LANGUAGE
If I ‘Ax’ a Question, Does That Mean I’m Uneducated?
Or might I instead be a 1000-year-old West Saxon? Or a medieval Spaniard?
“It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”
The author George Bernard Shaw had very strong views on language, and how it is written. And Pygmalion, the work from which that line is quoted, focused above all on how it is spoken, and the huge and unavoidable social implications of how the way we speak opens or shuts doors depending on who we are speaking to.
We all consciously have certain linguistic shibboleths, inherent markers that tell us if our interlocutor is ‘one of us’. Some readers may already have bristled at my writing ‘who we are speaking to’ instead of ‘to whom we are speaking’, and pigeonholed me as ‘clearly not having gone to a proper university’.
Such prissy punctiliousness about the finer — and often indefensibly spurious — points of grammar is thankfully becoming less common among speakers of English, even within the hidebound class structure of Britain. Or more specifically, Southeast England.
Regional or national accent nonetheless still plays a huge part in categorising others, ascribing a certain social…
