Some thoughts on recent trends in standard English in the UK

La bienvenue à Dr. Trista Selous, notre nouvelle collaboratrice invitée. Cet article a été écrit spécialement pour ce blog. Trista, qui a reçu son doctorat de l'Université de Londres, est traductrice agréée par l'UNESCO et membre de l'association des traducteurs du Royaume-Uni. Elle  habite à Londres, où elle a enseigné la langue, la littérature et le cinéma français dans divers établissements de l'éducation tertiaire. Traductrice depuis plus de vingt ans, Trista traduit des livres, des essais et des dialogues de film, fait du sous-titrage et assure l'interprétation pour des cinéastes et acteurs francophones en visite aux festivals londoniens. Auteur de The Other Woman (Yale UP, 1988) sur Marguerite Duras, elle a aussi publié divers articles sur le cinéma et la littérature français. 

 

English is an ocean, with all that implies in terms of great currents, quiet bays, areas of calm and storms. It is uncontrollable and ungraspable, so any attempt to describe the way that it has changed in any given period must inevitably be not only very partial, but highly subjective. What follows is an account of things I have noticed about changes to the English I hear in my everyday life in London. My main sources are friends and family and the BBC’s Radio 4, the serious talk station that represents perhaps the only benchmark we have for the current state of standard British English. The station is aware of this role, as its listeners write in and complain if they think it is propagating linguistic usage that they don’t approve of. As a result, changes don’t make it onto Radio 4 unless they have become entrenched and accepted.

 

So what has been happening to the English used in our house? Let’s start with pronunciation. There have been many changes over the last 30 years to the kinds of sounds British speakers make, but as these are hard to describe, I’ll stick to linguistic stress. We have constant arguments at home between the older and younger generations over where the stress goes in compounds and words of several syllables. My partner and I say ‘ice-cream’, our children insist on ‘ice-cream’. They all argue over whether they are watching ‘Top Gear’ (him) or ‘Top Gear’ (children). For us oldies, stress plays a role in meaning, separating words and indicating which is more important, so that the blanket stressing of the first element causes semantic chaos. But our children’s language operates according to different rules and all the arguments in the world won’t make them hear it our way.

 

Things are also on the move among the prepositions, those jewels of English subtlety over which no one really agrees. As a child I was told off if I said anything other than ‘different from’ and still follow that rule today, but am unoffended when others don’t. More recently though I have been bothered by the adoption by train announcers of ‘arriving to’, rather than ‘arriving at’. To me ‘arriving’ refers to the very specific moment of reaching a destination, but this sense of stopping is undermined by the use of ‘to’, pulling my inner linguistic web out of shape. Still more disturbing and far-reaching are the ‘tips of a flat belly’ I’m regularly offered on the internet, and the ‘instructions of using the smartboard’ provided at the college where I teach, where in both cases I would expect to see ‘for’. That ‘arrive’ should change its meaning is one thing, but the threat of losing for altogether is alarming and I hope that we can hang on to it in our little bay at least.

 

Other changes have affected the use of tenses, particularly those expressing the past. Alongside the present tense systematically used by historians to describe events taking place in previous centuries - apparently afraid no one will be interested unless they can be persuaded it’s all happening at the time of telling - is the perhaps related fading of the present perfect, the compound tense that relates past events to the present. So whereas, in the past, a newsreader might have said ‘Three British soldiers have been killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan’, where the tense indicates this is a new piece of information about a recent event, you are now more likely to hear ‘Three British soldiers were killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan’, where the tense cuts the event loose to float through days, weeks and centuries, leaving the context of the news programme alone to tell you this is something that has happened recently. Both the historians’ present and newsreader’s simple past seem based on a sense that the past and present are separate and different, and both are comparatively new phenomena. Do they reflect changes in a culture of constant upgrading that focuses more on the immediate and the future and gives less importance to the past?  We can speculate endlessly.

 

Another new tense-related phenomenon that seems more superficial and fashion-related is the use of the present continuous with the verb ‘love’ (eg. ‘I’m loving your new dress’), which seems to have been triggered, in the UK at least, by McDonald’s ads. This nightmare for teachers of English as a second language is an interesting case, precisely because it involves an obvious bending of a fundamental rule of English grammar, which native speakers would hear as an obvious foreigner’s mistake in most contexts. My own pet theory that this trendy use of the present continuous was originally triggered by the line ‘She’s a model and she’s looking good’ in a very successful song by the German band Kraftwerk back in the 1980s, which managed to sound cool rather than silly. But the more obvious source is American via the McDonald’s publicity machine. We in the UK have a love-hate relationship with the American language to which we are constantly and unavoidably exposed, enthusiastically adopting some elements while resisting others and blaming it for contamination of our linguistic souls, depending on which Americans we want (not) to sound like.

 

But American English isn’t the only influence. When the Australians started selling us their soap operas and even their pop music in the 1980s, Australian became cool, the language of sun-drenched cousins with no ambitions for world domination by anything other than straight-talking cheerfulness, and Brits rushed to adopt the ‘no worries’ philosophy and rising intonation, among other things replacing American ‘college’ with Australian ‘uni’ overnight.

 

More broadly and less tangibly influential no doubt is the use of English as a global lingua franca by people whose first language is different.. Perhaps this is also a factor in the changing use of prepositions: ‘arriving to’ might have been first uttered by a francophone rail employee; perhaps the ‘tips of a flat belly’ are the work of someone who preferred not to dip into the battery of prepositions English has to offer. Perhaps the news stopped telling us that something ‘has happened’ under the influence of other languages in which they simply ‘happened’.

 

Whatever the case, what is clear is that, like every other language, English will go on changing, and that this will continue to be a source of both joy and profound discomfort to some of its native speakers. The way we speak is part of who we are. Language is the medium we use both to ‘express ourselves’ and to identify and place ourselves in relation to others. But we don’t own it and we can’t control it. We adopt its changes often unawares, or in spite of ourselves, for reasons we can never pin down. The one thing we can be sure of is that, like the ocean, it pays no heed whatsoever to our will.