 Welcome very much to the British Library. This event is part of the Bloomsbury Festival Series. There are a number of events. Please do grab a what's on. There are plenty outside or obviously I assume as you're already here. You've had a look online and know some of the events. There's also lots of events forthcoming at the British Library in the next couple of months. And also a couple of exhibitions you might have opportunity to go and visit. We've just opened. There will be fun, a free exhibition in the main entrance hall in the main building of the British Library. Exploring Victorian entertainment through the Evanian collection of pamphlets and posters and catalogs et cetera et cetera. And then opening on the 4th of November is our major exhibition on maps mapping the 20th century. So please do take the opportunity to visit those two exhibitions. So this evening's event I'll allow our chair Henry Hitchings to describe how we're going to proceed. If I can introduce Henry, Henry works for the Oxford English Dictionary is a journalist. And obviously is very well placed to host this event as somebody who's written very widely on the English language. Probably most famously the language wars, which is a kind of exploration of linguistic debates about the notion of correctness and proper English et cetera. So Henry will explain how we're going to run the evening and introduce the rest of the panel. Thanks very much, Johnny. Hope I'm audible ladies and gentlemen. So yes, the subject this evening is a mixture of slang and identity and dialect. Those are the things we're going to be being addressed. As you can see this title, are you speaking my language? We've got on my left Johnny Robinson who works in the field of dialectology. The British Library has a fantastic collection of audio resources. I think one thinks of the British Library and thinks it's an amazing repository of books. But there's a lot more than that here. There's an extraordinary sound archive. And Johnny works extensively with that doing research into dialect and its history. We've then got the slang lexicographer, Jonathan Green, popularly known as Mr Slang. A name I think he was given by Martin Amos. Only in a footnote. Only in a footnote, but this is the kind of evening where footnotes really count for a lot. Jonathan, you can be Mr dialect just for tonight. But not in a footnote. Jonathan is probably best known now for his three volume dictionary of slang, which is the most comprehensive work on the subject of English slang. Recently become available online. For those of you who don't have the appetite for three volumes, there's also this slender, very recently published Oxford very short introduction to slang. Jonathan is also a great expert on the 1960s, although one might think that anyone who could be an expert on the 1960s probably wasn't there. We've then got Devyani... Yes, that joke has been made before. We've then got Devyani Sharma, who is Professor of Sociolinguistics at Queen Mary University of London. Devyani is an expert on dialect and has done a lot of work on British-Asian Englishes, a lot of field work, including a very interesting project in Southall, which she's going to be talking about more in due course. And she's very interested in the question of language and identity. And then we've got Susie Dent, probably most famous for her appearances on Countdown, also famous for being Danny Dyer's celebrity crush, as he disclosed on Radio One. And she has a new book out called Dents Modern Tribes, which is a book about different sections of society and the slang that they use that defines who they are, but that they also use to keep other sections of society at arms length, maybe bankers, boo, or cricket enthusiasts, or crossword puzzlers, or rappers, or people who are into skateboarding. And the book's just out, published by John Murray, and it's full of very fun information, and we're certainly going to be delving into that a bit in due course. A bit of housekeeping just to give you a sense of the shape of proceedings. We're going to talk for probably about 55 minutes in the form of a panel discussion, and then we're going to open it up to questions from the floor. I'll remind you about this when that happens, but there will be microphones being circulated, and when you do put your hand up to ask a question, if you could wait for the microphone to come to you before you start speaking, that would be really appreciated. I'm going to start off by asking Susie about your new book, and just can you tell us a bit more about it and what really drew you to this subject and just sort of delineated a bit for us? Yeah, well, I think I have always eavesdropped on conversations, and I've always found the sort of codes that other people speak in quite fascinating, and sometimes they weren't very overt codes, so one of the very first curiosities that I remember tripping over, and I must have been about five or six, was my mum's favourite expression, which we actually shared too. One was I couldn't give a tinkus cus, which was her way of saying I couldn't give a damn, and the other was, oh, my giddy aunt, which we don't really hear these days, but I think OMGA would be quite a good new acronym actually, and I remember thinking, who is this aunt and why is she so particularly dizzy? So I do remember that thinking, it was just curiosity that I couldn't quite decode, and then listening in on other conversations, particularly in the TV tribe, has always fascinated me too, so for example you're told, I use this one regularly as an example, but if you're told that you're looking hot on the floor, that's not Danny Dara speaking, that means simply that you are looking very shiny and you need a bit of powder and you're on the studio floor, and it's just little gems like this that have always fascinated me, and I thought it was time that I actually put some of these eavesdroppings down on paper, which is what I've done, and I've tried to not really infiltrate different tribes, although I didn't interview a Freemason or two, but just to try and see how language and anthropology work together, so how much of an insight you can gain about a particular group of people through the words that they use. And you very modestly talk about eavesdropping, but actually I know that you did quite a lot of field work here. Can you just give us a few examples about the types of people, the tribes, the different cadres of people that you went to? Well, I had some wonderful days, actually, and I'd say in my acknowledgments that if ever there was a book that could be dedicated to eavesdroppings, this would be it, but actually they were consultants, they weren't just people that I was surreptitiously listening into. So I spent a fantastic day out with paramedics, for example, heard how they dealt with death, which of course they face all the time, and it was with inevitable black, thick humour, and very surreal conversations about the level of death that somebody had achieved, in other words, had they gone past the stage of being revival, I guess. So they have this weird plus and minus system, plus ridiculous, very un-technical notions of being dead, dead, dead, or definitively dead. So that was an interesting one. I spent a great day out, two days out, actually, with cabbies, one with an Uber driver, one with a black cabbie to sort of compare and contrast, and inevitably the sat-nav took the role of the knowledge with the Uber drivers, and they didn't have that same kind of lingo. But one of the things I found throughout the book, and I would emphasise this, and I don't know if it's the same, Jonathan, with tuning into slang, but if you ask somebody what language do you use, you know, what is your tribal code, they will say, we don't have any. And this would be the same with Lex Cogfers or anybody, I think. He would say, well, we don't have any, but you catch it unawares, you catch it when people are talking to their own, members of their own tribe. So when it's not looking that you can really pick it up. Which tribe did you encounter which had a particularly sort of rarefied and rich argo that you perhaps weren't expecting it to have? Ah, so surprises. Well, when you say rich was Freemasons vocabulary was incredibly rich, a very archaic and biblical, but that's probably no surprise. I think sound technicians were a big surprise for me. I work with sound technicians all the time. They are the most unobtrusive people that you will ever find in a studio. They slip stealthily through the studio as they should. And yet go behind the scenes, and as I say in the book, you could be forgiven for thinking you've wandered into a branch of Ann Summers, because it is extraordinary the language they use. So they talk about all plugs are male or female, depending on whether they've got prongs or poles. They talk about donkey's dongas, butt plugs. This is the women as well as the men. So that was a real surprise genuinely for me. Other surprises, builders possibly, one of my favourite encounters. Wonderful builder in plaster called Luke filled me in on some of the wonderful phraseology that he uses. And inevitably this might just be a pocket of his sort of building trade. It may not be a national one, a bit like local dialects. But they talk about if they're plastering the ceiling they were talking about spreading the fat on Lionel, which is plastering is spreading the fat. Lionel, which is dance floor is the ceiling, if anyone knows the song. Gary Neville is a spirit level or a bubble for some. Their phraseology was wonderful and I had no idea that the stereotype, looking beyond language, the stereotype of the build the wolf whistling at anybody who walks by is actually true. Even for young 20-something very liberal married builders they still feel that they have somehow that history dictates that they have to wolf a flip people. There are a few women builders. Sadly I didn't meet any but I think obviously they're in a slightly tough position that they're going in ground. So linguistically they would be very different. I think. Out of curiosity that whistling thing, I mean is that about sort of the sense of trying to validate yourself as a builder and say I'm part of the drive. Yeah, there was a real pressure. I mean I think junior apprentice builders get a fair number of jibes about sort of long waits and sky hammers and they're sent off on ridiculous initiation rights to they say can you go and get a long wait or a long stand and inevitably that's what they get in the shop when they ask for those things. And it's very highly pressured and quite brutal actually. It's not all funny. They have a very, very tough time. So yes, quite possibly linguistically they do feel like they have to belong and in terms of their social behaviour too. But Luke, this builder said to me, you have a tape measure hanging down from your belt. It's your get out of jail free card. You feel like you're a builder. This is what you do. So it's quite interesting that history repeats itself merely because of sort of tribal identity. Jonathan, you've done a huge amount of work on sort of historical slang development and obviously this tribalism is one of the things that manifests itself repeatedly. What are some of the most interesting sort of identity issues that you've come up against here. People asserting their tribal identity. The whole of slang collection, I won't say lexicography, but the earliest collections of slang are all about tribes and one tribe in particular, which is of course criminals. And if you go back to 1530 and you get Robert Copland's highway to the Spittle House, in other words, the road to the hospital, and which the hospital in question was Barts. Barts Hospital in Smithfield. And basically there is a language that has been concocted quite deliberately by the tribe of wandering beggars who are known as the cantors and cant itself comes from Latin singing and that's because the language of the beggar is supposed to be that of the priest who doesn't say the mass properly but sort of sings it. And these are the canting crew and their language is probably about 200 words long and it's all about affirming who you are and of those words, one has survived, that word is booze. It may well be that one would say yes, that's logical enough, but such as panam for bread and wop for fucking has long gone. That wonderful character whopping Nell who niggles well. We shall not meet again, I'm afraid. This is how it is. If she will not wop for a penny let her try in for a make which means if she will not have sex for a penny let her be hanged for a hate me. And try in, which is all about three, the triple tree, which is the gallows which had three legs and a make which quite honestly I'm not even sure where that comes from but it meant a hate me. It's keeping the others out and it's affirming yourself and you see, I mean there really isn't very much in slang that is not criminal and tribe affirmative till about 1698 when a dictionary comes up by someone who we don't even know his name, he's known as B.E. Gent, Gent as in gentlemen and this dictionary comes out and you're beginning to see what I call it. Actually I've never really found a good explanation but I call it civilian slang by the time you get to my great hero Francis Gross in 1785 then you're starting to get a lot of normal slang as it were civilian slang, call it what you may in which asserting your identity is not so important except for asserting your identity as being slightly subversive, slightly rebellious, you're no longer, you're not part of standard English. I mean for me my alternative definition for slang is the counter language and that makes it an identity language of itself. In other words if you have a standard English or for that matter a standard French, Australian, whatever it might be I think we're hardwired as human beings or some of us to come up with something alternative and indeed rebellious and contrary and that in the term of language and identifying us as being rebellious and contrary and so on and so forth is slang. That's how it seems to work. You say in the introduction to your three volume dictionary of slang that slang is the language that says no and I mean you've just touched on that. One of the things which is apparent from what you've just said is that slang clusters a lot in particular areas of life. I mean I think it's pretty obvious that there's a lot of slang to do with sex. What are some of the other areas where slang is particularly rich and deep in the theme of vocabulary? I would put up my hand for being deeply cynical but it seems to me that slang is the vocabulary of us at our most human. In other words we're not trying to euphemise we're not trying to be polite we're certainly not trying to be politically correct and all those spades we're calling them spades in every sense of the word and slang has always done that so yes you've got sex there's probably 10,000 words of either sexual intercourse or parts of the body the giblets that we either put in or whatever it may be but beyond that it's the stuff that people actually say which is to do with insults which is to do with someone's fat they're ugly there's a very large unfortunately proportion of racist terms of nationalist terms as I say it's unrestrained it's unbuttoned we may disapprove of it and a lot of people may not agree with me but for me slang is ourselves at our most human and the themes that underpin this I mean in the end having sex in slang is man hits woman that's how it is the penis is always a gun the club a knife a dagger or what I would call a toy for a boy the vagina because slang is a very macho language is always this terrifying dark hole into which we want to go because it's exciting but we're terrified do you think that's changing actually or do you think that's I think it's very much changing and the next book that I want to do and I would like to put a little copyright notice on this is I want to deal with women and slang not women in slang we know what women in slang is women in slang are sluts and so on so forth it's all very depressing but there is a huge vocabulary for it whereas men of course are self-aggrandising but I think there is the last piece that the jig saw for me as a slang lexicographer as someone who writes about slang is that the relationship of women and slang now some of it's relatively easy because you go back to prostitutes you go back to certain trades that women would occupy and sex workers inevitably are going to be there because these are people who would use slang naturally but they also it's the girls talking about the customers and that's not the same as the customers talking about the girls in any way whatsoever but I think it's much wider than that and what you're seeing now in the social media which it's a gross generalisation and I'm very happy to be corrected but it does seem to me there is an element in social media of which girls are leading the way and the language you're seeing in that is not these themes that we've looked at in slang it's another identity it's another banner as it were and it's not what slang is stereotype to be I'm going to come to Daviani in a moment but I just want to ask you, you talk about the language that prostitutes use about their customers are there any particularly brilliant examples because people love a pungent example The one I remember was Gunk in the 60s I personally do not remember because I was sure I'm old but I'm not that old I do remember walking down Dean Street and this very nice woman stepping out and saying would you like a nice girl and I thought I'm only 13 I'm not sure, I'm not even old but Gunk, I don't know and I can't see with these lights so I can't judge but Gunk's were these huge squashy toys that were very popular in the 60s before the Beatles probably and this was a very dumb punter who'd pay a great deal of money what used to be in the 18th century called a culley but was now called a gong Do you mean you could just talk to him rather than do it I think we're getting into some strange areas here I think the audience you don't come to an event about slang and identity and have a weak stomach I'm trying to remember I think maybe you punched him maybe it was that kind of punter another word for the client of course Interesting, there was a gong con children's television and there was a gong con blue Peter when I was going up Blue Peter, yeah Or you can accent it blue Peter Yes exactly I think we can see that a lot of what we've talked about so far is to do with vocabulary and it always seems to me that when people talk about language very often the conversation quickly reduces itself to the level of talking about individual words or phrases and they're very interesting they're like fossil poetry words of repositories of all kinds of historical information but of course there's very much more to thinking about slang and dialect and identity than just looking at individual words or phrases Daviani this is really something you're very interested in and I wondered if you could talk a little bit about some of the things that you've uncovered where identity is expressed through what might be considered alternative forms of English where it's not really about the vocab so much as other things people are doing Yeah so when we hear about these examples of what we might call spectacular slang specialist very clear boundary defining lexicon you sometimes feel a bit left out because you think this is so cool and I don't do that type of stuff with my language so do I actually do the same type of identity building that these spectacular subcultures might do and I think one of the nice things with what Susie is looking at is actually going quite far into normal life showing that lots and lots of different regular groups that we encounter actually do develop these and it helps a lot to go beyond words and actually expand out into things like how you pronounce your words what kind of grammar you use and once you start looking at that you see that everybody does this tribal work and I think one of the useful things when we start trying to look at how everyone does identity through languages to break down identity a little bit so it's very easy to talk about well it seems like this group is doing youth language and they're doing a certain identity but it's a very vague term and if I ask any of you who are here what's your identity you immediately recognize how vague and non specific it is so one of the things that's quite useful I think when you try and link language and identity and see how it works is to think about levels of identity that we all do so some aspects of us are durable and maybe permanent and always with us so being a woman being a certain age a certain ethnicity and that may be or may not be important for you and you always doing a little bit of that identity but we also have roles and some of the examples you talked about are more roles like being a teacher or a doctor that you're sometimes in times not in being a mother and that's a bit in between in terms of levels of identity it's switched on switched off and then there are tiny moments of identity where in this conversation for instance we might disagree and I might want to position myself differently differently relative to someone I might want to play the devil's advocate or take back the floor and those are also identity where you're trying to do a little bit of work in an interaction and when we look at languages it's very useful to look at all those levels of work that we do so I can just give you one example it's not from my work but if you think about pitch which is how high or low your voice is when you're talking I might do one of these durable permanent kind of choices and speak in a very high voice and a breathy voice like a Marilyn Monroe kind of femininity and I might try and go through life speaking in this high voice and doing this permanent gender performance but actually I'll encounter roles where that pitch doesn't do other work that I need to do so if I'm a doctor I can't really maintain that permanent pitch so Margaret Thatcher is very well known for having lowered her pitch very dramatically while she was prime minister and that was for authority in that role we don't know what she did with her pitch levels outside that and then even when you go to that smallest level I might try to be feminine and high but then I get into an argument and I need to again do some authoritative work in the moment and I adjust my pitch and so we all do these kinds of bits of work and when you look at language you can look at dropping your H's or glottling your T's and doing all of those levels of work with all these pieces of language and that kind of connects us to more spectacular subcultures like users of prison slang and so on and we also do that boundary work in group out group work but in this much finer way Will you use the term spectacular subculture and it might can you just expand a little on exactly what you mean by that it's a very vivid term Well it's a term that's sometimes been used for groups like punks or mods or goths where there's very very overt identity work being done and often with adolescence and young people you see that kind of work it's very interesting that slang is very generated very fast and richly at that age group when you're discovering that you're your own person you're not the same as your parents and so I you know in some cases spectacular subculture might mean these more well defined in your face oppositional identities that use language you know really overtly display yeah but I mean I suppose what I'm trying to say is that it doesn't make the rest of us boring if we don't belong to them we also do that but in much finer ways Do you think it's fair to say that we all to some degree do this I mean just to choose a very prosaic personal example which is also slightly embarrassing to admit to I know I've caught myself in the act of buying a kebab at three o'clock in the morning speaking a little bit differently from how I'm speaking now or how I'm speaking in a job interview or how I speak to my granny you know and I mean do we all do that everybody does that well one word is accommodation where you it's actually quite automatic and unconscious that almost every human accommodates slightly to people that they're talking to so right now I'm a bit more British I'm Indian some of you may recognise that but I'm being a little more British and it's a little bit of identity in a way but it's also an automatic response to the situation and so you know it can vary so you can be more or less conscious of manipulating it so politicians will often manipulate it quite consciously when they're talking to more upper class audiences they'll shift to that end of their range a good example for me was George Osborne who would often, sorry to mention him but I mean would often speak in a way that just definitely wasn't how he really spoke because he was trying to seem like a man of the people wasn't a very convincing act but I think it is something you catch politicians in the act you mentioned sounding more British in some circumstances are there times where you deliberately sound more Indian or tried to sound more Indian I think that there are we use the word stances sometimes so there's stances that you take in conversation where you exploit these different voices that you have most people have a repertoire of ways of speaking and so I might I think if I were being dismissive now if we got into an argument if I didn't agree I might sound a bit more Indian because in a way I'm shifting to the more me voice or something Let's see if we end up there Johnny I want to come to you now because obviously your specialism is dialect and I'm sure for some people this is very familiar ground but can you just explain the difference between dialect and slang because I know that while a lot of people will understand that difference there are some people who don't really understand the difference and I don't know who's where on this but can you just encapsulate that dialect and slang are often very blurred boundaries between the two a good example would be we've got a collection at the British Library that was created about 10 years ago from a survey done across the UK of 40 everyday words and the words that people use to count in their everyday language words like your word for mother, word for tired and one of the words that cropped up quite regularly for annoyed was vexed and it cropped up in all sorts of social circumstances and it was described by some speakers as a posh word so somehow it's a kind of a prestigious possibly slightly old fashioned expression to be vexed for other people they associated it with their grandparents particularly in the north it was considered an old fashioned word that's what my grandfather who spoke dialect used to use so it's kind of tainted it's kind of a regional aspect to it and then other people for other people it was a really cool young hip hop British multicultural London English word vexed often pronounced vexed sometimes pronounced vexed occurs a lot in multicultural London English and multi-ethnic communities in the UK so it kind of words can slip between slang and dialect but really in simple terms dialect is three things the words we use the pronunciations we use and the grammar we use so drawing really on what Daviani was saying but if we're talking about dialect strictly then linguists tend to view that as how that reflects our regional identity our geographic identity so a word that might be particular to a particular geographic location or a pronunciation pattern that identifies somebody from somewhere so in a British English context the minute somebody like me opens my mouth and says bath all native speakers of British English immediately know something about me not a lot because I haven't got a very strong accent but there's that north south divide and then also the third strand being the grammar we use so that's I think one of the things a lot of people are conscious of is that some rightly or wrongly probably wrongly some dialects have quite negative associations in people's minds and some are seen as more prestigious or more attractive or more authentic or more sexy or more something but there are definitely stigmas attaching to some and I want you to speak about that but also I'm interested, I mean everyone speaks a dialect even people who think they don't well absolutely we encounter lots of people who say I haven't got an accent just refers to pronunciation patterns and of course everybody has the minute we speak we might hear if we're talking about just English whether we're British or American whether we're native or non-native whether we're Scottish or English and even somebody who speaks what linguists call received pronunciation so RP which is a regionally neutral middle class voice of the UK increasingly arguably of England it's not as widely encountered in younger speakers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for all sorts of cultural and political reasons so even somebody who speaks that voice they've got that identity that says something about their social background so yes we all have a dialect and as you mentioned some dialects unfortunately at different points in time have been viewed negatively some viewed positively so lots of research has been done where people react to certain voices in certain ways and there's the kind of the stereotypes you know the cockney car seller and the scow unfortunately the accent and dialect of Liverpool has suffered in recent times and been viewed negatively but what's interesting is often if people are asked to rate certain accents for different characteristics now all of this is nothing to do with linguistic judgment it's our own kind of social value judgments if you like about these voices people often view accents like say a Birmingham accent a Birmingham accent that's viewed negatively in terms of its authority is viewed very positively in terms of it being friendly so you know which is the greater human characteristic being friendly or being authoritative and viewed very positively in terms of authority but less so in terms of friendliness so you know these things can work in more than one way what's also interesting is if you play the same speaker so there is there's no difference in the pitch and the gender of the speaker and the range of that speaker's voice so a very good actor who can put on several accents if you play them to a non-native speaker audience who don't know what a Liverpool accent means in British culture and what a RP accent means etc then they react completely differently it's kind of a bit more random so there's clearly nothing linguistic about these judgments we make it's all based on our associations with certain stereotypes I've got a few questions based on that one thing is that I get the sense that having a received pronunciation accent what some people would call BBC English what some people might call speaking poshly is now perceived quite negatively whereas perhaps 50 years ago it was something so I want to ask you if you think that's true and if it is true why is it true also you touched on cockney and there's a sort of a kind of popular conception that cockney is essentially moriband that it's in terminal decline and is that true was that a myth and you mentioned multicultural London English and I wanted to ask you just to sort of explain a little bit whether that's displaced cockney as well gosh lots of questions so yes I mean cockney we all possibly have a sense of cockney cockney rhyming slang is used the world over you'd probably be able to speak much better about cockney rhyming slang than me but certainly we have a notion of what a very traditional London voice as portrayed by Dickens as portrayed through music hall as encountered very badly in Mary Poppins etc etc and portrayed to a certain degree in EastEnders obviously these things are representation rather than reality but we all have a sense of what that cockney was and is I mean and certainly there is still a traditional London voice that is very clearly a descendant of that what a lot of linguists, people like Daviana at Queen Mary University have been researching is the influences on particularly young speakers in London in multi-ethnic areas of British Asian communities, British Black communities, British Caribbean communities and that kind of hybrid voice that we hear among young speakers that draws on all those ethnicities British Asian, British Black and traditional London again exaggerated and kind of stereotyped in somebody like Ali G, the comedian who sends up that voice so that's kind of something that's emerging in London and may well continue or may well dissipate these things have been ongoing for centuries, I mean a similar process happened in Corby a small town in the Midlands in Northamptonshire where there was huge migration from Scotland to work in the steelworks in the start of the 20th century and there are people born in Corby to this day in their 40s and 50s who sound like they grew up in Scotland simply because that's and that kind of percolates so these kind of hybrid accents exist and dialects in all sorts of places so that's the one thing about cockney multicultural London English I forget what the other thing is I mean I think it's difficult to say really I mean yes and no I mean it's interesting, I was at university in the 80s and in Leeds and and received pronunciation seemed to be bizarrely popular possibly as a result of the whole Charles and Diana thing, there were lots of things like the Heist Potty Book which was a house party book that was published all sorts of things, kind of Green Wellies Barber Brigade, it was kind of a there was an attraction and I'm conscious that I've got young teenage children who absolutely adore Made in Chelsea so you know, there is an attraction to that very pucker-r-p I don't think it's the way they speak, that's the attraction well no pucker-r-pucker so it's difficult to say yes there are negative views of it but it fluctuates and it depends who you speak to and what somebody wants to do by that accent if you speak received pronunciation one of the things I think is intriguing about received pronunciation speakers, unlike most speakers of a relatively regional dialect or accent is there are very few ways you can fluctuate so I'm conscious that lots of people who speak dialect lots of people who have a strong accent can modify that quite subtly as they move between communities and audiences where an RP speaker only has a few ways of kind of modifying this speaker to go back to the George Osmond thing for purely selfish reasons I touch on this because when I was about 21 I interned at the BBC and I was told that I had too posher voice to be on the BBC which I was a little bit surprised to hear I'm all for the representation of more diverse Englishes but I went home and told my mother this and she said, but you have a rather common voice I learnt a lot there very quickly not all of it particularly welcome it seems to me that you are very well placed to pick up just a comment, I think one thing that is useful to think about is we all know that language changes all the time and if we see changes in RP towards estuary English or a kind of mix that brings in more vernacular and changes in Cockney where a new multicultural type of speaking is coming in it's useful to remember that what's also happening is a new standard and new vernaculars are developing so that relationship the standard vernacular relationship in Britain is very deep having lived in different places it's very noticeably deeply embedded in British culture that opposition so which style of speaking inhabits those faces changes all the time and we're in a time when both are changing but the relationship may be quite stable I think it's useful to remember those abstract kind of class based distinctions are quite deep so even if we see changes it doesn't mean a disintegration of that bigger social relationship or social arrangement I understand that I just want to come back to something, Johnny estuary English is something that's just been touched on it was a phrase that was very big in the 1980s it was a convo I think with David Roseworn what is it gosh estuary English as defined by David Roseworn is a combination of received pronunciation features so that BBC English voice that we use as a popular term and London features but not broad cockney so a kind of halfway point between what is clearly a regionally neutral prestigious British English standard and a local form in London and it's typically spoken by people in an area in the home counties and the suburbs around London it's quite widely represented in the media and it does it's one of the accents that does actually have quite negative views towards it among some people who's a tip, is it Jonathan Ross I mean who's a typical well that's a difficult thing to say who's a typical cockney speaker well I suppose we could get a typical who's mentioned Danny Dyer so yes I mean is Jonathan Ross an estuary English speaker or is he just a London English speaker it's a very difficult distinction it's basically a continuum somewhere between London English but not really cockney a kind of recognizably London accent and a recognizably RP accent so placing somebody absolutely as archetypically estuary English is quite difficult I'd say one of the reasons I think we're interested in this whole subject is because we all whether we admit it or not like placing people yeah and obviously these terms are very useful because it's very you can't in a split second describe what I've just said about estuary English but if you use the term estuary English most people get a sense of what that is if you use the term Geordi for Newcastle-Pontine Scouse these terms are very useful but if you use the term Geordi then that can go from very broad dialect speaking Geordi right through to somebody who has a very soft Newcastle-Pontine accent but they would all call themselves Geordi and Davion just to come back to you multicultural London English what are the specific influences that are bearing on English that are changing the grammar where are they coming from I think we kind of guessed the answer but what's the reality it's an interesting development because maybe people might be familiar with London Jamaican as a style that developed in the 80s in schools which was very heavily creole influenced so earlier London a contact way of speaking in London had one source which was very Jamaican creole influenced multicultural London English is quite a different phenomenon where in the east end of London it's interesting because it shows you how dialects and identities are so sensitive to things like housing policy and schooling policy so it happens that the way immigrant groups in east London live is in very mixed ethnically mixed states and schools and that mix has led to a kind of dialect that still has a lot of influence from creole languages because of their kind of popular cultural prestige in schools that's been true in London for a long time can I put you on pause there can you explain what creoles are so creoles are in the London context languages that people with the Caribbean heritage bring with them so in the Caribbean creole languages developed through plantation context contact between African languages and English or French or whatever the kind of dominant groups language was but there are such radically changed languages that they're treated as separate languages so most people have heard Jamaican creoles and Jamaican was English but with a lot of creole influence but multicultural London English goes beyond that one type of source and it has influence from young children coming in who don't speak English from very different backgrounds Somali, Polish, all kinds of backgrounds and acquiring east London English very fast in schools so you get effects that are both input from creole but also the effects of non-English speakers very quickly learning the language but it's become a variety that's sort of become established as a marker of working class identity in east London so one of the very striking things about it and there have been experiments to do this is if you play a typical speaker of multicultural London English to people in London they can't guess whether they're black or white or Asian because it's not just that the inputs are multicultural the users it's been taken up across ethnic groups and so it's a very striking dialect that's become more of a class identity than a particular ethnic identity I wanted to come back to you Suzy and just talk, I mean I think a lot of the people that you've been looking at are native speakers of English did you encounter interesting non-native pockets in your I did inevitably speak to when I say inevitably I guess I was sort of living to the stereotype here but some eastern European builders because I wanted to see what their experience was like and I mentioned earlier that there are a few women builders but actually they outnumber eastern European builders despite our fears that they're taking over the entire industry and they too interestingly in order to even if they're working in their own little enclave as it were they too start to absorb I'm not completely sure whether it's down the pub or where but they absorb some of the jargon that they're picking up from their native speaker counterparts which was really interesting because they're not actively trying to be part of the same tribe it seems to me, they see themselves as being other and in some ways they trade on that because obviously there are all sorts of positive associations as well as negative ones to do with things speedy and that kind of thing so I found that quite interesting and certainly if I get to write another book about tribes I would love to go Jonathan will have looked at this but to look at criminal slang because there it's very interesting I think that as far as I can make out each prison has its own very very distinct lexicon and it becomes the parlance of all prisoners no matter where they come from but yet it's quite local which is quite interesting so it draws on local landmarks local resonances and everybody picks it up no matter where no matter what their provenance is which I think is fascinating somehow and again it's that sort of sense of a sort of tribal unifying identity So if you get transferred to a new prison among all the practical things you have to deal with you actually don't understand what people are talking is that the point actually the sense of we're a breed apart and you've just turned up here? I think so I mean obviously it's a fairly important code to have if you want to defy the authorities I mean teen slang but it's in the same way doesn't it that the authorities are parents so I think within prisons clearly some sort of code that the you know the people who aren't the authorities will have their own the guards will have their own slang but clearly there's an imperative then but yes I mean I think that sense of belonging must be hugely important in a prison but of course there will also be ranks according to where you stand you know what role you play within that community There are some things that John has said I think that sense of belonging is really interesting and I don't want to compare children's playgrounds to prisons but it's interesting to say if you move from prison to prison what I think is really fascinating is encountering young children so primary school children who move and very quickly have to decide whether to fit in and absorb and there's still to this day huge amount of variation in playground games so the clapping songs and skipping songs and particularly the chase games is it tick, is it it, is it he things like ackee one two three pom one two three veins one two and that's something again I don't want to compare them to playgrounds but the minute somebody moves from a playground then there is that desire to fit in immediately and absorb and use that language or to create the identity that you are different and you remain outside I think it's a lovely piece of serendipity because I learnt from Jonathan you were talking about highwaymen at the beginning and I learnt from you Jonathan that one bit of code all those centuries ago between highwaymen if they were to bump into each other in the deep of night was to whisper the music's paid to say I am a fellow highwayman let me go, let me go on and play my trace and very I read ages ago a really surprising article that Elizabethan slang is coming back into prisons because I don't know where they get it from is that true? is it true or not? as they say down the nick bollocks what broke my heart if I may carry on with the criminal stuff when there was the big diamond heist the old guys who went in in hatton garden and friend of mine who was then working on the guardian got me the transcripts and I got terribly excited this was going to be a real bright into the criminal language of now but it wasn't it was heartbreaking basically there were a lot of people going oh it's bottle dropped out bottle dropping out is bottle in glass which is ass and it's ass not in the sense of your actual physical buttocks but it's like the 18th century use of bottom which was used to mean courage so if your bottle drops out it means you lost your bottle but it was basically that it was rather said it was things like you know they got these things the police they can hear what you're saying in your car so it's very sad I was yearning for I think prisons though particularly in America it's rather like that film if from years ago if you don't know the words you're in deep shit and that's what that's what becomes of you going back to the tribes and the identity and you were talking about Courtney rhyming slang I mean in a way that there are a number of creation myths vis a vis Courtney rhyming slang some would say it was Irish navies some would say it was criminals but the one that I'm inclined to go for and I think is best attested is that it was cost among us it was Courtney East End market traders and that was done very much to come up with something to come up with a language that both the authorities who ran the markets and the punters who were selling rotten apples to did not know what it meant and this may be negative stereotyping of the poor cost among us but this was there for a reason and what you get now in those days most of it you can find in a couple of mid 19th century slang dictionaries and you've got apples and pears for stairs you've got trouble and strife for wife you've got saucepan lids for kids et cetera what you don't have is what I think of as the sort of tourist rhyming slang posion bex for sex germaine grir or Britney Spears for beer someone and so forth these are almost something you get as a Zedlist celebrity it seems to me if you attain a certain degree of fame you will get a bit of rhyming slang but it's not in the same way of I think the carry level one was really scraping the barrel they're just appalling the spirit level but I think what's great about it is the way it assumes presumably obviously is no longer simply London based and the fact that it's been adopted and used worldwide there's a fantastic example of dialect innovation there's a notion isn't that dialects are disappearing and to a certain degree there's some erosion lexically geographically but nonetheless dialects are very good at refreshing themselves and innovating and there's a wonderful example of word used in Nottingham based on cockney rhyming slang in Nottingham if it's cold the local pronunciation is it's code and in Nottingham nowadays lots of young speakers are saying it's a bit derby as in Derby Road which is a road between Nottingham and Derby which is Brian Cloughway which links Nottingham Forest and Derby County but the massive rivalry between the two so saying it's a bit derby is having a popup derby at the road you're telling me this an example of how cockney rhyming slang has been approached by all of us hasn't it the place that you get it is Australia which presumably was because of what were known as the 10 quid poms who went out there in the 50s and it cost you 10 quid to get out of England and go and start off your new wonderful life in the happy country or whatever it's called but that was actually you've got rhyming slang in Australia much much earlier and for a while it was rhyming slang in America and the Americans believed that it was actually created by Australians and the English had picked it up from Australia they were of course wrong but it was there and it was it was basically because the Australians had picked it up from the English the sailors and indeed the criminals would go to the west coast and various other major seaports and bring that kind of language with them but it hasn't lasted and the likes of H.L. Menkin the great writer of the American language another three volume book despised it great clear has been horribly let's not forget though all of these dialects are also very often a kind of joyous banter because I think we're talking about it as a kind of necessary it's a requirement for fitting in and things but it's fun and we are amazing at wordplay in speakers of English or even non-letters speakers of English our language has the greatest capacity for wordplay so I think it's easy to forget that actually it's fun all this tribal talk well slang I mean is huge amount of it most of slang 75% of slang is standard English but it's been turned upside down inside out it's been tweaked it's been played with that's its joy there's very little well there's etymology but that's the etymology you'll find in the Oxford English dictionary it's not some kind of most of it's special slang etymology as such and that's as you say it's the wit it's the the moody interpretation I believe some would call it I've got two questions that have come up from what's just been said there the first is to you Johnny and we might not take it first but it's about something you mentioned in passing which is the erosion of regional dialects people talk about super regionalisation but the other thing I wanted to ask and it's just come up from both Jonathan and Susie is there are some of these sections of society which have a particular social dialect and that stays very inward looking and it doesn't percolate out through the rest of society and then there are other social dialects which do percolate and end up being mainstream English and wanted to ask which ones they tend to be perhaps we can do you first Johnny just this question of the erosion of some of these regional dialects or indeed not erosional but but more sort of class based or profession. Yeah I mean there's been a lot of research recently into what language term dialect levelling in a sense as you mentioned these super regional dialects whereby the big urban areas is a pull on all sorts of things socially and culturally so most of us nowadays no longer live where we grew up and have moved across the country and even people who are relatively local maybe travel great distances to work, to school, to leisure etc etc so come into contact with a wider range of people than maybe 50, 60 years ago. There was a survey called the survey of English dialects done 50, 60 years ago in over 300 locations in England and they interviewed speakers who were born in the 1880s who'd all spent their entire lives in the same village so had their parents and so had all four of their grandparents. Now that would be very difficult to replicate other than in a few small places nowadays so obviously that has had an impact on language, the amount of people we come into contact with so these big urban areas as people move into and move out of those urban areas so that process of Estru English that people are aware of maybe around London of those sounds percolating out of London is happening around Liverpool is happening around Newcastle is happening around Leeds and so on and so forth but personally I prefer to view as dialect change if we look at words particularly then certain words that were captured in something like that survey of English dialects are no longer used because the practice or the item itself is no longer used so they were talking about farm implements they were talking about farm practices that has all been mechanized so we don't need the word for that tool anymore that may have been different across the country but nonetheless if you know where to look and as you talked about eavesdropping if you listen to local people talking to local people then these words crop up spontaneously and naturally so I think it's that ongoing process of change what about this question of which of these sort of social dialects actually seep into the mainstream Susie what's your observation and then maybe you can speak to that so when you say social dialects you're not the tribe they're the tribal it's interesting I think in much the same way some people think that horribly termed change was the great vowel shift which changed many English pronunciation so that they moved apart from spellings much as people think it was a result of people trying to emulate cool Londoners so pronunciation changed I think because I always trust Clive Upton brilliant dialectologist but he thinks it truly was a kind of fashion thing so that people changed their accent and spelling changed the spelling stayed the same but accent moved on I think there have been fashions if you talk about some of the tribes in my book where clearly some professions for example we've seen this being incredibly cool if you think about the number of idioms that we've taken from flying in aviation for example flying by the seat of your pants or pushing that horrible, pushing the envelope etc clearly after the Second World War that was seen as being something that was cool to adopt that kind of vocabulary if you're talking about now which one of them might have a better sense of this than me but of the tribes in my book it's quite interesting I'm not sure whether there are any particular professions where people are picking up vocabularies because they think it's cool in the same way as they used to and I'm desperately trying to think of certainly I think things when music tend very quickly to seep into the mainstream you know times for styles of music because it's so pervasive whereas the language of accountants probably doesn't travel quite as well they were a very jolly lot that is bad they were so they were I don't know any undertakers I do and they were fantastic what's undertakerslang undertakerslang is dark as you would expect peppered with very silly jokes but things like all corpses are customers for example they have things like wooden overcoat for a coffin all sorts of things for furniture they call it which is a collective furniture for herces there was a great rivalry between cavity and barmas and the other kind of barmas so there's throat slashes and belly punches so the two terms of choice for them corpse call my all time favourite corpse call is a corpse that's been cryogenically frozen for future revivification should that day ever come that sounds quite niche I have to tell you we were talking about stuff that became mainstream none of that is going to become mainstream but they were a surprisingly jolly lot I was just thinking I suppose the most obvious one is drugs I mean there are my colleague contemporary I don't know what the quite right Jonathan Leiter who is an American slang lexacrographer and he on the whole steps aside from drugs not I'm sure on any moral grounds but I think he feels what I feel with a lot of Susie's stuff is it's what I call jargon it's small p professional slang and or occupational jargon it's not areas into which I go but there are certain areas where I have to accept that the size of the interest group is so vast that I have to put it in there and drug use is the obvious one and that's you know that's a huge vocabulary I mean I don't know how many words I've got I try to keep it on the more general stuff not the specific name the specific needle or whatever it may be and there are people of course who do that but that's the one that always shouts out to me words about being excited can often be words that start out as words for high well the words start off tend to be excited then move on to drink then move on to drugs the amount of crossovers obviously high as you say being the perfect one the whole idea of not at all I would just say builders talk about a pipe dream talking about drug vocabulary but being something it's a pipe that literally has a very bad come down in other words it falls off the wall but that's brilliant do they talk about builders bum then sorry I've lowered the tone I've lowered the tone that's fine it's really interesting to think about which in group domains have given us a lot of our idioms so slang becoming regular idioms and aside from these examples that we've talked about there's a huge cycle in American English from originally jive talk now hip hop into general culture and it keeps regenerating because there's such a desire to take those up and so bling and these kinds of words become quite general and also the frontier in America was just a source of things like an ace up one sleeve and hit the jackpot lots and lots of our idioms come from quite an in group slang kind of so it really makes you wonder why and business speak which you were just lamenting is actually really is a source of thinking outside the box and going forward all of these things that we don't really a lot of people don't like but they are really spreading as generic idioms so it's interesting to think why frontier rap music business speak have this potential for generating I guess with business speak so many people and I'm very conscious that often one starts out by being mystified by it then one despises it then one catches one's self using it then one despises it even more and then it's just normalised it's a sort of journey there that's very fraught I'm very conscious that we've got an audience here of about 150 people who I'm sure have lots of questions and I think it would be a great moment to turn things over to the audience I'd like to remind you to wait until the microphone come to you there will be two microphones I'd also say if you want to direct your question to a single member of the panel that's legit or if you just throw it open that's also good but very much your turn to ask some questions on any aspect what we talked about but also anything else that you think is pertinent to this whole subject of identity as expressed through language and slang and dialect put my glasses on now hello oh that's better does it work? can you hear me? so initially to Susie but in fact to the whole group in context is I'm a senior lecturer in paramedic science and we have a difficulty with getting our students not to jump on all the jargon in the first year particularly for academic writing so my question is should we usually try to dampen it down so they will say things like on my first job I did this and so on and so forth using that kind of language and we'll say no you should say we attended an incident so academically should we allow them to speak that way or because that's the parlance that they're using yes that's a very interesting point should we sometimes ride above the jargon I suppose one question is particularly when it comes to the emergency services it's such an important release valve for them it seems to me this sort of level of Banta which has its own lexicon I think I think very much with communication in general it's usually we respect context so essentially if they're amongst themselves and they have this joke a couple of paramedics did that when somebody from middle management comes they don't particularly like they will simply say there we are then and if you take the first initials from there we are then you get the judgement of that particular person they're talking to but they would never dream of saying that in different circumstances so I can absolutely see that there might be a need to dampen it down when communication is all and when you need to be transparent and not cliched because inevitably some of these will become cliched I imagine it's a little bit like business speak I imagine that a lot of the phrases that we now hate had a certain resonance to begin with and then they have become this sort of meaningless hackneyed phrases so I personally I wouldn't discourage them if they are using it with a clear meaning and if it is increasing that sense of belonging but clearly if it just becomes meaningless pattern and they're not really thinking about what they're saying then yes perhaps bring them back to reality a bit but I think it's possibly like asking someone to change their accent to some extent but again context is all I would say I completely answered your question but if I was on your example I was on a job I can't actually see you very well so if I'm sorry if I I can see where you are I just can't see whether you're really displeased by a response it looks happy it looks happy it's the register I think that's absolutely fair enough thank you for lowering the lights I think that's fair enough but I personally think it's quite an important from my experience it's quite an important part of their day that sort of unifying vocabulary so I wouldn't discourage it too strongly personally any of the others if you want to speak to them at all more yes there's a gentleman just here with some glasses blue shirt and then actually after you if the mic could go to to your right that would be good I'll go to that can tell us about how old words could be have you got anything you can tell me about how old words could be how old words could be how old words can be well you mentioned that one of the words that survived was booze so that brings in a kind of an idea it was mine more the perfect example I can offer is A the first rule is they're always old and you think and I came across something in the last year of research which absolutely delighted me now I think if I polled everybody here and indeed here and asked you the word dis to disrespect now A what group would you think it came from anybody want to vouchsafe okay let's I will I will answer my own question I mean it's going to be wrap it's going to be African American and it's going to come on stream around the 1980s one day I'm reading an Australian newspaper called the Sunday Times of Perth the date of which is in October October 1905 and here is my word dis and all of our word dis and of course this is heaven as far as I'm concerned this is the holy grail of what I do pushing it back pushing it back but I mean this doesn't fully answer your question of course but I would go back to my first glib comment is older than you think and these days you can really start finding because of the great difference was and I can only talk about slang lexicography but I'm sure it's absolutely true at the OED and everywhere else who does historical principles lexicography in other words is looking for textual citations of some form and that is relatively recent I mean you know this is well it comes with that but I'm saying well it's it's recent 80 years old and we thought it was and booze as Susie points out I mean booze you is at least 1530 it's what you're saying that we can't really talk very sensibly about slang pre-printing because it's not documented is that what you're driving at? Well you have phonemes you know basically shapes of sounds that are associated with particular things so you might have pen which is the penines penines in the Alps and they're associated with the same Celtic tribe so you know these words go way back that are associated with particular things and the way you frame the question I mean you use the and I enjoyed that you pronounced it out which a lot of people will be familiar with the northern dialect terms out and note where I come from in Yorkshire it's pronounced out and note but lots of people who don't use those terms naturally think it's out and out now there are not areas of the country where it is pronounced out and out and it's famously in that bread advert isn't it British bread advert the bread with out taken out and of course it has to be out there to rhyme without and for the slogan to work but actually it's far more widely pronounced out and note in the north than it is pronounced out and out but that goes way back I mean that's an old English word aewicht and nawicht anything and one thing so yes but as I mentioned before you know dialect words you can often trace back a long long time and the OED does that sort of thing wonderfully but also there are you know new dialect forms come in and these things evolve there's also a period I think in the industrial revolution you would know much more about where a lot of dialect because people are coming out of the country and into the cities are bringing it with them and some of it survives the slang this seems to happen but I mean I was probably the wrong person to answer that because of course slang just doesn't do that kind of deep deep etymology, deep background so on and so forth I was wondering whether any of you have ever done any research or know people who have done research on slang in sign language or gesture because just watching you all speak you all use your hands and gesture in very very different ways as you speak and it would be interesting to know My friend Tom Dowlsell who did, who was taken if you know Eric Partridge's dictionaries came out in the 20th century slang dictionaries anyway he has a colleague called Terry Victor and they did the revision in I think 2005 of the dictionary of slang and unconventional English Terry Victor who you could look up I believe has done a certain amount of study into exactly what you're talking about more than that I'm afraid I can't offer but he's the man and it's spelt exactly like it sounds Terry Victor and there's a project again I don't know a great deal about it but there's a project done at University College London on dialect and accent in British sign language so from what little I know because of the nature of signing and the way it was taught in the late 19th, early 20th century it was children who were signing were sent to centres in big urban areas so there is a recognisable Manchester signing accent to do with the so it's a lot to do with what they call the pinky so the little finger is it bent is it straight in certain words and also sign language again is subject to the same social and cultural pressures of other languages so for instance I believe in British sign language the word for India used to be pointing to the forehead but that's considered no longer politically correct and that's now India so sign language is kind of a subject to the same accent social slang phenomena I imagine another way that it parallels spoken languages I mentioned how adolescence are the source of a lot of innovation and slang and apparently across different sign languages old sign languages I'm aware of used both hands for signing but a lot of young people sign with just one hand which is kind of being cool and so you see the same processes with a different modality You're meant for a self-conscious now about what we're doing and the evening just went hip-hop there with that microphone noise so I feel that sign language might change there's a question that three rows behind you lady with her right hand up so this is a question for Susie the panel's been talking about the development of a multicultural London dialect and I wondered in your research if you had any insights into the opposite end of the scale so perhaps the super rich or the bankers and whether there were any sort of common terms or anything emerging at the other end yeah that's really interesting I mean a sort of social register or kind of class register that's very interesting I was a bit nervous about the title for my bankers chapter which is twats in the bulge brackets but actually I'm sorry to talk about twats often tonight but actually don't make that the quote of the evening but that is an acronym that they themselves use and they are the bankers that I met were mostly but not exclusively I would say from a particular a particular social class but they were acutely aware of the hard time that they've had or not well sorry the hard time they've had but they acutely aware of their bad reputation and so their jargon was absolutely steeped in self mockery which I thought was very very interesting and some of that mockery was poking fun at the fact that they were seen as being upperclass and idiots which you know you can have your own view on whether that's justified or not I think what I did find had been lost which I thought was very sad just again sticking with banking is on the floor of the stock exchange the jobbers etc a lot of that jargon which I think was originally on the jobbing floor had now disappeared which was a bit of a surprise so whether or not that was due to class pressures etc I'm not sure I met a couple of incredibly posh builders builders is now very lucrative business very expensive business and a very commercial business and they spoke in the same way as the workers that they employed I'm afraid they were the bosses but their tribal identity feel like as expressory language was exactly the same so whether or not this kind of professional jargon has a homogenising effect class and backgrounds I'm not sure but that was probably what I encountered I would say yeah bankers were interesting You've only got to listen to test match special and you still encounter public school slang don't you I mean Crooked is another one only in the older one the last person to do a book on that was I think called Marples and it was about 1940 but I mean what you were saying there I mean my older son who went to what I always call snotty boys high as a school but he's a chef and there's no way he's got tattoos up his arms and he speaks as do the rest of the chefs which is kind of smart that's true actually in that sense is language actually pulling them all together in ways it might be just camouflage possibly maybe they're just code switching all the time does he speak like that when he comes home no I don't think so what he does do you were talking earlier though of these things you do to apprentices and he does this thing go and get me five pounds of flour cut fine and there's a picture on Instagram of this poor apprentice anyway it's just heart breaking he's chopping away at the floor there's a question in the front row anyway yes and then there's one over here so if we could have the side and then that side I'll just have a quick question while the mic's going there do you ever think that people might be pulling your leg and then making stuff up I did try and get corroboration as much as I possibly could but if there were gems that I picked up I had to take their word for it and I'm sure there are a few leg pulling items in there but I thought they were fun so I put them in so my question kind of relates to the last question so for Johnny you described RP as middle class whereas a lot of older sources will call it upper class so has the meaning of middle class changed has RP changed or are there fewer class distinctions than there used to be well RP is arguably the most described accent on the planet and that it can be described in many many ways I mean I think certainly if I think of my parents generation who were born in the 30s I think RP was potentially for them yes perhaps considered upper class but also an aspirational accent to the point where people who progressed through education or had some form of social mobility was almost like a target accent for them to gravitate towards some did so successfully others less so and therefore I suspect it kind of got beyond the upper classes during that late part of the 20th century and we were talking earlier about whether it's now viewed so positively among younger speakers who are for once a better word aspirational socially or whatever so I personally think I mean there's a lot of David Crystal has estimated that I think about 2 to 3% of the UK at any point in the 20th century and now speak RP natively others adopted during their life so it's a minority voice but it's obviously got huge impact because it's recognised the world over it's taught the world over in English as a foreign language context but so that's why I would say personally I view it as a middle class not just exclusively upper class but then of course there are as any accent as I mentioned before about a Liverpool accent that has a very broad Liverpool accent down to a sort of very soft Liverpool accent RP is the same those voices on made in Chelsea are a certain stylised kind of arguably upper class or aristocratic or imitative of that kind of voice and then you hear somebody who is just regionally completely unidentifiable either through education or social background or whatever I think there's another little aspect to that which is I think now nobody self identifies as upper class or if they do actually they're just self identifying as a twat there's that word again I'm actually running a book on it but people would once have said I am upper middle class or maybe you are upper class but basically everyone else is massively some people don't it's massively expanded and people are much less comfortable with the sort of stratifications within the middle class that people used to talk about really freely I think it's become a much more elastic category and I don't know you might have something to say about that I think that RP and Standard English are a unique kind of tribalism so we often don't talk about RP and Standard English in the same terms as the examples we've been talking about today but when you look closely at it it has done all of the same work there are shibiliths of pronunciation Kate Fox has these now well known examples of whether you say serve yet or napkin whether you say sofa or city so the French origin words being more aspirational and therefore a little bit distasteful so these kinds of real exclusionary effects of Standard English and RP I think came in the recent decades to be less accepted for those reasons so I mean I think it's very useful often people accept RP and Standard English as if just well of course there's that and then there's all the special things we all do but that has been an ideological project as much of identity as much as any other it's been a bit destabilised and denaturalised Surely the irony of the serve yet napkin stuff was that Nancy Mitford who co-wrote No Bless Oblige in what 1956 said she did it all as a joke and everybody got terribly upset about it it's like my mother I heard some butchers actually talk about you and non-you backsline which was quite interesting as well so Pig Latin was you know Pig Latin sounded a bit lower class obviously so they didn't refer to it as that and that's very appropriate for butchers but yeah I mean why butchers I mean this is more general I mean butchers are the only people I mean I know it in here in the UK it's a bit and in France they have it as well and it's called Lushben which is Boucher backwards with a few added syllables but why butchers did you find were particularly inventive in this way I mean I genuinely didn't discover this except that it was primarily used to talk about customers so again to talk about others in some sort of coded way like Cockney rhyming slang but then waiters you know the history of waiters speak is not as long as butchers backsline so I don't know but it goes back centuries yeah We've had a question here which has been waiting still got your question haven't you and I think we've probably got time for one more there after so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 7 rows back hand very emphatically in the air that will be the last question but I mean there will be book signing afterwards Susie will be signing opposite of her book and I know others on the panel will be and there may be an opportunity to ask some questions in a more intimate setting then so don't worry if you didn't get your chance My question is sort of how we the difference between how we learn language and then how we learn dialect and slang so when I moved from Hull to Nottinghamshire people were very they kept pointing out my accent but I'd have to make a very conscious effort to speak proper and then a friend who English is his second language we were trying to introduce him to slang and he just thought we were taking the mic and he just thought it was ridiculous and he was actually correcting our English but then over like the last two years he started adding the slang like unconsciously whereas when we were trying to get him to teach it which is how he learned English he couldn't do it, it felt fake so yeah how It's a really fascinating question it's quite a complicated question I think the first thing to distinguish is how words behave and how other parts of your language behave so words are very promiscuous and you can pick them up and drop them very easily and that's why for example slang changes quite fast if it needs to if people are picking up your words you develop new ones but accent and grammar are much their entire cognitive systems that we learn so as you said it's quite hard to change your accent in a way that it's not hard to stop using a word that people don't know and so on so those behave quite differently and yet your point is absolutely right that it seems easy to pick up words but there are several elements that go into acquiring something like slang one is the correct semantic pragmatic range so you can go very wrong there's some research that shows second language speakers swear much more comfortably in their second language I don't know if people have noticed that but you're much more comfortable because you don't have all the associations that sort of shock first native speakers so you have to get a sense of those so sometimes I mean it's much wiser to be conservative as a second language speaker about words that have very very fine social distributions and social contextual meanings and the other is I think being a ratified user of a word so if you're apprenticed as a new speaker of a language you're on the periphery as a speaker whether you're authorized to use these words is a slow process so this happens at all levels of language so when I moved to the UK if I had become very British I could have done that but if you go too far or pick up too much than too fast as a peripheral member of a group it's problematic so it sounds like your friend was quite sensitive about those that balance The question further back Hi so my question is about the globalization of language I'm Egyptian born I was raised here in London but I went to an American school and everywhere I go everyone automatically assumes I'm American obviously because of how I sound so my question is living in such a melting pot society how does can you consciously consciously how does the way you speak your slang, your accent define who you are and how you're judged by others around you and is there a conscious way do people consciously change this you just mentioned actually Daviani that you could have really picked up the British accent I've been here since I was 7 and I haven't picked up I'm a Londoner through but I haven't picked up the accent and so my question really is about the globalization of language and how language is shifting to meet how cultures are melting together and how cities and communities are shifting and moving towards each other as opposed to a way and how people judge accents and slang based on simply how you speak rather than the deeper aspects of it Daviani in the first instance and then we might have a free style a bit around that I suppose you're asking a few different things so on the one hand there's the question of how global can we even be how much can we keep adapting and incorporating new stuff to do more and more complex identities and the other side is how people view you there are limits so aptitude is actually quite relevant it's very hard to understand but each of us has a different aptitude which is one very non-social kind of element which some people can actually change a lot more than others if you want to shift your accent but there's some research also on the fact that we have different styles of being styles of communicating so there's some old research that has these terms like sensitive communicators who like to move towards the people they talk to in interaction and they have this nice term noble selves people who don't like to shift because they like to be authentically themselves and I don't know if but I think it resonates so some people really don't shift very much in how they speak and I like this notion that actually some people have ideologies about themselves and I think that moving to how you get perceived side it's related to that so if you're a noble self and you don't vary at all you can be read as being too unaccommodating you know why isn't this person trying a bit harder why are they being and on the other hand if you're very flexible you can be seen as too free with accommodating but I think that that's where your strengths of social networks makes a difference so the more people get to know each other the more they get to know your preferences right so our initial stereotyping is based on very little information and we all stereotype automatically as humans and the more you have social exposure the more you can read a person's choices so I think you're right that in a globalised world it becomes harder and harder to make those calculations and understand what people are doing with their speech I don't know if anyone else wants to say anything about that I mean I think it's a brilliant question to end up because it's the issue in everything to do with language is the incredible change to do with globalisation so what you say is very interesting I would just say when I studied in America I tried first of all I remember I really liked to have a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich at lunchtime and she can the lovely dinner lady could never understand what I was saying so then I said I'd have a grilled cheese and tomato and she just laughed and then I tried really really hard because in some ways when I arrived I thought this is great, this is my chance to be anonymous which is the joy of being somewhere else of being abroad but then I realised I couldn't because I was definitively British so I tried really hard to fit in and become anonymous within that drive but I just couldn't do it so I obviously don't have that aptitude aptitude is just even are you able to and then there's also wanting to how far you comfortable going as well this is a longer discussion, I really wanted to strangely I could speak German fluently but I couldn't speak American English fluently and I don't quite know what's going on but when I was a child I lived in America and I thought let me be American and I really tried at age 12 and I flapped tea in the wrong place so I said barren and it's a bit a few Americans will say that but not many and I consciously decided I'm not, this is too risky I'm just not going to do it so you can even, it's the same thing as your experience you can want to and you find your limits and then you can just be a noble self I think the question of how much of a noble self one has is one that's going to give me a seatless night but I leave here I have to say I used to go in my 20s to watch a not very nice football team with a friend of mine who was a sort of you know kind of dynastic supporter of the football team first of all I thought it would be a good idea to sound a bit different and then I started sounding different and then I noticed that people actually respected me much more when I sounded the way I sounded before which I would keep slipping back into anyway but the most important thing I think is to tell you that there is a bar outside, I've been told more than once to tell you that there is a bar outside I'm very sorry that we have to conclude because I think there are more questions and there's more to be discussed because people are coming out on a rather drizzly Friday evening I'd like to thank the British Library and also the Bloomsbury Festival most importantly the panellists Johnny Robinson, Jonathan Green Debbie Anishama and Susie Dent and you Henry too