do generate some fuzzy sense of national
character and identity.
44
1. Identity: the foundations of British culture
2. Literature
and philosophy 3. Art, architecture
and design 4. Performing
arts 5. Cinema,
photography and fashion
6. Media and
communications 7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the state of modern Britain
Where does English come from?
Like most strands of British culture, the national tongue has twisted this way and that across the centuries. The Romans didn’t establish the English language. For that we look to the Angles and Saxons of north-west Germany. From the fifth century they deposited Old English, which, while largely unrecognisable compared to the modern version, established the fundamental bits of the language:
moon, woman, think – that kind of stuff. Not many Old English words survive but those that do are the most used in the modern language. Subsequent centuries saw the tongue added to and adapted with Old Norse (thank you Vikings), Latin (good work missionary folk) and, in greatest measure, Old French (Normans take a bow). By the 12thcentury, this mangle of words had become Middle English. Three hundred years later the language changed again, this time moved by the ‘Great Vowel Shift’. It began in the south east of England, where vowel sounds evolved and standardised, spread north and created the sounds of modern English.
The shift may have been caused by a mass migration of people trying to flee the plague, modifying their accents as they went in order to be understood.
It’s worth remembering that while much of this was going on, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Cornwall stuck to their ancient Celtic languages.
Old English Beowulf Middle English Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Early Modern English King James Bible Shakespeare
Word counts
As many as 4,300 words of modern English derive from Old English, 1,000 are from Old Norse and 10,000 are from Norman French.
Text matches
The four Celtic tongues of Britain
As English dug its claws into the lump of land that would become Britain, so the region’s elderly Celtic languages were pushed to the margins. Four variants have just about survived to modern times, although the speakers of each are also fluent in English.
Welsh (Cymraeg)
Once spoken across the whole of southern Britain, today it claims about half a million speakers, two thirds of whom speak Welsh on a daily basis: admirable stats considering how rapidly the language declined in the 20thcentury. The farther north or west you go in Wales, the more Welsh speakers you find. Dialects change with location, with a rough divide between north and south. Welsh occupies a mandatory slot on the
national curriculum and bilingual road signs are proudly erected nationwide; measures pushed forward by the Welsh Language Act of 1993 that gave Welsh home-turf parity with English for the first time in
450 years.
Scottish Gaelic (Gàdhlig)
Largely confined to the Highlands and Islands (particularly the Western Isles), where it’s spoken by around 60,000 people, Scottish Gaelic is the remnant voice of a language that blanketed Scotland until the 12thcentury. Despite the Scottish Parliament’s official recognition of the language in the Gaelic Language Act of 2005 and the use of bilingual road signs, Scottish Gaelic’s long decline is starting to look terminal.
A nod to the Mod Scottish Gaelic speakers let their hair down each October at the Royal National Mod (or Am Mòd Nàiseanta Rìoghail), a competitive festival of native music, dance, art and literature.
Saying goodbye to good day In 2007 Vale of Glamorgan Council barred its telephone operators from answering the blower with a chirpy bore da (good morning).
Union officials decided that making the largely English speaking telephonists use Welsh was straining their vocal chords and thus contravening health and safety regs.
Patagonian patter Around 1,500 people in the Chubut Province of Patagonia in southern Argentina speak Welsh; They are the descendants of 153 migrants who made the crossing west in 1865 to establish a Welsh state with the Argentine Government’s consent.
Cornish (Kernewek)
The plucky 3,000 or so West Country folk who bang the drum for Cornish have artificially resurrected the language – it hasn’t been a working ‘native’ language since the 18th century. Only around 400 of the revivalists are fluent. In 2002 the British Government formally recognised Cornish as a minority language.
Irish (Gaeilge)
The Republic of Ireland has clung more successfully to the Gaelic Irish language than Northern Ireland, although survival in the north has been ensured by its symbolism, by its connection to a unified Ireland (Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams apparently learned Irish whilst in prison). The Good Friday Agreement gave the language official status in Northern Ireland and initiated measures to promote it. Around ten per cent of the population now have some knowledge of Irish, specifically its strong Ulster dialect.
46
1. Identity: the foundations of British culture
2. Literature
and philosophy 3. Art, architecture
and design 4. Performing
arts 5. Cinema,
photography and fashion
6. Media and
communications 7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the state of modern Britain
The great dialect divide
Given Britain’s modest scale, and the fluidity with which its people move around, regional accents and dialects remain impressively diverse. Perhaps the biggest variation comes in England’s north/south split.
Conjure a rough dividing line north of London, reaching up to the Wash and down to the Severn Estuary, and either side of it the vowels diverge. To the north they’re kept short; to the south, usually, they’re longer.
However, variations in local accents can be noticeable within a distance of ten miles.
Ah dinnae unnerstaun ye: Scots dialect
Scots, or Lallans (meaning ‘Lowlands’), contains bits of Gaelic but derives largely from English. While Lallans reflects the old vernacular language of the Scottish lowlands, its evolution has been partly synthetic.
Poets like Robert Burns, and later Hugh MacDiarmid in the Scottish Renaissance of the early 20thcentury, attempted to ‘clean up’ the Scottish tongue,
establishing Scots. It’s written as it sounds: words like out become ‘oot’ and work becomes ‘wark’. Few people actually speak Lallans; today it’s more of a literary form. Confusingly, much of mainland Scotland speaks Scottish Standard English, in theory closer to English than Lallans. However, get up to Aberdeen, where proximity to the Norse ports across the water has given the local accent a dense Scandinavian burr, and you’ll do well to understand anything they’re saying at all.
Mersey melting pot The Scouse accent of Merseyside evolved in the late 19thcentury, born of Liverpool’s dockside blur of Irish, Welsh, Scots and Lancastrian visitors.
The word Scouse derives from lobscouse, a traditional Merseyside sailors’ dish of stewed lamb and hardtack (a dry biscuit-related affair).
Dairy dialect In 2006, language specialists identified regional differences in the way cows around the UK mooed, in particular noting the distinctive West Country drawl of Devon’s bovine beauties. Similar claims have been made about frogs and birds.
Talking Scots in Ulster Alongside English and Irish, both official languages, Northern Ireland also harbours the Ulster Scots language (also called Ullans, Scots-Irish or simply Scots among
the local population). It’s an Ulster-twanged variation on the Lowland Scots language, as carried over to Ireland by plantation settlers from Scotland in the 17thcentury. It has around 30,000 speakers in
Northern Ireland, although the recently established (and Government funded) Ulster Scots Agency is working to extend its reach.
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1. Identity: the foundations of British culture
2. Literature
and philosophy 3. Art, architecture
and design 4. Performing
arts 5. Cinema,
photography and fashion
6. Media and
communications 7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the state of modern Britain
Talking in class
Britain’s inky linguistic pool is clouded further by class.
You can go pretty much anywhere and discover a well-heeled ‘local’ coughing up Received Pronunciation (RP) (‘received’ meaning accepted or approved). RP began as a regional accent of the south Midlands, but was in the right place at the right time when its patrons moved south to London in the late medieval period and grew wealthy. By the 19thcentury, the accent had become the oral hallmark of Britain’s upper classes. RP is also sometimes referred to as Queen’s English; go back 20 years and it was also called BBC English, a term no longer appropriate at the linguistically egalitarian Beeb.
The changes on television reflect a wider shift in accents in the south-east of England, where the growth of Estuary English, in which the twang of Cockney meets the airs of RP, gives the burgeoning middle classes the feel of workaday credibility. Tony Blair, the common man, would occasionally slip into Estuary English (perhaps subconsciously) during his time as PM. Some analysts suggest that even the Queen has shifted toward the Estuary in recent years.
300 to 400 million people around the world speak English as a first language (over a billion have basic English).
The biggest chunk of first language English speakers, about 215 million, live in the USA.
English is an official language in more than 50 countries.
Exporting English
Begged, borrowed and stolen: the evolving language The English language in Britain evolves constantly.
Foreign words have long been de rigueur (pilfered most notably from the French), and today they’re absorbed from all over the place. In 2007, for example, the word wiki found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary, derived from a Hawaiian word meaning quick but now applied to a certain type of Internet site.
The words irritainment (annoying TV) and bimbette (an attractive but intellectually-challenged young woman) were included among the same batch of new additions.
Metaphor and simile are equally prone to rapid evolution. The British love new, glib phrases (it’s a country where pretty much anything can go ‘pear-shaped’, particularly when it’s ‘cheap as chips’), repeated interminably for a couple of years until some intangible social code decides they’re ‘past their sell-by date’. Slang offers even greater linguistic opportunity.
Informal words come and go, sometimes limited to certain regions, but some stalwarts of universal slang, from skint (moneyless) to cakehole (mouth) to blower (telephone), persist. Urban Britain is particularly inventive, its multicultural streets generating a new tongue for the 21stcentury with the unstoppable rise of Jafaican. Despite the name, experts claim it’s not actually an affectation but a shift in language born of multicultural mingling in post-war Britain, most notably with the mix of Jamaican, West African and Bangladeshi cultures. Such has been Jafaican’s growth that today you’ll find youngsters from Tower Hamlets to Torquay calling each other ‘blud’ and discussing whether those ‘skets’ is ‘butters’. Daily Mail readers are no doubt aquiver.
50
1. Identity: the foundations of British culture
2. Literature
and philosophy 3. Art, architecture
and design 4. Performing
arts 5. Cinema,
photography and fashion
6. Media and
communications 7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the state of modern Britain
The great British identity crisis
In England the terms ‘British’ and ‘English’ are virtually interchangeable. Venture into Wales or Scotland, however, and any notion of British identity is soon shot down. Here they’re Welsh or Scots, rarely British.
Mistakenly calling someone English will induce a weary sigh, or worse. The old English hegemony over Celtic neighbours has fostered a strong sense of identity in the smaller nations. They happily display the Welsh dragon or the Scottish saltire, and the rest of the world admires their national pride. Doing the same in England with the cross of St George – or even the Union Jack with its whiff of old colonialism and, from the 1980s, its association with right-wing groups – can bring accusations of jingoism. In England, if pushed to consider their collective identity, people are perhaps as likely to think of a region as a nation. Cornwall,
Yorkshire, the North East and the North West all have strong personalities, while the wider north/south split cuts a distinct, usually amicable divide. Urban Britain – London especially – can feel like a different country to pastoral areas, and some still define themselves in terms of ‘town or country’.
The complexities of national identity deepen across the water in Northern Ireland. Ask a local their nationality and you’ll get one of three answers: British, Irish or Northern Irish. The ‘British’ will almost certainly be Protestant (and therefore Unionist), the ‘Irish’ will probably be Catholic (Nationalist) and the small but growing minority that answer ‘Northern Irish’ may be either or neither faith but will, in the context of this part of the UK, be considered moderates and will probably be from younger generations.
There are exceptions. Some Catholics are Unionists, although far fewer than before the Troubles began in the 1960s; the violence and hatred of that period nailed ideas about national identity (of being Unionist or Nationalist) strongly to faith. Today, the violence has subsided, but the divisions haven’t simply melted away. The issues of faith – and their strong connection to nationality – still dictate where people live, go to school or socialise, despite ‘cross-community’
initiatives. It’s also worth noting that background and allegiances in Northern Ireland are sensed more than discussed; divined from names, clothing, school attended, football team supported. The question of faith, of which side of the fence you’re on, isn’t asked directly. (See section 8.2. for more on the sectarian divide in Northern Ireland.)
The grass is greener…
Anyone born in Northern Ireland is entitled to take joint Republic of Ireland citizenship if they so desire.
Our song’s better than yours No one is quite sure who wrote God Save the Queen, the dirgeful (and still unofficial) British national anthem, although many point to Dr Henry Carey for the words and Thomas Arne for the tune. Scholars even suggest the music has French origins. First performed in 1745, there are six (often varying) verses in all. Few Brits can recite beyond the first, although Scots will happily direct you to the final (optional) couplet containing the “Rebellious Scots to crush” line. The Queen must be sick of it – it plays on royal occasions and when England (and in the Olympics, Britain) takes to the sports field. The Scots and the Welsh have their own anthems for most
events: Flower of Scotland, by contemporary folk singer Roy Williamson, and The Land of My Fathers (Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau), written in 1856 by Evan James and his son James James, are usually sung with more gusto than their English equivalent. In Northern Ireland, the choice of anthem is unsurprisingly contentious. State and sporting events use God Save the Queen, unless the team is playing one of the other home nations, when A Londonderry Air (also known as Danny Boy) is called upon.
The united national rugby side has its own rousing, specially written song, Ireland’s Call, but sometimes gets Amhrán na bhFiann, the Irish anthem, as well.
Superiority complex
Regional and national differences acknowledged, where does Britain, as a country, see itself in the global order? High up, is the short answer. It may lack the territorial reach of old, and the days of industrial supremacy are long gone, but Britain still considers itself a world power. It’s in the G8, is one of only five permanent members of the UN Security Council, positions itself as the USA’s prime ally (some say lapdog), still spends an awful lot on its armed forces and retains its nuclear weapons. The average Brit is aware of this primacy from childhood; they’re raised with a fuzzy, underlying awareness that being born
‘British’ is a fortunate state of affairs. Today, the mild British sense of national superiority, of independence at best and insularity at worst, emerges in a reluctance to fully join the European party: to give up its currency or ‘give in to Brussels’.
What are the Brits actually like?
Of course there is no archetypal British personality, no set character to which they all conform. The media is convinced that there used to be, and discusses the collapse of British values at length: boozed up, greedy, oversexed, rude and thuggish – the country’s going to the dogs. Obviously, they exaggerate: the quiet majority slip under the radar and the loud minority are mistaken for the norm. While there is no consensus on character, most Brits share some common ground.
Tolerance remains a key ingredient.
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1. Identity: the foundations of British culture
2. Literature
and philosophy 3. Art, architecture
and design 4. Performing
arts 5. Cinema,
photography and fashion
6. Media and
communications 7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the state of modern Britain
“IT’S TOLERANCE, DECENCY AND DETERMINATION TO TALK ABOUT THE WEATHER ON ALL OCCASIONS AND A TENDENCY, WHEN A STRANGER STANDS ON ONE’S FOOT, TO APOLOGISE.”
Martin Bell, former BBC reporter and MP, on being British
The multi-dimensional nature of British society, with its mix of ethnicity, race and religion, speaks of its open-mindedness, as does the proportion (over three quarters) of first generation immigrants and their children who define themselves as ‘British’.
In a similar vein, the British won’t tolerate queue jumping, argue for hours about why they, not their companion, should pay for a round of drinks and have a weakness for the underdog. This sense of democracy, a quiet dignity (the old stiff upper lip) and the
intolerance of corruption are perhaps best summed up by the rather woolly sense of ‘fair play’. For all that, it’s worth noting that open-mindedness, particularly where race is concerned, may ebb somewhat behind closed doors – public persona and private opinion in Britain (like anywhere else) don’t always tally. Most Brits are still embarrassed by self-promotion (although
bashfulness seems to subside as you travel north) and overt displays of emotion, hiding instead behind a cynical and self-depreciatory, yet rather smug, brand of humour. However, the stereotype of the uptight, repressed Brit no longer seems that valid; attitudes to sex and sexuality are liberal even while the intimate details are rarely discussed.
Jack and the dragon The British flag, the Union Flag (or more commonly the Union Jack), its current design dating from 1801, represents the grouping of nations in the United Kingdom. Its ‘Jack’
name is thought to be nautical, ascribed to its positioning as a ‘jack’
flag on the bow of a ship. At present it features the crosses of St George (England), St Andrew (Scotland) and St Patrick (Ireland).
But where’s the Welsh dragon? In 2007, Wrexham MP Ian Lucas launched a campaign to cut Wales a piece of the action. “Let the debate begin,” he called. “Let the rest of the world know that the iconic symbol of the United Kingdom may change and that the reason that it will change is that we have a new constitutional settlement that affords Wales its true place in the Union.”
“We’ll think about it”, was roughly the response.
54
1. Identity: the foundations of British culture
2. Literature
and philosophy 3. Art, architecture
and design 4. Performing
arts 5. Cinema,
photography and fashion
6. Media and
communications 7. Food and drink 8. Living culture:
the state of modern Britain
An island of two halves
Britain has had a north/south identity split since the
Britain has had a north/south identity split since the