MODERN English(PRESENT-DAY ENGLISH)

1800 -

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SOCIAL & POLITICAL

History

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This era is marked by revolutions, wars and imperialismThere’s been political revolution that changed the society such as French Revolution and American Revolution and Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution developed the western countries significantly. They become industrialized which resulted the rise of developments in communication, science and technology, academic and linguistic

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World War 1 & World War II caused changes in political, economical, social and cultural aspects.

After WW II, Britain’s strength began to shrink and other nations such as Soviet Union and the United States began to emerge.

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Urbanization, Industrialization and Social Stratification

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• The process of urbanization which resulted from Industrial Revolution and Agricultural Revolution creates social strata

• Migration took place from farming lands to cities

• Population of Britain now concentrated more on science and technology and reside in

• commercial centres

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So, how do these changes affect the development of PDE?

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• The Modern English or Present Day English (PDE) period is another major extension of the lexicon and some minor changes of lexical meaning.

• However, the lexical system of English was very dynamic throughout its history. And it still is a very dynamic system today.

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• Having replaced Latin as the language of learning at the end of the EME period, English became the language to cover all discursive functions, styles, and registers.

• The major changes in the PDE period concern the dialects and sociolinguistics of English.

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• English goes through a phase of social diversification and stratification.

• The boundaries between traditional rural dialects have become less clear cut.

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• Modern English starts with influence in revolutionary philosophy, politic, and social.

• Revolutions, wars and imperialism

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The age of wars

• The First World War• The Second World War• British and United States involvement

overseas expanded politically, economically and culturally.

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Agricultural revolution, industrial revolution and urbanization

• In the modern period, massive transformations took place on the social scale.

• 19th century experienced an agricultural revolution: the agricultural output was increased due to the introduction of fertilizers, the use of modern agricultural machinery, and the draining of marshlands

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• 19th century England experienced massive population movement away from the countryside into the city.

• This resulted in industrial revolution.• Industrialization created new job

opportunities for non-educated rural workers.

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• With the migration of farmers into the cities, London became the heart of the British class-based society.

• Urbanization revolution influenced the linguistic developments of English.

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Technological revolutions

• Technological developments too influenced linguistic developments.

• It increases developments in:1- mobility or transportation technology2- and communication technology.

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• These inventions results social interaction and communication became more diverse and complex.

• Communication has grown global and become independent of distances.

• This affects patterns of linguistic usage and creates tendencies towards uniformity, but also tendencies towards linguistic change

• e.g. the development of e-mail English as a new linguistic genre

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• A further very important development is this context is the massive expansion of the media: radio, television, and the press.

• All of these developments had and still have a major impact on the English language especially on the standardization process.

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The first dictionaries• With the growing awareness of their

national language, the more elitist speakers of English wanted to know about linguistic rules and regulations

• Middle-class climbers, in addition wanted to have pronuciation dictionaries that helped them acquire the correct pronunciation to fulfil their social ambitions.

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• Fixing the lexicon of English and indicating the right pronunciation of English words, dictionaries was an important step towards the codification of the Modern Standard.

• The first dictionaries were Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall (1694) or Nathaniel Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721).

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• The intention of these dictionaries was to fix the language, to provide a standard for the use of words and their spelling.

• From a modern perspective, Johnson provided the best dictionary in case, although it contained some strange, idiosyncratic definitions

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PRESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR

Grammarians began to prescribe the rules of language

Prescriptive grammar

• established rules about what was correct to say and what not.

• These rules prevented the use of split infinitives (to boldly go where no one has gone before), double negations (why doesn‘t nobody never say nothing), or prepositions at the end of sentences (the place where I am going to).

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• prescritive grammar had quite an overt class basis. It was the language of the upper-class, the gentry, that was promoted whereas the language of the 90% majority was condemned as being full of flaws.

• This shows that there was a growing awareness of the socially distinctive varieties of the English language and a clear tendency to re-establish sociolinguistic power relations within English itself.

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Public School English

• before 1870 no superregional pronunciation standard existed for English. Even upper-class people – including the prime ministers (Gladstone and Peel) - could speak in their local dialect without being stigmatised.

• After 1870 things changed. With the education act of 1870, schools were opened for the general public

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• As a consequence, children from different classes were mingled for the first time. The elite reacted to this by re-establishing the linguistic and social differences and power relations in their very own way.

• When the public schools were opened to become accessible to everyone some schools remain elitist such as Eton, Harrow, or Rugby

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• As a reaction to this potential danger, the upper and upper-middle classes started to use the pronunciation of their dialect as a spoken standard for the educational sector.

• Non-standard vernacular uses were stigmatized and became a marker of a lack of education.

• Thus, lower classes started to use this newly established class dialect as well.

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The phonetician Daniel Jones called this educational standard English Public School English. Public school English is the origin of what is nowadays known as RP.

RP - Received Pronunciation

• with the development of public school English become RP

• the use of non-standard pronunciation became a marker of low social status and lack of education by 1890.

• the use of RP quickly spread from the educational context to become a general super-regional spoken standard.

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• With the invention of radio and television the dissemination and authority of RP was further strengthened: the BBC adopted RP as a pronunciation standard.

• They even founded an advisory board that had to decide on the right pronunciation of difficult words and moreover developed pronunciation guidelines for radio and TV speakers. Therefore, RP is also known as BBC English.

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The decline of RP

• For a long time RP was associated with authority, wealth, success, and elitism.

• The prestige of RP went so far as to make it the variety of English spoken in Hollywood films of the 1930s.

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• This negative attitude towards RP was highlighted after 1960 when people started to feel more positive about their regional dialects again.

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• It has been argued that the highly popular Beatles played an important role in this development.

• Speaking Liverpool dialect, the Beatles showed that one could be successful and endearing by using vernacular English.

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• The local conditions in non-central areas of England gradually became better.

• This caused people to feel more self-confident about their local background again.

• On the other hand, RP gradually increased its stigma as snobbish Queen’s English and its prestige therefore dropped considerably.

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• Nowadays less than 3% of English speakers use pure RP as their native dialect.

• While it is still used by the Royals, the Church of England, and in the High Courts and the Parliament, RP has become far less prominent in the media, especially the BBC, where dialects are not banned from the newsrooms any more.

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• The dialect landscape of England was strongly influenced by PDE period.

• Increasing urbanization, mobility, and communication technology caused traditional rural dialects to lose some of their distinct profiles: the dialects have been subject to leveling.

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• The movement of people away from the countryside into the cities has influenced their use of English. Modern linguists distinguish traditional, rural dialects of English from modern & urban dialects.

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Traditional dialects

• According to Peter Trudgill (1990), traditional English dialects are spoken in rural areas of England, usually by older and less educated people such as farmers or fishermen.

• The following map provides an overview of the traditional dialect areas of England and indicates some of the features by which they can be distinguished.

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Modern dialects

• Modern or urban English dialects are spoken in metropolitan areas of England, usually by younger, educated middle- and upper-class speakers. The urban dialects are not as distinct as the rural ones due to dialect levelling.

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Estuary English

• After the decline of RP in the last 50 years, a new super-regional form of English seems to make its way out of the South-Eastern English standardisation zone. The phonetician David Rosewarne has called this upcoming dialect of Estuary English.

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• Estuary English is described as a mixture between RP and Cockney.

• It is spoken in the area of Greater London. • From there, it has started to spread all over

England and is heard being spoken by MPs, business people, or entertainers.

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• The status of Estuary English is still disputed and discussed controversially among linguists.

• The discussions about Estuary English show that English still is a highly dynamic language that is constantly developing.

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• In 500 years from now, the PDE or Mod Eng. period will probably be described as one episode in the long history of English only.

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