From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
British English is the standard dialect of
as spoken and written in the . Variations exist in formal, written English in the United Kingdom. For example, the adjective wee is almost exclusively used in parts of
and , and occasionally , whereas little is predominant elsewhere. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within the United Kingdom, and this could be described by the term British English. The forms of
English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken, so a uniform concept of British English is more difficult to apply to the spoken language. According to Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English, British English shares "all the ambiguities and tensions in the word '' and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity".
When distinguished from , the term "British English" is sometimes used broadly as a synonym for
spoken in some member states of the .
that originated from the
brought to Britain by
from various parts of what is now northwest
and the northern . The resident population at this time was generally speaking —the insular variety of , which was influenced by the
occupation. This group of languages (, , ) cohabited alongside
into the modern period, but due to their remoteness from the , influence on English was . However, the degree of influence remains debated, and it has recently been argued that its grammatical influence accounts for the substantial innovations noted between English and the other West Germanic languages.
Initially,
was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the
Kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, , eventually came to dominate. The original
was then influenced by two waves of invasion: the first was by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who conquered and colonised parts of Britain in the 8th and 9 the second was the
in the 11th century, who spoke
and ultimately developed an English variety of this called . These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it was never a truly
in the stricte mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication).
The more idiomatic, concrete and descriptive English is, the more it is from Anglo-Saxon origins. The more intellectual and abstract English is, the more it contains
influences e.g. swine (like the Germanic schwein) is the animal in the field bred by the occupied Anglo-Saxons and pork (like the French porc) is the animal at the table eaten by the occupying Normans.
Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the
core of E the later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of the European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a
of great flexibility and with a huge .
This article contains
phonetic symbols. Without proper , you may see  instead of
characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see .
Map showing phonological variation within England of the vowel in bath, grass, and dance.
Those in the north generally pronounce such words with a short vowel whereas those in the south use a long vowel
vary amongst the four , as well as within the countries themselves.
The major divisions are normally classified as
(or English as spoken in , which encompasses
dialects and
dialects),
(not to be confused with the ), and
(not to be confused with the ). The various British dialects also differ in the words that they have borrowed from other languages. Around the middle of the 15th century, there were points where within the 5 major dialects there were almost 500 ways to spell the word though.
Following its last major
has started work on a new project. In May 2007 the
awarded a grant to Leeds to study British regional dialects.
The team are sifting through a large collection of examples of regional slang words and phrases turned up by the "Voices project" run by the , in which they invited the public to send in examples of English still spoken throughout the country. The BBC Voices project also collected hundreds of news articles about how the British speak English from swearing through to items on language schools. This information will also be collated and analysed by Johnson's team both for content and for where it was reported. "Perhaps the most remarkable finding in the Voices study is that the English language is as diverse as ever, despite our increased mobility and constant exposure to other accents and dialects through TV and radio". When discussing the award of the grant in 2007, Leeds University stated:
that they were "very pleased"—and indeed, "well chuffed"—at receiving their generous grant. He could, of course, have been "bostin" if he had come from the , or if he was a
he would have been well "made up" over so many spondoolicks, because as a
might say, ?460,000 is a "canny load of chink".
Most people in Britain speak with a regional accent or dialect. However, about 2% of Britons speak with an accent called
(also called as "the Queen's English", "Oxford English"
and " English"), that is essentially region-less. It derives from a mixture of the Midlands and Southern dialects spoken in London in the early modern period. It is frequently used as a model for teaching English to foreign learners.
In the South East there are significant the
accent spoken by some East Londoners is strikingly different from Received Pronunciation (RP). The Cockney
can be (and was initially intended to be) difficult for outsiders to understand, although the extent of its use is often somewhat exaggerated.
has been gaining prominence in recent decades: it has some features of RP and some of Cockney. In London itself, the broad local accent is still changing, partly influenced by Caribbean speech. Immigrants to the UK in recent decades have brought many more languages to the country. Surveys started in 1979 by the
discovered over 100 languages being spoken domestically by the families of the inner city's schoolchildren. As a result,
speak with a mixture of accents, depending on ethnicity, neighbourhood, class, age, upbringing, and sundry other factors.[]
Since the mass internal
in the 1940s and its position between several major accent regions, it has become a source of various accent developments. In Northampton the older accent has been influenced by overspill Londoners. There is an accent known locally as the
accent, which is a transitional accent between the
and . It is the last southern Midlands accent to use the broad "a" in words like bath/grass (i.e. barth/grarss). Conversely crass/plastic use a slender "a". A few miles northwest in Leicestershire the slender "a" becomes more widespread generally. In the town of , five miles (8 km) north, one can find Corbyite, which unlike the Kettering accent, is largely influenced by the West Scottish accent.
In addition, many British people can to some degree temporarily "swing" their accent towards a more neutral form of English at will, to reduce difficulty where very different accents are involved, or when speaking to foreigners.[]
Phonological features characteristic of British English revolve around the pronunciation of the letter R, as well as the dental plosive T and some diphthongs specific to this dialect.
In a number of forms of spoken British English, it is common for the phoneme /t/ to be realised as a
[?] when it is in the intervocalic position, in a process called . Once regarded as a Cockney feature, it has become much more widespread. It is still stigmatised when used in words like later, but becoming very widespread at the end of words such as not (as in no[?] interested). Other consonants subject to this usage in Cockney English are p, as in pa[?]er and k as in ba[?]er.
In most areas of Britain outside , the consonant R is not pronounced if not followed by a vowel, lengthening the preceding vowel instead. This phenomenon is known as .
In these same areas, a tendency exists to insert an R between a word ending in a vowel and a next word beginning with a vowel. This is called the . This could be understood as a merger, in that words that once ended in an R and words that did not are no longer treated differently.
British dialects differ on the extent of diphthongisation of long vowels, with southern varieties extensively turning them into diphthongs, and with northern dialects normally preserving many of them. As a comparison, North American varieties could be said to be in-between.
Long vowels /i:/ and /u:/ are diphthongised to [?i] and [?u] respectively (or, more technically, [??], with a raised tongue), so that ee and oo in feed and food are pronounced with a movement. The diphthong [o?] is also pronounced with a greater movement, normally [??], [??] or [??].
Long vowels /i:/ and /u:/ are usually preserved, and in several areas also /o:/ and /e:/, as in go and say (unlike other varieties of English, that change them to [o?] and [e?] respectively). Some areas go as far as not diphthongising medieval /i:/ and /u:/, that give rise to modern /a?/ and /a?/; that is, for example, in the traditional accent of , 'out' will sound as 'oot', and in parts of
and North-West England, 'my' will be pronounced as 'me'.
A tendency to drop
in s, stronger in British English than in North American English, exists. This is namely treating them, that were once grammatically singular, as grammatically plural, that is: the perceived natural number prevails. This applies especially to nouns of institutions and groups made of many people.
The noun 'police', for example, undergoes this treatment:
Police are investigating the theft of work tools worth ?500 from a van at the Sprucefield park and ride car park in Lisburn.
A football team can be treated likewise:
Arsenal have lost just one of 20 home Premier League matches against Manchester City.
Some dialects of British English use negative concords, also known as . Rather than changing a word or using a positive, words like nobody, not, nothing, and never would be used in the same sentence.
While this does not occur in Standard English, it does occur in non-standard dialects. The double negation follows the idea of two different morphemes, one that causes the double negation, and one that is used for the point or the verb.
As with English around the world, the English language as used in the
is governed by convention rather than formal code: there is no body equivalent to the
or the . Dictionaries (for example, , , , ) record usage rather than attempting to prescribe it. In addition, vocabulary and usage change with time: words are freely borrowed from other languages and other strains of English, and
are frequent.
For historical reasons dating back to the rise of
in the 9th century, the form of language spoken in London and the
became standard English within the Court, and ultimately became the basis for generally accepted use in the law, government, literature and education in Britain. The standardisation of British English is thought to be from both dialect leveling and a thought of social superiority. Speaking in the Standard dialect create those who did not speak the standard English would be considered of a lesser class or social status and often discounted or considered of a low intelligence.
Another contribution to the standardisation of British English was the introduction of the printing press to England in the mid-15th century. In doing so, William Caxton enabled a common language and spelling to be dispersed among the entirety of England at a much faster rate.
(1755) was a large step in the , where the purification of language focused on standardising both speech and spelling. By the early 20th century, British authors had produced numerous books intended as guides to English grammar and usage, a few of which achieved sufficient acclaim to have remained in print for long periods and to have been reissued in new editions after some decades. These include, most notably of all, Fowler's
Detailed guidance on many aspects of writing British English for publication is included in style guides issued by various publishers including
newspaper, the
and the . The Oxford University Press guidelines were originally drafted as a single broadsheet page by Horace Henry Hart, and were at the time (1893) the first guide of their type in E they were gradually expanded and eventually published, first as , and in 2002 as part of The Oxford Manual of Style. Comparable in authority and stature to
for published , the Oxford Manual is a fairly exhaustive standard for published British English that writers can turn to in the absence of specific guidance from their publishing house.
In British English
may be either singular or plural, according to context. An example provided by
is: " 'The committee of public safety is to consider the matter', but 'the committee of public safety quarrel regarding their next chairman' ...Thus...singular when... plural when the idea of plurality is predominant".
style guide follow Partridge but other sources, such as
style guides, recommend a strict noun-verb agreement with the collective noun always governing the verb
in the singular. BBC radio news, however, insists on the plural verb. Partridge, Eric (1947) Usage and Abusage: "Collective Nouns". Allen, John (2003) , page 31.
"British E Hiberno-English". Oxford English Dictionary (2 ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. 1989.
, Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary
applies the term to English as "spoke esp[ecially] the forms of English usual in ", reserving "" for the "English language as spoken and written in ". Others, such as the Cambridge Academic Content Dictionary, define it as the "".
Jeffries, Stuart (27 March 2009). . . section G2, p. 12.
McArthur (2002), p. 45.
, 1955 J. R. R. Tolkien, also see references in
. pandora.cii.wwu.edu.
. www.thehistoryofenglish.com.
[] biography on the
website, 25 May 2007.
McSmith, Andy. Dialect researchers given a "canny load of chink" to sort "pikeys" from "chavs" in regional accents, , 1 June 2007. Page 20
BBC English because this was originally the form of English used on radio and television, although a wider variety of accents can be heard these days.
Sweet, Henry (1908). . Clarendon Press. p. 7.
Fowler, H.W. (1996).
R.W. Birchfield, ed. "Fowler's Modern English Usage". Oxford University Press.
Franklyn, Julian (1975). A dictionary of rhyming slang. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. p. 9.  .
(1984). Language in the British Isles. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. pp. 56–57.  .
website, 02 April 2017.
, , 8 January 2017.
, , 2 April 2017.
. dictionary.cambridge.org.
Tubau, Susagna.
(PDF). The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics. :.
. courses.nus.edu.sg.
. www.ruf.rice.edu.
. 27 March 2014.
McArthur, Tom (2002). Oxford Guide to World English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.   hardback,   paperback.
Bragg, Melvyn (2004). The Adventure of English, London: Sceptre.  
Peters, Pam (2004). The Cambridge Guide to English Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  .
Simpson, John (ed.) (1989). Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
 –  Examples of regional accents and dialects across the UK on the 's 'Sounds Familiar' website
Hear and compare how the same 110 words are pronounced in 50 English accents from around the world – instantaneous playback online
 –  an online dictionary of British slang, viewable alphabetically or by category
by continent
: Hidden categories:Me Too founder Tarana Burke: ‘You have to use your privilege to serve other people’ | Life and style | The Guardian
After Weinstein, Burke’s slogan was adopted overnight by people sharing their experiences of rape and sexual assault. The women’s activist is using her high profile to help the young women she has spent decades fighting for – those who have suffered abuse, and don’t have a voice
Portrait by Ali Smith
Last October – three months and a lifetime ago – Tarana Burke was sitting in bed, scrolling through Twitter, when some unusual activity caught her eye. The 44-year-old had 500 followers and no great taste for social media: her work with survivors of sexual violence, mainly young women of colour, didn’t lend itself to public pronouncement. Twelve years earlier she had set up Me Too, an activist group that she thought, in her wildest dreams, might one day amount to a Me Too bumper sticker on somebody’s car – a kind of bat signal between survivors of sexual violence – but that on most days had no public presence at all. For her kind of work to be done right, she believed, most of it needed to be done in the dark.
What she saw on Twitter therefore made Burke jump out of her skin. Ten days earlier, Harvey Weinstein had been spectacularly exposed by the New York Times as the subject of multiple accusations of sexual assault, and there on screen, carrying the hashtag #MeToo, other women had begun sharing their stories. Burke didn’t know that the actor Alyssa Milano had stumbled on the phrase, unaware of its origins, and urged survivors of sexual aggression to use it. Nor could she know that, in the coming weeks, the Me Too hashtag would be used more than 12 million times, resulting in an extraordinary outpouring of pain, and a handful of high-profile men losing their jobs. All she knew that night was that someone was using her slogan and this wasn’t good. “Social media,” she says, laughing at the understatement, “is not a safe space. I thought: this is going to be a fucking disaster.”
Burke and I are in the offices of , a non-profit organisation in downtown Brooklyn where she is the senior director. “Congratulations Tarana!” reads a homemade poster on her office door, alongside a photocopy of Time magazine’s Person of the Year cover, featuring the “silence breakers” of #MeToo (fruit picker Isabel Pascual, lobbyist Adama Iwu, actor Ashley Judd, software engineer Susan Fowler, Taylor Swift and an anonymous hospital worker are pictured, while Burke was honoured on the inside pages). Burke has just returned from LA after attending the Golden Globes with Michelle W as she talks she is trying to eat a quesadilla from a polystyrene container while keeping an eye on her phone. This is one of the busiest times of year for the organisation, she says. “The world doesn’t realise I have a regular job!”
The idea of attending the Golden Globes was a challenge. “When Michelle called me and said: ‘I would love to take you to the Golden Globes,’ I said: ‘Why? I’m trying very hard not to be the black woman who is trotted out when you all need to validate your work.’” Ouch.
Actors and activists … Meryl Streep, Ai-jen Poo, Natalie Portman, Tarana Burke, Michelle Williams, America Ferrera, Jessica Chastain, Amy Poehler and Saru Jayaraman at the Golden Globes. Photograph: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images
“Well, Michelle is very thoughtful and she said: ‘That’s not what I want to do.’” Instead, the two of them came up with the idea of “flooding the red carpet with women activists – I know some badass women activists from around the country, across the spectrum, all races and classes, different issues – and we wondered what it would look like if we used the time usually allotted to [red-carpet trivia] for our issues.” , a smaller number than they had originally wanted but a signal, she says, of “how women have historically supported each other”.
It is possible that Burke’s use of the term “safe space” has it’s a term that, like “trigger warning”, “micro-aggression” and “rape culture”, has come to act on some people with the force of a hostile ideology – either that or make them glaze over. Last week in Le Monde,
denouncing the #MeToo movement as totalitarian, and
grumbling that it reduced women to the level of “Victorian housewives”. No one used the term snowflake, but that is the implication: that #MeToo is driven by the same people who think books should be banned and pieces of art they don’t like taken down from museums.
Burke, it must be said, is not this person. She is open to criticism. She allows that in a movement so large and fast-moving there are inevitable and considerable shortcomings. “Sexual violence happens on a spectrum so accountability has to happen on a spectrum,” she says. “I don’t think that every single case of sexual harassment has to result in the consequences should vary. But we need a shift in culture so that every single instance of sexual harassment is investigated and dealt with. That’s just basic common sense.”
Burke’s prediction that Me Too, in its latest iteration, would be a disaster was not because innocent men might suffer, or because the difference between assault and harassment might be lost, but because victims of sexual violence might be poorly served by the publicity. For two decades, Burke has done the grinding, unglamorous, financially ruinous work of setting up programmes to help victims of abuse, and that didn’t tend to include sharing their status online. As it turns out, she thinks the de-stigmatising effect of #MeToo represents a greater gain than the anticipated risks, and if she is unmoved by the accusation that we are in the midst of an overcorrection, it is because she has seen what the alternative – doing nothing – looks like.
Burke speaks at a rally in Hollywood, California. Photograph: Chelsea Guglielmino/FilmMagic/Getty
She is also aware of the numbers. At one of the first Me Too workshops Burke ran, for high school-age girls in Tuskegee, Alabama, she asked the girls to fill in a worksheet noting three things they hadn’t known before they came, adding that if they needed help, they should write “Me Too” on the paper. “Doing it that way, it wasn’t like: raise your hand if you want a Me Too sheet!” she says. “We weren’t asking people to out themselves.” At the end of the event, she and her colleague collected the sheets. “I’ll never forget,” says Burke. “There had been 30 or so girls in the room and we expected around five or six Me Toos.” There were 20. “And we looked at these things and said: ‘Oh, shit.’”
The work that grew out of that is almost too subtle for the volatility of the current moment to bear, but it is the basis of what Burke hopes Me T use the hashtag, she says, “but let’s talk about why, and let’s talk about what happens after”. For Burke, that means confidence-building which is to say , establishing the difference between self-esteem and self-worth. “I think a lot of girl-centred programmes are like: ‘We want to build your self-esteem by telling you that you’re beautiful, and asking you to tell yourself you’re beautiful every single day!’ That rang false to me. Because I can tell you that if you live in a world that devalues you, there is nothing to support that message. I want girls to feel worthy just for existing, because for black and brown girls – and actually just for girls – it’s ‘You’re worthy if’; so, if you’re the smartest girl, or if you’re the prettiest girl, or if you run the fastest. There has to be something attached to it to add value to your life and that can become something you become consumed with – ‘I hav I have to be beautiful’. So, for me, it was like, ‘Let me teach you what the world thinks about us, and let me teach you what we’ve seen the world do to girls who look like us. And let me teach you why they’re wrong.’”
There is inherent strength in agency. #MeToo, in a lot of ways, is about agency. It’s not about giving up your agency.
Burke is, of course, not immune to the forces she is teaching the girls to resist, although, as she points out, she is also a single mother of a 20-year-old daughter and has a badass attitude and a lot of life experience. Still, when she logs on to social media and isn’t quick enough to filter the comments, there it is: the thing from which all women are supposed effortlessly to move on, because to do otherwise is to be a Victorian. “Oh, every day,” she says cheerfully, of being attacked by trolls. What do they say? She smiles. “They say: ‘You are too ugly to rape.’”
It is possible that, thanks to #MeToo, some women who might usefully have shrugged off a minor grievance may decide to pursue it. They may – in the language of the times – internalise an idea of themselves as victims. This is the argument running counter to Me Too and it’s one that, rightly I think, Burke laughs out of the room, not least because, even with the huge swell of #MeToo testimony, it is still not exactly cool to out yourself as a victim of sexual violence.
What, I ask, of the argument that there will be collateral damage and some men will be overly punished for minor transgressions? “I hate that,” says Burke. “I don’t want that to be true. I’m sure it will be true, just as there is a small percentage of accusations of sexual assault that are just not true. But I tend to pivot away from that because people tend to blow that up and ma ‘What if she’s lying?!’ OK. But it’s, like, a 3% chance.”
She also won’t have it that sexual violence and sexual harassment are entirely unrelated things. “[People say:] ‘There’s sexual harassment over here and you shouldn’t conflate it with rape,’” she says. “W those are two very different things. But they’re on the same spectrum.
is like the gateway drug. It’s the entry point. ‘Nothing happens, so let’s go a little bit further.’”
Buke and actor Rose McGowan at a women’s convention in Detroit. Photograph: Alamy
The greater threat is that Me Too is an invitation for women to whom nothing serious has happened to assume the status of victims. Burke fairly screams at this. “Of all the critiques – and I’m very open to critiques of this work – that one in particular makes me crazy. Because I think the women who are saying that don’t realise what they are doing. There is inherent strength in agency. And #MeToo, in a lot of ways, is about agency. It’s not about giving up your agency, it’s about claiming it.”
What about the temptation to overstate minor transgressions? “There was a murky time – maybe it still exists – when people would say: ‘Well, this guy one
I don’t know if I can say #MeToo.’ And I’d say to people: ‘I cannot define how you or your body responds to things. I can’t tell you that’s not trauma.’ I’ve seen cases with young people and families where there is a child who has experienced some form of sexual violence and there areis one set of parents who say: ‘That’s just kids experimenting.’ And there are others who say: ‘I’m going to get my kid into therapy, this is traumatic.’ Some of that is based on the response of the child, and I think that happens in general. It’s what you respond to.”
It is also the language in which you choose to respond. “When I first started Me Too, young people had no language to talk about this,” she says. “And that’s something I’ young people have a way to talk about it now. Hearing the words ‘rape culture’ doesn’t seem foreign to them.” You can dislike the t you can find it aggressive, or vague, or wide-reaching, but there is no doubt that to the person drenched in shame, hearing the words “rape culture” communicates at the most basic level: it isn’t your fault.
Burke has been through thi as a child, she was assaulted by some boys in her neighbourhood, and it is one of the things that motivated her to become an activist. “I grew up in, not poverty – that sounds a bit Tiny Tim – but, you know, low-income, working-class family in a housing project in the Bronx. We didn’t have a ton of resources. But my mother was very determined – she had me in all anything she could put me in, she did. And I read a lot when I was young. Those were the things that helped change the trajectory of my life. And the first glimpses of healing, and understanding what had been happening to me as a child, came from the literature that I read. So I had this ‘out’ that I saw the girls I worked with did not have.”
The process of healing is one that she would say is never complete, and part of Burke’s discomfort with the spotlight – “I’m uncomfortable being th I didn’t want to be a figurehead” – is that, she says, “I’m still dealing with my own stuff.” She is squeamish about what she calls, drily, her “15 minutes”, not least because people keep encouraging her to monetise it. “Ever since this went viral, people have been saying: ‘You should sell Me Too T-shirts! How do I get those T-shirts?!’ Everyone has a stream of income idea.” (In fact, there are Me Too T-shirts that Burke has, for years, barely been able to give away. Until recently, every time she wore one out of the house, guys would read the slogan on the front and say flirtatiously: “Oh, me too! Me too!” Then they would see the back, which read something like “end sexual violence now” and Burke would wait, amused, for the terrible silence. “The guys would be like: ‘Er, I’m so sorry.’” She laughs uproariously.)
Anyway, she says, “We don’t sell the T-shirts because they are a gift. A lot of times I hand them out and say: ‘Whenever you’re ready.’”
Between Time magazine and the Golden Globes, Burke’s profile is continuing to grow, and she is determined to rise to the demands. “Inherently, having privilege isn’t bad,” she says, “but it’s how you use it, and you have to use it in service of other people.” For what feels like the first time, the privilege she is referring to is her own, and it is the privilege of an extremely large audience. “Now that I have it, I’m trying to use it responsibly,” she says. “But if it hadn’t come along I would be right here, with my fucking Me Too shirt on, doing workshops and going to rape crisis centres.” She gives a huge laugh. “The work is the work.”
o Tarana Burke will be speaking at the
in Sydney, Australia on 4 March