Dr. Umar Farooque                           

Madhubani, Bihar, India

Abstract:

‘The Queen’s English’ or ‘The King’s English’ means correct English according to the original British Standard. The English Language originated in England and as such, Standard English stands foe correct English as it has been spoken and written in England. Standard English has its designation changed to the King’s English or the Queen’s English according to the sex of the British Sovereign. If England is governed by a King, the term used to indicate the standard of correct English is the King’s English. If, on the other hand, as in 1889, England is governed by a Queen, the term is used ‘The Queen’s English’.

Key Words:  The King’s English, The Queen’s English, Standard English, Sovereign

Introduction:

As it has been observed in “The Story of English (ed. Robert MC Crum and Robert Mac, New Faber and Faber, London Boston, BBC Books, p. 21), “Throughout the history of English there has been a contest between the forces of standardization and the forces of localization at both the written and the spoken levels”. In the eighteenth century, the first substantial English dictionaries appeared. It was the first significant move towards written standardization. When Queen Victoria was on the throne of England, the idea of ‘The Queen’s English’ was realized. It indicated a spoken standard of Standard English.

Every standard language has its varieties and sub-varieties, dialects and sub-dialects. Despite the influence of television and radio, we can still find a surprising number of regional varieties of spoken English within the United States, Canada and Australia and even within the British Isles. Here, depending on which country we are driving through, a donkey can still in called a moke or a cuddy or a nirrup, or a pronku. In the English Lake District deg, frap, heft, joggle, nope and whang all mean ‘to beat’. While it is true that local idioms are not strong as they were, we probably underrate their resilience and attribute more power to the leveling forces of television and radio than they deserve. The Story of English tells us that a conversation between Dorset Shepherd and an Aberdonian farm-worker can still be a dialogue of the deaf. In the nineteenth century, these regional differences were even more distinctive, but as the industrial towns of Lancashire and the Black Country mushroomed, the country side was deprived of its rural work-force. A steady improvement in literacy helped to disseminate more widely a standard of written English. With the industrial revolution the face of England was changed. The industrial revolution meant roads, canals and, above all, trains; people travelled more, both geographically and socially. We have only read the novels of Charles Dickens to see the truth of George Bernard Shaw’s famous dictum that “it is impossible for an English man to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despite him”. The pressure of class-ambition speeded up the emergence of a standard form of English speech. Writing less than a generation after the beginning of Universal elementary education in England, Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’ Urbervilles, drew an interesting contrast between Tess and her mother. Mrs. Durbeyfield habitually spoke the dialect of her daughter, who passed the Sixth Standard in National School under a London trained mistress, spoke two languages; the dialect at home, more or less; ordinary English abroad and to persons of quality.

R.P. is the abbreviated form of Received Pronunciation. It is a term that entered common currency at the end of the nineteenth century. Received Pronunciation pinpoints attention to a specific accent-the educated accent of London and South-East England. There was nothing wholly new in this. Three centuries before, an Elizabethan writer had described the most desirable form of English, the usual speech of the court, and that of London and shires lying about London within six miles and not much above. But now for the first time, the public and preparatory schools were spreading this preferred English nationwide, so much so that in 1971 the phonetician Daniel Jones christened standard spoken English ‘Public School Pronunciation’ (PSP). This was, however, a label that did not stick.

The emergence of Received Pronunciation (RP) - the outward and visible sign of belonging to the professional middle class-went hand in hand with the rise of an Imperial Civil Service and its educational infrastructure. The Education Act of 1870 not only established the English Public School as the melting-pot of upper and middle class speech and society, but also started a boom in English Preparatory School. Now the children of Country Squires, city nobility, army officers, imperial civil servants, small-town lawyers, doctors, clergymen and suburban dentists could be brought together from the ages of eight to eighteen, drawn from many parts of the country and educated in one confined space, often isolated market-towns like Uppingham, Sherborne, Tonbridge and Worksop. The contrast in the English speech of the educated elite before and after the Education Act is starting. Before 870, many of the most eminent Victorians retained their regional accents throughout their lives. Sir Robert Peel, one of England’s most famous Conservative Prime Ministers, never disguised the Middle speech, Lord Stanley; later fifteenth earl of Derby (Rugby and Cambridge) spoke ‘a sort of Lancashire patios’. His liberal opponent, William Goldstone, spent his childhood in Liverpool and his ‘Lancashire love survived both Eton and Oxford’. This suggests that he was virtually under no social pressure to lose it. Frederick Temple, a headmaster of Rugby School, had a marked provincial accent which his unruly boys loved to mimic as “Bies”, you getting ruddi: this must cease’. But he was not scorned for his speech. Even at Eton, the shrine of English Private education, the Reverened J.L.Joynes, one of the poet Swinburne’s tutors’ is known to have pronounced ‘died’ as ‘doyed’ and to have attacked the ‘oidle’ in his sermons. All these idiosyncrasies were noticed but they were not stigmatized.

By the 1890s, all this had changed. A new generation of post-education Schoolmasters would rebuke the boy who said, ‘loike’ for like. Accent-leveling was not only applied from above, pressure among the schoolboys themselves was a powerful incentive for a new boy to acquire the approved tone. From the 1880s, at Bedford Modern School, local boys with a North Bedfordshire accent ‘were so mercilessly imitated and laughed at that if they had any intelligence they were soon able to speak Standard English’. By the end of the nineteenth century some ambitious parents began to tear the local schools where their children might ‘pick up an accent’. Non-Standard English was now seriously stigmatized as the mark of the under-educated. At Oxford it had become virtually a condition of social acceptance among undergraduates that one should speak the Queen’s English with a specific accent and intonation.

Received Pronunciation (RP) was not confined to the Public School which has a special and wider administrative role to play within Victorian society to provide the British Army and the Imperial Civil Service with a steady now of well spoken recruits. At the height of the empire, R.P was widely recognized throughout the colonies as the Voice of authority. Indeed, it was jealously preserved as such. George Orwell’s Burmese Days contains references to Received Pronunciation. The Burmese butler at the Club shows an unacceptable proficiency, when he says, ‘I find it very difficult to keep the ice cool now’. Strangely enough, for his proficiency, the butler is rebuked by the white sahib. ‘Don’t like that damn you-I find it very difficult! Have you swallowed a dictionary? ‘Please, master, can’t keeping ice cool-that’s how you ought to talk. We shall have to sack this fellow if he gets to talk English too well’. Within privileged parts of the British Empire the officer corps of the Indian Army, for instance-the aspiration towards RP-the educated accent of the elite-became total. As one retired officer in the Indian armed services remarked, our teachers drilled into our minds that the thing to aspire was what is known as the King’s English’. The King’s English or the Queen’s English means purest English undefiled.

The identification of RP with power, education and material success encouraged imitation. At the same time, it stimulated a distinct antipathy and many people resented its implicit snobbery. The speech of army officers, for instance, became the subject of parody, chahnce for ‘chance’, pahchase for ‘purchase’, bahd for ‘bird’. This style of speech has continued to be treated in books like Fraggly Well Spoken, and The Sloane Ranger’s Handbook. The evolution of an identifiable upper middle class standard was matched by the emergence of rural and working-class stereotypes flourishing alongside educated speech both in Britain and throughout the empire. It is clear from the works of a writer like Rudyard Kipling that the phenomenon of the officers speaking RP and the troops speaking English vernacular was widely recognized. In a ballad like ‘Danny Deever’, written by Kipling, the voice of the rank-and file is unmistakable. ‘What are the bugles blown for? Said Files-on-parade ‘To turn you out, to turn you out’, the colour-sergeant said. ‘What makes you look so white, so white? Said ‘Im dreading what I ‘ve got to watch Sergeant said. Like many of Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads, ‘Danny Deever is full of Cockney- ‘allow for ‘hollow’ and for ‘hand’, and ‘a’ for ‘of’, hangin’ for ‘hanging’. George Bernard Shaw in Pygmalion uses the characteristic Cockney speech in the lips of Eliza Doolittle.

Conclusion:

The establishment in Britain in 1922 of the first radio broadcasting service, the BBC, was a milestone for the English language. The British Broadcasting Corporation would have to make rulings about the acceptability of words. An acceptable vocabulary is an essential feature of the Queen’s English or the King’s speech. Should airman be recognized in favour oif aviator? The BBC was also to deal with foreign borrowings. Would the words Zeitgeist, Weltans Chaung and Ubermensch or should the BBC Voice say time-spirit, world out-look and superman? There are such Americans as cocktail, joy-ride, pussy-foot, road-hogs and sneak-thief. The so called Advisory Committee on Spoken English (ACSE) was to arbitrate on the usage and pronunciation of words, English and foreign. Within the British Isles, the spread of RP by the BBC, first on radio, then on television, helped to reinforce what was an already strong connection in many people’s mind between education and ‘Standard English’. This is usually perceived as the pronunciation found in public schools, the universities, the professions, the government and the church. The influence of this association was in its day, enormous, even though RP was spoken by only about three percent of the British population, a tiny fraction of the world English speaking Communities. Standard English is the best kind of English.  Even RP itself has changed. The phoneticians Dr. J.G.wells has demonstrated what he regards as ‘the clear differences between the RP of fifty years ago and the RP of today. This has much to do with fashion. Working-class culture has come to be admired in many ways. People are now a bit embarrassed to be seen imitating upper-class behavior. It has become smart to go down market, and this is reflected of course in their pronunciation.

References:

1. The Queen's English Society. "Cover Page - The Queen's English Society". Retrieved 3 October 2010.
2. The Guardian. Retrieved 4 June 2012.
3. Lewis (June 4, 2012). "Lack of interest spells the end for the Queen's English Society". The Independent. Retrieved July 26, 2012.
4. Queen's English Society: Events Archived July 21, 2012,
5. Quest 111, Summer 2012
6. "Pedants' revolt aims to protect English from the spell of txt spk" The Times, 7 Jun 2010
7. http://www.queens-english-society.org.uk/
8. "We need an Academy of English to save our beautiful language", Gerald Warner. Daily Telegraph Education, 8 June 2010.
9. Carey, Stan (11 June 2010). "The Queen's English Society deplores your impurities". Sentence First, WorfPress.com.
10. Johnson (The Economist): "This Time We Mean It"