it is the stories of English of course
that's what i'm talking about this evening,
not the the story of English
which some of you may
remember was the title of the television
series
or twenty or more years ago
and the story of English that was told in
that particular program and indeed has
been told virtually in the same way for
the last hundred years or more
is the story of one kind of English only,
a story of standard English.
And dialects,
the nonstandard varieties of English
have been virtually neglected.
And quite consciously so.
Here's a quote to illustrate the point,
H C Wyld [Henry Cecil]
'A Short History of English',
a book I
cut my teeth on when I went too
read English for the first time - 
absolutely standard work - and this is
what he says;
when you open his book and look for
dialect you will find them there at the very
back in the very last chapter sort of
tucked away at the end somewhere
'Fortunately', says Wyld 
at the present time, 
'the great majority of the English
dialect sort of very little importance
as representatives of English speech
and for our present purpose we can afford
to let them go.
Except in so far as they throw light
upon the growth
of those forms of our language, which are
the main objects of are solicitude,
namely
the language of literature and received
standard spoken English.
Quaint and eccentric 
he calls dialects.
And those are two of the commonest
adjectives for dialect in that
particular period of our history.
Oh, there's another little quote here. You'll love this one.
He allows at one point that there may be
sophisticated valleys
of dialect use
saying
'these certainly differ
from the pure old dialect
but isn't identical with the English, let us say, in 
in Oxford
or Cambridge
common room
or in an officer's mess?
We should probably say
that it was not', 
says Wyld.
Well, that captures
a whole ethos of attitudes towards
dialect in relation to the standard
language.
Standard English is proper English is
correct English.
Dilect is
inferior English, is low quality, is
deficient in some way to be judged
against the criterion of the standard
language.
And the names for these
dialect situation are of course many and
various, and they're all negative in their
associations, aren't they?
People talk about
thing about these varieties being
'patois' or 'cant' or
or a lingo of some kind or 'broken
English' or 'gutter
English' or
'substandard
English'.
Linguists on the whole have tried to get
away from this kind of
negative terminology - we talk a lot about
non-standard English
as the most neutral way of expressing
the relationship, but even that is a
somewhat, uh,
negative way of looking at the situation.
Something has gone horribly wrong,
that's the point.
Standard English is the minority dialect -
always has been.
Perhaps one percent of the English speakers
of the world, um, use standard English. Or
I should say, of course, English writers of the world, because standard English
is essentially the dialect of the
written language.
Defined, as you know, by its grammar, by
its spelling and its punctuation and, to a
minor extend, by its vocabulary as well.
If people say 'What is standard English?'
we give examples and there are dozens of
them - like
in standard English we don't use double
negatives
for example.
Nobody in standard English says 'I
haven't got nuffink.'
or something like that. 'I don't have
anything.'
So a double negative is in current
terms non-standard. Or the use of 'ain't'.
'Ain't got nuffin.'
Very much non-standard. Or 'We was sat 'ere.'
Very much no standard.
And then of course in spelling and
punctuation there are lots and lots of
examples of
the standardization of the language. We
have to spell
correctly in order to
use standard English well. We have to punctuate correctly, in so far as it's
possible, in order to use standard
English well.
But that written language, that
written definition of standard
is still only a minority
of the overall English language used
in the world.
Nobody's got any real statistics, of
course.
But how many people speak standard
English
in that way? iIm doing my best at the
moment.
And indeed you will hear standard
English spoken on the most public of
occasions, and that's why everybody gets
the impression that it's universal but
in actual fact perhaps only five percent
at most
of the spoken English around the world
is going to be standard English. Most
people around the world use double
negatives and say 'ain't'
and have various kinds of,
uh, irregular verb used in the
non-standard sort of way.
