Nah, that idea was around in force for English since the 16th century, and probably long before that.
-fh
Well the original ‘correct way’ to speak English was at least partly derived from the Norman conquest when those Saxons who would not fit in with the Norman way of doing things were replaced in pretty short order by Normans who would.
The then French way of speaking then became associated with aristocracy and was desirable for anyone who had ambition.
Accent in British culture has long been a mark of education and of supremacy and as such it has always been fairly exclusive.
For the overwhelming population, especially in a feudal economy where one never rose above a certain position in life, accent was not something they would not have considered.
It is only a fairly recent phenomenon in UK tv that the BBC have used presenters with strong(ish) regional accents, certainly up until around ten years ago anyone who had an accent as a frontperson tended to be pigeonholed into certain roles, the classic has to be Eddie Waring with his very strong Lancashire accent which was both an oblject of gentle amusement and affection but at the same time kept him out of more mainstream ‘serious’ BBC reporting.
For most Britons when they tuned into a BBC broadcast of any sort the accent was nearly always ‘estuary’ English.
Virtually every program was included in that BBC rule and for such a major output of tv media in the UK it would be surprising if it had no influence on the way people speak in the rest of the country.
At the more extreme end of accents the Welsh had to fight long and hard to prevent their entire language simply being swallowed up by English, and one of their strategies for dealing with this was to ensure that tv based media broadcast had a certain percentage of local Welsh programs in that language, they certainly thought that such media had an important role to play in keeping a whole culture alive, let alone an accent.
It is suprising. But it’s also true. Go to your local bookstore and have a look at Language Myths. It’s the easiest thing to find on the topic, and you only need to read one chapter. It lists some sources so you can look at the research that has been done if you’re still not convinced. They specifically discuss the BBC English phenomenon.
Yes, it’s counterintuitive, but a lot of things about language are.
-fh
It looks like I’ll have to nip along to my bookstore and do some reading then.
Apart from the fact that Cornish isn’t Gaelic, it’s an enormous leap to suggest that because there were naval ports in southern England, Navy slang would have originated from Cornish. I mean Portsmouth, for God’s sake. When did anyone speak Cornish in Portsmouth? And I won’t even mention Chatham. I think you may want to back this up with some examples.
Another book discussing the phenomenon is The Story of English. It’s been a lot of years, but I seem to recall them saying that certain island communities in the mid-south US had accents (not grammars or vocabularies) that hearkened back to the earliest settlers.
– Beruang
I’m rather late, but I just found this thread. As regards the Elizabethen accent theory in mass media, I first ran into the idea in “Christy” by Catherine Marshall. This is an account, somewhat fictionalized, of her mother’s work as a missionary in Appalachia c1912. She mentions the idea that the language had remained unchanged for hundreds of years. Keep in mind that this was pre-radio. I particularly remember her talking about the speech rhythms and the way some phrases had a sing-song quality eg, “Tuesday, twas a week ago”. I have also run into the theory while researching folksongs. Many of them were handed down virtually unchanged since the original settlers arrived. I know a number of people made recordings in the early part ot the 1900’s of “Hillbilly” musicians singing traditional songs. As these were also pre- radio, they ought to give a fairly clear idea of the actual regional accent.
hibernicus writes:
> Apart from the fact that Cornish isn’t Gaelic . . .
Actually, it is. There was a Gaelic language called Cornish that died out two or three hundred years ago. It was spoken in Cornwall. On the other hand, a Cornish dialect (i.e., the dialect presently spoken in Cornwall) is just a dialect of English.
Was it really a Gaelic language, or only a Celtic language?
It’s only a Celtic language.
The languages on the Gaelic branch of the Celtic family are Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Manx.
Cornish is on the Brythonic branch, along with Welsh and Breton.
Sorry, you’re right after all. Cornish was a Celtic language, but it was not a Gaelic one.
Wendell, actually, the Bryhonic branch of Celtic languages are related to the Gaelic branch of languages. Just how English is related to German and Dutch.
Afflau i chi, heddiw!
Sqrl
Yes, in fact, I do know what the structure of the Celtic language subfamily is. (Celtic = Brythonic + Gaelic. Brythonic = Welsh + Cornish + Breton. Gaelic = Irish + Manx + Scottish.) It’s just that posting in the middle of the night I momentarily confused Gaelic with Celtic.
There were, however, many other continental (European) Celtic languages and dialects spread all the way across the continent: Celtiberian in Spain, Gaulish in France, Galatian in present-day Turkey, etc. All the “Gall” place and regional names today (also Gallicia, Gaul, etc.) seem to be variants on the same Celtic theme.
Visit Tangier Island in the middle of the Bay, speak to some of the older inhabitants, and you’ll hear a very distinctive accent (I go over for my job a couple of times a year). Its dying out pretty quickly, but there are some traces of it. I don’t know its origin, I’ve always heard it was much like the Cornish accent heard in Britain. The Northern Neck of VA has similar sound related to it.
I’m not convinced Cornish would have been that much of an influence even in Plymouth, Dartmouth or Torbay. By the time of significant West Country emmigration to America and the creation of a permanent Royal Navy, Cornish was already a minority language within Cornwall, being largely confined to the western tip of the county.
This is what this website
http://artalpha.anu.edu.au/web/arc/resources/papers/cornish/cornishresearch.htm
has to say on the subject:
Ladock is over thirty miles from Plymouth.
Some Cornish influence on either English naval slang or American dialects or accents seems perfectly plausible, but I would be careful about overstating such claims.
I read somewhere that “gotten” was the original past tense for “to get”, but somewhere along the line the “ten” has been dropped in British English but not in American.
I have searched but cannot find reference to this (searching for “gotten” tends to come up with a lot of results :o) - so has anyone here got an idea?
I thought that this was a discussion about regional dialects, not about language, and the dialect of the South-West of England certainly extends right the way through Cornwall and up into West Sussex, ie from Landsend past Plymouth, Portsmouth and beyond Bognor Regis and further than that.
Yes one can pick up differances btween say Devon, Cornish and Hamphire accents but to those unfamiliar with the region these sound fairly similar, actually the Bristol accent can sound similar to those who are not too familiar with the area.
Since dialects have tended to become less and less distinct over the last 70 or so years particularly it is fair to say that these would have been even more distinct in the 1500’s.
If you travel to certain islands in the Carribean there are very similar accents to those in the South-West, they may be parallel but separate developements but I would think this unlikely since these were primarily British possessions for sugar plantations.
The British navy bases were there primarily to protect trade(and yes they also were around to protect the Cinque ports and prevent invasion too) which took place in a large part from places in the South-West, some of the earliest colonists left from those ports and they would have been in contact for long periods at sea with South-Western men manning the sailing vessels.