Beyond the “gentry aesthetic”: elites, Received Pronunciation and the dialectological gaze

ABSTRACT

I argue here that sociolinguistic studies of elite accents have largely been trapped in a methodological and theoretical cul-de-sac, isolated from other work in dialectology, blinkered by outdated concepts of elite status, and entangled with ideologies about standard accents. I begin by presenting the hurdles that face scholars of elite accents in English. There have, firstly, been few robust empirical investigations of English elite accents and our understanding of them has not been integrated into theorisations of language variation and change. Secondly, there has been a consistent but problematic “gentry aesthetic” in work on such accents – a concentration on the aristocratic, landed, private school-educated elite. Thirdly, a cycle of ideological linkages between phonetic descriptions of English, elites and accent standards has led to an overpowering dominance of “Received Pronunciation” (RP) in debate about upper-class accents, preventing us from examining the everyday accents of elites independent both of century-old descriptions of RP and of the assumption that elite accents are standard accents. I conclude by outlining what a dialectology of elites might look like, freed from overpowering orientations to RP and the standard, and enabling elite accents to be integrated into sociolinguistic models of language variation.

KEYWORDS:

• Received Pronunciation
• dialectology
• standardisation
• elites
• accents
• sociolinguistics

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski for persuading me to look in an elite direction, and to them and Alexandra Jaffe for very helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

David Britain is Professor of Modern English Linguistics at the University of Bern in Switzerland. His research interests embrace language variation and change, varieties of English, dialect contact and attrition, dialect ideologies, and the dialectology–human geography interface.

Notes

1. Standard accents arise in somewhat different social, historical, and ideological contexts wherever they emerge. I focus here on English in England because of the complex but well-documented tangle, discussed later in the paper, of language standards, elite accents, and phonetic description.

2. My working definition of the elite for the purposes here is the group in society with the highest levels of economic, as well as social and cultural capital.

3. Sociologists, too, recognise that their own discipline has in many ways both focussed on the concerns of the working classes – “the problematic of the proletariat,” in Lockwood’s (1995) words – and failed to scrutinise the make-up of social elites (e.g. Savage 2015; Savage and Williams 2008; Sayer 2014). Savage, Devine et al. (2015, 1022), for example, write that “one struggles to read any sustained studies of the social composition of small elites within sociology even though it is clear that their relative income and wealth has increased dramatically.”

4. Coupland has argued (e.g. 2014) that this vernacularisation of the media should be viewed as an example of sociolinguistic change, change in the social foundations that underpin the relationship between language and society. Vernacularisation, he argues, may well be a sign of “a realignment of ideological values and social norms attaching to so-called ‘standard’ … varieties” (2014, 85). Nevertheless, such a vernacularisation will not lead to a disappearance of social value being attached to accent (Kristiansen and Coupland 2011, 29).

5. See also Duponceau (1818). In a discussion of the pronunciation of the /iu/ diphthong at the start of words such as “usage,” he says that

  I am told that in some of the English provinces, it is pronounced exactly like the French u, and, of course, is there a pure vocal articulation. But according to its most generally received pronunciation, it is more properly a diphthong. (1818, 259)

6. One could argue, however, that these comments demonstrate an expectation that those who do not command an accent such as this – that is the less privileged speakers of non-standard accents – bear the responsibility for understanding the educated elite who do.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation [100015_146240].