Conclusion

Summary

A book on language change in progress cannot have a neat ending. Many of the developments described in the preceding chapters are still in flux, and the end-points remain uncertain in many cases. A number of trends, however, have emerged that, while certainly not exceptionless, are pervasive enough to deserve pointing out in a conclusion to a book on changes in standard English in the past century.

In phonology, the major development of the past century has been the emergence of an array of educated standard accents, broadly along national lines. Where there was no single national pronunciation standard in 1900, as in the United States, there is one now. By contrast, the sphere of influence of RP has contracted geographically. Where educated speakers outside the British Isles deferred to RP – that is, an external or “exonormative” standard – in the first half of the twentieth century, as many of them tended to do in the dominions and colonies of the British Empire, this deference has usually not persisted, and new “endonormative” national educated accents have arisen in the wake of decolonization. A difficult remaining issue is, in fact, the present status of RP, because its role has strengthened and diminished at the same time. As has been pointed out, it ceased to function as the prestige accent of an empire when that empire dissolved as a political agent.