Last week, I was a judge in an English speaking competition in Minsk, as part of a world-wide competition organised by the English Speaking Union. And then I gave a speech in English at Friendship House (Дом Дружбы).
It was a humbling experience to listen to 12 young people from Belarus speaking English fluently – far better than I can speak Russian. Their range of vocabulary and the sophistication of their sentences were very impressive.
One of the issues I raised with them was speed. I suggested they could be slower, so their audience could keep up. Despite my own advice, I probably spoke too quickly when I gave my speech. That often happens when the adrenalin is pumping, and you get nervous. The excitement of the event forces you to speak faster. But without nerves, you probably won’t perform.
I subsequently did a quick internet search for some advice on speaking. I had told the competitors that I thought Barack Obama spoke at 60 words a minute. In fact, according to my internet search, when he gave his acceptance speech in Chicago immediately after the 2008 Presidential election, President Obama spoke at 90 words a minute. It was slow because he used all the tricks of “pitch, pace and pause” to maximum effect.
While pace may have been a problem for me, I didn’t really notice the pronunciation of the competitors. They had a range of accents and a few words were spoken that didn’t sound right. But none of their performances was affected or undermined by their pronunciation.
There are still marked differences in the accents and pronunciations in the various regions of Britain. A thick Glaswegian accent is still a complete mystery to anyone who lives in southern England. And of course, there are a lot of, differences in grammar, as well as pronunciation, between British English and American English.
I’m not sure whether the lack of a standard pronunciation is a cause or effect of English not being a phonetic language. But pronunciation has changed. Many academics believe that the American pronunciation, especially their elongated vowels, is closer to how English was spoken in Shakespeare’s time, than the English spoken in Britain today.
When Samuel Johnson was working on his great dictionary, he wrote that he hoped to produce a dictionary
“… by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed and its purity preserved”. By the time he finally published it in 1755, he admitted he had failed. In typically florid prose, he wrote: “Those who have been persuaded to think well of my design, require that it should fix our language and put a stop to those alterations which time and chance have hitherto been suffered to make in it without opposition. With this consequence I will confess that I flattered myself for a while; but now begin to fear that I have indulged expectation which neither reason nor experience can justify.”
All languages change over time. Other nations set up academies to establish rules for their language. We, the British, have never bothered.
Before I began writing this blog and reflecting on my own language, I hadn’t realised that we used to have genders for all nouns, just like other Indo-European languages. But at some point between the 11th and 14th centuries, when Old English was merging with the French brought in by the Normans, my forebears dropped gender.
It is as if we opted for having a wider vocabulary, instead of complicated grammar. Or another example of English pragmatism?