Hello, my name is Simon Horobin.

I'm professor of English at the University of Oxford

and in this module, I'm going to address the question: Why study

language change?

And what I want to suggest is that studying how language was used in

the past and how it's changed over time helps to inform debates about usage today.

And to demonstrate that I want to give you an example.

During the summer of 2021

Lord Digby Jones

sent off a tweet,

complaining about the pronunciation of one of the BBC's Olympic Games

reporters,

Alex Scott, and her inability

to pronounce the G's at the ends of words like weightlifting,

kayaking,

running.

Saying that it was distracting

what was otherwise interesting coverage,

Alex Scott defended herself and said that the

pronunciation

of those words was a feature of her accent,

part of her identity as somebody who grew up in a working class family

in East London.

Digby Jones responded again, saying that this wasn't about accent.

It's about elocution

and correctness.

So who's right in this debate?

Well, if we look back to the earlier history of English,

we can see that ideas about correctness came in the 18th century.

We've always had different accents of English,

but before the 18th century

they were not considered to be

somewhat better or worse than another just different.

It was in the 18th century

that the idea of a standard accent emerged,

and it became socially desirable to acquire a particular accent.

Interestingly, during the 18th century,

the variety, which was considered to have greater social prestige,

did not pronounce the G's at the ends of those words.

So

kayakin,

weightliftin,

runnin,

was actually the correct way of pronouncing those words.

What happened is that in the 19th century,

the middle classes became concerned

that that pronunciation was incorrect

because

it didn't correspond to the spelling of the words,

which ended with

the letter G.

And so as a result, the middle class accent began to reinsert that sound.

Into the 20th century,

the pronunciation without the final -G sound,

continued to be prestigious but associated,

particularly with an aristocratic usage known

as upper class received pronunciation.

If you've read any of the novels by Dorothy L. Sayers about her upper class

aristocratic sleuth, Lord Peter Whimsy,

you'll notice that she always represents him

as speaking without that final -G

sound.

But that

upper class received pronunciation began to be replaced

in the 20th century by a mainstream RP that does pronounce that -G,

and as a consequence,

the pronunciation without that sound

was associated specifically with the working classes and became

perceived as being

incorrect and

undesirable.

And that's the situation we see

today.

What that example teaches us, I think,

is that we need to be careful not to place social values

on these distinctions because you can see that they are rather arbitrary,

so an accident can change over time. There's nothing

correct or incorrect about one of these particular pronunciations.

It's simply that they, in linguistic terms, are different. They're alternatives.

They are variables which can be selected

at some particular point in history,

as one being perceived as being correct and the other as incorrect.

It might be tempting to think, as they did in the 19th century,

and this is implied by Lord Digby Jones

that

the spelling indicates that there should be a final -G sound at the end of these words.

But that's to confuse the relationship between spelling and pronunciation.

Spelling is just a way of trying to capture

the diversity of pronunciation in a fixed form.

And, of course, pronunciation has changed over time,

and spelling

hasn't.

So we still spell a word like night N I G H T, even though

the pronunciation that reflects nicked hasn't been heard in England

since about 1500.

And yet we don't call people GH-droppers because they failed to pronounce it.

The spelling has remained fixed, the pronunciation has changed.

And, of course, it's one fixed spelling system

for a whole variety of different accents.

We don't have a different way of representing

the North-South distinction between the pronunciation of the vowel in bath or bath.

One spelling has to fix all, and it doesn't make one pronunciation

more correct than another.

So we need to remember that these different accents of

English are not necessarily better or worse than another.

They are simply different.