A

common
language
British and
American English
ALBERT H.
MARCKWARDT
RANDOLPH
QUIRK
 A COMMON LANGUAGE
B R I T I S H AND AMERICAN ENGLISH
 Professor Quirk Professor Marchnardl

In May, 1963, at a Conference in Washington on the teaching

of English, agreement was reached between the BBC and the
Voice of America to produce jointly a radio series on the British
and American variants of the language. Professor Randolph
Quirk of University College, London, was chosen to represent
Great Britain and Professor Albert H. Marckwardt of Princeton
University to represent the United States. They met in London
to co ordinate their ideas and again in Princeton and in
Washington, where the dialogues between the two experts were
recorded.
\
 A COMMON LANGUAGE
BRITISH AND AMERICAN ENGLISH
*

Conversations between
ALBERT H. MARCKWARDT
Princeton University
RANDOLPH QUIRK
University College London

FROM THE RADIO S E R I E S

BROADCAST BY
THE BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION
AND
THE VOICE OF AMERICA
The British Broadcasting Corporation

1964
Foreword
 Reprinted by
English Teaching Division
Information Center Service
United States Information Agency
Washington, D.C.
1965
For the past one hundred and fifty years or more, the British and
the Americans have been talking, often in a patriotic manner,
about the rich and apparently numberless differences between
the English of Great Britain and that of the United States.
Indeed, in many other countries where English is spoken or
studied, the notion of a widening gulf between the two varieties
of the language has become generally accepted. As between the
British and the Americans, the issue has never been quite so
serious as it seemed; there has been a measure of mock insult
and exaggerated nationalism. Nevertheless, to native speakers
of English on both sides of the Atlantic and, in much greater
degree, to all those learning English as a second or foreign
language, the differences have quite understandably suggested
one question: which English is 'correct' English?
What a glad and liberating event, therefore, when two scholars
such as Professor Marckwardt and Professor Quirk give us a
rather wider view of the English language. The two varieties of
English, they tell us, have never been so different as people
have imagined, and the dominant tendency, for several decades
now, has clearly been that of convergence and even greater
similarity. The very manner in which these two urbane and
learned men converse suggests to us, quite as much as does the
content of their discourse, that all the talk about differences
has been misleading. It is clear that communication between
Professor Marckwardt and Professor Quirk is complete, and
that their ways of speaking English are mutually acceptable.
Recognizing this central fact, we are still free to enjoy the
diversity that they represent as well as discuss.
The British Broadcasting Corporation and The Voice of
America have jointly produced the Marckwardt-Quirk
conversations as a radio series. We are glad to make the
 Foreword
conversations available in printed form to all those readers,
wherever they may be, who are interested in a greater understanding
of English in the world today.
If only to illustrate how slight are the differences between us,
British spelling is adopted in the contributions of the British Contents
professor, and American spelling in those of the American
professor. Foreword page 5
CHRISTOPHER DILKE ROBERT C. GOODELL 1 Two Languages or One? 9
Head of English by Radio Chief, Radio English-Teaching
and Television Brunch 2 The Areas of Difference 14
The British Broadcasting The Voice of America
3 Areas of Identity 20
Corporation
4 Differences in Vocabulary 26
5 The Common Starting Point 32
6 Looking Back to London 38
7 Political and Linguistic Independence 44
8 America's Coming of Age 50
9 Regional Variations in the British Isles 56
10 Regional Variations in the United States 62
11 Equality of Status 68
12 The Future of English 74
 1
Two Languages or One?

AMERICAN VOICE. The isolation of America from England will

produce, in a course of time, a language in North America, as
different from the future language of England, as the modern
Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the German, or from one
another.
QUIRK. Well, Al, that's what Noah Webster thought of the future of
English. Now granted, in terms of the speed at which languages
change, there's not been a lot of time yet for this to happen. All the
same, it does seem to me that these words of Webster's aren't even
beginning to show signs of proving true, are they? After all, he wrote
them around 1800, and here we are a hundred and sixty-odd years
later, chatting away quite happily.
MARCKWARDT. Of course, Randolph; it's only fair to say, though,
that by 1828 Webster had revised his thinking on this point, when he
said that in all essentials our two nations spoke the same language, and
he added very significantly, I am sure you'll agree, that it was highly
desirable to perpetuate that sameness.
QUIRK. Yes indeed, and this has remained, of course, the aim of all
responsible citizens in our two countries ever since. Yet we have found
-1 have found at any rate -that teachers in many parts of the world are
really worried about these two varieties of English of ours and about
which one they should be teaching. Have you met this?
MARCKWARDT. Oh yes, and it's something I disapprove of. It's
almost as if people were taking seriously that old joke in My Fair Lady
about Americans not having spoken English for years.
QUIRK. Yes, but if you say you're speaking English why do some of
your countrymen deny this and talk about 'the American language'?
That was the title of H. L. Mencken's well-known book, after all.
MARCKWARDT. Well, I don't think they deny it really. Remember
that Mencken gave his book the title The American Language in
9
10 A Common Language Two Languages or One? 11
1919. This was just after the first world war, a time when Americans
were learning, probably for the first time on this massive scale, that
there was variation between the English spoken in Britain and in the
United States. Mencken thought, just like Webster in his early
thinking, that the two varieties were drifting apart but, again like
Webster, he had second thoughts about this by about 1936.
QUIRK. But his title stayed put, you mean. Well, if you don't call
your form of English 'the American language', how do you refer to it
when you want to distinguish it from our variety?
MARCKWARDT. My preference has always been for the term
'American English' and I like to think of it as a 'variety' rather than a
'dialect'. Calling it a 'variety' is useful because, after all, there are
dialects in both of our countries, so to call it a 'dialect' would be
misleading.
QUIRK. And I strongly agree, of course, with this way of putting
things. One thing that's troubled me at times is this term 'Americanism'
- it's something we often speak about in Britain, you know. Is it
considered an offensive or condescending term in the United States?
MARCKWARDT. Oh, not at all. We in America also speak of usages
peculiar to the country as 'Americanisms', and American dictionaries
will label them in this way.
QUIRK. May I ask another question then, Al? When you speak of
'American English', do you include the English of Canada in this as
well as the English of the United States?
MARCKWARDT. The word 'American' is always giving Americans
trouble. You see, it's the only word we have really, to apply to people
and things of the United States, but at the same time it can apply to the
entire continent as well, so that, although there are some differences
between the English of Canada and that of the United States, there
aren't very many of them. And to use the term 'American English' for
both - or really to cover all of the English of North America - seems
entirely satisfactory. Now, let me ask you a similar question. How do
you speak of your variety of English in the United Kingdom?
QUIRK. Well, it doesn't seem to be so easy for us and there's cer-
tainly not so much agreement. We have, after all, lacked the moti-
vation that you've had to seek a special term. The name 'English'
agrees with the most populous part of the British Isles, England. And,
as you know, we didn't become a new nation when you American
colonies split off. And so to many people in Britain the question
simply never arises: our language is called English.
MARCKWARDT. Well, so is ours.
QUIRK. But I'm glad to say that in recent years in Britain, our
perspective has widened as we have become aware of the many
varieties of English that there are in the world. And I think it's be-
coming common now for us to speak of 'British English'. You see, we
have our problems with names as well. This term 'British' poses one,
since it is so often linked with the Commonwealth, and 'British
English' can therefore be taken to mean any of the forms of English
that are spoken in the areas of British political influence. In turn, I
think that problem is sorting itself out as we come increasingly to
speak nowadays of 'Australian English', 'New Zealand English', 'Indian
English' and so on. And this is beginning to leave 'British English'
pretty clearly indicating the English of the British Isles.
MARCKWARDT. Now, what do you use to refer to a word, a pecu-
liarity of British usage? We use 'Americanisms' for ours. Do you say a
thing is a 'Briticism'?
QUIRK. No, that would be rather rare. I think a 'Briticism' or
'Anglicism' might be meaningful enough to a linguist, somebody who
studies English, but to the ordinary Englishman - well, it would just
leave him cold; he wouldn't know what was meant. He might even find
the idea of 'Briticism' slightly offensive.
MARCKWARDT. I can understand that easily enough. But now we
mustn't let all this talk about how we are to refer to our two forms of
English get out of hand. We certainly don't want to give the
impression that there's nothing but differences.
QUIRK. No indeed, especially as everyone else who seems to speak
or write on this subject tends to dwell on the differences only.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, I wonder why this is so. I suppose they are so
slight that to Britons and Americans the only things of interest are the
differences, not the similarities. And, of course, slight or not
differences can be awfully important. Let's just take as an example the
forms of personal address. You and I have known each other for a
dozen years or more and it would be most awkward, most artificial, if
we were to address each other in any way except by our
12 A Common Language
first names. But am I not right in thinking that, broadcasting in Britain,
we wouldn't be doing this; we'd be expected to drop it.
QUIRK. Well, I think that's partly true. Mind you, I think the BBC
would let us have our way and call each other by first names if we
were doing something on variety or vaudeville! But on an educational,
a fairly serious programme, as I take it this is, I think the BBC would
expect us to address each other - well - by surnames alone,
'Marckwardt' and 'Quirk'. How about you in this respect?
MARCKWARDT. In America, I think on the most formal level we'd
address each other as 'Professor'. On a slightly less formal plane we
would say 'Mister', but in both cases, of course, giving the surname.
But just to use surnames alone would lead to a rather false impression
in the United States. It would make us seem rather distant.
QUIRK. I am not surprised about that, because in the United
Kingdom, too, this use of bare surnames can be very easily and quite
widely misunderstood. And I think it's chiefly in London and the South
that the use of surnames can be practised politely and informally. So
there is by no means, you see, a clear distinction between British and
American usage in this respect. Usage in the two areas overlaps. A
slighter difference, but one that often puzzles people, crops up with the
way Americans use the word 'trade'. I've certainly felt momentary
surprise on hearing an American friend say he trades at some store or
other. To us this sounds rather as though he's selling things to them
rather than buying. At any rate, it sounds as if he is carrying on more
than just wandering around from counter to counter buying things. It
almost sounds as if he is negotiating with them.
MARCKWARDT. This is exactly how we came to use the word in this
way. After all, right through the nineteenth century, America was still
a frontier country. There was always a portion of it that hadn't been
completely opened up. There was always a portion without banks,
probably without even the most rudimentary commercial
establishments - 'shops', as you would call them. And often the only
way to do business in these places was for the storekeeper to accept
what his customer had to offer, what his customer may have grown or
hunted or made, and then to give him in return an agreed amount of
whatever merchandise the customer was interested in having. So, you
see, 'to trade' came to mean exactly the
Two Languages or One?
13
same thing as 'to shop', because that's the way you paid for it.
QUIRK. Yes. Well, as you know, what is called 'the trade' in Britain
is quite sharply distinguished from the ordinary buying public.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, I do, and again that's one reason why the
British expression that one sees on wholesale stores tends to puzzle
Americans: 'Sold only to the Trade.'
QUIRK. Yes, well you know what it means, don't you? It means that
this establishment only sells to other shopkeepers. It means the same in
fact as you do with your sign, 'Wholesale Only', which is an expression
that we also use in the United Kingdom, of course.
MARCKWARDT. Just recently I saw in a British classified advertise-
ment a section of the jobs vacant that was labeled 'Shop and Store
Staff'.
QUIRK. Well, what's so odd about that? You have got both shops and
stores in America too, haven't you?
MARCKWARDT Yes, but the terms are very differently distributed
among us. You see, broadly speaking, our 'store' is what you call a
'shop'. In America a merchant will call his store a shop if he wants to
give it an air of elegance. But, in general, we can't - as you do -use the
word 'store' of a place where goods are simply stored and not sold. But
you see, here again, there's a great deal of overlap between our usage.
QUIRK. I think it's important to stress that although we in Britain are
very quickly adopting the American use of 'store' in the sense of 'shop',
we are not at the same time dropping this older use that we had in
Britain of 'store' for a place where things are stored without retail
selling going on. Incidentally, what about the other senses of the word
'shop'? You know, we in Britain can use the word for a place where
things are made - machine shop; workshop; the shop floor of a factory;
and, of course, we speak also of shop stewards.
MARCKWARDT. Oh yes, we have all these uses of 'shop' exactly as
you do. But there's one thing we ought to mention again before
stopping: this important matter of overlap between our usage and not a
simple division.
QUIRK. Exactly.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, well, next time we'll get down to details in
considering how far our varieties agree and how far they differ.
The Areas of Difference 15
 2 point is that, here again, we share the irregularities on both sides of the
The Areas of Difference
MARCKWARDT. As we talked last time, Randolph, even about some
of the slight differences between our two varieties of the English
language, the striking thing, of course, was that we have no difficulty
in understanding each other, though you are British born and educated,
and my background is purely American.
QUIRK. Yes, that is very striking, and I hope that this time we can try
and understand what there is about this English language of ours
which makes it possible for the two of us - having grown up, what,
four thousand miles apart?
MARCKWARDT. I suppose so.
QUIRK. —to be able to communicate so easily.
MARCKWARDT. Well, we might begin by recognizing that a lan-
guage consists of sounds, words, inflectional forms and the arrange-
ment of words into phrases and sentence patterns.
QUIRK. Let's begin with one of these: the inflectional forms or, as
we sometimes say, the morphology of English. Surely, in this respect,
British and American English have not diverged very much, have
they?
MARCKWARDT. No, not at all. Literally thousands of nouns form
their plurals in the regular fashion in the manner of cat - cats; dog
-dogs; church - churches. And this is the same on both sides of the
Atlantic. And even the few score nouns which behave irregularly, such
as knife - knives; tooth - teeth; sheep - sheep, have the same form in
San Francisco that they do in Nottingham - or in Melbourne, Australia,
for that matter. And wouldn't you say the same thing for the verbs?
QUIRK. Yes, I think I would. Here again the regular forms are so
overwhelming in number, aren't they? You know: J love, he loves, they
loved, they have loved; I wait, he waits, they waited, they have waited.
Compared with these, there's only about a hundred and twenty or so
which are irregular verbs like can and could. And the
14
Atlantic.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, I've got your point.
QUIRK. Got? I thought Americans always said 'gotten' when they
used the verbg^ as a full verb. But you did say 'I'vegot your point,'
didn't you?
MARCKWARDT. Yes, I did. You know, it's a common English belief -
almost a superstition - about American usage, but it does turn out on
examination, as many other things do, that we are closer together than
appears on the surface.
QUIRK. I see.
MARCKWARDT. Actually, we Americans use gotten only when our
meaning is 'to acquire' or 'to obtain'. 'We've gotten a new car since you
were here last.' Now, when we use get to mean 'possess' or 'to be
obliged to', we have exactly the same forms that you do. 'I've got a pen
in my pocket.' 'I've got to write a letter.'
QUIRK. Well, would you say, then, that for the rest of the verbs, our
two forms of the language are pretty well identical?
MARCKWARDT. Well, that depends on what you mean by identity. I
can think, for example, of two instances where our spellings are alike
but the pronunciation is different. For example, both of us spell the
past tense of the verb to shine as s-h-o-n-e, but I pronounce it [ʃoun].
QUIRK. Yes, and I pronounce it [ʃon]. And I suppose that the other
verb you've got in mind here is the verb to eat, where the past tense is
spelt in both forms of English a-t-e. But I pronounce this as [ɛt], as do
most of us in Britain, and I think that we would tend to regard the
pronunciation [eit] as a relatively uneducated one, as though people
learnt the word from seeing it spelt. But isn't it true that the usual
educated form in the United States is this form [eit] and that you'd
regard [ɛt] as a bit odd?
MARCKWARDT. More than a bit odd, I would say. Actually, to us,
[ɛt] seems rustic, countrified, even uneducated. That is, our reaction is
very much like yours, but in reverse.
QUIRK. Well, I would have thought that is just about all we have to
say about morphology, isn't it?
MARCKWARDT. Well, let's not forget the verb dive, where the past
tense form dove is certainly regarded as an Americanism. But again
dove is by no means the only possible form in the United States. In
16 A Common Language The Areas of Difference

17
 fact, I think dived occurs just as often, if not more often. But I agree
we've covered the inflectional situation very well. Now, let's give a
little thought perhaps to the order of words in phrases and in sentences,
because after all, it is through word order, rather than inflectional
forms, that so much of our meaning today is conveyed in the English
language.
QUIRK. Yes, and doesn't this answer the question that you put a few
minutes ago - why we have so little difficulty in understanding each
other?
MARCKWARDT. I suppose it does.
QUIRK. Over the past few weeks, you know, you and I have been
sitting down together, writing hundreds of sentences together, and
talking to each other, speaking phrases and sentences by the thousand.
Yet, it's almost impossible to think of any places where -provided we
were trying to say the same thing, convey the same meaning - you and
I would have arranged the principal sentence elements in any different
way.
MARCKWARDT. You're right of course, Randolph. The entire
English-speaking world puts the subject before the verb and the object
after it in making a statement.
QUIRK. Yes, and puts the active verb or auxiliary before the subject
when asking a question - if you compare 'John is writing a letter' with
'Is John writing a letter?'
MARCKWARDT. Yes, and furthermore, we generally put most of our
adjectives before the nouns that they modify. And in the very few
exceptional cases where the modifying word or phrase comes after the
noun, it does so in both Britain and America - that is, we both use
editor-in-chief.
QUIRK. Yes, without any question at all, I think word order is pretty
well the same, no matter where English is spoken. And I can't for the
moment think of any real differences.
MARCKWARDT. Well, I can think of one. What occurs to me is a
sentence like this, 'My books, let me show them you.' I've seen this in
writing by an English author and I doubt that any American would put
what we call the direct object pronoun them before the indirect object
you.
QUIRK. Well, I don't think it is very common with us either, but it is
interesting that you should be aware of this in reading it and not I. This
I think would be reasonably natural for me, but of
course I could also say 'Let me show you them.' Is that what you
would use?
MARCKWARDT. Either that, which sounds normal enough, or
possibly, 'Let me show them to you.' But I think this is so typical that,
although here there is a slight possibility of difference, there is also a
much greater area of potential overlapping. Yet, we may be in danger
of being so much aware of the differences that we fail to give due
recognition to the greater amount of similarity, even identity.
QUIRK. Yes, this business of overlap happens with our expressions
of time, too, doesn't it? The American expression 'five of eight' or 'five
after eight' always catches our attention in Britain immediately,
because, of course, we don't happen to use either one of them.
MARCKWARDT. And we don't notice anything odd about your
saying, 'It's five to eight' or 'It's five past eight,' because we can use
these too. But do you realize that while we both say 'It's nearly' or 'It's
almost eight o'clock,' or even 'It's getting on toward eight o'clock' - we
find it very odd to hear an Englishman say 'It's getting on for eight
o'clock.'
QUIRK. Well now, I don't think that I ever realized that this last one
was purely British. All the same, none of these grammatical dif-
ferences add up to very much, do they? Let's talk awhile now about
pronunciation, because I think that here things may be a little bit more
difficult, because there is such a wide range of variation -isn't there? -
within each of our areas. Take the difference which is probably best
known: the sounding or not sounding of r after vowels. Words like
bird and hurt. It's not just a matter of saying that Americans sound the
r's - [bə:rd] and [hə:rt] - and that Britishers don't. After all, as you
know, in Scotland, Lancashire, Ireland, and the whole of the Western
counties of England really, these r's are pronounced more or less as
they are with you.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, and in the United States, on the other hand, you
will find a rather large area in Eastern New England, almost all of the
area around metropolitan New York, and various parts of the coastal
South, where Americans don't sound the r's. And it is equally difficult
to generalize, I think, about the differences in our pronunciation of
words like [dæ:ns] dance.
QUIRK. Which we pronounce as [dɑ:ns].
MARCKWARDT. Because, after all, in the United States we do vary
R—B
18 A Common Language The Areas of Difference

19
a good deal. Eastern New England does have the [dɑ:ns] type of vocabulary are often very misleading. Usually we're given lists of
pronunciation, but in parts of it there's what we sometimes call the words where the two areas are supposed to differ absolutely and
compromise vowel - that is, a vowel that's halfway between [æ:] and certainly this is far from the truth as we frequently find it. We get pairs
[ɑ:]. It's the kind of thing you would hear in Boston, perhaps, in 'park like mail and post, sick and ill, sidewalk and pavement. Now these are
your car' or 'going to Harvard.' not just American and British respectively without any qualification.
QUIRK. That sounds good. As you know, the United Kingdom QUIRK. No, indeed; they make it sound as if we in Britain and
doesn't have this pronunciation [dams] at all widely. It occurs among America speak utterly different languages, when again the important
educated speakers of course and occurs in the South and in London, thing is that there is a very great deal of overlap. We don't want to go
but in the Northern counties of England people have a short 'a' and say on record as showing that these two varieties of the language are
the word rather like [dɑns] or [dans]. Not unlike yours. And in the mutually incomprehensible, do we?
south-west of Britain they drawl the vowel and say something like MARCKWARDT. Certainly we don't. Everything that we've talked
[da:ns]. Both of them are pretty far from the [ɑ:] vowel which many about today has shown the degree to which they are not incom-
people identify as typically British. prehensible but inter-comprehensible, understandable between
MARCKWARDT. Well, in addition to this matter of the region in peoples, understandable between national boundaries. Next time we
which these variant pronunciations occur, there is another con- ought to talk about how this works out in the vocabulary.
sideration as well. There are, I think, about six hundred commonly
used words in English which all go back to an [æ] pronunciation in
Shakespeare's time. Now of these six hundred there are only about one
hundred and fifty words like dance where today we do find the
variation between [æ:] and [ɑ:] that we have been talking about. In the
other four hundred and fifty, that is to say three quarters of the total,
[æ] is common to both England and America. We both say cap [kæp];
we both say sand [sænd], bat [bæt], bad [bæd] and so on.
QUIRK. I think this is a terribly important point and a further reason
why we should insist on people not exaggerating the differences
between British and American English. After all, we have been
considering the inflectional endings on words and found that, except
for a very few instances, our practices are much the same. And then
we talked about grammar - word order - and found even more
uniformity, if anything. And now, to my surprise indeed, in the case of
pronunciation we have seen that, although there is some variation, it's
by no means a straight simple line of distinction that runs down the
middle of the Atlantic, so to say, separating America from Britain. I
suppose now it's time we turned to that one last area where differences
can occur; you know — vocabulary.
MARCKWARDT. Well, that's a large subject and I think we shall have
to talk about that some other time. I'll say only at the present that most
of the examples that people trot out when they talk about
Areas of Identity 21
 3 for certain in what country of the English-speaking world it was
Areas of Identity
QUIRK. Well, this time, Al, I suggest we develop still further what
we were saying last time about the broad basis of identity that exists
between our two varieties of English. Let's see, for instance, how this
identity works out in practice in some of the great fields in which our
two peoples intercommunicate pretty freely. And let's pay at the same
time particular attention to samenesses in vocabulary, because after all,
what we said last time was chiefly about inflections and grammar and
pronunciation.
MARCKWARDT. Right, and let me begin by saying that the new
edition - the 1961 edition - of Webster's (New International) Dictionary
makes a point of what it calls the International Vocabulary of Science.
And it's very striking to see how many words in the dictionary have
these letters I.V.S. after them. It makes us realize very clearly how vast
a vocabulary is held in common by all the members of the English-
speaking world. And consequently, it's usually quite impossible to look
at a piece, say, of scientific writing, and be able to say whether it
originated in America or Britain or, of course, somewhere else, such as
Australia. It's a highly important fact, that in every scientific field,
every worker is in close communication with every other worker. It
doesn't make a bit of difference if he's in Utah, or Yorkshire. Let's take
the following example:
VOICE. The psittacosis group of organisms, including the agents
of trachoma and lymphogranuloma venereum are obligate inter-
cellular parasites. The infectious particles or elementary bodies
measure about 0-3fx in diameter. They are commonly described
as viruses, though such classification is not easily reconciled with
available evidence on their chemical composition and biological
properties.
QUIRK. Well, I for one didn't understand much of that.
MARCKWARDT. I'm innocent, too. But anyway, I defy you to say
written.
QUIRK. I won't attempt it. But, of course, it's fairly easy to see why
we should have identity - or at any rate near identity - in such scientific
language, because, as you say, scientific research so much and so
obviously depends on scientists keeping in close touch with each other
across frontiers.
MARCKWARDT. Yes.
QUIRK. It's quite unlike the situation that we sometimes find in
industry and commerce, where it matters that specialists should work
away on their own, independently, in secret. What seems to me far
more significant is that there are areas of common discourse which
extend way out from these special fields into the fields of general
interest: the humanities, for instance; subjects like criticism, art,
theology, philosophy.
MARCKWARDT. True. Though here again it's worth noting that the
subjects you mention are the very ones that concern the interest of the
most highly educated, the most cultivated people.
QUIRK. Yes, and I think we really ought to stress the importance that
this most educated section of our communities has in keeping open the
channels of communication, as it were. The degree to which we have a
common language is in no small measure, it seems to me, due to the
speaking and writing of these leading citizens in the two communities -
the people who most feel the need to keep in touch across national
boundaries.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, and certainly, Randolph, in such fields of
general interest as music and art, there is wide agreement in the
language used. And in this respect we must remember the most
important fact is that we share a common literary tradition. Writers and
reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic have always felt especially
keenly the need to read the work from the other side.
QUIRK. True, and it's no doubt significant that, for all these subjects
which as we say have a common language, there is this well
established, firmly moulded, written medium of expression. Let's listen
to a couple of passages of writing that have appeared in recent issues
of journals in our two countries. This first one is about a new public
building:
BRITISH VOICE. Not surprisingly, the glass wall has found its way
20
22 A Common Language Areas of Identity 23
 into institutions as well as houses. A whole sub-language of
architecture has grown up devoted to producing permanent
awnings - horizontal or vertical baffles shading the glass - to
allow glass to take its omnivorous course. The momentous dis-
covery that the way to cut down on overexposure caused by glass
is to cut down on glass may be just around the corner. The art
museum too has been afflicted by glass walls. The reasoning
there seems to be that art museums are part of the general
'advance' section of culture and glass is definitely advance, there-
fore glass is the only truly fitting substance. Ignored has been the
simple truth that the backs of most pictures are not particularly
inspiring to look at. The glass-walled museum has brought the
free-standing, movable partition into its own and forced the
development of a whole rhetoric of flexibility.
MARCKWARDT. Very good. Now here's a second passage, this time a
comment on a symphony concert.
AMERICAN VOICE. Now it is one of the' factors of Tchaikovsky's
greatness that, resisting the pull of his character and environ-
ment, he never fell into that trap: his emotion, though many-
layered, is beautifully concise, and on the rare occasions when it
is vapid, it is openly so. The style and ground plan of Rach-
maninov's symphony derived almost exclusively from Tchai-
kovsky - nothing wrong in that - but it is by his lack of emotional
honesty that the young Rachmaninov stands condemned. In a
way, the symphony is not immature enough. Instead of avowing
a whole-hearted youthful allegiance, Rachmaninov raids the gems
of Tchaikovsky's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies but changes their
settings so that they shouldn't look like loot. Underneath the
trappings, there is a dry, academic habit of mind, of which the
composer is half-conscious and wholly ashamed; even in his
maturer works, Rachmaninov neither lost his aridity nor the fear
of confessing to it. His reputedly 'academic' contemporary,
Glazunov, a man of comparable creative gifts, never suffered from
this mortification. On occasion, as in the Seventh Symphony, he
can smile at his academic streak, and becomes eo ipso the greater
composer.
QUIRK. Well, I wonder how many listeners were misled there by the
voices reading these passages: misled, I mean, into thinking that the
one read by an American was written by an American and
vice versa. Certainly, I think you'll agree, Al, that there wasn't much,
apart from the voices, for listeners to go on. For my own part, I'd
accept the news quite happily that both of them were written in
America or both of them in Britain or, in fact, both in Australia.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, and notice that this was true whether the
language was being very precise and rich, for example: 'the
development of a whole rhetoric of flexibility' in the first passage, or
'avowing a whole-hearted youthful allegiance' in the second; or
whether the language was being light-hearted and colloquial, for
example: 'may be just around the corner' in the first passage, and
'nothing wrong in that' in the second.
QUIRK. Quite. Or when the language was witty and sophisticated and
amusing. This, you'll agree, is at least as remarkable as the other
features that we've been mentioning because the language of wit is
surely the hardest one to get across frontiers, isn't it? MARCKWARDT.
Yes.
QUIRK. I'm thinking of the whimsical sort of understatement about
'the backs of pictures being not very inspiring to look at'. This is
something which, it seems to me, very much belongs to what we
sometimes call the Anglo-Saxon peoples, the British and Americans.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, it's common to both sides of the Atlantic to share
this taste for dry understatement. We both tend to say 'not too bad'
when we mean 'very good indeed'. QUIRK. Yes.
MARCKWARDT. And yet the fact is we really cheated a bit here in
having the American read what was, in fact, a British piece of writing
from the London periodical The New Statesman, and having an
English voice read the American passage which we took from the
American periodical The New Republic.
QUIRK. Yes. Well, I don't want to go back on what I said a moment
ago about the two passages not betraying their origin, but I wonder if
we might think again - now that we know their origin - just to see if
there are British or American features that we didn't notice before.
MARCKWARDT. All right, provided it remains clear that we would
never even have thought of doing this, if we hadn't been told that
24 A Common Language Areas of Identity 25
one was British and the other American. Primarily, they're both just calls it 'an art museum*. By this he means, of course, a place where
English. pictures are hung on view to the public and this would be understood
QUIRK. Agreed. But now that you know the second passage was perfectly well wherever English is spoken. But 'art museum' is not an
British, Al, let me just ask you if there was anything that might have expression that a British writer, I think, would be likely to use. He'd be
helped you to spot its origin? more likely to put 'art gallery'. After all, this is the usual expression in
MARCKWARDT. Well, there was, in fact, one thing. You remember Britain, isn't it, as you know from things like the Tate Gallery, the
toward the end there was that racy little bit about loot: 'Rach-maninov National Gallery, and so on.
raids Tchaikovsky but changes things so that they shouldn't look like MARCKWARDT. Here's another case of overlap. We in America, too,
loot.' are quite likely to use the expression 'art gallery' when we're talking
QUIRK. Yes. about them in general, but certainly many of our most famous art
MARCKWARDT. I don't think an American writer would have used galleries are called 'museums'. There's the Metropolitan Museum, the
shouldn't here. He would have either put the whole thing into the past Museum of Modern Art (both of these in New York), the Chicago Art
and said, 'Rachmaninov changed things so that they wouldn't look like Museum, the Fogg Museum in Boston, and so on.
loot' (that is, using wouldn't instead of shouldn't), or he would have QUIRK. Well, so much for these areas of discourse in which there
used the present and substituted won't for shouldn't 'Rachmaninov seems to be the greatest and easiest inter-communication. I think next
changes things so they won't look like loot.' time we ought to look a bit more closely at some of the areas in which
QUIRK. Yes, and if I too can use a bit of hindsight, there are a couple there is more divergence between British and American English.
of things about the first passage that might have helped me guess it
was American. Do you remember the sentence with that unusual word
order - it was something like, 'Ignored has been the simple truth . ..'?
MARCKWARDT. Yes.
QUIRK. Well, now, of course, there are plenty of British writers -
especially in the popular daily press - who like to use this kind of
inversion, but I don't think that the stylistic trick is as popular with us
as it is with you.
MARCKWARDT. No, I'm sure it isn't.
QUIRK. Perhaps we should add on this point that this kind of
inversion is uncommon, isn't it, in the spoken English both of
Americans and of British people. It's something that's almost entirely a
written device and then chiefly confined to journalistic style.
MARCKWARDT. We can go further than this, I think, and say it is
particularly characteristic of a style associated with the American
magazine Time. And I think probably that it's from this journal that
other writers have copied it.
QUIRK. Yes, I wouldn't be surprised. Well, there's one other point
about the American passage that would perhaps be a better identifier.
The writer is discussing a new public building and he

4 footwear. We got caribou and prairie from the early French settlers.
Differences in Vocabulary
QUIRK. In our last programme, Al, we talked a good deal about the
areas of what were nearly identical features of the language of Britain
and America and I think that this time we ought to give some attention
to those parts of the language where the differences in vocabulary are
much more noticeable.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, we should. I often describe these as falling into
four classes. First, there are what we might call the 'realia' -the real
things - the actual things we refer to in the two varieties of the
language. For example, the flora and the fauna - that is to say the
plants and the animals - of England and of the United States are by no
means the same, nor is the landscape, the topography.
QUIRK. All this must have created a big problem for those early
settlers, mustn't it?
MARCKWARDT. It surely did. From the very moment they set foot on
American soil, they had to supply names for these new species of
plants and animals, the new features of the landscape that they
encountered. At times they made up new words such as mockingbird,
rattlesnake, and eggplant. And then occasionally they used perfectly
familiar terms but to refer to different things. In the United States, for
example, the robin is a rather large bird, a type of thrush.
QUIRK. Yes, whereas with us it's a tiny little red-breasted bird.
MARCKWARDT. And a warbler, isn't it?
QUIRK. Yes.
MARCKWARDT. It sings. Corn is what you call 'maize'. We never use
it for grain in general, or for wheat in particular.
QUIRK. Or oats. Well, wouldn't foreign borrowings also be im-
portant in a situation like this?
MARCKWARDT. Oh, they were indeed. A good many words, for
example, were adopted from the American Indian languages -hickory,
a kind of tree; squash, a vegetable; moccasin, a kind of
26
Differences in Vocabulary 27
The Spanish gave us canyon and bronco.
QUIRK. Well, that's a good selection of the names for objects -these
realia. But what was your second category of words?
MARCKWARDT. There are also different names for different ways of
doing things, different ways of manipulating materials. These are
terms that apply to skills, to crafts. Food and cooking are very
important here. For example, I am sure that you would have called the
steak that I had at your home a few months ago 'grilled'. I would speak
of it as 'broiled'. And this applies to many other fields as well.
QUIRK. Yes, I see. Well, I take it that the third of your four classes
of words might be those that you coined to refer to different
institutions.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, indeed.
QUIRK. We all know your social and political institutions are very
different from ours. Where we have words like parliament, you have
words like congress and senate. And you have this notion of a
primary, which always puzzles me.
MARCKWARDT. Oh, a primary election is really a preliminary one.
It's an election by means of which the political parties now nominate
their candidates to run for office. And then there is the regular election
later on. Now, this used to be done, particularly in small areas, by
means of what we call the caucus, and caucuses have pretty much
been given up.
QUIRK. And then in the legal profession the work that with you is
done by lawyers is with us split up between two professions .really,
the solicitors at one end and the barristers at the other end.
MARCKWARDT. Oh yes, there is a historical reason for this, you
know, in that it was the solicitor, I think, that operated in equity where
the barrister operated in common law. And this was greatly changed as
soon as our whole judicial system, our system of judges and law, was
organized.
QUIRK. Yes, and then there's the terminology of sports; many
baseball terms, as you will know, are as unfamiliar to us as cricket
terms are with you.
MARCKWARDT. Yes.
QUIRK. But some of them, some of these terms from both our
sports, get across the Atlantic in both directions, don't they? For
example, there's your expression, 'getting to first base'.
28 A Common Language Differences in Vocabulary 29
 MARCKWARDT. Yes, and notice that this has had an extension of
meaning as well. 'First base', after all, is the first of the four bases that
a runner tries to get around when he makes a hit. But now when we
say, 'He isn't able to get to first base,' we mean that he can't even begin
to succeed, he can't even get the rudiments of the subject.
QUIRK. Yes, quite.
MARCKWARDT. Tell me about a sticky wicket.
QUIRK. Well, in cricket a 'sticky wicket' is a condition of the pitch
which makes it very difficult to bowl, and very difficult for the
batsman to hit the ball; and this likewise has a metaphorical appli-
cation so that when we say that somebody is 'batting on a sticky
wicket', it means that he's got a particularly difficult task to do.
MARCKWARDT. Oh, yes.
QUIRK. Then, there's the whole field of education as well.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, I would like to talk about that in particular
because I suppose that you and I are better equipped to talk about the
vocabulary of education than almost anything else. Now, I wish you'd
begin by explaining something that has always puzzled me and puzzles
many Americans. What is public about what you call a 'public school'
in England?
QUIRK. Well, of course, members of the public go to it! But
seriously, centuries ago, there were certain schools established in the
United Kingdom by charitable foundations: people left money to
establish a school. These came to be contrasted originally with private
schools - or with pupils that were having private tuition -institutions
that would be run purely for the private profit of the owner. For this
reason, they were then called 'public schools'. But, of course, by the
time we got our real public school system, in your sense - our state
education system, nationwide - the name 'Public School' in England
was too much identified with the early foundations that I have been
talking about (which by this time, of course, had very great prestige)
for us to be able to use that name in addition for the state schools.
MARCKWARDT. That's very helpful indeed. Really, in the United
States, I think that the word 'public' has an even wider application than
the one you have just given it. A Public School is one that is first of all
open to the entire public. Second, it is supported by public funds, tax
money. And third, every local school system in
the United States is governed by a policy-making Board of Education
that is publicly elected.
QUIRK. Even the word 'school' itself has got important differences
for us, hasn't it? In the United Kingdom, as you know, 'school' is
almost entirely restricted to educational places which are attended by
boys and girls just up to the age of, say, eighteen. I grant that there are
some exceptions where 'school' is applied to parts of a university (part
of my own university is called the London School of Economics); but
in general a school is for children.
MARCKWARDT. This is true for us as well. One unit of a university
in the United States may be called a College of Medicine, whereas
another one in the same university could be called the Law School.
But our general use of 'school' is very broad indeed. It's quite possible
for us, for example, to say 'Stanford is a good school,' and we could be
referring here to the undergraduate college, to the graduate school or
to the entire complex. Or we can say, 'My son is no longer at school,'
and this again would depend on context as to whether he had left
school in theBritish sense or whether he had ceased attending a
university or college.
QUIRK. Well, that expression would certainly throw out a British
listener, I think. But speaking of universities, we've also got a different
set of labels for the teaching staff, haven't we?
MARCKWARDT. Yes, in the United States, for example, our full time
faculty - which you call 'staff', incidentally - is arranged in a series of
steps which goes from instructor through ranks of assistant professor,
associate professor to that of professor. But I wish you'd straighten me
out on the English system. Don, for example, is a completely
mysterious word and I'm never sure of the difference, say, between a
'lecturer' and a 'reader'.
QUIRK. Well, readers say that lecturers should lecture and readers
should read! But seriously, I think that there's more similarity here
than one would imagine. Let me say, first of all, that this word 'don' is
a very informal word and that it's common really only in Oxford and
Cambridge. But corresponding to your instructor we've got the rank of
assistant lecturer, usually a beginner's post. The assistant lecturer who
is successful is promoted, like your instructor, and he becomes a
lecturer and this lecturer grade is the main teaching grade throughout
the university world.
30 A Common Language
Above lecturer, a man may be promoted to senior lecturer or reader,
and both of these - there's very little difference between them -
correspond closely to your associate professor. And then finally he
may get a chair, as we say - that is, a professorship, or, as you would
say, a. full professorship. It's pretty much a difference of labels rather
than of organization, it seems to me.
MARCKWARDT. Well, we could talk about many other aspects of
education and go on for a long time but I think we should get on to
something else.
QUIRK. One thing that we should get on to is the fourth class of
words that you brought in first of all. What was that fourth class?
MARCKWARDT. New inventions. Let's just glance for a moment at
the situation when a new invention strikes each of our countries at the
same time. Suppose I call off the American form of a number of
automotive terms and you respond with the English equivalent. O.K.?
QUIRK. O.K. The parts of a car, is it?
MARCKWARDT. Yes. Sedan?
QUIRK. Saloon.
MARCKWARDT. Windshield?
QUIRK. Oh, that's windscreen.
MARCKWARDT. Gear shift?
QUIRK. Gear lever. But I thought you didn't have such things any
more.
MARCKWARDT. Well, we haven't all changed to push-buttons. What
do you call the trunk, the place for luggage?
QUIRK. The boot. Well now, just a minute. Let's get this thing the
other way around. You translate for a spell. What do you call the
bonnet}
MARCKWARDT. The hood, but your hood is our top.
QUIRK. Dynamo?
MARCKWARDT. Generator.
QUIRK. The wing or mudguard?
MARCKWARDT. Ah, that's a fender. Only bicycles have mudguards
with us.
QUIRK. What do you call the sparking plug?
MARCKWARDT. Sparkplug.
QUIRK. What do you call the sump or crankcase, the thing that
contains the lubricating oil?
Differences in Vocabulary 31
MARCKWARDT. We use only crankcase. We do have the word sump
in the United States but it is used in wholly different connections.
QUIRK. I suppose Americans aren't always able to pay for a car
outright, are they?
MARCKWARDT. No, by no means. At least two-thirds of the time
they pay for it in installments or on the installment plan, as we do for a
good many things.
QUIRK. AS we do too, I'm afraid. Instalments seem to be a common
term between us but we also have the term hire purchase that we apply
to this rather slow and agonizing way of buying things. I take it that
we agree in making a down payment, do we, and in trading in our old
car?
MARCKWARDT. Yes, and here just as elsewhere we are constantly
finding points of sameness even in areas of what seem to be the
greatest difference. And it's these very points of identity which give us
enough common ground so that the differences really don't bother us a
great deal. After all we're both broadcasting, we're both using a
microphone and I suppose you're doing it on wireless and I'm doing it
on radio.
QUIRK. Well, yes, we do still use this word wireless a bit, but radio
is getting more and more common in Britain, and don't let's forget, it
has always been common to some extent. The BBC weekly
programmes have appeared in a journal called the Radio Times for the
past forty years.
MARCKWARDT. Well, this corrects another mistaken notion of mine.
We have so much to learn, each one of us, about the other's variety of
English language. But it's so much fun.
QUIRK. It is indeed; I agree there. And the more we learn, it seems,
the more we find we have in common. But I think we'd better stop and
plan next time to go back and look at the period when our two varieties
of English were completely one and the same.
MARCKWARDT. You know, in this connection, I can't resist quoting a
remark by James Russell Lowell, one of our nineteenth-century men of
letters. Once, in response to a rather savage attack upon the American
version of English, he commented that it was a great pity that our
American ancestors had nothing better to bring with them than the
language of Shakespeare!

5 throned monarch better than his crown.
The Common Starting Point
QUIRK. Well, you certainly scored pretty impressively last time, Al,
when you spoke of the American colonists bringing the language of
Shakespeare over with them. I felt I just ought to mention, mind you,
that we did keep some of it in Great Britain, too!
MARCKWARDT. Oh, of course you did!
QUIRK. But, seriously, it is nice to think that Americans and British
share a language which had its common starting point shared with
Shakespeare, too. And he's not too early for this, is he?
MARCKWARDT. No, not at all, Randolph. Jamestown, the first
permanent colony in Virginia, was settled in 1607. That's nine years
before Shakespeare died. And even if we think of the settlements in
New England - the Plymouth colony, which dates from 1620; the
Massachusetts Bay colony, dating from 1630 - even if we think of
these, we must remember that the adults in the groups who came over
had learned their English around 1600, just about when Hamlet was
first performed and when Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and many of the
other great dramatists were at the height of their power. It was an
exciting, a glorious age.
QUIRK. Yes, and it is to the English of this Shakespeare's England
that we have to look, then, for the basic common ground that we have
in British and American English today. Well, let's try to do this by
listening to what English sounded like at that time, to what it sounded
like in the opinion of scholars who have reconstructed it from
contemporary evidence. Here's part of Portia's famous mercy speech in
the Merchant of Venice. In order to make a particular point we shall
use the version with the common misquotation of dew for rain.
READER. The quality of mercy is not strained,
It droppeth as the gentle dew from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
32
The Common Starting Point
33
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes The
MARCKWARDT. Now, I'd like to point out that in this passage the
word quality, which in American English has a vowel that is made
with just a very slight rounding of the lips, has replaced the [kwæliti]
that Shakespeare had. But I gather that in England you have gone
rather farther with this rounding process.
QUIRK. Yes, to [kwɔliti] with the lips still further rounded as
compared with you and, of course, far more rounded than in
Shakespeare's time.
MARCKWARDT. And then there is the word dew. Many Americans
still pronounce this just about the way it was said in Shakespeare's
time, but on the other hand many of us have simplified the vowel,
dropped the [i] part of the [iu] and we say dew with just about the same
sound that we use for the all-purpose verb 'to do'.
QUIRK. Yes, and as you know, in Britain many of us have also kept
to a pronunciation not unlike that of Shakespeare's time. But many of
us again have also simplified the vowel part though in so doing we
have complicated the consonant part, because many of us say [dʒu: ] -
more or less with the same sound in the first part (the consonant) as in
'juice'. There's another word that illustrates, it seems to me, an even
more striking development and that was the word beneath. In the
Shakespearean version we found [bi'ne:θ], but both you and I say
[bi'ni:θ]. In other words, despite the physical separation of at least three
thousand miles since the time of this Shakespearean common language,
both the British and the Americans have shared some linguistic
changes.
MARCKWARDT. Oh, yes. And there's another thing that Americans
and Britains have shared and that is the change that you find in words
like throned to thron'd - though, again, both of us have kept a few of
these as adjectives with the -e-d part sounded; that is, we say,'He learnt
it', but 'He is learned'. And here again, on both sides of the Atlantic,
the movement has gone in the same way. And one final point in the
passage - notice that Shakespeare said 'it blesseth' and 'it droppeth'.
QUIRK. Yes.
MARCKWARDT. That is, here English and Americans have shared R—
c
34 A Common Language The Common Starting Point 35
the change by which these -e-t-h forms of the third person singular
verbs have been replaced by the 5 as in blesses and drops.
QUIRK. Yes, quite; and we've also shared the way in which these -eth
forms are almost wholly restricted in the modern English of both areas
to religious usage, the language of prayer.
MARCKWARDT. Yes.
QUIRK. But don't let's go any further into sounds and grammar. After
all, they don't constitute the whole of English by any means. Let's turn
to vocabulary for a bit and tiy to explain why we didn't just go on using
the same words for things as we did in Shakespeare's time.
MARCKWARDT. All right. Basically, I suppose, the explanation is
simply that languages change. It's one of the few general statements
that one can make about all languages in all periods. And so it was
inevitable that we shouldn't be using exactly the same vocabulary that
we did in Shakespeare's time.
QUIRK. Yes, and of course with our two communities getting
physically separated at this time, these inevitable changes that you've
mentioned become still more complicated.
MARCKWARDT. Oh yes, of course. When the American colonists
crossed the Atlantic, the language situation was such that - it seems to
me - one of three things could happen. First of all, it was possible for
the colonists to keep using certain things while the people whom they
had left behind in Britain changed theirs.
QUIRK. True.
MARCKWARDT. Then you could have the reverse of this process;
that is, it was equally possible for the people in England to preserve
their habits while the newly emigrated Americans changed theirs.
QUIRK. Yes.
MARCKWARDT. And then finally, you see, both the British and the
Americans could have changed.
QUIRK. Well, let's try and illustrate those three possibilities now.
Fall and autumn would be examples of the first, wouldn't they?
Shakespeare used the word fall as the name of the season, just as you
do in America, but since his time, most of us in Britain have come to
use only the word autumn. Then the second type of change, well, pig
sty and pig pen could illustrate it.
MARCKWARDT. Right.
QUIRK. We in Britain have kept on using the old word, pig sty,
and that is pretty rare, I gather, in America where the newer form pig
pen was coined.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, that is quite right; and for the third possibility
we could mention the word neat.
QUIRK. Neat?
MARCKWARDT. I mean the word neat that Shakespeare would have
used in the sense of 'cattle'.
QUIRK. Oh, yes.
MARCKWARDT. YOU see, this has been retained neither in the
English of Britain nor in the English of the United States. But naturally
enough, I think, you would expect the second possibility to work out
most frequently. After all, as soon as the new settlers reached America,
they were in this new situation. The plants and the animals, the
landscape - all of these were new. They represented many new
experiences and new experiences called for new names.
QUIRK. Quite. Well, now, where did you turn for your new names?
I suppose the earlier inhabitants of America, that is the American
Indians, must have provided a good deal of them, didn't they?
MARCKWARDT. Yes, to a considerable degree but not entirely. In
some cases new names were made, really, by changing the meanings
of existing English words. For example, take the word creek, which in
America means a stream, the tributary of a river, though in England it's
only an inlet.
QUIRK. Yes.
MARCKWARDT. Now this change came about simply because the
early settlers sailing up a very irregular bay, like Chesapeake Bay,
named as 'creeks' what they took to be inlets. Then later on, when they
explored the interior a bit, these very often turned out to be the
estuaries of streams. The name stuck and the streams and their
branches simply came to share the word creek and here a new
American English meaning was born.
QUIRK. Yes.
MARCKWARDT. But you're right, of course; the Indian tribes supplied
a good many new words: squaw, raccoon, tomahawk. We talked about
these last time.
QUIRK. In our last discussion, yes. But borrowings don't explain
everything either, do they? We mentioned in an earlier talk that your
use of the ordinary English stock of words was important and
36 A Common Language
The Common Starting Point 37
how you adapted these English words to new meanings as you required
them. You remember we had examples like robin and corn and egg cently tells them how nice it is to see so many homely faces out in the
plant. And I suppose that this is one of the reasons why there are audience.
surprising differences in the meanings of such quite ordinary words as QUIRK. There's another source of new words in America which we
robin and corn as between one side of the Atlantic and the other. A haven't mentioned today by the way, Al. Don't you sometimes - and
further example that occurs to me - your use of the word bug. You use we, too, of course - resurrect old words that have become obsolete,
it, you know, quite abstractly, it seems to me, for pretty well any kind both in Britain and America? It seems to me our use of the word sib for
of insect. the offspring in a family is an example of this in Britain, and that
MARCKWARDT. Yes. turnpike has been given a similar new lease of life in America.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, that's true. That is, as soon as what we now call
QUIRK. Well, your use of it - in case you don't know - strikes
British ears as particularly odd, because we use it for only one a 'limited access highway' - that is, a main road - became common in
the United States, and we started charging tolls for the use of these fine
particularly unpleasant kind of bug that's found under rather unpleasant
new roads, someone - apparently with a good sense of history - seems
conditions - a 'bed bug' in slum or dirty beds. Incidentally, some of us
to have thought of resurrecting the word turnpike, which was used
at any rate are still a bit surprised to hear of being able to buy ice cream
early in the nineteenth century. And in the modern period we got it
in a 'drug store' - because, of course, for us a drug is a pretty highly
used first, I think, with the Pennsylvania Turnpike in the early fifties.
specialized medical word.
And then as that road extended into Ohio and Illinois and Indiana, we
MARCKWARDT. Oh yes, there is a world of difference between a
have an Ohio Turnpike, an Illinois Turnpike, and Indiana Turnpike as
drug store and a chemist's shop! But we ought to mention, too, some of
well.
the words we've adopted from your regional dialects. For example, QUIRK. Well, no one should say history is bunk after hearing this.
there's a whole series of words which refer to some kind of diagonal We've seen the importance, I think, of studying history to understand
across the square. We have catter-cornered, cat-cornered, kitty- the forms of British and American English and how they started
cornered and all of these come eventually from the French word diverging after that period of the fully common language which ended
quatre meaning four. in Shakespeare's time. In our next talk I think we ought to look at the
QUIRK. What a shame! I always thought this had something to do factors that prevented all these divergences that we have been talking
with a kitten going across a square. But the mention of regional about from getting out of hand - the things that prevented them from
dialects does remind me that in many cases, the standard American- destroying our common language.
English word - which often doesn't happen to be known in standard
British English - is, on the other hand, very well known in British
dialects. The word faucet is a good instance of this. As you know, we
have the word tap in standard British English, corresponding to your
vtordfaucet, but several dialects of Britain have this word faucet. Then
again, there's the use of homely in American English. Homely in
Britain, of course, means something rather pleasant, but in American
English 'not very good looking'. This older sense again is preserved in
some of the British dialects.
MARCKWARDT. Well now, that's a very good word to illustrate
Anglo-American misunderstanding. At any rate, many funny stories
depend on it, like the one about the British lecturer visiting the United
States; he faces his American audience and very inno-
 6 Looking Back to London
Looking Back to London
QUIRK. We saw last time that American English has had a con-
tinuous existence separately for over 350 years. Now in that time, with
all the changes that have taken place in the way our society is
organized and the way we live, the kind of work we do, the way we're
governed, we shouldn't be surprised surely that some differences in
language have come about between our two countries.
MARCKWARDT. Oh, certainly not. We have more reason, I believe, to
be surprised at how slight the differences are. To me, you know, it's
amazing and very heartening that despite three thousand miles between
us - and this is a distance which for 200 years took weeks to travel in
small ships - we have never really lost sight of a common standard of
English.
QUIRK. That's true. At first, of course, this must have been
enormously helped by the fact there was this political link between us,
a link that lasted for the first 150 years.
MARCKWARDT. Oh yes. As we have seen, of course, some differ-
ences did develop during that time; but in general Americans didn't
want to be different then, and indeed they felt self-conscious when
differences were pointed out. It was in 1735, I think, when an English
traveller on a voyage to the colony of Georgia mentioned a steep river
bank which he said 'the Americans in barbarous English call a bluff'.
While London remained their political center, Americans were all too
inclined, perhaps, to agree with rather uncharitable comments of this
kind. And I think this restrained them from multiplying new so-called
'barbarisms' wholesale.
QUIRK. Yes.
MARCKWARDT. They certainly did not take pride in an independent
version of English. It was British English that had prestige.
QUIRK. Yes, and this did keep the English of educated people on
both sides of the Atlantic from diverging to any marked degree. I think
you could even go further and say that the common literary
39
tradition - the fact that we had common reading material - actually
caused the language on both sides of the Atlantic to make whatever
changes it was making in parallel, keeping the changes in step as it
were.
MARCKWARDT. Yes.
QUIRK. I think that this is true not only for vocabulary where
keeping in step is fairly easy, but even for pronunciation where
divergence is possibly easiest. As we saw, I think last time, when
America was settled, all speakers of English said [re:zn] for 'reason'
and [de:1] for 'deal' and this pronunciation was still common in both
countries in the early 18th century. Yet today both British and
American speakers have the [i:] pronunciation; they've kept in step, in
other words, by developing the pronunciations [ri:zn] and [di:l].
MARCKWARDT. Yes, and another interesting point in the same
connection, I think, concerns the r after vowels in words like bird and
hurt. We've already seen that this kind of pronunciation was universal
in the seventeenth century. We heard last time that it was the
pronunciation that Shakespeare was supposed to have used.
QUIRK. Yes.
MARCKWARDT. And then gradually in London and in the areas
surrounding it, the r sound was lost, but it was kept elsewhere in
England and especially in those parts that were farthest away from the
influence of the capital. I think it's no accident that in the United States
the r-less areas, the ones that say [hə:t] and [bə:d], should be on the
East Coast, particularly in New England. Well, why? The great port,
the great cultural center of Boston, simply responded very readily to
influence from London. And this happened to a degree also in the
coastal South - especially around Richmond, Virginia, around
Charleston, South Carolina - both of which, you see, represent two
very old local cultures.
QUIRK. Yes, I see. This is very interesting. Would you say, then,
that even today perhaps there's some feeling in the United States that
this New England area that you mention and that portion of the south-
east around Charleston are still regarded as speaking a 'better' kind of
English?
MARCKWARDT. Well, to the degree that such a feeling exists, I think
it's probably confined to those parts of the country, and it isn't shared
by speakers elsewhere. And we must also remember
3S
40 A Common Language Looking Back to London

41
 another thing and that is, the earliest lexicographers, the early
dictionary editors in the United States, came from New England.
Pronunciations in the earliest editions of Webster's dictionary reflect a
New England pronunciation and we Americans have always respected
the authority of the dictionary.
QUIRK. Yes, you have indeed! I think there are some other factors,
too, that help to prevent the breaking up of English into separate
dialects whereby the speakers wouldn't be able to understand each
other. For example, during the eighteenth century there was the
levelling influence that was caused by the growing importance of
London, the capital.
MARCKWARDT. Oh, yes.
QUIRK. And this led people throughout Britain to look south, as you
said, for a basis of imitation in their speech and to lose at least in part
their regional identity. This helped to establish in Britain this concept
of the standard, of one language.
MARCKWARDT. Well, wouldn't you say also that the spread of
education, the spread of literacy, would be a factor here?
QUIRK. Yes, indeed I would. People at that time could read in large
numbers for the first time. And connected with this fact, we find that it
was this period that was also that of our first great novelists.
MARCKWARDT. Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne.
QUIRK. Yes. Literacy does, I think you'll agree, have this stabilizing
influence, restraining people from changing language and pulling
people towards the form of the written word.
MARCKWARDT. And it is also the period when, in your country just
as in ours, dictionaries came to be available on a wide scale and people
read and studied them very carefully.
QUIRK. Yes, certainly. You think of Nathaniel Bailey in Great
Britain and, of course, the great Doctor Johnson.
MARCKWARDT. Yes.
QUIRK. And it was also a century when educated people were very
much concerned with standards in language, the century when English
grammars were first written, on a really large scale -the great teaching
grammars, at any rate, that have come down to us from people like
Lowth and Lindley Murray.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, and all of this was true on the American side,
as well. There's always been, you see, a keen interest in education
here, a tremendous respect for it. Nowhere, I think, has the school
teacher had more authority in language matters. And this certainly
maintained the idea of a standard, especially in relation to the written
language, and very often, of course, in relation to the standard in
London.
QUIRK. In effect, then, it encouraged the maintenance of one kind of
English everywhere.
MARCKWARDT. Definitely, and there's another point too. And that is,
from the very earliest times, the American population was by no means
as fixed in one place as it was in Britain. Once having made the big
move in crossing the Atlantic, the settlers and their descendants found
it that much easier to move again after they were in the United States,
when there were fresh opportunities to do it. Actually, there are
millions of people who move every year and there are many
communities which have in them very few people who were born there.
QUIRK. Yes, I think this is of enormous importance linguistically. If
people move around in a community, they obviously don't develop the
sort of private speech habits that lead to dialect differences. After all,
dialects develop when a community - say a village - becomes fairly
settled and stable and thus relatively out of touch with other villages. It
is quite different from the kind of situation that you've just been
describing. In the United Kingdom, for instance, our dialects have
undoubtedly been preserved by the relative immobility of our
population.
MARCKWARDT. Oh, yes.
QUIRK. For example, the Yorkshire dales, the Gloucestershire
villages and elsewhere. It seems to me, the fact that the American
population was shifting around in this way would mean a constant
spreading and evening of any of the divergences that were cropping up.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, that's true, and then there is still another factor
that enters in here. A man moves to a new-place. He has to make for
himself a place in this community. Now, he doesn't want to speak a
language that is different, and so the result is, he is going to conform.
He doesn't want to be criticized by the people in his new environment,
and as a matter of fact, of course, if he's too different, he's not going to
be understood at all.
QUIRK. True. Every factor which tends to stability, to lack of
42 A Common Language Looking Back to London

43
change in a language, in fact does tend to preserve this ready ability MARCKWARDT. And if other language groups then were to establish
that we all want, to understand each other. Now, I'm not, of course, themselves elsewhere, it wouldn't have been at all difficult, you see, for
suggesting that this would be the conscious aim of people. separatist movements to develop, and if they did, this would weaken
MARCKWARDT. And let's not forget another thing as well: that the the Union and for this reason a common language became very
American moves across the country is true enough, but he also moves important, indeed.
up and down a social scale. And in exactly the same way that QUIRK. Yes, I can readily see that the preservation of English as the
geographical movement - geographical mobility - has its effect on the official language in the United States was important politically from
language, social mobility does also. the very start. This insisting on standards of English was in effect
QUIRK. True. insisting once more on stability, wasn't it?
MARCKWARDT. And the effect again is very much the same. MARCKWARDT. Yes.
Differences are going to be ironed out. Well, at any rate, today our QUIRK. It meant that the two varieties of English, British and
emphasis has been on unification and all of the cultural and the social American - without any aim on the part of Americans, of course -kept
forces which encourage this. closer together.
QUIRK. Yes. MARCKWARDT. Yes, and all of this sounds not too different from the
MARCKWARDT. Now next time let's see how the American Revo- language problems which some of the new nations around the world
lution, a movement with an emphasis upon independence, tended to are facing right today. Everyone of them realizes sooner or later that a
disrupt these unifying tendencies that we've just been discussing. language is going to be of the utmost importance in establishing not
QUIRK. Yes, but even some aspects of the independence itself of the only communication but national unity as well.
new republic did mean in effect stability of English and the QUIRK. Yes.
preservation of the common language. For instance, with independence MARCKWARDT. But coming back to our more immediate topic, let's
and the cutting of the political ties with London, the opening up of the look forward next time to a rather fuller consideration of what the
frontiers as a settlement area for immigrants from all parts of Europe - revolution of 1776 really meant for the English language in America.
even from all parts of the world, surely, it was true that it became very
important at that time politically to preserve a common language
within the United States.
MARCKWARDT. Oh, yes indeed. At the outset of its separate
existence, remember that the United States was a fairly loose
federation. Actually our first attempt at a Constitution had the title
Articles of Confederation. And it was a loose union. There was an
ever-present danger here that each of the original thirteen States would
go off in its own way.
QUIRK. Yes.
MARCKWARDT. And this danger was heightened by the presence of a
number of foreign language groups in various parts of the country.
We've already mentioned the French in the Mid-west and the extreme
South. And you know that the Germans in Pennsylvania at this time
amounted to virtually one third of the total population of that state.
QUIRK. Really?

7 American about your English. What I mean is, it's not just been a
Political and Linguistic Independence
QUIRK. You referred last time, Al, to an Englishman, in 1735 I think
it was, criticizing an American expression as barbarous.
MARCKWARDT. Yes.
QUIRK. Well, it seems to me that however much criticisms like this
must have been resented, Americans couldn't really do very much
about it before the revolution of 1776, since London remained the
political and cultural capital that established standards. But in 1776,
with political independence, there must have been moves toward
cultural and therefore linguistic independence, mustn't there?
MARCKWARDT. Yes; in fact, from time to time it was seriously
debated whether the political independence shouldn't be symbolized by
having a completely separate language. One person - as naive as he
was optimistic - proposed that Americans should learn Hebrew, which
was then widely believed to be the oldest language on earth.
QUIRK. Yes.
MARCKWARDT. And then again Greek ideas and the Greek language
had great prestige, so there was a proposal to have Greek as the
national language of the new republic. But a rather more realistic view
was taken by one man in Congress, though. He pointed out that if the
real aim was just to have a different language from that used in Britain,
it would be much more convenient for us to keep English in the United
States and to make the British learn Greek.
QUIRK. But even when they reached the sensible and only practicable
solution, namely sticking to English, surely Americans must have
wanted to make some sort of gesture to show that this wasn't just
English, the language of Britain. And I wonder whether this hasn't
always been the main motive behind books like Mencken's The
American Language, and other references to what is specifically
44
Political and Linguistic Independence 45
scholarly desire to describe the use of English in America. It's been in
quite large measure surely a sort of sop to the nationalism of a new
nation, the actual looking for differences to show that Americanism
really exists.
MARCKWARDT. Well, certainly we find in Webster a good deal of
deliberate cultivation of divergences almost for divergence's sake. This
applies, I suppose, even to the now accepted spellings like -o-r in
words like humor where British usage has -o-u-r, or -e-r in words like
center where British usage has -r-e. But it applies even more to his
recommendation of forms like d-e-e-f for deaf; that is, spelling which
reflected an American pronunciation all right but a pronunciation
current, perhaps, among the less educated, the less socially prestigious
Americans. Oh, we certainly had a bad attack of linguistic nationalism,
like many another newly independent country.
QUIRK. This linguistic nationalism, though, in the time of Webster
and Jefferson must have been connected with the impact that French
Revolutionary ideas had on the American Revolution, I suppose; you
know, the Rousseau and Descartes ideas, the Social Contract, and the
idea of education by reason rather than education by social imitation;
the democratic ideal in fact, as opposed to the aristocratic ideal.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, this played a very important part and it's this
rationalism, I think, that has contributed to the importance of the
dictionary in forming American attitudes toward language. It's this, too,
that has led, in part at least, to spelling pronunciations; forms like
['fɔ:hed] forehead, where the older pronunciation, just based on what
was heard, was ['fɔrid].
QUIRK. Yes, and ['weskit] getting replaced by ['weiskout] waist-
coat. But I must point out that spelling pronunciations go on in pretty
well every community as soon as literacy is important, and we
certainly have the process very strongly operating in Britain.
MARCKWARDT. But I don't think you have the cult of the big
grandiose word as we do. And this is also a product of this early
mystique of education which somehow, I think, also got translated to
the frontier: But, nevertheless, as well as these extremist American
moves, there were also powerful stabilizing factors; we
46 A Common Language
need to remember again that Webster himself came to see the
importance of British and American English sticking together.
QUIRK. Yes, indeed; we certainly don't want to give the impression
that we think of Webster as a nationalistic crank. Even his more
extreme views, after all, had very good linguistic sense behind them.
His feeling that British English and American English would split into
two languages was pretty reasonable in his time in view of what was
known to have happened to Latin, splitting up into French, Spanish,
Italian, Rumanian, and so on.
MARCKWARDT. Portuguese.
QUIRK. Yes.
MARCKWARDT. Oh, yes, there is no doubt that Webster had linguistic
history on his side; in fact, he studied it very carefully and certainly his
philological forecast must have seemed very reasonable at the time.
QUIRK. Yes.
MARCKWARDT. And it was supported by the very great mutual
antipathy, the controversy between Britain and America which went on
for some decades. There was a real willingness for separation in all
respects, a real desire for it, in fact. Many Americans wanted nothing to
do with anything British, and they certainly were not prepared to
tolerate any longer any British attitude of superiority. Quite early, you
know, in the nineteenth century a Yale professor turned the tables on
British sneers on Americanisms by drawing up a list of 'Briticisms',
new barbarities that had been coined in Britain, and these included
words like absenteeism, perfectly familiar today throughout the entire
English-speaking world.
QUIRK. Yes, it's interesting that most new words, in fact, coined in
Britain since the time that our countries separated politically have
become familiar in America just as most new American expressions
have since become familiar in Britain too.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, and then also, especially in the early nineteenth
century, we find British speech being made ridiculous or, at any rate,
being typed on the New York stage. The dramatists use such devices as
substituting a w for a v - wery for very, and sometimes even a to for r,
and, of course, this familiar matter of dropping the h - Halbert, did you
'ear 'im?
QUIRK. Oh dear! And this last remains one of the very firm ideas
that Americans have of British English. It's rather odd the way
Political and Linguistic Independence 47
people in both our countries have these set notions about the speech in
the other area. You know one of the pet British ideas about American
English is that it's slangy, and this no doubt results just from the impact
of the uneducated speech in things like gangster films.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, and all of this jive talk by jazz musicians.
QUIRK. Another idea that we have about American English is this
business that you mentioned - the pomposity and long-worded-ness.
Words like location for place, and that sort of thing. These notions, it
seems to me, do a great deal of harm because they distort things in
picking out for attention features which aren't really typical at all of
educated use on either side.
MARCKWARDT. Well, I quite agree, Randolph. With us, the idea of
British speech is not merely a matter of dropping the h's, but also a
feeling, I think, that it's clipped and effeminate. Mencken had a
wonderful phrase for characterizing British speech, at least as it
appeared to him. He spoke of its 'mauve, Episcopalian ring', and, of
course, it would be difficult to find a British speaker, probably, who
answered to the range of this popular description.
QUIRK. Quite. I am sure that's what an American gas station
attendant must have had in mind when he was talking to me once. He
got more and more dubious about me as he spoke. At last he said, 'I
just can't believe that you're British. You're not dropping your h's.'
Well, little things like this are instructive, it seems to me, in revealing
the ignorance that has existed on both sides of the Atlantic about the
speech on the other side, an ignorance which, I think and I am very
glad to think, is fast disappearing. My own favourite story is one of the
mid-nineteenth century when a fashionable Boston debutante was
visiting London. She was at a society ball one night and was dancing
with a young British Guards officer and he made no attempt to conceal
his admiration for her (which was all right, of course), but equally he
made no attempt to conceal his surprise at being with an American girl
that he could understand. He had the nerve to compliment her on her
English and even went so far as to suppose that she must be unique
among her countrywomen in speaking English so well. To this, I'm
glad to say, the young lady had the wit and presence of mind to reply,
'Oh, yes, but then I had unique advantages; there was an English
missionary stationed near my tribe.'
48 A Common Language Political and Linguistic Independence 49
MARCKWARDT. Very good! Well, it wasn't just political separation difference here comes about simply because of the way in which goods
which caused divergence and mutual ignorance. There were great had to be transported in the United States. Try to think of household
internal activities in both countries which brought lots of new goods being taken from New York to St. Louis in 1836. You simply
expressions into existence. There was the Industrial Revolution, after couldn't get it there all the way by land or all the way by water, so that
all, hitting both countries simultaneously, causing enormous changes land transportation came to be called freight as well.
yet with poor transatlantic communications which really prevented the QUIRK. And it was this period that produced some of the differences
effects of these changes from being made known. It still took weeks to that have become exaggerated in the minds of many people who
cross the Atlantic. So this on top of the political antipathy, the political believe that everything there is to say about British and American
conflict, allowed real divergences to develop in British and American English is this divergence: things like the lift and the elevator.
English during the nineteenth century. MARCKWARDT. The different political system in the United States,
QUIRK. Yes, yes, I agree. This means that if political separation of course, not only produced a good many new words in this period,
had taken place in, say, 1876 instead of 1776, there would still, of but words that were by their very nature not exportable to Britain
course, have been the antipathy that you mentioned, but we would because you had little use for them. I am thinking, for example, of the
have shared the Industrial Revolution already and all the language word filibuster, which we use for the deliberate delaying tactics that
changes that were caused by the Industrial Revolution; and with the can be employed in our Congress.
faster travel, the steamship and the telephone - these things would have QUIRK. True. These just aren't words that we're likely to use our-
prevented too much linguistic separation from taking place. selves. Well, now next time we'll be talking of the period which began
MARCKWARDT. Exactly. Well, now let's think of some of the ways in to see the reversal of this separation process and the beginning of-a
which British and American English went their separate ways during new increase in the common currency of British and American
this period. We're no longer concerned with the new expressions that English.
settlers were obliged to find to match their uniquely new experiences,
but with new expressions on both sides to match the march of
industrial and scientific progress.
QUIRK. Yes, well the nineteenth century is referred to as the age of
steam, isn't it?
MARCKWARDT. Yes.
QUIRK. Let's look at the steam train then, for a minute. Here's
something that was, after all, developed more or less simultaneously
and independently on both sides of the Atlantic and without any
linguistic consultation, as you might say. In both areas the new form of
transport used words or parts of words that had long been familiar -
rail plus road in America, and rail plus way in Britain; track in
America, but line in Britain, or in the case of the track inside the
station, the platform; then we have sidetrack in America, but called
siding in Britain; boxcar in America, but goods van in Britain, and so
you could go on.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, and there is the use of freight for merchandise R—D
that is being transported. Now, it's interesting to see that the
 8 America's Coming of Age
America's Coming of Age
MARCKWARDT. Last time we talked about the separation of the two
main strands of English. I wonder if it isn't time now to think of their
reunification.
QUIRK. Well, when do you think this process began, Al, and indeed
how do you think it came about?
MARCKWARDT. I am inclined to be a little bit cautious here; that is, I
doubt if we can put our finger on any one date or any one event.
Processes like this take time and even over a period certain factors
continued to make for separation, but at the same time others worked
in the opposite direction. Ultimately, I suppose, the unifying forces
slowly began to outweigh those making for separation. If we must give
dates, I suppose we'd have to say that between 1900 and 1920 the trend
towards separation was really reversed.
QUIRK. Yes, that seems to me to be true, too, but why do you think
it happened between these particular periods?
MARCKWARDT. Well, for one thing, it's this period which marks
what Andre Siegfried once called 'America's coming of age'. It was a
time when the United States began to exercise a force in international
affairs. Our war against Spain marks its beginning. The end coincides
with the conclusion of World War I. Now during these twenty years,
Americans developed much more confidence and became less
defensive about their ways of doing things, and this attitude was
extended to their language.
QUIRK. Yes, well I'd particularly like to agree with this reference to
the First World War. It was after all at this time that Americans and
British people first really came into personal contact on a mass scale;
that is, ordinary Americans and ordinary British people. It is also
around this time that we can sense a great appreciation on the part of
British people of the status of American institutions, the growth of
American influence, the greater tolerance for American institutions
and, ultimately, even a readiness to adopt American
50
51
practices, including certain aspects of the practices in American
English.
MARCKWARDT. Well, I'd be very interested in knowing what some of
these American institutions are that you have in mind here.
QUIRK. Oh, for one thing — most obviously perhaps — the contact
that we made with American popular music; the impact that jazz had.
Soon after that, of course, we get the first contact with Hollywood and
the films, and the vast interest that was shown in Great Britain in your
Wild West hero figures.
MARCKWARDT. Oh, I see. You know, when these Wild West hero
figures get on television, we have a term for them now; we call them
'horse operas'. Well, anyway, I agree with everything that you said but I
think we mustn't overlook the fact that there is a physical side to this as
well. After all, during this period ocean voyages between England and
America speeded up to a considerable extent. We were beginning to
make contact with each other through radio; even through telephone.
All of this, certainly, tended to bring our varieties of the language into
much more intimate contact than they ever had before.
QUIRK. Yes, that's true; but, of course, although the telephone was
probably very important for people, a few people, in official positions,
it was surely the talking film that really made British people aware -
again on a pretty massive scale and again virtually for the first time - of
the rich range of what American speech sounded like.
MARCKWARDT. Oh yes.
QUIRK. And certainly I am told that at first some people, particu-
larly the older people, had some difficulty in understanding the
'talkies'.
MARCKWARDT. Well, I know that there were a great number of
difficulties in understanding all the way along. I remember learning
several years ago that when one of Sinclair Lewis's novels was
dramatized and put on the London stage, there was so much language
that the British didn't understand that finally they found it necessary to
include with the programs a little glossary for the benefit of the
audience and this, I think, has taken place on both sides of the Atlantic.
Here is a case in point, a way in which words can get across the
Atlantic and get used. Now, I happen to like your trifles and your fools
as desserts, as 'sweets'. We prepare them in our household. Then when
we have guests and we serve them, we use
52 A Common Language America's Coming of Age 53
the English terms for them. This familiarizes a number of people, you
see, with two English words. They may even serve them themselves
and this is just the beginning of a long chain where a word gets a much
wider range of use.
QUIRK. Well, I hope they suffer your fools gladly, Al.
MARCKWARDT. Ha ha! Now can you think of any Americanism that
you might have adopted as a kind of reverse process?
QUIRK. It's awfully hard to single out particular American usages
that I have adopted. For one thing, it seems to me that in the past
fifteen years American expressions have become so very common in
Britain that it's genuinely difficult for us now to know when we are
using American expressions, whether a particular newish locution that
we are using is indeed American.
MARCKWARDT. Yes.
QUIRK. But I might just mention the verb to talk with. I find myself
now speaking of talking with somebody where I know that only three
or four years ago I would have used only the verb talk to: 'I've been
talking to somebody'. Then, more colloquially, there are expressions
like / wouldn't know, which I think I have also adopted over these
recent years. The verb phrase to get something across meaning to
convince somebody of something; to get by meaning just manage to
subsist (on so many pounds): to get by on five hundred pounds a year.
But wouldn't you think that part of this interpene-tration of our two
languages has also increased with the increasing interest that ordinary
people have taken in the study of language over the years — in the
structure of language?
MARCKWARDT. Very definitely. Certainly, all of us know much
more now than we did before, about what is American and what is
British. We have excellent dictionaries made with much greater care
than they have ever been made before. Several people, at least, have
written books on the American variety of the English languages, not
only Mencken; there are people like Thomas Pyles who have done
excellent work. So over the past fifty years we have learned a great
deal about how standard languages develop.
QUIRK. Yes.
MARCKWARDT. And this has resulted in our becoming much less
absolute in our view toward what is standard language. Remember that
England and the United States really shared one eminent linguistic
scholar. That was Sir William Craigie.
QUIRK. Yes, of course. Sir William Craigie worked for a good many
years in Oxford, didn't he, on the great Oxford English Dictionary
which is another joint project really; it is the repository at any rate of
our joint language. And then he later went to Chicago and worked on
the Dictionary of American English.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, that's right; and there was a time, you know,
when he was spending one term at Oxford and one in Chicago,
carrying on both of these projects at the same time.
QUIRK. That's a beautiful instance of Anglo-American co-operation,
isn't it? But he showed, didn't he, how the British slowly started to
adopt American words even in the nineteenth century. I remember he
mentions that the expression to make a bee-line for something came
into British use at that time, and also the word blizzard meaning
'snowstorm'. And this word bluff (a headland) that you mentioned in an
earlier talk. MARCKWARDT. Yes, I did.
QUIRK. You mentioned it, I think, as a word that at one time was
condemned by English people as barbarous.
MARCKWARDT. Well, I notice that some of the words that you've
taken over seem to have no particular connection with American
culture. Expressions, for example, like to take a back seat or to get the
hang of something - to be able to understand it.
QUIRK. Yes, but some of the expressions do reflect features of
American life, don't they? For example, to strike oil.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, I wish I could!
QUIRK. Well, you'd certainly make a lot of money that way. But the
curious thing is, you see, that the metaphor to strike oil doesn't have
very much literal meaning in England; it's essentially an American
expression. And we mustn't forget O.K., a good American adoption
that has really gone right around the world.
MARCKWARDT. Yes.
QUIRK. Well, now we have talked quite a bit about American in-
fluence on British English in this way. Have you got anything to report
about the traffic that may be going on in the reverse direction?
MARCKWARDT. O.K., we'll talk about the traffic in the opposite
direction. For example, an American retailer trying to cast an aura of
high fashion might even use your word swank about his establishment;
he often calls it a shop. Also in the general field of men's clothing,
there's a dressing-gown, and a dinner jacket (you know, our
54 America's Coming of Age 55
A Common Language
millions of readers there was no other sign that this was an American
native tuxedo now sounds a bit vulgar). And then, of course, there's expression. And I don't think it's any accident that at the present time
Colonel Blimp, this wonderful figure from Low's cartoons which we our young people are already using rocks in this originally American
adopted in the twenties within a very short time of Low's first drawing sense.
him in the British press, and finally I notice that although we used to MARCKWARDT. Well, this is very significant indeed. The effect of all
think that baggage was somehow an American term and luggage an that we have been talking about is something that is bound to upset the
English term, we have now come to adopt luggage much more, confident predictions that were made early in the nineteenth century of
especially in connection with air travel. this almost inevitable split up of English. What we see here, instead, is
QUIRK. Yes, well I think it is equally true that we in Britain have really an increasing unification of English, resulting in a steady, almost
come more and more to adopt the word baggage. I have certainly relentless, march towards the status of a world language.
noticed that on shipping lines, perhaps chiefly those that are connected
with the American trade, we use baggage on the signs indicating where
it is to be checked. {Checked is not a word we use, incidentally.) But
this blending of our usage in connection with luggage and baggage
would seem to me to be rather typical of this trend that we've got in the
twentieth century towards neutralizing the differences between our two
forms of English. And your mention of David Low a moment ago, the
cartoonist, and the speed with which you in America adopted Colonel
Blimp and the ideas that we associate with him - these things remind
us of how important the press is as a source of mutual linguistic
influence.
MARCKWARDT. It's most important, of course; the press stands not
merely for the speedy exchange of news, especially since the
development of the teleprinting process, but it serves as a medium in
which it's possible for millions on both sides of the Atlantic to be
confronted by the written word as it's fed into the newspaper channel
from either a British news agency, or from one of the several American
news sources. In this way a word appears to the reader to be
completely naturalized. It has no American label, no British label, no
accent attached to it.
QUIRK. You're quite right. One actually sees it. I think one can be
particularly struck in Great Britain by the way in which American
expressions, say, like commuter, have appeared in the press in recent
years. Another example: you know the British use of rocks; rocks are
too big for us to throw. If we're going to throw something it has got to
be stones. I remember a headline in a British daily not so long ago
which read: Rocks thrown at political leader, and I found that this use
of rocks was repeated lower down in the paragraph as well. It's true
there was a little Associated Press notice indicating it was from an
American source, but for the
 9 Regional Variations in the British Isles
Regional Variations in the British Isles
MARCKWARDT. Now, in our talks so far, we've raised several points
with respect to British and American English. One of these has been,
of course, their basic identity - the fact that they both spring originally
from precisely the same source, the English of Shakespeare's time.
QUIRK. Yes, and we've also been stressing the overlap in usage
between the two areas - that it's not a case of one word in Britain -say,
post - and a different word - say, mail - in America, but more usually
the same two words, post and mail, in the two areas, but with some
differences in distribution and emphasis.
MARCKWARDT. And in addition, the survival - in one or the other of
the regional dialects in each area - of words that were common in the
standard of English of Shakespeare's time, but which now survive as
standard in only one of the major varieties of English.
QUIRK. Yes, and related to that point again, the fact that the features
marking off one of these major varieties of English from another don't
simply constitute lines of demarcation running down the middle of the
Atlantic north and south; rather, they zig-zag across in an east-west
direction, parts of British English being identical with parts of
American English, while differences in these respects can exist within
either British or American English.
MARCKWARDT. I think this is an extremely important point,
Randolph. How about illustrating this kind of variation which exists
within each variety of English? I certainly would like to hear
something about the varieties within British English.
QUIRK. Right. Well, let's begin by distinguishing between standard
and dialectal forms of English even within the British Isles: because
although there's virtually only one standard form that we teach abroad -
the kind that I'm speaking now, the kind described in the works of
Daniel Jones and other British linguists—
MARCKWARDT. R.P.
57
QUIRK. —there are at least two other forms in Britain which have
something of the status of standards; that is, they can be used by highly
educated people without seeming, so to say, 'local'. I m referring, of
course, to Scots and Irish English. Let me illustrate these with the
sentence, 'The poor -man who sat in the corner looked very tired as he
sipped his cup of tea with a preoccupied air.' Here is the sentence read
by a speaker of educated Scots:
SCOTS VOICE. The poor man who sat in the corner looked very
tired as he sipped his cup of tea with a preoccupied air.
MARCKWARDT. And how would it sound if read by an educated
Irish speaker?
IRISH VOICE. The poor man who sat in the corner looked very
tired as he sipped his cup of tea with a preoccupied air.
QUIRK. Well, of course, besides these forms of English there are
many very distinctive dialects in Britain which to a varying degree
lack the status of standard and which are therefore less often used by
educated people.
MARCKWARDT. Well, why do you think there are so many dialects
in what is, after all, a fairly small area?
QUIRK. I suppose it can be summed up in the word 'conservatism' -
not of course political conservatism! Traditionally, British people have
clung to their local communities, they've not tended to uproot
themselves and move from end to end of the country; and they like to
keep a rugged individuality in their habits - and this, of course, means
also their linguistic habits.
MARCKWARDT. Well now, these dialects you're referring to are the
regional ones, aren't they - the ones that are related to the different
places where people live. What about the other sort of dialect, the
speech variation that depends on where people are placed on a social
scale?
QUIRK. Yes, there are certainly speech variations which in that way
cut across the regional dialects and which are related to social status, to
occupation, and above all, I think, related to people's degree of
education. One well-known feature is the A-dropping that we talked
about in one of our earlier discussions.
56
58 A Common Language Regional Variations in the British Isles
MARCKWARDT. Oh, you mean the 'ark at 'cr feature that many
59
Americans think is a badge of British English?
QUIRK. Exactly. In fact, it's a mark only of decidedly uneducated QUIRK. Yes, well there are two points here, aren't there? First, the
speech and it's widespread only inasmuch as it's not specially rigidity: let's postpone the social importance bit for a moment. As I
identified with any of the regions. It crops up, let's say, in the speech said just now, R.P. embraces a pretty wide range and, what's more, it is
of office cleaners in Liverpool as well as in London. But the social changing all the time and has changed very much over the past half-
dialect that attracts most attention in Britain is, of course, the so-called century. Not long ago there was a radio programme in England about
'Received Pronunciation'. the late Max Beerbohm and it included several recordings of his own
MARCKWARDT. Ah yes, this famous 'Received Pronunciation' early radio talks of thirty and forty years ago. I was struck by hearing
-otherwise known as 'R.P.'. You know, I often find myself referring to him say the word 'leisure' with the same stressed sound as you have in
this variety of English, and over and over again people in the United American English, ['li:ʒə]. And as he said it he added, 'if that old-
States ask me, 'Just what does "received" mean here?' - and believe fashioned pronunciation is now understood.' Well, similarly,
me, Randolph, I'm never quite sure as to how to answer this one. pronunciations like [krɔ:s] and [frɔ:st] for [krɔs] cross and [frɔst] frost
were the ordinary Received forms fifty years ago, but I think they're
QUIRK. I'm not surprised. The whole idea is rather quaint and
pretty rare among R.P. speakers today.
perhaps typically British in the empiricism that it implies. I think it
MARCKWARDT. R.P. is less technically referred to as 'Oxford accent',
goes back to the linguists' reluctance to talk about a 'standard' English
'public school English', and perhaps especially 'BBC English'. Is this
in Britain, just in case 'standard' should imply that this is imposed by
close association of R.P. with the BBC really justified?
law, a form of English that people ought to speak. And, as you well
QUIRK. Yes, I think it is. For one thing, it's really through the BBC
know, this is something that the English-speaking peoples have always
that this form of English has become so very widely and well known
resisted.
throughout the British Isles. When the BBC started broadcasting, its
MARCKWARDT. True enough; no English Academy for us!
announcers and newsreaders adopted this form of English, and it's
QUIRK. NO, but on the other hand, it's common for the social and
become so widely accepted (so well 'received', in fact) that when the
intellectual leaders in any community to conform in their speech
BBC nowadays experiments with regional accents that are aimed at
habits, and our linguists - such as Daniel Jones - tried to describe the
particular regions in the hope of producing a homely atmosphere,
kind of English that seemed to have this status of, so to say, being
complaints come in pretty thick and fast. Whatever accents listeners
'received' as right and proper by what constituted the social and themselves use, they seem to prefer to listen to R.P.
intellectual 'establishment' of England. But let's make no mistake:
MARCKWARDT. Well, this partly takes care of the second point we
despite the apparent precision of the label, Received Pronunciation in
were going to look at: the present social importance of R.P. Clearly,
fact embraces a fairly wide range of pronunciations, and is more a
from what you say, R.P. does have very great prestige as the form of
focus of varieties than a single, rigid set of forms.
English that cuts across all regional variations and which can be
MARCKWARDT. Well, I'm glad to hear this explanation, Randolph,
listened to with pleasure by the widest selection of English people.
and so will our foreign listeners be glad. There's a lot of misunder-
QUIRK. Yes, this is true, I think. But I'd like to say that its social
standing among teachers overseas, because it's often believed that
status isn't quite as absolute as it seems to have been, say thirty years
there is far more standardization and rigidity about British English
ago. A far greater number of people today feel free to use a form of
than is in fact the case. And I wonder also if there isn't a distorted
regional dialect without seeming uneducated, and, oddly enough, I
sense of the unique importance of R.P. as the only form of British
think the BBC is partly responsible here too. It has not
English which can be 'received' as socially and intellectually,
educationally acceptable.
60 A Common Language
only spread a familiarity with R.P., it has also made us more familiar
with the different regional dialects that are heard throughout the British
Isles - and I think it's made us far more tolerant of them.
MARCKWARDT. Oh, you mean it's no longer true what Shaw said in
Pygmalion: that whenever an Englishman opens his mouth and says
something, another Englishman despises him. But are you finding that
easier travel, radio and television and so on are also having the effect
of making the regional dialects disappear?
QUIRK. Well, I suppose they are, very slowly; I think dialectal
differences are less sharp than they were at the beginning of this
century, and that proportionately fewer people speak with a broad
regional accent.
MARCKWARDT. Well, in that case, before it's too late, let's hear some
examples of British regional dialects. How about beginning with
something in the north - one of the Yorkshire dialects?
QUIRK. Right.
YORKSHIRE MAN. Eeh! As far back as I can tell ther's alius bin
trouble wi' t' roof o' yond laithe when it rains; t' watter pours in
at t' top, at t' riggin', tha knaws, an' t' spoutin's rotten. I wa'
nobbut a lad about six or seven when my father saw it an' said it
'Id fall down sooin; but it's still theere. Round t' end ther' used
to be a field wheer us bairns used to laik. Ther's a beck at t'
bottom, it goes past them willers, under t' brig an' into t' river.
It's not a reight long way - just past t' cross-rooads, over 'ere.
MARCKWARDT. Interesting. For one thing, I noticed that this was
very far from the image of 'clipped' speech that many Americans have
of British speech.
QUIRK. Yes, and some of the vowel sounds must have sounded
strange to American ears, I think.
MARCKWARDT. Quite! And so were many of the vocabulary items;
bairns for children, for instance.
QUIRK. Yes, and that verb laik, to play. Well, now let's hear from a
man from Gloucestershire.
GLOUCESTERSHIRE MAN. As far back as I can mind, there've
always been trouble with the roof of that barn when it do rain; the
water pours in at the top, at the crease, now, and the shootins is
rotten. I were only a boy about zix or zeven when me vader
Regional Variations in the British Isles
61
zeed'n and said'n would fall down zoon; but he still be there.
Round th'end, there used to be a groun' where us children used to
play. There be a stream at the bottom; it do go past they withies,
under the bridge and into the river. It bain't a very long way
-just past the cross-roads over yer.
QUIRK. Well, now, Al: was there anything there more familiar to
American ears?
MARCKWARDT. Yes, indeed, some points of pronunciation; the
sounding of the r's after the vowels, for instance; and the unrounded
vowel in rotten.
QUIRK. Yes, well here we go again, not only finding features that
overlap between British and American English, where it's commonly
thought there's a sharp distinction, but also finding that parts of British
and parts of American English agree, where there is divergence and
lack of agreement within British and American usage. The ability that
Englishmen and Americans have to understand each other must surely,
in part at least, be due to the wide variation that exists within each of
the major varieties, so that all of us are in the habit of being tuned to
wide variation and to making adjustments accordingly.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, and it might not be going too far to say that to
some extent more adjustment is needed when one Briton speaks to
another Briton (or when one American speaks to another American)
than when a Briton is talking to an American. This is especially true if
we're dealing with people of similar educational or occupational
backgrounds.
QUIRK. Yes, that's so. Well, next time I look forward to hearing
more about this matter of the adjustments Americans make in speaking
to each other; in other words, to hearing some of the American
regional dialects.

10
Regional Variations in the United States
MARCKWARDT. Last time we heard some of the different types of
English in the United Kingdom. We have our dialect differences in
America as well, you know, and there's one passage in John Stein-
beck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath, that makes this point very neatly.
OKLAHOMA MAN. I knowed you wasn't Oklahomy folk. You talk
queer kinda. - That ain't no blame, you understand
ARKANSAS WOMAN. Ever'body says words different. Arkansas
folks says 'em different, and Oklahomy folks says 'em different.
And we seen a lady from Massachusetts, an' she said 'em differ-
entest of all. Couldn' hardly make out what she was sayin'.
QUIRK. That's a lovely passage. But you know, I think it would be
surprising to many people, as it is to me, to find that English in the
United States has such variety. You see, Al, there's a very widespread
view throughout the world (and it's certainly pretty strongly held in the
United Kingdom) that American speech is all very much alike.
MARCKWARDT. Well, Randolph, it's different enough, after all, that
we have considered it worthwhile making a linguistic survey of the
United States and Canada, just as Professor Harold Orton and some of
his associates in your country have undertaken an investigation of
English dialects.
QUIRK. Yes, of course, that's true. But won't you go on a bit and tell
us how much regional dialect there is in the United States?
MARCKWARDT. Well, from the point of view of pronunciation, there
are certain easily recognizable types. Here is coastal New England.
NEW ENGLAND VOICE. Bert, I'd like a glass of water in my room
if you please.
Now note here the use of [a:] in glass and the vowel of Bert, quite 62
Regional Variations in the United States 63
similar to yours. This speaker will insert r in phrases like 'the idea of
it', and he did say 'water in my room'. But it is not so generally known
that western New England doesn't share these features of
pronunciation.
QUIRK. Well, certainly, that bit of American English that we've just
heard sounds much more like the British English that's familiar in the
United Kingdom than most American speech does. What else is there?
MARCKWARDT. Well, there's also a coastal southern type, sometimes
called Plantation Southern.
SOUTHERN VOICE. I'd like a glass of water too. Don't forget, I'm
thirsty.
Now notice, this one treats [r] somewhat more irregularly; it doesn't
have the [ɑ:] for [æ:] -1 suppose you noticed the pronunciation of
glass; also the words too and I'm. Now in addition, some rather
definitely local dialects remain, especially in those areas which, rather
unlike much of the United States, retain a characteristic local culture.
One of these is Charleston, South Carolina, and here we would expect
to hear something like this:
CHARLESTON GIRL. I have a late date at eight.
Now in Virginia, in order to meet this appointment, the young man
would go:
TIDEWATER VIRGINIA MAN. Out of the house and down the street.
QUIRK. You know, part of that sounded to me quite like Canadian
English; the [əut əv ðə həus] bit at any rate.
MARCKWARDT. Well, that's quite true, Randolph. You would hear it
in various parts of Canada and particularly around Toronto.
QUIRK. Now so far, you haven't said anything about the speech in
the big cities. What is New York speech like?
MARCKWARDT. Well, there is, of course, a definite New York
metropolitan type.
NEW YORK VOICE. D'ya think there's a glass of water in this
joint? I'm thirsty.
64 A Common Language
QUIRK. But that's not typical of all New York speech. Aren't we here
involved with social rather than regional dialect?
MARCKWARDT. To a degree. And this does happen in our larger
cities, but not elsewhere.
QUIRK. Yes, well, we've heard quite a bit of that on American films.
But it certainly seems to me that you've found many more differences
in American speech than we've realized.
MARCKWARDT. Well, there are these differences in pronunciation, as
I've said, in the older portions of the country. As one moves west,
particularly beyond the Appalachian Mountains, the more obvious
distinctions tend to level out, and the language is much more uniform.
QUIRK. I see. But let's take, if I may, your own speech as a case in
point here. Now, I know you come from Michigan, which is one of the
states in the Great Lakes basin. How does your pronunciation differ
from others in 'hat huge central portion of the United States?
MARCKWARDT. Technically, my speech wrould be classified, I think,
as an Inland Northern type. I pronounce g-r-e-a-s-y as ['gri:si]. Had I
been born two hundred miles to the south, I would in all probability
say ['gri:zi]. I pronounce the preposition o-n with the same vowel that I
use in father [ɑ:n]. Again, someone from southern Ohio or southern
Indiana would be likely to say [ɔn]. But these isolated instances are
merely illustrations, and no more, of the areas of difference in
pronunciation.
QUIRK. Yes, I'd noticed that all these differences that you've men-
tioned so far are matters of pronunciation. And I did notice, too, that in
the passages that we've played - particularly the piece from The
Grapes of Wrath - that there were many grammatical differences, 'I
knowed', and 'you wasn't', and 'that ain't no blame' with the double
negative. And another verb form, 'we seen*.
MARCKWARDT. Well, these differences exist, really, on a social or
an educational level. They aren't distributed so much regionally as they
are socially. The regional variation occurs in pronunciation, in
vocabulary, relatively little in grammatical form or syntactic structure.
QUIRK. I notice in this connection that these grammatical forms like
'I knowed' and 'we seen' are forms that occur in uneducated speech in
Britain, too.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, I'm sure they would.
Regional Variations in the United States 65
QUIRK. Well now, what about these items of vocabulary?
MARCKWARDT. Let us take cottage cheese as an example. This could
very well be called the standard form for the home-made cheese that is
generally made by allowing curdled milk to stand and then straining it.
Now, in eastern New England this is called sour-milk cheese; in the
inland North, the part I come from, it is Dutch cheese; in the Hudson
valley, which is a subsection of this, it's pot cheese. Smear case, which
we borrowed from the Pennsylvania German—
QUIRK. Smear case - like 'schmieräse'?
MARCKWARDT.—exactly, only anglicized, made English; this is
current in a belt running from East to West in the middle of the
country. And in the South, I think probably one would find clabber
cheese or bonny clabber cheese.
QUIRK. This is really an amazing variety. Would you say that they're
all still in use, all these words?
MARCKWARDT. Yes, they are, particularly whenever this product
continues to be made at home or on the farm. And also to a degree, by
the older people in communities, rather than the younger. But as a
product of this kind comes to be manufactured and distributed on a
national basis, then the national term tends to take over, so that
undoubtedly you'll find cottage cheese squeezing out the rest of these,
although a great many people still will recognize the older terms.
QUIRK. It's a shame that, although we are approving of the spread of
uniformity in English, it means losing these very picturesque words,
isn't it? Can you think of other vocabulary items?
MARCKWARDT. Well, let me take just one more example. We would
all recognize earthworm as a cultivated, if you will, or literary term.
But in various parts of the country there are alternate terms, this time
so broadly distributed that one could almost call them regional:
angleworm in the North - this would include New England and the
inland North as well; fishworm or fishing worm in a huge belt running
entirely across the mid-portion of the country. But then, in addition,
certain terms are primarily local. In Rhode Island, you'll find
eaceworm being used. In northern Connecticut, angle dog. And at the
southern tip of New Jersey and possibly one or two spots along the
Atlantic coast farther to the South, eel worm.
QUIRK. Well, I would never have thought that there was such
R-E
66
Regional Variations in the United States 67
A Common Language
MARCKWARDT. Yes, I think so. The use of ain't in certain situations,
variation in the American vocabulary. But isn't there also a sense in
which could occur anywhere in the country as we said before, does
which the concept of uniformity in American speech is actually
violate our standards of acceptability in general. So does a sentence like
endorsed by the Americans themselves? Wouldn't you say that
'Florrie and me was married.' Probably anyways in place of anyway.
Americans take a certain amount of pride in having a coast-to-coast,
The old unchanged plural - 'six mile down the road'. These are the
Canada to Mexico, standardization?
things that would help us to define a cultivated standard, but even
MARCKWARDT. Satisfaction might be a better term than pride; at
within these limits it's not rigidly defined, because of the vast amount
least they don't regret that so few differences exist. As a nation, we of movement up and down the social scale. But again, I must almost
took literally the dictum of the rhetorician Campbell: a proper speech contradict myself by saying that although our standard is not rigidly
should be current, reputable, national. Consequently, except for the defined, there are probably more taboos against individual items -
few older local cultures, the American has little or no interest in things that you feel you won't say and that no one should say - than you
speaking a dialect; he has no feeling of warmth or sentiment for the have in cultivated British English.
language of the soil from which he sprang.
QUIRK. Yes, I see. Well, this time and last, we've been devoting our
QUIRK. Well, let me ask this: can you say whether any of the
attention to the variations that exist within Britain and the United
varieties of American dialect that you have been mentioning has States. In our next programme, I suggest we go back to talking about
greater prestige than others? the English language as a whole.
MARCKWARDT. This is partly, I think, a matter of education. It's only
in part a matter of the cultivation of the speaker. Certainly cultivated
New England and cultivated Southern have prestige among the people
who speak these dialects, but I doubt very much that speakers from
other parts of the country would shift to them, consciously try to
imitate them and, as a result, give up their own natural speech. The
large central and the western parts of the country, I think, have a rather
different attitude; here, my notion is that they really take their dialect
or their variety of speech for granted. It's nothing that they have any
pride in at all.
QUIRK. I wonder, Al, to round off, whether you could sum up what
you might call the standard speech in the United States. How do you
think it's made up? What's it based on?
MARCKWARDT. Let me make the point first of all, that the standard
in the United States has a much greater range of what I would call
'permissible variation' than does Received Pronunciation in England. It
includes cultivated Southern, cultivated New England, cultivated
Midland and Inland Northern. In short, it's not based on any one
region, and no one speaking a regional, or one of the few remaining
local dialects feels that, in doing so, he is violating a canon of
acceptability; he's not violating good taste.
QUIRK. No. But I do notice that you mention the word cultivated
from time to time. Are you implying that the standard is socially rather
than regionally based, then?
Equality of Status 69
 11
Equality of Status
MARCKWARDT. In our last two discussions, we've seen the tre-
mendous variety of English that exists within each of the English-
speaking areas we represent.
QUIRK. Yes, we have.
MARCKWARDT. But we also made the point that this internal variety
(as we might call it) was being leveled out, and that this matched the
kind of leveling of the differences between British and American
English that we've been considering from time to time. Now, let's look
more closely at the present state of things with our two forms of
English; they seem to me to add up to what may be called, without
exaggeration, the miracle of English in the world today.
QUIRK. Yes, indeed. You remember, Al, in our fifth talk, we dis-
cussed English in Shakespeare's time. Well, now, when Shakespeare
was writing and America was being colonized, we reckoned there were
what - about five million English-speakers in the world altogether?
MARCKWARDT. Yes, we did.
QUIRK. Well, today there are about two hundred and seventy million
people who speak it as their native language - not to mention a further
and very important hundred million or so who use it as a second or
foreign language.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, Randolph. This vast increase in the population
of English speakers is part of the miracle that we've been talking about,
but it seems to me that - in conjunction with this increase in numbers -
the miraculous thing also is that, among the two hundred and seventy
million native English speakers today, there is no greater dialectal
difference than there was among the five million in the year 1600.
QUIRK. That's true - and there may well be less. That reminds me of
what you wrote in a book some years ago, Al, when you des-
68
cribed English as a highly unified language: 'more so', you said, 'than
tongues spoken by a far smaller number of people.'
MARCKWARDT. It's nice of you to remember what I wrote on this
subject, Randolph. But oddly enough, wouldn't you agree that,
although differences are so slight, it's also true that there's much freer
and franker recognition of differences in linguistic usage today, both
within and between the English-speaking countries?
QUIRK. And what's at least as important, this freer recognition means
also a freer and franker acceptance of such differences as exist. I don't
think this is as paradoxical as it sounds. We've said modern
communications are to be given credit for the increasing unification of
English. But I think to a great extent also we should give credit to the
spirit of tolerance which, just as soon as it helps us to recognize and
accept each other's English, allows us to start borrowing from it and
using it ourselves. And this of course has the effect of reducing the
differences that we are by the same token recognizing.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, certainly. And it's the knowledge, the aware-
ness of this new spirit of linguistic tolerance, this universal give-and-
take, that helps us answer quite unequivocally the question we raised
in our very first discussion. When foreign teachers are worried about
which English they should teach - British or American - it seems to me
that we've now arrived at the point where we can say without
hesitation: teach the form that you know and that you have the
resources to teach.
QUIRK. Yes, secure in the knowledge that whatever differences there
are, they won't make much difference to ready understanding or ready
acceptability. There are already several standard 'Englishes' in the
world - and a teacher's choice may well become still wider in the years
ahead. But at any rate for the present, no one on earth need be in any
doubt about the status of standard British English and standard
American English. Both are recognized as wholly acceptable wherever
English is used - and that of course includes within Britain and
America.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, and wouldn't it seem ridiculous for us if a
native speaker of American English tried to teach British English?
And it would be equally silly (and quite as hopeless) for an English-
man to try and teach American English. The two varieties are too
similar for either side to be consistent if we are to speak the other
70 A Common Language Equality of Status 71
variety. You know, this reminds me of a time I was sitting in a little
lunch-room in the United States, and an American woman of some
social pretensions came in with her husband; when the waitress
showed them a seat, she looked across the room and said (in what she
clearly thought was a superior accent) 'Can't [kɑ:nt] you put us over
there?' But a couple of moments later, talking more naturally just to her
husband, I heard her say 'Is it half [hæ:f] past six yet?' It sounded
ridiculous to hear her mix her forms of language, though certainly she
thought that her [kɑ:nt] was better than her ordinary pronunciation as
represented by [hæ:f].
QUIRK. But of course two people, one saying [kɑ:nt] and the other
[kæ:nt] would have been acceptable to each other.
MARCKWARDT. Certainly.
QUIRK. Well, this matter of the full acceptability of each other's
English is terribly important and I think we ought to think of some of
the factors that are promoting it at the present time. We should
certainly mention the continued and in fact increasing exchange of
written materials between our two countries. It's not just works of
science and learning, but ordinary everyday reading - novels and plays
and poetry.
MARCKWARDT. Right. And contemporary British literature is studied
in every English Department of every college and university in the
United States.
QUIRK. And I can't think of a British university where American
literature isn't similarly studied. John Braine and J. D. Salinger are
novelists who are read with equal eagerness by young people on both
sides of the Atlantic, and the comic verse of, say, Ogden Nash, is as
much enjoyed in Britain as the serious poetry of, say, Robert Graves is
in the United States. And W. H. Auden, after all, has been a poet in
both our countries.
MARCKWARDT. And just as we claim equal rights in Shakespeare
(since he wrote before our two nations separated), so too we lay equal
claim today to T. S. Eliot, who was born and educated in the United
States but who has long since written in England as a British citizen.
QUIRK. Quite, quite. And I think we need to give special emphasis
to written forms of English - even if only because it has become
conventional among linguists to stress the spoken language and to
regard written language as secondary, derivative. It surely needs to
be recognized that a literary language - the language as written down -
has itself a powerful effect on spoken language.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, I'm sure this is true. We may, of course, study the
spoken language first in order to get certain ideas straight about its
structure. And this is extremely important. But this does not mean we
should neglect to study the written language. And again, from a purely
teaching viewpoint, we may decide it's best to teach spoken English
first, but this is certainly not to devalue the literary language. One
aspect of the importance of written English can be seen in the steady
increase of spelling pronunciations throughout the English-speaking
world. QUIRK. That's true.
MARCKWARDT. We find a pronunciation such as ['weiskout]
waistcoat instead of ['weskit], ['fɔ:hed] forehead instead of ['fɔrid], a
herb instead of 'erb. And of course this process has gone on a long
time; after all, Chaucer said parfit where we say perfect. All of this
testifies to the leveling and stabilizing effect of the written word.
QUIRK. I quite agree; I don't think this can be said too strongly or too
often. And we can go further. Your examples have been concerned
with pronunciation, but wouldn't you agree, Al, that this stabilizing
and levelling effect holds true also for the larger units of grammar and
style?
MARCKWARDT. Oh yes, certainly. The literary tradition helps to
shape and conserve the spoken syntax of educated people, and since
it's the educated people who hold positions of influence (that is
writers, statesmen, actors - even professors), the literary tradition has a
strong if indirect influence on virtually every member of our
community.
QUIRK. We have here, then, an additional force that's working to hold
and even bring our two forms of English ever closer together. But, of
course, in my own country, it's perfectly true that the most obvious and
powerful single influence on our English is the usage of the United
States. And the same holds for English in other parts of the world: it's
all being very strongly influenced from America, which is perfectly
natural. Not only is the United States the most populous of the
English-speaking countries - it's also the one with the greatest political
and economic influence. MARCKWARDT. Well, it's true, I suppose, that
while already in the
72 A Common Language
nineteenth century the United Kingdom started to adopt words from
America, this has become a real flood in the past twenty years.
QUIRK. It certainly has. People used to think, you know, that this was
chiefly because of the popularity of American entertainment -the
influence of films and jazz and popular songs. And it's true, of course,
that the influence here has been very strong; we've expressions like
disc-jockey.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, someone who plays records on a radio pro-
gram.
QUIRK. That's it. And quiz programmes; the expression 'to give
somebody a build-up' - meaning to increase his reputation; and in
fact the expression 'being on the air' itself, as we are at this mom
ent. But it's not just the world of entertainment. It's the same in the
world of public affairs and business - words like top secret, double
talk_____
MARCKWARDT. Yes, an ambiguous kind of statement or almost
deceptive.
QUIRK. The expression, sales resistance. And then again, in the
press, with expressions like blurb - an advertising description of a
book -ghost writer, and editorial.
MARCKWARDT. Oh, that last one's a surprise; I thought in Britain
you always said 'leader' or 'leading article'.
QUIRK. We use all three now. By the way, I wonder which of us was
the first to think of having 'baby-sitters' to look after our children when
we went out for the evening?
MARCKWARDT. Well, I don't know, but I have a daughter who baby-
sits regularly. This is what we call an example of 'back-formation'.
Now, tell me, do Londoners commute to work?
QUIRK. Yes, within the last four or five years, British people who
have to make a train ride to work every day have come more and more
to speak of themselves as commuters.
MARCKWARDT. Well, this American influence on you seems to be
enormous, all right, but we mustn't jump to the conclusion, though,
that it's all one-way traffic. I'd like to come back again to literary
tradition. It's not just that we exchange whole television programs
today: it's the fact that the London literary world is such an important
literary center in the English-speaking world. The indirect influence of
written materials that we mentioned earlier helps to sustain Britain's
part in this great, in this really miraculous
Equality of Status 73
operation of moulding a more and more widely used medium, and a
more and more closely unified medium.
QUIRK. Yes, it's curious that although we now have over two
hundred and seventy million native speakers of English, there is
probably, as we've said before, less possibility now of misunder-
standing between any of them than there's been for a couple of hundred
years. That's just about the last word on this miracle, isn't it? For the
rest, well, we just take pleasure in the fact that we have as many little
linguistic differences as neighbours should have -like Yorkshiremen
and Lancashiremen—
MARCKWARDT. Or New Yorkers and Bostonians.
QUIRK. —the kind of differences there are between families, or
indeed, within families. Enough differences to give us something of a
sense of individuality.
MARCKWARDT. Enough to justify a few transatlantic jokes.
QUIRK. Oh yes, do you know that old one about the American lady
who is supposed to have said to someone in England, 'Do you have
many children?' and the reply was, 'Oh no, only one every couple of
years.' This rests on the rather dubious existence of a tendency in
England to use do in questions with the verb have only when habitual
actions are referred to.
MARCKWARDT. Well, then there's the one about the Englishman
coming to New York and trying to buy a saloon; he was directed to the
government bureau concerned with liquor licensing, because of course
although he only wanted a car, he is supposed to have wanted to open a
bar, a pub. You could do the same joke in reverse with an American
trying to buy a sedan in London and being told, I suppose, that sedan
chairs can only be found in museums.
QUIRK. Very good! And they talk about us being divided by a
common language. Not on your life! But we thoroughly enjoy the
privilege of sharing a common language.
The Future of English 75
 12
The Future of English
QUIRK. Well, those of us who make a profession of studying
language and languages, as you and I do, concern ourselves more often
with the past or with the present state of languages rather than
attempting to do something about the future. But today I think we
ought to try and talk about this future of English. Now what do you
think some of the things are, Al, that we ought to be considering?
MARCKWARDT. Well, I should think, Randolph, that the number of
speakers would be one thing. We know, for example, that in
Shakespeare's time there were about five million persons speaking
English. At present, there are no less than 270 million speakers of
English who have learned it as their first language, that is to say, who
speak it natively. This, after all, is a more than fifty-fold increase in
four centuries. In addition, there are many millions also who speak
English as a foreign or as a second language; possibly 135 million. I
think we can foresee a continued increase here in the future.
QUIRK. I like this distinction, by the way, that you've just mentioned
between English as a foreign and English as a second language. When
we say English as a foreign language, we're referring to people who
learn English in foreign countries, just so that they can come on an
occasional vacation to England or the United States, or read books in
English, read English literature. This has been going on for at least two
hundred years. But the really crucial and important phenomenon that
we have in the twentieth century-is this English as a second language
business, where English, though not the native tongue, is in some
degree in everyday use for purposes of government, or teaching, or
administration.
MARCKWARDT. That's right. And, you know, the distinction between
English as a foreign language and English as a second language is
something that we have to thank you for in England.
74
For a long time in the United States, we used the two terms just
interchangeably. But now, English is playing a very important role in
many parts of the world in establishing inter-comprehensi-bility
between parts of a nation which either do not have an alternative single
language to cover the entire country, or where the administrators of
that country find it more convenient to use an international language to
carry on their business. One thinks, for example, of various parts of
Africa, of course, and India is a notable instance where English is a
minority language from any ordinary point of view and yet is one of
the official languages.
QUIRK. Yes, true. And we mustn't forget that it's not only necessary for
the various groups in the new nations to communicate within the
countries; it's also necessary for statesmen of countries like Ghana, and
say, Guinea, to communicate across frontiers. MARCKWARDT. With
each other.
QUIRK. Exactly. Now, how are they going to do this? The chances
are that it will be either in English or in French, with possibly English
having the better chance.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, I should think it would, and this is an ex-
tremely important aspect: that is to say, the use of English for foreign
negotiations between governments, where, of course, in earlier
centuries French was the traditional language of diplomacy, and,
before that, Latin.
QUIRK. Well, in addition to all this, it seems to me that English, the
English language, reflects the combined prestige and the varied
activity of two countries, not just one: of Britain and America. Surely
there's no other language in the world that has this particular
advantage, is there?
MARCKWARDT. No, and moreover, it's more than just a matter of
prestige on the one hand and activity on the other. That is to say,
English is global already. People speak it natively in virtually every
continent of the world. We may have a few million speakers less than
some of the other widely spoken languages, but after all, we have the
advantage of a geographical distribution that no other one of them has.
QUIRK. That's true. Well, among this intense activity that I had in
mind, we have the intellectual activity. After all, in the seventeenth
century, men wrote their works of, let us say, scientific
76 A Common Language The Future of English 77
description in Latin; in the eighteenth century, we have botanical
descriptions very largely in French.
MARCKWARDT. But let me say just one thing here. It's always
interested me so much that late in the seventeenth century Newton
wrote his treatise on mathematics in Latin; early in the eighteenth
century he wrote his treatise on optics in English.
QUIRK. True. Well, of course, today English is very widely used for
this purpose, and I think that it's not too much of an exaggeration, is it,
to project into the future and say that English will - at any rate, in the
immediate future - be the most important language of learning.
MARCKWARDT. Well, it certainly looks that way. I've observed that
one of the prime motives for students all over the world is simply to
acquire a command of English that will enable them to read textbooks
in such fields as chemistry, engineering, and medicine. I've seen this in
Mexico; I've seen it in Japan; I've seen it in the Near East; it seems to
go on all over.
QUIRK. Well, I've seen it in India, of course, and in Africa. And it's
surely unthinkable that any country will be able to afford to translate
the vast wealth of learning or should set aside the funds, indeed (amid
their hunger and other problems), to translate books in the sciences or
the humanities, in medicine and law, into languages like Thai, Swahili,
or Pushtu. And consequently, for the countries where those languages
are used, English must remain the 'window on the world' so far as
science and learning are concerned.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, I've always liked that expression. But so far,
Randolph, we've been talking about the status of English in the future,
and I definitely agree with this last point. But I wonder if we have any
ideas, though, of what the language, the English language itself, will
be like as we look forward to the year 2000, or 2500?
QUIRK. It's very difficult, isn't it? I mean, obviously one thinks of
the way in which our vocabulary has grown over the last four hundred
years and how it's undoubtedly growing at the moment. I'm often
struck by the way, when I pick up a serious newspaper or a learned
journal, I find many words that I simply haven't met before. And our
current unabridged dictionaries of English have something like half a
million words entered in them. Surely, we
might predict that the word-population of English may go up to say,
well, three-quarters of a million.
MARCKWARDT. Possibly.
QUIRK. But what do you think, Al, about what will happen to the
way these words are sounded throughout the world?
MARCKWARDT. Well, I think we have to examine this in several
phases. Certainly we can say that over the centuries the consonant
system of English has been relatively stable. There haven't been a great
number of changes, and I don't suppose there will be.
QUIRK. HOW about the vowels, though?
MARCKWARDT. Well, I'm a little more uncertain about what is going
to happen to them, although again, words like sap, bed, grim, full, all
of these that are pronounced with what we popularly call the 'short
vowels', have not changed in pronunciation since King Alfred's time;
this is a thousand years or more. It's quite conceivable, therefore, that
they will remain very much as they are. Now the long vowels and
diphthongs - the [ei], [i:], [ai] sounds -these are the ones that have
constantly been shifting from one generation to another, and I should
not be surprised at all to see them continue to do so. And I feel also
that British English is rather ahead of American English in the
development of stress patterns -accent. In some instances you have
shifted the stress forward earlier within a word than we have. At any
rate in a word like ['sekrəteri] secretary, for which you say—
QUIRK, ['sekritri].
MARCKWARDT.—we've given up the secondary stress; and in
['sekən,deri] secondary, for which you say—
QUIRK, ['sekəndri].
MARCKWARDT.—we still keep it. I think, in a few instances, we're
just beginning to catch up. But then, of course, there are also the
grammatical forms of the language. Now, do you have ideas about
this, Randolph?
QUIRK. Well, just as you say that the pronunciation of bed has
remained unchanged from Alfred's time, so too, the greatest
irregularities that we have in English also seem to survive extra-
ordinarily well: nouns with irregular plurals, for example, like geese,
and mice, and calves; verbs like sing, sang, sung - bring, brought, and
of course the entire verb to be; then you have irregular adjectives like
good, better, best, and our entire range of personal pronoun
78 A Common Language The Future of English
forms which is probably, along with the verb to be, the most irregular
thing that we've got. 79
MARCKWAKDT. What about the words of less frequency in doubt this is the very essence of inter-comprehensibility. And in the
grammar? light of this, the question of British versus American English, that
QUIRK. I think that here we may predict some regularization; seems to worry people from time to time, actually seems of very little
certainly, there has been regularization, hasn't there? Perhaps with the importance. It's not a matter of British versus American, it's one of
verb to strive, which at one time had only the past tense strove, and the British and American.
past participle striven; now increasingly people say 'I strived to do it,' QUIRK. Exactly! And the English-speaking peoples speak in many
and 'I have strived for years to do it.' Similarly, with the verb to wake. voices and in many places. Their affairs certainly have long since
Also many nouns have regularized their plurals, nouns that are rarer ceased to be limited to Britain and America, though it's nice to think
than the goose and mouse that we talked about earlier: words like that they are continuing to look to Britain and America -not to Britain
formula and antenna which traditionally had plurals like formulae, or America - for a language which may help them conduct their affairs
antennae, and now commonly formulas, antennas. Then, of course, in the world. The sphere of English now is the world.
there is still another side of the whole structural machinery or pattern MARCKWARDT. And we in the United States and in Great Britain are
of the language, and that's the matter of word arrangement. Got any glad to take a world view toward it.
ideas about this, Al?
MARCKWARDT. Well, certainly, it may well be that English, which
already has a very fixed word order, will iron out the few areas of free
variation that continue to exist. For example, the placing of adverbial
modifiers seems to have become regularized over the years, so that in a
sentence like, 'They discussed it thoroughly at the meeting yesterday,'
we no longer have a free choice as to where to put these adverbs.
QUIRK. There's one big factor which makes prediction on the basis
of the past very difficult. I think you'll agree that almost all our
predictions have assumed that forms would develop in a set direction
according to phonetic laws, grammatical regularizations and so on. But
we have had one enormously important new factor that's been brought
into operation, namely the printed word. I think that it is very difficult
for us at the present time - when we've only had universal education
for about a hundred years - to predict just how important is going to be
the stabilizing effect of the printed word upon us. I had this in mind
when you were talking about British English being ahead of American
English in development of stress patterns. Look at the increase of
spelling pronunciations, after all.
MARCKWARDT. Yes, that's true. Never, certainly, has the spoken or
the written word had such far-flung distribution; without a