Embed Notice

https://unherd.com/2025/04/is-standard-english-dying-out/

It’s all a far cry from the encounter between Oliver and the Artful Dodger in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. Alone and tearful in London, Oliver runs into a “snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy” who says “Hullo, my covey, what’s the row” to which Oliver replies “I am very hungry and tired. I have walked a long way, I have been walking these seven days”. It’s hard to know how someone brought up in a workhouse can produce this impeccable piece of Standard English, but there’s a Victorian literary convention which holds that virtuous people tend to speak in this cultivated style. Oliver turns out to be of genteel birth, so perhaps his posh English is genetically determined. You can’t have a hero who drops his aitches, any more than you can have an archbishop who drops his trousers. Moral and linguistic propriety go hand in hand. A gentleman has both good morals and good manners, the latter reflecting the former. As in the novels of Jane Austen, problems arise when someone is socially a gentleman but morally a total bastard.

A good deal of British humour springs from quick changes of linguistic register. Legendary comedians like Tony Hancock, Frankie Howerd, and Kenneth Williams all trade in abrupt shifts from the tones of the civilised middle classes to a blunter, more popular idiom. A pretentious flight of fantasy is punctured by a sudden crude or mundane comment.

https://archive.ph/xbulO