Catching Up: Accents & Class

[GulPlum]

No: HPFGUIDX 45723

(My apologies in advance: some of this is going to ramble. This is a 
comment on several recent posts, which I won't necessarily quote)

Firstly, I'd like to clarify that, being perfectly aware that there are 
non-linguists, non-native English speakers and non-Brits present on this 
list, I was using "standard English" in a generic sense rather than any 
technical one. I was slightly remiss in capitalising "Standard" throughout, 
as "Standard English" does indeed have a specific meaning in linguistics 
and philology.

All I was trying to indicate by use of that term were "deviations from the 
norm". Dialects (and  indeed whole languages; indeed, some linguists make 
the case that some "dialects" are indeed separate languages!) differ from 
one another by variations in one or more of vocabulary, grammar, syntax, 
pronunciation (including enunciation, stress and cadence) or spelling (in 
written form).

The problem is that it is very difficult to convey differences in 
pronunciation without recourse to the phonetic alphabet... :-) Taking this 
very list as an example, it's impossible to tell until someone makes a 
mistake that they're not native English speakers or what their background 
is. We can usually tell the Americans and the Brits apart by our spelling 
of colour/color etc., and some of the questions that get asked, but 
otherwise, communicating as we do through a text medium, we have no grounds 
on which to make assumptions. Heck, we can't even make safe assumptions 
about educational levels - perhaps not in this list, but certainly in other 
HP forums, I've been surprised to discover that people who come across to 
me as barely-educated teenagers are in fact 30, 40 or even 50-plus with 
formal education better than mine.

JKR has given Hagrid and Stan non-standard grammar and syntax, although 
even native Brits find it difficult to distinguish exactly what regional 
qualities are being put across, although the implication is that they're 
uneducated. Furthermore, some of the language foibles they've been given 
aren't internally consistent. As a result, the only thing we can say about 
them is that they have holes in their education of *English* - in Hagrid's 
case, we learn that he has an incomplete *magical* education as well.

It's true that kids at schools (especially boarding schools) tend to 
equalise their accents to something approaching the highest common ground, 
but this isn't really a linguistic issue ("how" they do it) but a 
psychological one ("why" they do it). Kids don't want to stand out and try 
to fit in as best as possible. When most of their peers have a particular 
"accent" or vocabulary, they see a need to pick these up themselves. Very 
often this is a result of direct mickey-taking.

On top of that, the media (especially TV) play a role in unifying 
vocabulary. Less so accents, as there is a variety of them both on TV and 
in people's daily lives, but words whose usage may be limited to certain 
areas or peer groups can very quickly become widespread. One word I 
remember from my youth as being pretty much exclusively used in Lancashire 
(not that I've ever lived in Lancs, but I have several friends from there), 
wassock (meaning, very roughly, "fool"), has since become standard fare 
country-wide as a result of several northern-based TV shows.

As a result, expecting to be able to determine people's social or 
geographic origins by their vocabulary is getting pretty difficult. I 
therefore don't find it strange that although everyone in the Potterverse 
*appears* to speak "perfect" English, there really are no grounds to expect 
this to be the case.

At Hogwarts, the kids are from all over the country and thus it would be 
expected that there's a huge variety of spoken accents. There is therefore 
little pressure to conform, as there is no "standard" by which to measure 
oneself. I can't speak for either version of the audio books, but TMTSNBN 
is a good indicator of that: McGonagall's Scottish lilt, Dumbledore's vague 
Irish brogue, Snape's West London (though not RP) don't really give the 
kids a clear aspirational ideal.

[Complete aside: coincidentally, I heard Fiona Shaw and Ian Hart on the 
radio today (in separate programmes) speaking in their natural accents 
(Shaw: Irish, Hart: Scouse) and it struck me that whilst the two of them 
"poshed up" their speech patterns for the first movie, Maggie Smith hid her 
plummy self behind her Scottish impersonation. :-)]

Some people have pointed out that it's a bit difficult for kids to have 
picked up regional speech patterns, as the wizarding world is self-enclosed 
and keeps itself apart. On the other hand, I feel compelled to draw 
attention to Ron's statement that they've had to inter-breed with Muggles 
for some time to stave off extinction... Muggle-borns and mixed-bloods seem 
to have been attending Hogwarts for some time (if not since its founding) 
and so pupils would probably gravitate towards peers and some regional or 
class speech patterns would be maintained or introduced. As an example, the 
current meaning of "cool" has only been prevalent in the UK for about 30 
years, yet the kids use it quite frequently and naturally (though they 
*over* use it in TMTSNBN).

As Eloise said, JKR is confined to what she can communicate on paper and it 
is very easy for the rendition of regional accents to appear very similar 
to each other, not to mention difficult to read. She therefore limits this 
literary device to very few characters, in order to make them stand out. 
Whether or not this indicates the absence of varied speech in the wizarding 
world does not necessarily follow, though.

As for the chap who washes the dishes at the Leaky Cauldron, I consider him 
to be a bit of an aberration on JKR's part. We've already witnessed a few 
magical ways to deal with such matters (though not Magic Dishwashers, yet!) 
:-) so I can't really see the need for someone to be employed to perform 
that function. In fact, generally speaking, the magical world doesn't 
really have much of a need for a working class to perform menial jobs, as 
most of these can be performed by magic. Squibs or those who don't manage 
to get many OWLs probably therefore end up with even poorer prospects than 
real-world academic under-achievers.

--
GulPlum AKA Richard, who's going to end this here. There's more he'd like 
to say, but it's getting late and this is probably long enough already....