The Cockney accent of the working class in London can be heard in a few movies and television series. But in real life, it’s more difficult to understand people of this social class, not so much because of the different way they pronounce words, but because of the particular type of slang they use. It’s based on a whole set of rhymes, such as apples and pears standing for “stairs.” But then, to make it really obscure, the usual way of speaking eliminates the rhyming word: “Get up them apples!” Another example would be the phrase bees and honey, which is substituted for “money.” Except, in practice, the typical substitution only uses the first part: “I ain’t got the bees to pay me rent.”
If you hear someone in London groaning, “I ‘ave to pay me Burton next week,” what bill is he complaining about? The whole phrase is Burton-on-Trent, so it’s his "rent" that’s troubling him. Or if the young lady next to you informs you that she’s “going up the frog,” where do you suppose she’d headed? The complete phrase will give you a hint: frog and toad. What rhymes with that? Yes, indeed, she’s heading “up the road.” As one last example of this type of slang, what does the elderly gentleman want at the restaurant when he asks for a drink of “fisherman’s”? He’s talking about the fisherman’s daughter, so naturally it’s a glass of "water."
In Scottish English, though, there’s a very different reason that some words are difficult for Americans to understand. Now, some words are simply pronounced differently. For example, where the average American would say “church” for a house of worship and “birch” for a certain type of tall, straight tree, the Scots speaker would pronounce these words “kirk” and “birk.” That’s dialect, not slang. But Scots also contains some distinctive words, such as ben for “mountain.” That one comes from Gaelic, in which beann means a peak. In Irish Gaelic, bin still means a cliff. A high spot that’s not quite so high in Scotland is a brae, another word not often heard this side of the Atlantic. But that one doesn’t come from Gaelic. That’s from Norse, the language spoken by the Vikings, in which it was bra, and in which it meant “eyelid, brow, river bank.” In Scots, though, it means a hill, not necessarily next door to any water or eyeballs. As one final example, there is also that little squirt who sits on mama’s knee, the bairn. That word is neither Gaelic nor Norse. It happens to come from Old English bearn from the verb beran, “to bear.” In American English, we still have the related verb “to bear” and the adjective “born.” But we no longer use the noun, substituting “baby” or “child.” So, Scots English contains some loan words, as linguists would say, especially from Gaelic and Norse, that American English does not have.
American English has lost some old English roots still maintained by the Scots and picked up loans from other languages along the way, too, that other branches don't have. We use more words from Spanish than the British do, for example, including patio, macho, adobe, and lariat (the last one from la reata). Bits of English wander into Spanish as well, along the border between the United States and Mexico, creating a hybrid language familiarly known as Spanglish. I remember reading a parody of a famous Christmas poem years ago, written in Spanglish. The first line was: “’Twas the night before Christmas and all through the casa, not a creature was stirring. Que raro! Qué pasa?” (Of course, there should be an upside-down exclamation point in front of the one phrase and an upside-down question mark in front of the final question, too, but my computer wouldn’t let me put them there – that uncooperative gerbil, behaving badly as usual, gave me an empty box when I attempted it).
Wherever English is spoken, people make it their own in one way or another. In Hong Kong, those who speak Chinese as a first language tend to add the particle la to their English, since there is no equivalent in our language. This little syllable can be added to change a verb into the past tense in Chinese, but it’s also added for many other reasons, all of which it seems only a native Chinese speaker can fully fathom. So indispensable is this la, it appears in the speech of the speaker of English as a second language in Hong Kong, or in Chinglish, as a result.
Some folks find the speech of others -- if it differs from their own in accent, dialect, slang, or (shudder!) language -- to be dreadfully scary and threatening. But this world has managed to stumble along with over 5,000 languages being spoken in it thus far. It's not going to collapse in on itself anytime soon if people go on inventing new ways of saying the same old things. That's part of the fun of language. So, if you're worried about the health of the English language, don't go signing any of those petitions to make it the official language or to force other folks to speak it if they don't want to. Just go forth and coin a new word! Then be sure to come back here and let us all know what it is.
Comments
A concise, clear and interesting mini-dissertation on these oft-muddled catagories of language.
Excellent exmaples that should pique anyone's curiosity.
Linguistics 4 Life!
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