of Rich, Jan 2007]

and

The students also started asking me if I knew this or that model, offering to show it me so that we could do it later in the class... [HLT Magazine, Jan 2004],
which are found in British English.

Now, sitting at home, I'm limited in the sources that I can access on this topic, but I did find the following in a 1928 review of Jespersen's A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles by George O. Curme (Language, Vol. 4, No. 2):
In Old English, the dative normally followed the direct object when both forms were personal pronouns. It still keeps its old position here, altho it has lost its old distinctive form: 'Show it me' (Pinero, Sweet Lavender, Act II). In America it is more common to employ here the new dative with to: 'Show it to me.' It seems self-evident here that to me is a dative, not a prepositional phrase. It corresponds to the British simple dative me. Moreover, we find in American English the old simple dative alongside the new dative with to: 'I give it to you' or 'I give it you' (Oemler, Slippy McGee, Ch. V). In this position we have two dative forms, the older simple dative and the new dative with to. The new dative is the result of our desire to give the dative a more distinctive form. In America the old simple dative is now common only before a noun used as a direct object. I gave you a book. Elsewhere we feel that the dative should have a distinctive form.
By 1937 (Language Vol. 13, No. 3), we have Frederic Cassidy writing:
To use [Jespersen's] Give it him argument to deny a word-order distinction of DO and IO, then is a self-contradiction of the worst sort. At least among nouns, there certainly is such distinction.

But even among pronouns what is the true situation? The normal word-order is the same as among nouns, and almost without exception the reverse word-order holds only when it is the DO. In short, this exceptional order is not a free pattern, but a 'bound form' or petrified phrase [...]. It never became an active pattern; neuter it being usually DO and therefore needing no word-order distinction, could violate the ordinary pattern under pressure of rhythmic or other considerations. The nominal order, on the other hand, is a living pattern, permitting all possible combinations of nouns and pronouns and when new words are used, we follow this pattern.
Now, I don't know how Cassidy's claim that DO-IO order is restricted to it DOs relates to Curme's claim that DO-IO order was the usual order for pronouns in Old English. (Did Curme overlook the fact that it was usually it in that position, or was them equally likely to occur in that position in OE?) The it observation remains true in BrE today, though. There are about 6000 UK Google hits for bought it me (once I sorted out the ones that were about buying something called It's me or the dog), but only three for bought them me.

Looking for advice on how to use these forms, there's not much via the Internet. (If I'm going to continue to blog from home, I should really bring my style books back from the office!) The Columbia Guide to Standard American English doesn't acknowledge the existence of the DO-IO order:
Dative is the grammatical case that marked Old English (and Latin) nouns and pronouns functioning as indirect objects or the objects of certain prepositions. Today the preposition to accomplishes periphrastically the dative function as indirect object, as in I gave the keys to him, or syntax does the job alone by putting indirect object before direct object: I gave him the keys.
Then we have a Swiss English-teaching site overtly denying the existence of the DO-IO object order:
The simplest way to look for remnants of dative case in English is to ask yourself whether the preposition "to" is being used or whether there is a verb present which would normally require the use of the preposition "to". For example - "give" is the easiest to remember. You don't say "give it me", rather "give it to me". In this case the verb "to give" is said to be a dative verb, and "me" becomes dative. Note that me is exactly the same in accusative and dative case - this is why dative and accusative are said to have merged into what many people call "object case". [[English] Grammar primer part 2: Dative and Genitive Case]
Within BrE, there is the perception that the DO-IO order (without to) is (in Better Half's words) "common". The Teaching Grammar site at University College London lists Give it me as 'non-standard' but acceptable in some dialect(s), but doesn't say which ones.While BH associates it with London working class, there's more discussion of it on the web as a feature of Lancashire speech. (Very far away from London, in case English geography is not your strong point.) On the BBC Lancashire site, it says:
Lancashire is a rich area in which to study accent, dialect and grammar as Willem explains: "If I were say, playing with my pen in a very annoying way, and you were to take the pen away from me, I might tell you, "Hey, that's my pen, give it me!" but there's also speakers who wouldn't say "Give it to me!" but who would say "Give me it!" and then there's also speakers who would say "Give it me!" This last order "Give it me!" is not very common in Britain in general, but what we find in Lancashire is it's actually the preferred pattern."
The reason I was moved to blog about this phenomenon is that I was hearing it a lot on television last week. One instance was in an ad(vert) for Somerfield supermarkets, in which a woman is complimented on her dress, and she replies "Nigel bought it me". Whether there's been an increase in DO-IO orderings on the television, I cannot say for sure. Still, it strikes me as a symptom of increased tolerance of different dialects on British television and of the increase in use of regional dialects in advertising in particular, where 'northern' can translate into 'trustworthy' or 'down-to-earth'. For more on that point, see voiceover artist Emma Clarke's blog...
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who speaks Global English?

Jun 15, 2007
I just read "A global reach for mind and mouth", an article in the 8 June Times Higher Education Supplement by Nick Saville of the Cambridge University English for Speakers of Other Languages program(me). They're the people who make up (some of) the exams that non-native speakers of English take in order to have their ability in English certified. The article concerns a study that Cambridge ESOL commissioned on the future of the English language, and says:
Demos [the thinktank that did the study] paints a picture of a world in which English is presently dominant as the leading language of international commerce and government. This position has largely been consolidated by English being the predominant language of computing and the internet. However, of the estimated 1.3 billion speakers of English in the world, there are only 330 million native speakers -- and this puts Britons in a minority within a minority.

The report says, moreover, that the UK had rested on its laurels and that its approach towards English is more suited to days of empire than to a world of global commerce and travel. The British have failed to address the need to learn other languages adequately (we have the lowest levels of bilingualism in the European Union) and are equally disdainful of those who speak other forms of English than our own, especially new varieties such as Spanglish (a Spanish-English dialect), Hinglish (a mix of Hindi and English) or Singlish (a Singaporean, Malay, Indian and English melange).
It goes on to discuss how Cambridge ESOL copes with this. I started reading this article expecting something completely different than what I got, however. The article takes up about 3/4 of a tabloid page and never once mentions American English (or the United States or North America) by name. It doesn't mention any other nations whose main language is English either, but in discussing the role of English in the global marketplace, it just seems weird not to namecheck AmE--particularly in pointing out the spread of English through computing and the internet and British disdain for other varieties of English.

American English: the elephant in the global English living room.
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resources on regional accents

Apr 2, 2007
We have American houseguests at the moment, so not a lot of time to blog, but lots of time to sit around and listen to other Americans' impressions of BrE. So far, we've discussed pudding/dessert, Jell-o/jelly (both mentioned back here) and something else that we discussed for at least a few minutes and that I have now forgotten completely.

So, in the absence of time/presence of mind to write much more, here are some recommendations for resources on regional accents. The British Library has recently unveiled their Sounds Familiar? website. This is a wonderful resource, full of descriptions and recordings of various dialects in the UK.

Looking for something somewhat similar for the US, I found the Varieties of English website at University of Arizona. This covers other Englishes in addition to American--and doesn't cover the whole of America. (For instance, the English of white Arizonans isn't treated at all.) But if you click on 'Southern States' or 'Northeast US', you get some general description and sound samples. A classic (meaning that it already existed when I started teaching) American dialect 'edutainment' is the film American Tongues. If you can find a copy, it's definitely a good one.

If you have other dialect audio-visual resources to recommend, please do so!
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suckers for an accent

Mar 21, 2007
Paul pointed out this article and discussion on BBCNews about the tendency for Americans to assume that the British are brighter (and their lack of recognition of non-RP accents as British). Better Half says that he's not sure whether Americans think he's smarter because of his accent, but he does think Americans (in America) find him more interesting and give him more attention because of it. American women often also find the accent sexy... Better Half says for the record that he didn't say that last sentence--though the fact that he's had more American girlfriends than British may provide some corroboration.



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shameful self-promotion

Feb 23, 2007
It's just too embarrassing to ask, so I'll just put this here:


What you do with that is your business.

It's been a problematic week (Britishoid understatement), so haven't had a chance to post, but did see an old (17 April 1996) Steve Bell If... cartoon in the Guardian that made me think of (AmE) you-all. I can't reproduce it here (can't find it on the web, and fear that people who break copyright rules might not get blog awards), but the dialogue goes like this:
Her Majesty the Queen out on a walk with her corgi "Geraint" [emphasis as in original]

HM: Tell me Geraint Do you think I'm middle clawss? I pay
tex, I live in inner London, I wear sensible claythes. My children aren't very bright and my husband's unemployed!

G: You'll always be my little bit of rruff maaajesty!

Some quick notes on the sounds here, courtesy of Upton and Widdowson's Atlas of English Dialects:
  • The pronunciation of a before [s], [f] or [θ] as 'aw' is a distinctly Southern pronunciation. This was due to a couple of fashionable sound changes in the South. In the 17th century, people here started lengthening this vowel, and in the 18th it moved further back in the mouth (hence the 'aw' quality). This later became part of 'Received Pronunciation' (RP).
  • Pronouncing tax as tex: This is an exaggeration of the conservative form of Received Pronunciation, which U&W describe as 'a with a flavour of e'. They note that 'to many Northerners southern [ae] sounds like [ɛ], and it is not hard to see how this pronunciation at times slips over in to the full [ɛ] to which it is so close.'
  • U&W don't cover claythes (i.e. variant pronunciations of o in the middles of words), and the RP pronunciation of this sound is typically [əʊ], which gives it a bit of a Frenchish sound. I've found a few uses of claythes on the web. One is from a man in Teesside wondering about a woman in a play (Does she get her claythes off?). But other evidence is in favo(u)r of this being a northern thing as well, as there are historical spellings of clothes with a or ai in the OED, such as clathes and clais, which are marked as Northern and Scottish, respectively. (Well, she does spend a lot of time at Balmoral...). Any other thoughts on why the Queen is depicted as saying claythes?
cheating postscript: I was sitting in the theat{re/er} tonight, watching a show, and suddenly reali{s/z}ed that I forgot to end this post in the manner I'd intended--which was to point out the study that's shown how the Queen's English has become decidedly more "middle clawss" over the years. So now I have.
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outwith and diet (the Scottish factor)

Oct 17, 2006
As frequent commenters on this blog can tell you, I am not all that up on the details of English as it is spoken in Scotland, nor in the north of England (or Wales, or Northern Ireland...). I'm in the south, on the south coast. South south south. So most of the Scottish speakers I hear are on television (or, in pleasant but intense weekend bursts, Scrabble tournaments). For a while, I was hearing a fair amount of Scottish-accented speech on The Thick of It, a political satire in which the government's spin doctor is played by (*sigh*) Peter Capaldi (whom I still have a crush on due to Local Hero—undaunted by the many more/less savo(u)ry characters he's played since then). In/on the program(me), the Scots seem to run the government really, and it's generally felt that this was made to reflect real life. Sometimes I think it reflects my real life too, as I work at a university in southern England that has a Scottish Vice Chancellor and a history of Scottish people running various administrative departments.

Linguistically speaking, this means that sometimes the unfamiliar terms that come up in the university's administration-speak are Scottish imports. I'm not sure if we're the only university south of the border in which the year's exam diet is spoken of, but my colleagues who have come from other parts of England to work here find this term as foreign as I do. In Scottish law, a diet is a court session—and in academia it is the series of exams and examination boards (a feat of mind-wrenching bureaucracy necessitated by the classification of degrees) that happens at the end of the academic year—i.e. the examination 'season'.

I was reminded of this today when I was filling out a form concerning a new course. It said:
List all the programmes which will include this course. This should include ALL programmes within and outwith your school.
This was not the first time I'd encountered outwith where I would say outside or possibly (but only if I wanted to sound highfalutin in AmE) without. But this time, I was moved to investigate it, and (whaddya know?) it's marked in my dictionaries as Scottish. (My concise dictionaries say Sc(ottish), while the OED says Now chiefly Sc.) A little further investigation on the (AusE>BrE) uni website reveals that the author of the document is a graduate of the University of Aberdeen.

I wondered whether I should start to develop a paranoid theory about the Scottish conspiracy to run my life and drown me in paperwork (for all of my paranoia is deliberate), but then I thought about the fact that all the Scottish people I know are super-nice and very efficient. Contrary to popular stereotypes, they always seem willing to buy a round of drinks. (So what if my sample size is limited to less than a dozen Scots? They're buying!) If these people do have plans to run my life, well, maybe I should let them. Perhaps it'll turn out that all the drink-buying was a ruse, but it's a lot better than the other paranoid fantasies I have to choose from.
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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)