Speech and Character: Dialect

Abstract

It is probably no exaggeration to say that the speech of any individual is as unique (though not as unchangeable) as his fingerprints. This uniqueness derives from the infinite number of ways in which the features of the spoken language, on the phonological, lexical and grammatical levels, may be combined to form distinguishable modes of utterance or spoken styles. And although written speech, whether a record of actual utterances or a fiction, is necessarily deprived of many of the finer points which make for individual variety in the spoken language, enough possibilities remain for the range of written dialogue to be very wide indeed, and for the differences between individual examples to be almost endless. The features which, in particular combinations, make for uniqueness may be broadly classified under two heads: [1] those indicating membership of some social or regional or other readily identifiable group — Old Etonians, say, or Anglican clergymen, or Petticoat Lane stallholders, or English-speaking Welshmen; and [2] those which are personal and idiosyncratic. Professor Higgins, in the first act of Shaw’s Pygmalion, detected in Colonel Pickering’s speech traces of a career which embraced ‘Cheltenham, Harrow, Cambridge, and India’; but Pickering’s speech inevitably contains certain favourite words and turns of phrase, idiosyncrasies of pronunciation, mannerisms of stress and intonation, and all the other qualities which distinguish the speech of any given upper-middle-class, public-school-and-university-educated, Anglo-Indian ex-soldier from that of other officers and gentlemen with a similar social, educational and occupational background. ‘Speech’ here is, of course, to be taken as referring not to any individual utterance but to the totality of a user’s resources as manifested in the sum of his performances as a speaker; obviously any given sentence may exactly resemble that of another user, but differences will inevitably emerge over a larger stretch of language.