The Representation of Non-standard English in Literature and Film

Corso di Laurea in Lingue, Letterature e Filologie

Euroamericane

TESI MAGISTRALE

The Representation of Non-standard English in

Literature and Film

CANDIDATO RELATORE Michele Tognotti Prof. Silvia Bruti

Contents:

Introduction

1. British English and American English

1.1 Introduction 8 1.2 The English language 9 1.3 Historical notes 9

1.4 British English 10

1.4.1 The rise and prestige of RP in England 11

1.5 American English 12

1.5.1 SAE (Standard American English) 13

1.6 Notes on phonetics 15

1.7 English spelling 18

1.8 Standardization and language discrimination 19

2. The Representation of dialect and non-standard varieties in

literature

2.2 Orthographic manipulation: a literary device 23

2.3 Sound 23 2.3.1 Semi-phonetic respellings 23 2.3.2 Eye dialect 25 2.3.3 Allegro speech 27 2.4 Vocabulary 28 2.5 Grammar 29

2.6 The role of the reader 30

2.7 What can writers do to solve the problem? 33

3. Analysing dialect representation in Malouf’s Remembering

Babylon

3.2.1 A short history of Scottish English 34

3.2.2 The phonology of Scottish English 35

3.2.2.1 Vowels 35

3.2.2.2 Scottish Vowel Length Rule 37

3.2.2.3 Monophthongs 38

3.2.2.4 Diphthongs 38

3.2.3Consonants 38

3.2.4 Prosodic and paralinguistic features 39

3.2.4.1 Rhythm 39

3.2.4.2 Pause 39

3.3 The author 39

3.4 Remembering Babylon 40

3.5 The languages in the novel and the sense of authenticity 41 3.6 Bad guys with bad English: stereotyping? 45

3.7 Standard English speakers 48

3.7.1 Mr. Frazer and hi wife 48

3.7.2 Mrs. Hutchenche and Leona 49

3.7.3 The Government House entourage: Sir George, Lady Bowen,

Mr. Herbert. 50

3.8 Metalanguage: ‘talk about talk’ 52

3.9 Free indirect speech and steam of consciousness 54

3.10 Style shifting 56

3.11 Conclusions 58

4. The representation of dialect and non-standard varieties in

film

4.2.2 Stereotyping in movies: The Goonies and The Godfather 63

4.2.3 The straightforwardness of movies 65

4.3 Dialect coaching 66

5. Analysing dialect representation in Guy Ritchie’s Snatch

5.2 Cockney English 67

5.2.1 A brief history 67

5.2.2 Cockney rhyming slang 68

5.2.3 Notes on phonology of Cockney 69

5.2.3.1 Vowels 69

5.2.3.2 Diphthongs 70

5.2.3.3 Vowels before /ɫ/ 71

5.2.3.4 Consonants 71

5.3 The director: Guy Ritchie 73

5.4 A case study: the film Snatch and its plot 74 5.5 Jason Statham’s Cockney English 75 5.6 The ‘Jewish’ scene: overturning stereotypes 76 5.7 Different ways of using metalanguage 78

5.7.1 The ‘Pickeys’ 79

5.7.2 Cousin Avi and his powerful metalinguistic comment 81

5.8 Sneaky Russian stereotypes 82

5.9 Brick Top’s style shifting 83

5.10 Other English varieties in Snatch: General American,

Scottish English and Italian American accent 85

5.11 Conclusions 88

6 Comparing film and literature

90

6.1 Introduction 90

6.2 A case study: Oliver Twist 90

6.3 Comparing scenes 91

6.3.1 The book 91

6.3.2 The movie 93

6.3.3 A monstrous otherness becomes ‘the bad Jews’ 96

6.4 Conclusions 96

Conclusions

Bibliography

Filmography

Introduction

This work draws on linguistic notions and approaches in order to delve into the ways in which different varieties and dialects of English are represented in a range of films and literary texts. The representation of language in both films and literature is meant to be a representation of spoken, rather than written, varieties. The main purpose of this work is to demonstrate how a valuable field of analysis this topic can be, not only for being interesting in itself, but for offering alternative ways for understanding important dynamics in both art forms, such as identity, communication, society and interpersonal relationships. In fact, the representation of non-standard speech in film and literature can play an important role in establishing characters, setting the scene, highlighting thematic concerns and showing relationships between characters, as well as having implications beyond the text (or the screen) in terms of perpetuating or challenging stereotypes of different kind of speakers. Throughout this work several varieties of English are brought up and discussed, from their phonetics to their sociolinguistic implications, in order to better comprehend all the possible meanings that their representation in texts (or on screen) may convey. Therefore, the work begins introducing English standards (Chapter 1), the academically recognized varieties that are, both in their spoken and written form, considered as reference models for school education, mass media, and anyone who wants to adopt a correct usage of the language. The chapter concludes with two interesting paragraphs: the first discusses the issue of spelling in written English, and how such incongruity between sounds and their graphic representation has been exploited by authors, who can freely modify the spelling of some words in order to suggest a non-standard pronunciation. This aspect is quite unique of English. The last paragraph describes how a variety becomes a standard, and with what social and geographic

consequences. In Chapter 2 the first key topic of this work is introduced. It discusses the way writers can represent dialect and non-standard varieties in literary works, which features (sound, vocabulary and grammar) of a particular variety they choose to represent and which they choose to omit in order not to confuse the reader. The last paragraphs in this chapter talk about the role of the reader in this process and its importance that has to be taken into consideration by authors. In Chapter 3 the analysis begins, focusing on the non-standard representations in David Malouf’s novel Remembering Babylon (1994). Since Scottish English is the most significant and consistent variety represented throughout the novel, this chapter contains a section dedicated to the description of this variety, especially from a phonetic point of view. The

speeches of almost every character are analyzed, identifying what

pronunciation of which specific variety they are supposed to evoke, and the contribution they give to the depiction of the characters themselves, the setting and the relationship between the characters. Author or characters’

commentaries about language are analyzed in terms of metalanguage, which is another interesting topic both in literature and movies. Other important topics that are treated in the course of this work are stereotyping, style-shifting, authenticity and language discrimination. Chapter 4 deals with the

representation of dialect and non-standard speech in films, explaining how and why it differs significantly from the representation in texts, and offering some examples from few famous movies. In Chapter 5 the object of analysis is Guy Ritchie’s movie Snatch (2000). Likewise Chapter 3, there is a section dedicated to Cockney English, since the majority of the characters speak this variety. The movie, set in London criminal suburbs, is impregnated of stereotypes and clichés, and offers an incredibly vast number of cases in which the

1. British English and American English

1.1 Introduction

When we think of what distinguishes humans from other living being things, the first thing coming to our minds may concern the ability of thinking.

Humans have been described as tool-making animals. However, we can hardly imagine thoughts without words, or the production of any kind of tool without any cooperation and interaction as some form of communication is needed. Language is, in fact, the most sophisticated tool that humans have ever invented. Unlike animal cries, human language is articulate: it is a system of signs represented by sounds produced with phonatory organs. Linguists

consider language to be basically a spoken system, and the written language is seen as secondary and derivative. There are two main reasons for that: firstly because every individual acquires naturally the spoken version of a language, whereas the acquisition of writing is something that needs to be taught in the aftermath; secondly because all languages are spoken (with the exception of dead languages) and only a part of these are written. Anyway, whether it is spoken or written, every language has a structure with rules. The set of rules of a language is known as grammar, and it operates at various levels:

phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics. These levels go from the smallest unit of structure in language, the phoneme, to the biggest, a lexical item carrying a special meaning within a text. This type of approach is called synchronic, for it focuses on how a given language works in a precise moment of its history, being the present or the Medieval Era. A study with a diachronic approach analyses the changing of a given language over time. Languages do indeed change over time. As something natural and inevitable, human language adapts itself in response to the needs of its users. Therefore, the English spoken today in Harlem will not be the same English that will be spoken in ten years, and so forth. As far as the synchronic approach is concerned, in this work phonetics and phonology will be privileged, for attention will be paid to the sounds of English and their representation. However, before talking about sounds and pronunciations, a short diachronic introduction is in order, to see when and where English was born and how it has changed over the centuries.

1.2 English language

English is one of approximately 6,900 living languages and currently the most widely spoken language in the world (Meyer 2009: 20). The reasons why it became so popular have little to do with the language itself; it is probably due more to historical and geopolitical explanations: it was the British colonial adventure that pulled the trigger for the initial spread of English worldwide, then a major role has been played by the rise of the United States, in the

twentieth century, as an economic and political power in the world (Meyer: 1). English is a member of the Germanic languages, a group that belongs to one of the biggest language families in the world, Indo-European. English, like every other language, has changed over time.

1.3 Historical Notes

In its history, it has gone through different stages. It is thought to have had its origins around AD 400, when the Romans had ended their occupation of England, and the number of Germanic tribes (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) started to increase through a series of invasions. There were different kingdoms, with different dialects, and this group of Germanic varieties formed Old English (or Anglo-Saxon) (Barber 1993: 104-5). The Norman Conquest in 1066 was a big turning point. English ceased to be the language of the governing classes, and since the Normans ruled England for approximately 300 years, this had a profound influence on the language. When in the late fourteenth century English became once again the language of the whole country, it had changed so significantly, that was no longer close to Old English. The English of this period is called Middle English, and it was very different from Old English, especially due to the influx of French vocabulary (the Normans spoke French), as well as the simplification of its inflectional system.1 After the addition of many words of French origin to the English lexicon, English speakers were more prone to borrow words from abroad. After winning back its central role at the expenses of French, English had to deal with the influence of Latin (Barber 1993: 175-77). Latin still had a great prestige as a language of international learning, and during the Renaissance there was a massive wave of Latin

1 _{An inflection is the modification of a word with prefix, suffix, infix or vowel} change, to express one or more grammatical categories. Old English had an

inflectional system for case, number and gender. In Middle English we witness a great reduction in the number of inflections (Barber 1993: 116-118, 157).

loanwords to English. These were not, obviously, the first Latin loanwords to be borrowed by English, as the first contact between the two languages had happened many centuries before, when English was still spoken on the continent. Another great change in English during this period was due to the Great Vowel Shift (Barber 1993: 191). This was an important change in

pronunciation, for vowels began to be replaced by vowels pronounced higher in the mouth or transformed into diphthongs.2 _{It was mainly because of these two} linguistic events, and not because of political or cultural conflicts, that the transitions from Middle English to Early Modern English took place. Although borrowing words from Latin and the Great Vowel Shift were not fully

completed until the seventeenth century (Barber 1993: 199), other events occurring in the meantime further affected English language. The shift from an oral to a print culture is one of them: with the invention of the printing press, the literacy increased, and the written language gained as much prestige as the spoken one, or even more. Dictionaries and grammars started to appear and people felt that English needed to be “ruled” or “regulated” (Barber 1993: 201-3). By the 18th century, the language was slightly different from today’s

English. The system of orthography was the one we use now, although spellings varied from writer to writer. With this growing attitude of standardization and codification, English saw its final stage, the so-called Modern English. It is the same English that sailed towards America and many more countries, becoming a world language.

1.4 British English

Let us now look at British English, the English variety spoken in the U.K., with a synchronic approach. There are many regional varieties in the United

Kingdom, which can differ one another by accent, intonation, lexicon, expressions and so forth. The major divisions of dialects go along with the political division of the nation. We will have the so-called English English, or English as spoken in England, which embrace Southern English dialects, West Country dialects, East and West Midlands English dialects, and Northern English dialects. The English spoken in Northern Ireland is called Ulster English, and then we have Welsh English in Wales and Scots English in Scotland (these last two are not to be confused with Welsh language and Scots language).

1.4.1 The Rise and Prestige of RP in England

As we have already mentioned, every language that has spread geographically has produced varieties, which are called dialects. What has not been said is that we may find different spoken varieties even within the same country (or

community) that might be regarded as regional dialects. Regardless social or historical relevance of a variety, linguists tend to consider all these labels as equal (Preston 1976: 1). They think that all spoken languages, whether they are national standard varieties or just regional lingos of some remote communities of speakers living in small mountain villages, have the same linguistic

importance and own the same status, as regards “grammatical and phonological complexity, beauty and aesthetic potential, and congruity to the culture that supports them for general and complex communication purposes” (Preston 1976: 1). In theory, all spoken languages are equals: there are not better languages, or languages that are more correct than others. In practice, the opinion of professional linguists matters very little. What gives importance and prestige to a language has to do with politics and society. In the same way that the economical and political rise of the United States implicated that English became a worldwide language, social beliefs can determine if a spoken variety has an overrated and unfair prestige. Thus, it is what non-linguists believe that constitutes precisely the cognitive reality that makes it possible to better understand the attitudes and perception of a speech community (Lippi-Green 1997: 6). Therefore, the concepts of language and dialect are misleading: standard varieties are labeled as the language of their countries (or

communities), in spite of being just some varieties among others. Behind every standard variety of any language, there is a process called standardization. In British English, the standardization of the language led to the

acknowledgement of a standard variety and to a social accent, called R.P

(Received Pronunciation). After the emergence of printing (in the late 1470), in the course of fifteenth and sixteenth century, one London dialect became the language of printing, the written language (Mugglestone 2004: 2). From the late seventeenth century onwards there has been a series of publications by grammarians, novelists, phoneticians, teachers that contributed to the creation and spread of these attitudes around the U.K. Jonathan Swift, John Dryden, Robert Lowth, Joseph Addison, discussed and wrote about English grammar and spelling, and how its right usage should have been. It is safe to say that the standardization of spelling, and of the written language more in general,

foreran the standardization of pronunciation and speaking. At the end of the eighteenth century, though, a new genre flourished: the pronouncing dictionary. These dictionaries acted as a means by which “the pronunciation of each word

can be reduced to a certainty by fixed and visible marks, the only way in which uniformity of sound could be propagated to any distance” (Mugglestone 2004: 3). In his General Dictionary of 1780, Thomas Sheridan stated that he strongly believe in standardization in order to “spread abroad the English language as a living tongue, and to facilitate the attainment of his speech, it is necessary in the first place that a standard pronunciation should be established, and a method of acquiring a just one should be laid open” (Mugglestone 2004: 4). From the late eighteenth century onwards there has been the creation and the consolidation of a number of national stereotypes in terms of speech. Regional markers were stigmatized, and the best speakers of Standard English were “those whose pronunciation, and language generally, least betray their locality” (Mugglestone 2004: 5). There was the common idea that a standard spoken English had to be prescribed for all speakers without exception (Mugglestone 2004: 21). It was a set of non-standard and supra-regional norms, a class accent rather than a regional one. It was the Received Pronunciation, known as R.P., the accent most frequently associated with Standard English.

1.5 American English

The colonization of America and other countries led to the transportation of English all over the world, hence, to the origin of many Englishes. The English spoken in Australia is different from American English, and British English is different from South African English. We have also seen that linguistic

differences are found even within the same country. The seventeenth century British English disembarked to America and developed in a different way than it did in the British Isles, such to an extent that is not possible today to consider English spoken in the U.S. as a mere dialect of British English, but rather as an important variety of English with its own characteristics, spoken by over 140 millions people (Marckwardt 1958: 2):

The term English denies the implication of a separate language. At the same time the adjective American [..] is intended to indicate more than the mere transplanting of a vernacular to a new soil, but rather to suggest its new growth as a somewhat changed and wholly indigenous organism

The English-speaking settlers that populated those American lands made contact with the tribes of indigenous people and borrowed some words from their languages in order to describe species of plants and animals that were unknown to them before. In the westward expansion of their territory, the British colonists soon came into contact with the French:

American English reflects the other non-English cultures, which the colonists and frontiersmen met in their conquest of the continent.

(Marckwardt 1958: 33) Even more substantial and important it has been the contact with the Spanish colonization and culture in the south toward the Gulf of Mexico. Therefore the English of the colonists rapidly increased its vocabulary with loan words from French, Spanish and German too (Marckwardt 1958: 41).

These are the main reasons why the English spoken today in the United States is far different from the English spoken in the United Kingdom. As far as concern the diversification of American English amongst the States of America, it has to be said that comparing to the great amount of regional varieties that, for instance, could be found across England or Wales, it is possible to define American English as a relatively homogeneous language (Gramley 2009: 14). Despite a lesser degree of dialects than British English, American English varies across the country. There are three main American varieties, such as New England (Eastern type), Southern dialect and a general or Western speech covering the rest of the country (Krapp 1960: 35).

1.5.1 SAE (Standard American English)

Standard American English has been defined as the English that with respect to spelling, grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary is substantially uniform though not devoid of regional differences, that is well established by usage in the formal and informal speech and writing of the educated, and that is widely recognized as acceptable wherever English is spoken and understood (Lippi-Green 1997: 57). American English went through a process of standardization similar to that which led to the stabilization of R.P. in England:

Any study of the development of the English language in the modern period must take into consideration the influence of prescriptive grammarians who

came into fullness of power in the eighteenth century. In England and America this influence differed only in degree.

(Pyles 1952: 76) One of the most important men in the process of “correcting and unifying the language” (Pyles 1952: 96) has been Noah Webster. Some of his works, such as Grammatical Institute of the English Language (1783) and The American Spelling Book (1788) were best sellers and influenced the global perception of language all over the U.S:

He shaped the course of American English [..] and he was largely responsible for the dissemination in this country of an attitude towards language which prevails to this day

(Pyles 1952: 123) Despite all the efforts made by the prescriptive grammarians and more in

general by the American educational system to teach people how to speak correctly, linguistics tells us that it is not humanly possible for people to speak exactly the same standard variety. There is nothing bad in it, actually: language just cannot be geographically or socially neutral. That is why maybe it is not possible to consider SAE as a concrete and written set of grammar and spelling rules, but rather as an abstract entity that embraces all the standard regional varieties found across the country:

Every regional variety can be representative of standard American English. [..] Dialect is not a language variety to be identified as standard or nonstandard; each dialect has both standard and nonstandard varieties.

(Preston 1976: 1). In the following chapters it will be used the expression General American (or GA) to refer to a pronunciation that can be understood and recognized as standard all over the United States.

1.6 Notes on phonetics

We produced vocal sounds through our speech organs (tongue, palate, velum, teeth, etc.). The air comes from the lungs and passes through the vocal cords, in the larynx. As mentioned before, the smallest unit of sound in a language is a phoneme. A phoneme is a distinctive speech sound, for it creates a difference of meaning in a word. Language variation depends on the inventory of the phonemes that it contains (Meyer 2009: 196). In order to discuss the sounds of languages, a special system has been created, called I.P.A. (International Phonetic Alphabet). In this alphabet each symbol corresponds to one (and only one) sound. Thus, the word cat would be transcribed like /kæt/. It is important to notice that a phonetic symbol represents only one sound, for in the English alphabet a letter (or grapheme) can represent more than one sound. For

example, the pronunciation of the a in cat is different than that of the a in talk (/tɔ:k/). Especially in English, the relation between the letters of the alphabet and sounds is weak and complex (Meyer 2009: 197). This is because English uses the Roman alphabet, originally specific for the spelling of Latin, and also because in every language, writing is usually more conservative than speech, hence spelling may not reflect some changes that have occurred in

pronunciation (Meyer 2009: 198).

In English, as in all languages, the first distinction that needs to be drawn is that between vowel sounds and consonant sounds. The number of consonants across varieties of English is relatively constant; but the same does not apply for vowels, which can change from one variety to another. In this chapter we will discuss only the sounds found in the standard varieties of American and British English, relatively to two recognized pronunciations. i.e., GA (General American) and RP (Received Pronunciation).

In English there are three parameters for classifying consonants: voicing, place of articulation, and manner of articulation. English has six plosives, and they are divided in three pairs each one with one voiced and one voiceless: /p/ and /b/, /t/ and /d/, /k/ and /g/. Voicing is a property that depends on whether the vocal folds vibrate or not. Each pair has the same place of articulation, which is the place in the mouth where the sound occurs. For example, /p/ and /b/ are bilabials because their articulation involves the lips. All six consonants have the same manner of articulation: the air that comes from the lungs is

completely blocked for an instant, and that is why they are called plosives. English has three nasal consonants, all voiced: /m/, /n/, /ŋ/. They have

respectively the same place of articulation as the three pairs of plosives:

bilabial, alveolar, and velar. The air passes through the nasal cavity rather than the oral cavity. Fricatives are the most numerous, and except for the voiceless /h/, they are dividable in four pairs each one with a voiced and a voiceless, respectively: labiodentals /f/ and /v/, dentals /θ/ and /ð/, alveolars /s/ and /z/, and postalveolars /∫/ and /ʒ/. In fricatives the passage of the air is narrowed so that a friction is produced (Barber 1993: 8). English has two affricates, one voiceless and the other voiced: /t∫/ and /dʒ/. Their place of articulation is the palate, so they are called palatal. The affrication is the combination of a plosive sound followed by a fricative sound. English has also four approximants, all voiced: /ɹ/, /j/ and /w/ are called centrals, /l/ is the lateral. In the approximants, the passage of the air in the oral cavity is a little bit obstructed, much less than in fricative, though. For this reason, the approximants are also called

semivowels (Meyer 2009: 202).

The classification of vowels depends on the position of the tongue in the mouth, which can be high or low, and in front or in the back. The vowel /i/ is a high front vowel, for its articulation occurs with the tongue being at very high position in the very front of the mouth. The vowel /u/ is a high back vowel, that means that the tongue is at high position like in the /i/, but it is positioned in the back of the mouth rather than in the front. The vowel /ə/, known as schwa, is articulated with the tongue positioned in the middle of the mouth, as can be seen in table I. The other vowels are /ε/, /ɪ/, /ʊ/, /eɪ/, /oʊ/ (GA), /əʊ/ (RP), /Λ/, /ɔ/, /æ/, /ɑ/ (GA), /ɒ/ (RP), each one with different degrees of height and position (at the front or at the back) in the mouth (Meyer 2009: 202). The boundaries between vowels are not so clear as they are between consonants. Their categorization in a table is a useful way for linguists to study and compare vowels. Here are some words containing these vowel sounds: /i/ meat /ɒ/ rot (RP)

/eɪ/ date /ɪ/ rip

/u/ boot /ε/ bet

/oʊ/ goat (GA) /æ/ snack /əʊ/ goat (RP) /ʊ/ book

/ɔ/ thought /ə/ arrive (vowel in first syllable)

/ɑ/ rot (GA) /Λ/ gum

park (RP)

As we can see above, GA and RP differ in the pronunciation of some words like goat or rot, for instance. Within the United States, many speakers would not pronounce rot with /ɑ/ but with /ɔ/ because “the vowels /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ are merging, with /ɔ/ replacing /ɑ/ in many words” (Meyer 2009: 203). Another big difference between GA and RP is that one accent is rhotic and the other is non-rhotic. This means that while in GA the consonant sound /ɹ/ occurs following vowels in syllable, in RP it does not. A common example is the pronunciation of the word park: /pɑɹk/ in GA but /pɑ:k/ in RP (Meyer 2009: 204). So far we have discussed vowel sounds whose quality (position in the mouth) remains the same during its articulation. If the tongue changes its position in the course of the sound, the sound produced is called diphthong. GA and RP have three diphthongs in common (Table II):

/aɪ/ fight /aʊ/ house /ɔɪ/ boy

Table II. RP has four additional diphthongs that occur in syllables where GA would have a simple vowel plus a rhotic /ɹ/ sound:

GA RP clear /klɪɹ/ /klɪə/ bear /bεɹ/ /bεə/ wire /waɪε/ /waə/ four /foʊɹ/ /fʊə/

Table III. In GA, any time a vowel occurs before an /ɹ/ in a single syllable, the /ɹ/ colors the vowel, creating in a sense a single sound. In RP, in contrast, no such sequences of vowel + /ɹ/ exist, resulting instead in a diphthong (Table III). What we have discussed thus far, concerning individual sounds in a given word, it is called the study of segments. When the analysis goes beyond this level, taking into account different features such as syllables, stress or pitch, we move to the study of suprasegmentals. In this section we will not explore the study of suprasegmentals.

1.7 English Spelling

English spelling can represent a problem for writers, even for those who are born into English-speaking cultures. Other languages, such as Spanish or Korean, by comparison are more phonetic, that is to say that most letters are pronounced, and most letters are pronounced in a consistent way (Bell 2012: 19). About 25% of English words contain letters that are either not pronounced or pronounced differently than they are pronounced in other words.

Unfortunately this 25% embraces about 400 of the most frequently used words (Crystal 1994: 198-213). A famous and hilarious example of the irregularity of English spelling, wrongly attributed to the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, is the invented grapheme ‘ghoti’ for the spelling of fish (Zimmer 2008: 1): ‘f’ is spelled gh as in rough, ‘o’ as in women and ‘sh’ is spelled ti as in emotion. This example, of course, is an exaggeration of the issue: the spelling ti is never used with this sound at the end of a word in English, and the spelling gh is never used with this sound at the beginning of a word. However, the fact remains several words in English are not spelled as they are spoken. The combination ough provides a good example (Table IV):

Tough à /ˈtʌf/ Through à /ˈθruː/ Dough à /ˈdəʊ/ Bought à /ˈbɔːt/

Table IV.

There are more common problems with spelling in English, such as swallowed syllables,3 homophones,4 silent letters,5 etc. (Crystal 2012: 153-157). The reasons for the irregularity and complexity of English spelling are many. First of all, everything derives from the aforementioned concept that any written language is no less than someone’s attempt to fix something that was only spoken until then and that is constantly changing. Although graphically fixed, a language will always remain in flux. This would affect all languages equally though, and it would not explain why English spelling is said to be much confusing compared to other languages. A plausible reason could be the

3 _{Aspirin is pronounced ‘asprin’ (/æsprın/), every is pronounced ‘evry’ (/εvrı/), and so} forth.

4 _{two, to and too are all pronounced ‘too’ (/tuː/)}

amount of invasions the British peninsula suffered along its history, and yet the amount of new loanwords whose spellings have not been converted to fit English’s phonological system (Stirling 2013: 1). Furthermore, pronunciation also changed a lot over the last three centuries but the spelling remained the same that Noah Webster had established. This is especially the case of words containing silent letters (Crystal 2012: 198-213). Even though we will not explore the history of English spelling or its irregularities in details, it is important to talk about this aspect of English language. The awareness of the incongruences of English spelling, that is of the problematic relation between sounds and its graphic representation, led authors to take advantage of it, to transform something that might be a weakness of the language, into a literary weapon. That is why in English, more than in any other language, the

representation of spoken language in writing is such an interesting topic to analyze.

1.8 Standardization and Language Discrimination

There is a common conception that there is a good English, and following from that, a bad English. Further, there is a good deal of consensus of who speaks good English, and who has authority to decide what is good.

(Lippi-Green 1997: 3) Non-linguists are quite comfortable with the idea of a standard language,

although the reality is another one:

The myth of standard language persists because it is carefully tended and propagated, with huge, almost universal success, so that language, the most fundamental of human socialization tools, becomes a commodity. This is the core of an ideology of standardization, which empowers certain individuals and institutions to make these decisions and impose them on others.

(Lippi Green 1997: 61) When a variety shifts its status to function as superordinate, such variety is no longer perceived as geographical and regional, while all the others are

automatically subordinated to it. The next phase, is the inevitable growth of the ideas of right and wrong, relatively to the standard and to the non-standard.

The prescriptive grammarians use this binary opposition to make a “set of assumptions about language behavior which can, in real terms, sometimes exert more influence on speakers’ attitudes than does direct observation of the

language itself” (Lippi-Green 1997: 58). That is, a true ideology about

linguistic correctness that can influence people’s beliefs to such an extent that they may change their way of speaking. Standardization not only consists in “the historical and linguistic processes by which one variety of the language has come to assume superordinate and non-localized roles within the nation, but also in a complex of beliefs and attitudes which evolve around the

‘standard’ which results” (Lippi-Green 1997: 60). Standardizing a language has negative consequences. Every process of standardization implicates a parallel process of de-standardization (Hodson 2014: 25) at the expense of all the other varieties that are not considered standard. The standard variety becomes the language, and anything that differs (in grammar, lexicon or pronunciation) from it becomes dialect: whether this is fair or not it is not the point. The point is that there is an evident hierarchical structure that could influence people’s beliefs to the extent that they see the standard as the right and original form, and the non-standard as the wrong, corrupted form. Researchers have found that a standard variety is always associated with power and status: listeners associate standard language with higher level of intelligence, confidence and ambition (Hodson 2014: 27). It is the way of speaking one should adopt in order to climb the social ladder. Once these beliefs spread all over a country, cases of language discrimination may arise:

Although discrimination on the grounds of race, religion and gender or social class is not now publicly acceptable, it appears that discrimination on linguistic grounds is publicly acceptable, even though linguistic differences may

themselves be associated with ethnic, religious and class differences. In effect, language discrimination stands as proxy for discrimination on these other

grounds and may be openly used to discriminate against lower class or minority speakers while avoiding direct reference to class or ethnicity.

(Milroy and Milroy 1999: 2-3) The Standard Language Ideology (SLI), a term coined by James Milroy (2001: 530-555) embraces the concepts expressed above. Many scholars studied this topic, such as Pierre Bourdieu, James and Lesley Milroy, Rosina Lippi-Green, Bourdieu, et al. The inclination towards an abstracted and idealized language, which is imposed by dominant institutions, both for the written and spoken code, but which in most cases correspond to the spoken language of the upper

class. The educational system plays a big role here: in the majority of western countries, the primary educational goal for schools is the acquisition of literacy with the adoption of both spoken and written standard language (Lippi-Green 1997: 69). In the U.K., for instance, the children who already speak Standard English are thus at a significant educational advantage, and “given the existing correlation between Standard English and social background, this serves to further reinforce social inequalities” (Hodson 2014: 31).

2. The Representation of dialect and non-standard varieties

in literature

2.1 Why use dialect?

One of the most important skills a good author should possess is the ability to depict characters. Authors want their main character to be as much realistic as possible, and in order to do so they have to indicate where he/she is from and how he/she speaks. For this reason authors have attempted, through

orthographical manipulations, to represent speakers’ accents and ways of speaking, in order to provide information about their regional and social backgrounds (Hodson 2014: 92). Dialect writing may be defined as placing transliterate sounds onto paper to intentionally create an identity for a character or to situate the character with respect to geographic origin, social class,

ethnicity, and gender (Qualey 2008: 1). Not only does the study of dialect in literature tell us about individual character and locations, but it can also give information about relationships between characters: two characters speaking two different dialects may have different attitudes towards each other during the dialogue, depending on the context, the location, and on how their dialects are regarded within that specific context and location. However, this is not an easy task for storytellers: giving characters the proper dialect can be a

challenge. The simple action of writing an accent down on paper to transform something audible into something visible can be a very inexact process

(Hodson 2014: 13):

English has a single orthographical system which is used for a very diverse range of account [..] For a literary author, then, any attempt to manipulate the spelling of a word in order to indicate a dialect pronunciation is always going to be a very inexact art, and one that is liable to be interpreted in different ways by different readers.

(Hodson 2014: 91) Speech has been central to the novel since its emergence as a distinct genre in the eighteenth century (Hodson 2014: 1). The early popularity of dialect

writing in U.K. and America is due to several reasons. In England, for example, the realism movement led the authors to write about lower social classes and to do that as realistically as possible. Hence, representing an actual and popular speech can give authenticity to the less wealthy characters and give more realism to the novels (Qualey 2009: 3). In America, from the late ’800 to the

beginning of World War I, there was a big mass immigration wave. People from many parts of the world could be found anywhere across the United States, and American writers wanted to demonstrate in writing who was speaking. Dialect was believed to give writing “local color” (Holgar 2000: 99-102).

2.2 Orthographic manipulation: a literary device

We can find dialect representation in the three key places of a text: direct speech, narrative voice, and free indirect speech. It is direct speech, of course, that allows writers to utilize this technique at its best. Direct speech is often introduced by a reporting clause6 (Hodson 2014: 85), and quotation marks signal the beginning and the end of speech. Therefore, any attempt by the writer to represent something about the speaker’s dialect takes place within those speech marks. The oddities in direct speech will often contrast sharply with the standard language of the main narrative (Hodson 2014: 85). The representation of differences with respect to the standard language is best approached through the three levels of linguistic analysis: sound, vocabulary and grammar.

2.3 Sound

2.3.1 Semi-phonetic respelling

Sound is the most significant feature of dialect representation in literature. There are different techniques to play with orthography and spelling in order to represent speech sounds that will be automatically associated by the readers with a non-standard variety. The first case is semi-phonetic respelling (Hodson 2014: 90), which consists in using misspelled words to replicate what is being said. The words are written as they sound:

He jerked the stick in the direction of the man’s heart. ‘Stop that,’ he yelled. ‘Just steik yur mooth’

(Malouf 1994: 3)

In the example above, the last three words (in bold) are the representation of sounds that belongs to a non-standard variety: Scottish English. ‘Steik’ is an uncommon Scottish verb meaning to close. ‘Yur’ for your and ‘mooth’ for mouth indicate a higher and closer pronunciation of both vowel’s sound, realized respectively by removing the o and replacing the u with a o (double o suggest something close to /u:/). The reader immediately notices the

orthographic changes and realizes that the character is not a speaker of standards.

As a rule, of course, the nonstandard spellings in dialect writing represent pronunciations that are not standard in any section of the country.

These semi-phonetic respelling can vary in their degree of phonetic

transparency, that is to say that some respellings are easier to understand by the reader than others, for example, TH-fronting represented by replacing th with f as in ‘fick’ for thick or ‘fank you’ for thank you

(Hodson 2014: 93):

[…] She sits high, but she looks low. Dat’s what Ah say ’bout dese ole women runnin’ after young boys.

(Hurston 1937: 5) This is another example of representing a non-standard variety by

semi-phonetic respellings: the dental pronunciation /d/ replacing the interdental /ð/ in the words that and these, the elision of -d in old before a word beginning with a semivowel and replaced with a silent ‘e’ to indicate a marked pronunciation of the lateral (/əʊl:/), and finally the grapheme ‘ah’ for I (/aɪ/) indicating a

pronunciation of the first phoneme /a/ more backwards in the mouth (close to an /ɑ/ sound) with respect to General American, and the elision of the second part of the diphthong, the phoneme /ɪ/. An English-mother-tongue reader would immediately relate these linguistic features with Afro-Americans’ way of speaking.

However, some other semi-phonetic respellings require an effort from the reader to understand what sound is being evoked:

It is true that the same nonstandard spelling may on occasion represent different pronunciations to different readers. For example, the spelling ‘haid’ for head may appear to one reader to be intended to rhyme with aid, in which case it would be a substandard dialect form, perhaps intended to represent a pronunciation heard in some parts of the South [America] but recognized in all

regions as nonstandard. To another reader it may appear that ‘haid’ is intended to rhyme with said.

(Bowdre Jr 1976: 179) Many respelling, though, are totally conventional:

Consider, for example, the use of ‘t’ to indicate the glottal stop produced by definite article reduction, which is found in many parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire (‘there’s trouble at t’mill’) or the use of ‘ch’ to represent an unvoiced palatal fricative in Scottish dialects (‘och, you don’t want that’). These representations are liable to be opaque to anyone who is not already familiar with both the dialectal feature in question and the orthographic convention that is used to represent it.

(Hodson 2014: 93) Therefore, such respellings often indicate a specific pronunciation, but the inexact nature of the English spelling system make it difficult to be sure about what that pronunciation is. It could be said that semi-phonetic respelling would be always reliable only if the writer and the reader share the same accent.

2.3.2 Eye Dialect

Although many writers’ respellings have the purpose of representing a specific nonstandard variety from a specific part of the country, some writers may just want to represent someone’s speech as generally more popular and less

cultivated than the norm. The purposes of doing this could be, for example, to establish a sense of superiority between the author and the reader in contrast with the less educated speaker of dialect. Furthermore, the popular speech of one character could be contrasted with another character’s standard speech in order to indicate social, economic or educational differences between the two. Hence, the focus here is more on the speaker himself/herself, rather than on his/her peculiar way of speaking. In order to do so, a different technique is in use by writers, which is called eye dialect. This term was coined by George Philip Krapp (Krapp 1960: 228), and the concept was defined as follows: First and most extensive use is the class dialect which distinguishes between popular and cultivated or standard speech [..] The impression of popular speech is easily produced by a sprinkling of such forms as ‘aint’ for isn’t, ‘done’ for

did, ‘them’ for those and similar grammatical improperties. This impression is always assisted by what may be termed as eye dialect, in which the convention violated is one of the eye, not of the ear. Thus a dialect writer often spells a word like front as ‘frunt’, or face as ‘fase’, or picture as ‘pictsher’, not because he intends to indicate here a genuine difference of pronunciation, but the spelling is merely a friendly nudge to the reader, a knowing look which establishes a sympathetic sense of superiority between the author and the reader as contrasted with the humble speaker of dialect.

(Krapp 1960: 228) Since Krapp’s time, however, the term has now acquired a wider meaning: it now covers any variation of spelling to indicate particular pronunciation or accents (Brett 2006: 1). In this work we have kept the original label, following contemporary scholars such as Joan Beal (2006) and Jane Hodson (2014). Therefore to be classified as an instance of Eye Dialect a word, must be

purposely misspelled by the writer to produce some calculated effects (Bowdre Jr. 1960: 2):

[…] And that’s wot he likes. Boys is very obstinit, and wery lazy, gen’lmen, and there’s nothink like a good hot blaze to make ‘em come down vith a run.

(Dickens 2003: 112) The sounds produced by reading the misspelled forms (reported in bold) are no less than the sound of what, of obstinate and of nothing in Standard British English pronunciation, that is in R.P.; the eye dialect forms, anyway, help to provide more information to the reader: the speaker is depicted as poorly-educated, contrasting with the well-educated gentleman whom he is talking to. There are other non-standard spellings in the abstract above, (such as ‘wery’, ‘gen’lmen’, ‘em’, ‘vith’ and the syntactical variation ‘boys’ instead of the singular form) which have not been reported in bold. In fact these are not forms of eye-dialect: ‘wery’ for very and ‘vith’ for with are both semi-phonetic

respellings that contributes to the depiction of a less educated character, even though they do not indicate a specific non-standard pronunciation (Brett 2006: 53); the misspelled forms ‘gen’lmen’ for gentlemen and ‘em’ for them belong to a category discussed in the next paragraph.7 Let us see this little abstract from Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums:

‘D’yever hear them guys talk?’ 7 _{See ‘Allegro Speech’.}

‘I shore did.’

(Kerouac 1959: 64) Here is another example of eye dialect: by writing ‘shore’ instead of sure the author kept the Standard American sound of the word, but he achieved something else too: the allegro speech’s form (see next paragraph) in the interrogative sentence, plus the eye dialect in the answer, give to the

conversation a sense of intimacy and colloquialism; the speakers’ relationship is probably close enough to allow them to adopt an ‘informal’ parlance when they speak, or maybe they are just less educated characters who would spell those words in that way. The context often plays a good role helping the reader to interpret eye dialect forms.

2.3.3 Allegro speech

Allegro speech is a term coined by Dennis Preston that refers to the attempt by authors to represent, through the use of misspellings, the fact that speech is casual, “not carefully monitored” (Preston 1985: 328). It could be argued that Allegro speech has something to do with syntactical phonetics:

In everyday conversation, speakers do not sound each word out fully and separately. Speech requires the rapid and continuous realignment of multiple different parts of the vocal tract (tongue, teeth, lips, oral cavity, nasal cavity)

(Hodson 2014: 99) Here are some more abstracts from Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums, which provide some excellent examples of allegro speech:

‘You’re crazy, Morley.’

‘I dunno, maybe I am, but if I am I’ll leave a lovely will anyway.’ ‘D’yever hear them guys talk?’

‘I shore did.’

‘Well I’m gonna go,’ said Japhy.

‘Well if you’re gonna go I’m goin with you.’

Some allegro speech forms have become widely used and then recognizable by any English speaker, such as ‘dunno’ for don’t know, ‘gonna’ for going to (‘gotta’, ‘wanna’, etc.) and also the elision of g in the –ing forms. Every one of these variations of spellings does not change the pronunciation of the words, but rather influences the reader (as well as eye dialect does) in forming some ideas about the character’s attitude, education, and his/her position in the novel. Even though in real-life conversations these processes occur with every

speakers of every variety of English (no matter how close or far from standards their speech is), in novels, there is a sort of conventional behavior taken on by authors that implicates that these rapid speech processes are ignored for speakers of Standard English:

The fact is that in real-life conversation ‘you and’ me will almost always be contracted (‘you an’ me’) by RP speakers as much as by Cockney speakers, because pronouncing the ‘d’ in the middle is unnecessary and inconvenient from a phonological point of view. However, literary tradition dictates that Standard English speakers have their words reported in full. This means that standard and non-standard speaker are again treated differently in the reporting of direct speech, with the effect that non-standard speakers generally seem more careless about pronunciation than standard speakers.

(Hodson 2014: 99)

2.4 Vocabulary

In order to further highlight characters’ peculiar speech, authors can make use of some non-standard words that belong to the dialectal lexicon of the variety they want to represent. It is not essential, of course, that readers understand every single word in a text. Nevertheless, the deduction of meanings of unfamiliar vocabulary requires an effort on the part of the reader, and can be discouraging especially when combined with lots of respellings:

Writers are unlikely to respell dialectal words in order to indicate

pronunciation, for example ‘time’ might be respelled as ‘toim’ but ‘rile’ will be allowed to stand because it would be too difficult for the reader to process both the respelling and the unfamiliar word.

(Blake 1981: 17) The use of dialectal vocabulary can be useful for those writers who want to avoid the risks and complications of semi-phonetic respellings, but still wish to depict their character’s speech as non-standard. In this case, direct speech

would be reported without any spelling’s variations from the norm, yet with the insertion of some dialectal words that would immediately suggest to the reader that the speaker comes from a specific area.

2.5 Grammar

The manipulation of grammar structures could be another method for representing some peculiar ways of speaking. Anyway, as we have already pointed out when talking about rapid speech processes in real-life

conversations, spoken language is much more casual and spontaneous than written language. Direct speech in literature is just a literary construct (Hodson 2014: 102) and even though it captures some features of the spoken language, it ignores many other traits of real speech:

Characters who are represented as standard speakers will typically be given entirely standard written grammar, even though no real person actually speaks in this way.

(Hodson 2014: 102) Having said that, an author might just need to report some grammar features of real speech to indicate a deviation from the presumed norm. There could also be some grammar features that are stereotypical of a specific language variety: Tea Cake ain’t been no boy for some time. He’s round thirty his ownself.

(Hurston 1937: 6) Double negatives and repetitions are some of the stereotypical features that have been most condemned by prescriptive grammarians, and their use in the sentence above is extremely efficient to depict the character as a poorly educated or, at least as a speaker whose variety deviates from the norm. Readers can also quickly understand that the speaker is American, for the ‘ain’t’ form is specific from American English. The speaker’s variety is non-standard, due to the double negative and the expression ‘ownself’, regional from various parts of southern England and United States (it serves to emphasize: ‘his ownself’ is more emphasized than just himself).

However, the representation of non-standard grammatical features is, in general, much less significant than phonology or vocabulary.

2.6 The Role of the Reader

A key problem for any writer who wishes to represent non-standard varieties of English is that readers tend to dislike such representations. Readers are

inherently resistant to the representation of dialect on the page (Hodson 2014: 107). First of all, the representation of any written dialect requires additional effort from the reader:

Readers often engage with passages of dialect representation in a spirit of enforced labour.

(Toolan 1992: 34) The results may be a decrease in reading speed, or even the loss of important plot information if the non-standard forms are not interpreted correctly, or if the reader skipped them over in irritation:

Today’s trend for the writers to convey the information which the reader needs and make it detailed enough to place the character, but not so detailed as to distract the reader. Some attempts of showing dialect accurately turned into more of a transcription than literature.

(Balhorn 1998: 53) The perpetual dilemma for writers is to determine how far to go in accuracy without losing the reader. A writer has to be careful in using these non-standard language representations so that the reader is neither annoyed nor slowed

down. It would seem that when the reader begins to struggle with spellings interpretation or words selection and has no way of looking them up, the author has gone too far. There is another reason why readers react negatively to

written dialect representations, and it is due to cultural aspects. As far as English-speaking community is concerned, there is a close cultural association between Standard English and literacy (Hodson 2014: 107). This means that in front of the non-standard representation techniques described in the previous chapter (semi-phonetic respellings, non-standard grammar and regional vocabulary items, etc.) many readers will respond negatively. Sociolinguists have conducted studies to examine readers’ reactions to these dialect

representations, such as Alexandra Jaffe and Shana Walton: different participants were given different versions of the same transcript of an oral history interview; the three versions differed in their degree of orthographic non-standard representation, from a totally standardized one, to the heavily

accented one in which features of the speaker’s accent’s (Mississippi’s accent) were represented as accurately as possible (Jaffe and Walton 200: 560). The non-standard orthography the participants found in the passage made them make all kind of assumptions about the speaker’s background and personality (Jaffe and Walton 200: 564-5). Participants who read the heavy version were, of course, the ones who had the most negative perception of speaker’s

personality, imagining a ‘scrawny, young person’ or ‘someone who’s not very educated’ (Jaffe and Walton 200: 580-1). The main aspect that arose from this study is that in written text, orthography is intrinsically tied up with the

standard language ideology:

Our readers’ performances and comments also illustrate the ideological power of orthography. Orthography stands for linguistic form, for regularity, for authority, for systematicity. For these reasons, it plays a major role in positioning the language it represents vis-à-vis the standard: both specific standard language, and the very idea of ‘a standard’ [...] The use of non-standard orthographies to represent features of non-non-standard speech runs the risk of delegitimizing the ‘non-standard’ code’s claim to be a language (to be like the standard). Our research suggests that it is almost impossible to avoid stigma in the non-standard orthographic representation of others’ low-status speech variety.

(Jaffe and Walton 2000: 582-3) It is clear then that if an author makes use of dialect representations in his/her novel, characters speaking a dialect are likely to be treated with less respect by the reader than characters who speak in Standard English. Another issue that should not be underestimated is that despite readers’ perception of

non-standard variety representations and non-non-standard variety speaking characters, they are probably not accustomed to reading passages of dialect either, and the writer may lose them even before in the process. It is no easy task for writers: The problem is that the potential always exists that the reader will interpret any such attempt at dialect representation as negative. This present a serious artistic problem for authors: how can the voice of a character be represented in a way that indicates something about the character’s speech patterns, but without immediately triggering the response that the speaker so presented is being denigrated?

The context plays an important role too. The dialect narration in Trainspotting, for example, is probably perceived differently by Scottish readers from the way it is it is perceived by the rest of the world’s English speaking community. Irvine Welsh, the author, is Scottish and the non-standard variety spoken by the narrator is Scottish. If the author of Trainspotting had been English, he would have arguably been subjected to all kind of accusations by Scottish readership. Where an author can make no claim to be an authentic speaker of the dialect he/her is trying to represent, he/her is seen as an outsider and therefore

susceptible to criticism. Denigration of a community and of their non-standard language, stigmatization and linguistic stereotyping are some of the accusation the author may receive. Linguistic stereotyping is intended as an inaccurate rendering of the dialect based upon a small number of linguistic features

(Hodson 2014: 114). The point is, then, that the identity of the audience and the identity of the writer are two really important factors. Graham Shorrocks made a significant distinction between the expressions literary dialect and dialect literature:

I shall use literary dialect to refer to the representation of non-standard speech in literature that is otherwise written in Standard English (for instance, some of the dialogues in the works of such authors as Eliot, Dickens, and Hardy) and aimed at a general readership; (non-standard) dialect literature, by contrast, will refer to works composed wholly (sometimes partly) in a non-standard dialect, and aimed essentially, though not exclusively, at a non-standard-dialect-speaking readership’

(Shorrocks 1996: 386) This distinction helps to understand the difference between a local novel

written in dialect and aimed only to the readership of that particular region in which such dialect is spoken, and an international work, aimed to international readership, that contain passages of dialect representations. The works

mentioned and studied in this thesis belong to the second category, works using literary dialect, which are brave attempts on the part of writers to represent something diverse, non-standard, identity-marking, for a common,

2.7 What can writers do to solve the problem?

Then, it may looks like there is not a single and safe solution to this problem. The reader’s reaction to non-standard representation on the page is

unpredictable, and it potentially could be negative at any time. Anyway, there are some possible solutions for writers to adopt, which can help at least to limit the damage. The first is to use Standard English for all the characters,

regardless the accent they have. The author can find other ways to inform the reader about character’s speech, for instance by telling his/her origins or even explicitly making some comments about the speech itself.

Another possible solution is to write the whole text in non-standard (Hodson 2014: 119). It is the case of the aforementioned Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. The contrast between the narrative voice and the direct speech of the characters is diminished, and moreover the reader is forced to get used to the non-standard variety representations:

The magistrate lets oot a sharp exhalation. It isnae a brilliant job the cunt’s goat, whin ye think aboot it. It must git pretty tiresome dealin wi radges aw day. Still, ah bet the poppy’s fuckin good, n naebody’s asking the cunt tae dae it.

(Welsh 1996: 165) Hodson offers two more solutions bringing example from post-colonial writers’ works: avoiding to represent non-standard characters’ speech at all (for those characters whose speech is non-standard, the author uses free indirect speech) or challenging the standard language ideology by treating standards as non-standards in order to make some kind of provocation (Hodson 2014: 120-24). Although these two last possible solutions are fascinating, we personally think them to be more risky and unproductive.

3. Analizing dialect representation in Malouf’s Remembering

Babylon

3.1 Introduction

In this chapter, the representation of some English linguistic varieties within a novel will be analyzed. The novel in question is David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon, and one of the varieties in question is Scottish English. Before

entering the core of the analysis, little introductions to some distinctive features of Scottish English, to the author and the novel will be illustrated.

3.2 Standard Scottish English (SSE)

3.2.1 A short history of Scottish English

The history of Scotland and its language goes hand in hand with the history of Great Britain in general. Important event of the past such as the Roman, Scandinavian and Norman invasions formed very similar conditions for England, Scotland and Ireland (Alkazwini 2017: 1). The basic linguistic features shared by those three varieties depend on their belonging to the Indo European family and Germanic group. Scottish English is the result of the contact between Scots speakers and English speakers (Macafee 2004: 60). The English language entered Scotland very early, with the Old English dialect of Northumbrian established from the 7th century in the southeast of present day Scotland. However, it took more than ten centuries for English to supplant written Scots, and spoken Scots features continue to be used to this day (Smith 2004: 48):

The term Scottish English or more preferably, Scots in present day

encompasses a wide spectrum of varieties, with Broad Scots at one end and Scottish Standard English (SSE) – a variety generally described as being ‘standard English with a Scottish accent’ – at the other. This results in a linguistic continuum where the boundaries between Scots, ScStE and even English English are not clearly defined.

Standard Scottish English has also been defined as a modified version of Standard English spoken in Scotland, that is, Standard English spoken with a Scottish accent (Wells 1982: 398). McArthur adds a definition of Standard Scottish English; he sees it as ‘a more or less homogeneous range of nationally acceptable norms of spelling, grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation, which is in turn one variety of “World Standard English” (McArthur 1979: 50) (while World Standard English is defined analogically as a more or less homogeneous range of internationally acceptable norms). Anyway, the characteristic features of Standard Scottish English can obviously be found mostly in phonetics and phonology, even if there are some peculiar traits in grammar and vocabulary too. SSE possesses a phonological system that is unique for Scottish speakers, it is shared by most of them, and it differs from other accents of English in numerous ways (Neroldová 2013: 14).

3.2.2 The phonology of Scottish English

3.2.2.1 Vowels

Scottish vowel system is one of the smallest in the English’s speaking world (Wells 1982: 399). The basic Scottish Vowel System, as Abercrombie (1979: 45) names it, comprises 13 items providing a basis for description of other accents. The Basic Scottish Vowel System compares two representative accents (Tab 1,2,3): Standard Scottish English as a representative of Scotland, and Received Pronunciation as the representative of England, which is the most commonly-used system associated with Standard English in England:

Basic Scottish Vowel System

Scotland (SSE) England (RP)

bead i i bid ɪ ɪ bay e eɪ bed ɛ ɛ (never) (ɛ̈) bad a a balm ɑ

not ɔ ɒ nought ɔ no o oʊ pull u ʊ pool u bud ʌ ʌ

side ʌi _aɪ

sighed ae

now ʌu aʊ

boy ɔe ɒɪ

Table V. Syllables closed by /r/

Scotland (SSE) England (RP)

first ɪ ɜ word ʌ heard ɛ (herd) (ɛ̈) here i ɪə fair e ɛə hard a ɑɔ forty ɔ ə four o poor u ʊə Table VI. Vowels of Unstressed Syllables