Evolving English: One language, many voices

What have I been up to in the near month since my last post?

Well, I pretty much have a new routine now: after work I come home and go to bed till dinner time. My teaching job is pretty exhausting, so luckily I have Wednesdays off to catch up on laundry and emails and errands.

I wanted to talk about my trip to England last month, but instead of recounting where we rode our bikes in Cambridge or which museums we saw in London, I'll just talk about one really neat thing:

The British Library's current exhibit Evolving English. (Looking online it seems to have just closed to make way for the exhibit on Science Fiction starting in May)

I'd been to the British Museum in 2007, but I told my husband we had to go again, and I was so glad we did. In the main entrance hall the official sign indicating the exhibit has the direction "Over yonder" under the title. How great is that that an official sign has 'over yonder'?

The exhibit retraced the origins of the English language and then had a whole part on the various dialects present around the world. Explaining the origins of the language there were of course copies of Beowolf and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and some lyrics. There were headphones available to listen to the texts being read out loud or sung, which was great since illegible scribble on old velum doesn't give you much of a sense of the language. They also had maps of England showing where the Saxons arrived and the Normans and where the language moved.

In the modern language section, there were a number of examples of writing about the English language. There were, for example, cartoons poking fun at Brits 'dropping their H'. I didn't realize that in the 19th century pronouncing the h at the beginning of a word was considered more educated and 'proper'. Poor people aspiring to sound middle class would thus make sure to pronounce all the h's. This is probably why the British pronounce 'herbs' with an h and Americans use the older pronunciation.

There were also really interesting dialect dictionaries on display. From post-war Britain there was an American-British dictionary to help kids understand that cool country where Elvis came from. There was an example of a newspaper from colonial India with words borrowed from local languages. There was also an English-Boer dictionary to understand the South-African dialect.

For some authentic English examples of common phrases, there was a sign with "The riot act has been read" and I think some more, but now I don't remember them! Right by this there was a little display showing somewhat random combinations of words to create funny newspaper headlines. It was something like noun-verb-adjective-noun, with results like 'Policeman jumps funny fence" or "Mother throws hairy bathtub".

The last part of the exhibit was multimedia based, with a map of the British Isles on a touch screen and headphones so you could listen to recordings of people from various locations. I listened to a little audio station with several people talking about language, and there was a man who said that your accent was an integral part of your identity and that his worst fear would be for an generalized global English accent to become the norm.

Then on your way out was probably the coolest thing in the exhibit: telephone booth type stations where you could record your voice for the use of future linguistics researchers. Of course I participated!

You could either explain an expression from your dialect or read aloud Mr. Tickle (or do both). I couldn't think of any expression used in San Diego or California but rarely elsewhere (in fact the New England expression of 'wicked' came to mind), so I chose to read Mr. Tickle. Before reading you had to state where you were from and if there was anything in particular about your accent. I think I only said California and forgot to specify San Diego, but I explained that I've lived in France for several years and have worked with many non-native English speakers so I've evolved into more of a general non specific American accent.

While the exhibit was going on you could record your own voice through the library's website, but that's now closed to new submissions. I do encourage you to browse the recordings though and listen to people from Scotland or Ireland. The accents are just great!