2 - Prescriptivism and the suppression of variation

Summary

Towards a standard of pronunciation

It is generally agreed that Received Pronunciation as a distinct and widely recognised sociolect did not exist before the nineteenth century and was not named as such until Ellis used the phrase to describe a pronunciation used ‘all over the country, not widely differing in any particular locality’ (1869–1889: 23). However, as Raymond Hickey has reminded us in the introduction, the notion that one type of pronunciation was superior to others had been around at least since the sixteenth century, when most commentators broadly agreed with Puttenham (1589) that the ‘best’ pronunciation is ‘the vsuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx myles’. What is lacking from these early accounts is any prescription or proscription of specific features: readers are told where and from whom the most prestigious pronunciation can be heard, but are not advised to adopt or avoid any particular sequence of phonemes. In the early seventeenth century Alexander Gil provides what Dobson acknowledges to be ‘the best account of seventeenth-century dialectal pronunciation’ (1957: 142), giving examples of Northern, Western and Eastern pronunciations, but recommending that only the ‘Common Dialect’ should be used, at least in prose. He uses terms such as ‘barbarous’ to refer to regional pronunciations, and reserves his strongest condemnation for a social group which he calls the ‘Mopsae’, who appear to be advanced speakers carrying forward changes ‘from below’ which have their geographical origin to the East of London.