The Stories of English, page 70
Dramatic licence, of course. And everyone – linguists included – is happy to make allowances, in the interests of enjoying a good story. But from time to time we find authors taking the trouble to do something a little more difficult, introducing language variation and change to suit the circumstances of the plot, and this can add a greater dramatic realism and a deeper level of characterization. Some add a colouring of archaic language as the story moves back in time (as with the novels of Walter Scott); some introduce novel constructions and vocabulary as time moves forward (as in George Orwell’s 1984); and some incorporate dialect variation when presenting a cross-section of a fictitious society (as in Emily Brontë, p. 496). We might expect authors who are philologists to be especially sensitive to such matters, and in the case of J. R. R. Tolkien, professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, so it proves to be.
The hobbit domain created by Tolkien (in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings), the Shire, was quite extensive. He describes it as being some forty leagues in one direction and fifty leagues in another (120 × 150 miles) – an area equivalent to the whole of England north of Birmingham. It contains several regional divisions – four ‘farthings’, each of which contains several ‘folklands’. The hobbit inhabitants are of all ages and occupations, of different social classes, and of both sexes, and they interact with a wide range of racially different groups, such as orcs, goblins, and elves. In such circumstances, dialect distinctions ought to abound.
In fact, there is not as much as we might have expected. Most of the characters speak Standard English (in a variety of accents, in the 2001–3 filmed version), regardless of race. However, Tolkien is quite scrupulous in distinguishing characters of a higher and lower class among the hobbits. Standard English is used by the hobbit heroes (Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, Pippin, and Merry), as well as by the wizard Gandalf and the noble supporters whom the hobbits meet on their journey. A nonstandard English is used by Frodo’s man Sam Gamgee, the Gaffer (Sam’s father), Tom Bombadil, and other rustic characters. The only other nonstandard-speaking character in the novel is Gollum, who has an accent and dialect all of his own, a curious mixture containing some regional dialect constructions, the occasional sigmatism (yess), and the kind of deviant usage associated with the four-year-old stage of child language acquisition:
They won’t hurt us will they, nice little hobbitses? We didn’t mean no harm, but they jumps on us like cats on poor mices, they did, precious …
The English used by the hobbits would with few exceptions not be out of place in the part of the country where Tolkien himself lived and worked (Oxfordshire and Warwickshire), but several of its features are found widely in English rural dialects.36 There is no attempt at a systematic or totally consistent representation. In some cases, Tolkien seems to have aimed for no more than a dialect colouring. For example, at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings (Book I, Chapter 1), the Gaffer is discussing the Baggins family with his friends. It is entirely in a colloquial variety hardly distinguishable from the standard language until the very last word:
Mr. Frodo is as nice a young hobbit as you could wish to meet. Very much like Mr. Bilbo, and in more than looks. After all his father was a Baggins. A decent respectable hobbit was Mr. Drogo Baggins; there was never much to tell of him, till he was drownded.
By contrast, some other characters get a fuller representation. Mr Butterbur, the landlord of the Prancing Pony, uses a wide range of dialect forms. Here he is apologizing for not sending on a letter from Gandalf to Frodo (Book I, Chapter 10):
and I’m mortal afraid of what Gandalf will say, if harm comes of it. But I didn’t keep it back a-purpose. I put it by safe. Then I couldn’t find nobody willing to go to the Shire next day …
And Sam Gamgee uses a similarly wide range of nonstandardisms, as when he talks to his horse (Book II, Chapter 3):
Bill, my lad … you oughtn’t to have took up with us. You could have stayed here and et the best hay till the new grass comes.
or when he tells himself off in delight at having forgotten he was carrying some rope (Book IV, Chapter 1):
Well, if I don’t deserve to be hung at the end of one as a warning to numbskulls! You’re nowt but a ninnyhammer, Sam Gamgee.
or when he talks to Frodo about the time of day and their breakfast (Book IV, Chapter 4):
About a couple of hours after daybreak … and nigh on half past eight by Shire clocks, maybe. But nothing’s wrong. Though it ain’t quite what I’d call right: no stock, no onions, no taters. I’ve got a bit of a stew for you, and some broth, Mr. Frodo. Do you good. You’ll have to sup it in your mug; or straight from the pan, when it’s cooled a bit. I haven’t brought no bowls, nor nothing proper.
For a literary dialect representation, quite a large number of different forms are used (compare the listing in Interlude 18, p. 481) – certainly more than enough to represent a social contrast between Frodo and Sam. They include nonstandard verb agreement (they has, they goes, he don’t), auxiliary verbs (ain’t, durstn’t), past tenses (etten, took ‘taken’), pronouns (hisself, ee ‘you’ as in thank ’ee), prepositions (nigh on, agin ‘near’, a ‘on’, as in a-purpose), adverbs (leastways, yonder), and multiple negatives. There are also some well-known nonstandard lexical uses, such as lay (‘lie’) and learn (‘teach’), dropped consonants (Lor bless you, o’ ‘of’), and eye-dialect words (dunno, et ‘ate’, jools ‘jewels’).
The portrayal is not entirely consistent. For example, Sam sometimes uses ain’t and sometimes ’s not, and he uses nowt in one of the examples above (which is a little surprising, given that this is chiefly a word from the North and North-east Midlands) but nought in other places. He also seems to be bidialectal. He is capable of speaking a (slightly archaic) Standard English when occasion demands it, as in this example (Book IV, Chapter 10):
Good bye, master my dear … Forgive your Sam. He’ll come back to this spot when the job’s done – if he manages it. And then he’ll not leave you again. Rest you quiet till I come; and may no foul creature come anigh you! And if the Lady could hear me, and give me one wish, I would wish to come back and find you again.
Treebeard, the Ent, is also sufficiently bidialectal to be able to make a slightly apologetic dialect joke about the name of his race (Book III, Chapter 4):
there are Ents and things and things that look like Ents but ain’t, as you might say.
However, issues of consistency and realism are beside the point. We are not dealing with a true regional dialect here. We are dealing with hobbits, and we do not expect hobbits to speak a consistent dialect of British English. I suspect we would be mildly disappointed if they did come out with a realistic Cockney or Geordie or Scouse. Middle Earth is not of our world, and its dialect representations should also be a step removed from human experience. Perhaps this is why Tolkien gives us an insight into their different way of thinking at the very beginning of the book. Bilbo Baggins is using the hobbit counting-system above 100 when he declares, in the opening chapter: I am eleventy-one today. English speakers from upper-earth, unless they are Tolkien fans, don’t usually calculate like that.
Chapter 20 Times a-changin’
Nonstandard English in a chapter heading? Such a thing would never have been seen in a serious book a century ago; but it is not unusual today. Indeed, nonstandard language is often found even in book titles. A brief search of Web booksellers brought to light hundreds of examples. Here are a few recent titles using ain’t or double negatives or both:
Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood (1995)
Ain’t Nobody’s Business If You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in Our Free Society (1996)
Ain’t Misbehavin’: A Good Behaviour Guide for Family Dogs (1997)
You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet: the Future of Media and the Global Expert System (2002)
It Ain’t No Sin … Springsteen (2001)
It Ain’t Necessarily So: Investigating the Truth of the Biblical Past (2002)
It is plain from the quotative element in these titles that an element of acceptable nonstandard English is part of our everyday consciousness. We have stored away in our memory such phrases as ain’t misbehavin’, and can bring them out as required, confident that other people will recognize the allusions. It is a common practice on the part of title creators, who are always on the lookout for the attention-grabbing phrase, and it is by no means restricted to the book trade. Popular songs and record albums do the same thing – as is evident from ‘Ain’t Misbehavin’ ’, the name of a Louis Armstrong hit from the 1929 musical comedy Hot Chocolates. More recent musical examples include ‘Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number’ (1994), ‘Ain’t Life Grand’ (2000), ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ (2001), and ‘It Ain’t Safe No More’ (2002).
People do not fuss about this sort of thing: they accept the nonstandard usage for what it is – a special effect, embedded within a Standard English frame of reference. And it is this same notion of a shared, community memory for language which allows newspaper subeditors to write such lines as:
There’s silver in them there hills
introducing a travel piece about visiting a ghost town in Australia’s Blue Mountains where there is an old silver mine.1 Very few people will have heard anyone actually say them there hills (or tham thar hills) in real life, and certainly not in Australia, but they are aware of its cinematic history, spoken by prospectors in films about the days of the American gold-rush. It makes a good headline. Similarly, community memory holds a large store of archaic forms (all of which have to be considered nonstandard in present-day English) upon which headline writers and journalists frequently rely, usually to produce a catchy headline or to add an element of humour or parody to an article. These next examples were collected in a study of newspaper language in the mid 1990s:
What doth it profit a man to gain the Dow Jones Industrial Average and lose his own soul?
Hark, all ye with thy ears thus tilted.
Taxman cometh, but can’t getteth
For yea verily, I say unto thee, just as Elton John’s career is dead …2
The Bible and Shakespeare are primary sources, but often no specific text is implied: usages commonly rely only on a general sense of older speech patterns, such as the use of thou or an -eth ending. Often the usage is wrong. No Early Modern English author could ever have said ‘all ye with thy ears’. But accuracy, as we have repeatedly seen (Chapter 19), is beside the point, when it comes to literary effect.
What is important about these examples is that they provide evidence of a growing presence of nonstandard English outside the domain of creative literature (Chapter 19). We might expect to find nonstandard usage in literary genres, where so much of the purpose is to reflect identities and relationships. For example, it is unusual, but not out of place, to find a poet using nonstandard language for the title of a collection, as did Linton Kwesi Johnson in Mi Revalueshanary Fren (p. 505). And we might expect to find nonstandard usage in the titles of humorous books, especially those which focus on parodies of regional dialect, such as Let Stalk Strine or Yacky Dar, Moy Bewty!.3 What is much less expected is to find it in the titles of serious books on sociology or technology, or in newspaper articles from the ‘quality’ press. None the less, it is a noticeable feature of recent years to see nonstandard usages acting as a subtle counterpoint to the predominantly standard language. Often, blink and you’d miss it – as in this single-word example from a theatre review which mentions a character, the goddess Isis, ‘who lives on the seashore, in disguise, selling – geddit? – ices’.4 But just as often you can’t avoid it, for it is in large type. An item in the travel section of one newspaper is headed Finns ain’t what they used to be – a report on a new architectural style in Finland – and in the same edition we find a review of the film Ali G Indahouse, whose headline capitalizes on the nonstandardisms associated with its leading character:
Respect to da right honourable gangsta. But Ali G, why is you sold out so soon?5
These examples suggest that the rehabilitation of nonstandard English has made considerable progress. However, its public presence is still quite limited. The history of association of nonstandard English with informal, jocular, and intimate settings currently restricts it to certain kinds of subject-matter where these resonances do not clash. In newspapers, nonstandard English grammar and orthography are generally found only in the creative and leisure pages, such as the review section, the sports section, or sections providing comment, letters, and other personal reactions to events. They hardly ever appear in news articles; and we can feel uneasy when we see them used there. It was a daring moment indeed when the Sun used Gotcha (‘Got you’) to refer to the sinking of the General Belgrano in the Argentinian conflict, with the loss of many lives.6 For many people, this was taking nonstandard usage too far, for the playful connotations of Gotcha – said, for example, when we have caught someone out in an argument, or discovered someone in a game of hide-and-seek – resonated uncomfortably in a story dealing with matters of life and death (see further, panel 20.1).
20.1 Bible stories
Uncertainty over the role of nonstandard English can also be seen when it is used in domains from which it has traditionally been excluded. Retellings of the Bible are an example (see also p. 489). In God is For Real, Man (1967), by New York prison chaplain Carl Burke, we find Bible stories ‘translated’ into the language of the city streets. Here are the first three of the Ten Commandments:
1. You shall have no other gods before me … Means God’s the leader – nobody, but nobody, man, gets in the way. This is the top. He is Mr. Big, real big.
2. You shall not make for yourself a graven image … This means no making things that look like God in the craftshop at the settlement house. No worship things like rabbits’ foots and lucky dice and, damn it, dolls.
3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain … It means knock off the swearing, or you better watch out.7
In Arnold Kellett’s Ee By Gum, Lord, we find the New Testament turned into broad Yorkshire. Here is the announcement of the birth of Jesus from Saint Luke’s Gospel:
Nah ther’ wor a two-a-thri shepherds ’oo t’ same neet ’appened ter bi aht i’ t’ fields near Bethle’em, sitting rahnd the’r campfire, keepin’ watch ovver the’r sheep. All of a sudden, says Sent Lewk, these ’ere shepherds see t’ sky breeten up wi’ a gloorious blaze o’ leet ’at shines all rahnd ’em. Well, the’r flaid ter deeath! An’ while the’re cahrin’ theeare on t’ grahnd, as weak as watter, an’ all of a dither, t’ Angil o’ t’ Lord says tul ’em: ‘Nay, there’s nowt ter bi affeared on! Ah’ve come ter bring thi some reight cheerful neews …’.
Now there were a two or three shepherds who the same night happened to be out in the fields near Bethlehem, sitting round their campfire, keeping watch over their sheep. All of a sudden, says Saint Luke, these here shepherds see the sky brighten up with a glorious blaze of light that shines all round them. Well, they’re frightened to death! And while they’re cowering on the ground, as weak as water, and all of a dither [tremble], the Angel of the Lord says to them: No, there’s nothing to be frightened about. I’ve come to bring thee some right cheerful news …
Criticism of such experiments is diminishing, with the rise of global English, and the production of biblical texts in international varieties of nonstandard English, such as the various pidgins and creoles of the English-speaking world. Some translations are in fact quite old. Here is a version of the Ten Commandments in Queensland Kanaka Pidgin dating from 1871.
1. Man take one fellow God; no more.
2. Man like him God first time, everything else behind.
3. Man no swear.
4. Man keep Sunday good fellow day belong big fellow master.
5. Man be good fellow longa father mother belonga him.
6. Man no kill.
7. Man no take him Mary belong another fellow man.
8. Man no steal.
9. Man no tell lie bout another fellow man.
10. Spose man see good fellow something belong another fellow man, he no want him all the time.
We ain’t seen nothin’ yet
The book title cited above referred to the future of broadband technology. Its theme was that, however impressed we are at the way Internet technology, in particular, has progressed during the past few years, this is nothing compared with the advances which have still to take place. It is the same with language. However impressed we are at the evolution of regional standards and the re-emergence of nonstandard English over the past century or so, this is nothing compared with the linguistic developments which are about to take place as a result of the new technology. In a way, this should not surprise us. Technological progress affecting the media has always had a significant impact on language variety and language change. But there is something about the Internet which takes us into a new era.
The impact of technology on variety has been evident at every stage in English linguistic history. Printing added a whole new dimension to written language, as is evident from a moment’s reflection on the range of variation in style, graphic design, and typography encountered in books, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, and all kinds of printed ephemera (p. 334). The telephone introduced new techniques of spoken communication, and the telegraph added a distinctive written style (the words telegrammic and telegrammatic entered the language in the 1860s). Radio broadcasting did for the spoken language what print had done for the written, adding a new dimension in the form of talks, announcements, sports commentaries, news broadcasts, weather forecasts, and all the genres which can be found in the pages of any channel guide. The advent of television added yet another dimension: televisual speech varieties are not the same as radio ones, nor is the written language of television (as found, for example, in commercials) the same as that found elsewhere. Most recently, the advent of the mobile phone (or cellphone), with its space-restricted screen, has motivated the development of a further variety based on linguistic abbreviation, in the form of text-messaging.
