Queen's English Research Articles

From the Queen's English to reclaiming indigenous languages: An African poetic perspective

From the Queen's English to reclaiming indigenous languages: An African poetic perspective

Whose English? A Guide to Rhetorical Style in the Nineteenth Century

This article explores the history of the English-language style guide, a genre of writing with beginnings in the eighteenth century. Gaining popularity in the Victorian period, the style guide began to solidify as a genre dedicated to preserving certain linguistic usages. I argue that, from the nineteenth century on, the best style guides have used rhetoric as the cornerstone of their linguistic philosophy. Guides which ignore rhetorical scholarship tend to be reactionary and of limited use to the reader. To emphasize these two types of guides, I look specifically at The Queen's English and The Dean's English, two extremely popular, polemical style guides written in the mid-nineteenth century.

Is Queen’s English Drifting Towards Common People’s English? —Quantifying Diachronic Changes of Queen’s Christmas Messages (1952–2018) with Reference to BNC

ABSTRACT Queen's English (QE), a linguistic symbol of the royal or upper class, is a particular variety or an aristocratic form of English. However, QE has been dethroned by a surprising finding that it shifted phonologically towards common people's English (CE) between the 1950s-1980s, arousing a debate on its existence. Based upon Queen's Christmas Messages (1952-2018) and BNC, this study quantitatively investigated whether QE has experienced diachronic changes and drifted towards CE. Our PCA analysis shows QE's fluctuating lexical richness, increasing lexical complexity and synthetism, and steady syntactic features during the six decades. Piecewise regression and statistical results indicate 1) QE is drifting towards CE in lexical richness and complexity between the 1950s-1980s; 2) QE exhibits an interaction between a “drifting force” and a “deviating force” towards or from CE between the 1950s-1980s in syntactic features; 3) QE maintains a synthetic form distinct from the analytical one of CE over the 66 years. These phenomena are likely related to the collapsing social structure between the 1950s-1980s, identity building in Queen's early reign and age factor. This study firstly quantify the drift of QE towards CE lexically and syntactically, which may shed some light on quantitative investigation of diachronic language changes.

Bet You Missed It--What Do Flurries of Doves and the Queen's English Have in Common?

Bet You Missed It--What Do Flurries of Doves and the Queen's English Have in Common?

Nettleford and Rastafari's Inner Landscape

Introduction: Removing the plantation, redeeming the landscapeThe influence of the movement has been very, very far-reaching and deeply penetrating . . . which you [Rastafari] must take every credit for because you really have been forcing people in Jamaica to accept the fact that they are black. I have never seen a blacker country which is afraid of blackness. One of the marvellous things about the Rastafarian is, people like us are not racist. We are not that unsophisticated to be racist - only buttos are racist. But we are not that silly not to be raceconscious. And that's a delicate balance of sensibility which I first found among the Rastafarians . . }Bob Marley, Burning Spear, Bunny Wailer, Sizzla, David Rudder: these are just a few names which come to mind when we think of our articulate black resistance tradition today. This of course would be to confine our scrutiny to the realm of popular/ verb al oratory, without appropriately regarding the facility these artists have been afforded by the pioneering work of one of Jamaica's gigantic cultural magicians, Nettleford. It was Nettleford who, since his rise to national prominence in the late 1950s, was to be at the vanguard, re-presenting and securing a place for culture as the purview of the intellectual. From that space Nettleford was to advise the national and international directorates about the embodiment and integrity of the African Jamaican cultural heritage. To paraphrase Hilary Beckles, Nettleford became the chief consultant on obeah, or perhaps even the chief obeahman in this region.2The idea of African freedom and dignity as a journey, and the struggle continuing, are the key expressions of help and direction that I garnered from the late professor's work, wit and wisdom. A few years ago, I recall him saying after a panel of cultural studies scholars presented aspects of their work ranging from Kumina and Revivalism to Rastafari and dancehall research: The future is secure ... I can die now! When Nettleford made that statement I thought it morbid hyperbole. It was only after his passing, after I shared this comment with Barry Chevannes, also now sadly deceased, that I realised there could be a different reading, one that was not morbid but indeed celebratory, suggesting a sense of accomplishment, as in, work is done. I am now ready to return to my maker.I immediately gained a different appreciation of the years he had spent teaching, training, securing the African cultural presence. Indeed, Nettleford had inherited much from others such as Miss Lou and Mass Ran, Wycliffe Bennett, Ivy Baxter, and Rastafari brethren. It was a relay of sorts - the production, preservation and advancement of this cultural knowledge. And the professor always strived to play his part well. My mother described him as Rex the slave boy, referring to his complexion, his willingness to dance barefoot, half-naked, to the drums of our African ancestors - even quite late in his life. This was her way of commenting on his embrace of rooted Jamaican culture, despite his command of the Queen's English. Although African enslavement in the West crippled the ability to retain Africa or to garner achievement for our people, Nettleford, early in his career, turned this experience of enslavement inward, and upside down on its head. Indeed, where slavery attempted to remould the entire landscape to suit the plantations' need, Nettleford retreated to the inner landscape: a marronage within.For many, slavery was the manifestation of extreme trauma and commencement of a process of silencing. From the silence of slavery came the voice of Rastafari. This Rastafari voice is what Nettleford sought to engage in his treatment of 'landscape', particularly the conversation about the inner landscape. To this extent the 'inner landscape' metaphor employed by Nettleford is not unlike the Rastafari concept of 'word, sound, power' as a means of breaking the silence. In theorising the inner landscape, Nettleford debunks the plantation meta-narrative, having removed the edifices of the great house/plantation system. …

Language Traps

My first paediatric job in the UK was a locum junior house officer in 1975. It was at Northwick Park Hospital on the outskirts of London adjacent to the Borough of Harrow, for which the school of that name is an icon. Free access to the school's old squash courts was a much appreciated privilege bestowed upon junior staff at the hospital. The hospital itself was a burgeoning hive of academic and clinical expertise, which included the Department of Paediatrics. I was challenged by an admission in my first week on duty. An 11-month-old girl of Pakistani ethnic origin presented with a febrile convulsion. Investigations revealed hypocalcaemia. My examination identified short stature and, with some biochemical clues, clinical evidence of infantile rickets. I found the extraction of an accurate dietary history difficult because of language problems. As best as I could ascertain, the child had been fed on goat's milk. With some excitement but uncertainty, I conveyed my findings to the senior registrar. This happened to be Harvey Marcovitch, who has enjoyed an illustrious career in paediatrics and journalism, culminating in becoming editor-in-chief of Archives of Diseases of Childhood. Uncertain of the implications, Harvey pursued this to identify whether goat's milk was likely to be deficient in vitamin D. His enthusiastic search took him to the research centre of the hospital to which there was an attached veterinary section. After some hours of fruitless research, he returned to the parents to take his own history and conduct his own examination. He did not identify any dietary indiscretions. With some cynical and disparaging comments regarding ignorant Aussies who have lost touch with the Queen's English, he informed me that the child had never been on goat's milk. In fact, she had been on a very orthodox brand of formula, well known in the UK but not so well known in the Antipodes, called ‘Cow and Gate’.

Global English(es) and Global Chinese(s): toward rewriting a new literary history in Chinese

In the process of the globalization in culture, English has become more and more powerful and hegemonic along with the obscurity of the boundary of nation-states. The blurring of the national identity has led to the variegation of language. Although people of almost all countries are learning the English language, the hegemonic position of the traditional ‘King's English’ or ‘Queen's English’ has gradually been deconstructed, with many global ‘englishes’ appearing in the contemporary English-speaking world and non-English-speaking world. This fact has also had a strong impact on the purity of Chinese, one of the newly emergent international languages. Along with the heightening of China's position as both an economic and political power in the world, the fever for learning Chinese will also rise in some non-Chinese-speaking countries. Like English, Chinese is also undergoing a sort of splitting: from one standard Chinese into different ‘Chineses’. Thus writing literary history could also be done by means of language rather than merely by that of country or nation. The essay concludes with the author's new model for rethinking literary historiography by calling for the rewriting of a new literary history in Chinese.

Social pathology of cleft palate in the african: mathematical precision of pitch gaps in tribal tonal linguistics.

Social pathology of cleft palate in the african: mathematical precision of pitch gaps in tribal tonal linguistics.

Francis M. Wafer: A Surgeon in the Army of the Potomac (review)

Reviewed by: Francis M. Wafer: A Surgeon in the Army of the Potomac Andrew McIlwaine Bell Francis M. Wafer: A Surgeon in the Army of the Potomac. Edited by Cheryl A. Wells. Kingston & Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-7735-3381-3. Map. Illustrations. Timeline. Appendix. Dramatis personae. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xxi, 225. $34.95. Medicine is one of the most under-researched sub-fields of Civil War history. For whatever reason, scholars of the period have traditionally avoided detailed discussions of medical matters even while acknowledging that far more soldiers died in hospital beds than on battlefields. Our understanding of the war has suffered as a result, which is why the title of Francis M. Wafer's first-hand account of [End Page 281] his wartime experiences—A Surgeon in the Army of the Potomac—is so wonderfully tantalizing. But the book never quite lives up to its promising title. The handful of case studies it contains are overshadowed by its crisp descriptions of Union army life and the campaigns which took place in the east after 1862. When the Civil War began, Francis Moses Wafer—the son of Irish Catholic Canadians—was studying medicine at Queen's University in his hometown of Kingston, Ontario. Eager to gain more clinical experience, Wafer volunteered to serve as a surgeon with the 108th New York Infantry and rendezvoused with the Army of the Potomac in the wake of its humiliating defeat at Fredericksburg. From a purely medical standpoint, it was a good time to enlist. Dr. Jonathan Letterman had recently improved the army's ambulance service and field hospital system and Surgeon General William Hammond was busy modernizing the Medical Department's moribund bureaucracy. Wafer's letters and memoirs, however, contain precious few references to the organization he worked for and focus instead on the Iliadic events that were unfolding around him on the battlefields of Virginia and Pennsylvania. At Chancellorsville, he watched rebel shells sweep "through the woods thickly" and cut down trees before spending a lonely night in a jerry-built field hospital tending patients in the dark (pp. 22-24). His recollections of Gettysburg are a compendium of combat horrors: "One of our men was rolling on the ground in agony—a piece of shell having struck him in the hip. Lieut [A.D.J.] McDonald sprang to his feet—a ball having passed through his shoulder. Lieut [Robert] Evans rolled over in the agonies of death, shot in the brain" (p. 43) . Students of medical history will be disappointed that these macabre observations are not followed by detailed descriptions of nineteenth-century anesthetic and surgical techniques. But Wafer was writing for his "immediate friends" rather than historians and knew that the former group would be loathe to read too many particulars (p. 3). Instead, he left them (and us) with a refreshingly-clean Canadian interpretation of America's defining historical moment, one free from the harsh prejudices contained in so many other first-hand accounts of the war. Having observed the North's and South's antebellum political contests from the neutral-ground of Ontario, Wafer never developed a deep-seated hatred for his Confederate enemies and was even able to praise them for their bravery in battle and compassion toward Union POWs (p. 29). In addition, his views on African Americans were enlightened by the standards of the time. After encountering a number of black troops at Petersburg, for example, he expressed admiration for "their soldierly appearance & discipline" and "gallant conduct under fire" (p. 126). Not all of Wafer's fellow Irishmen in blue would have agreed. A ballad popular among Irish-American units at the time enjoined listeners to let "Sambo be murthered instead of [whites] on every day in the year." Editor Cheryl A. Wells deserves praise for writing an excellent introduction, carefully reconstructing Wafer's prose, and beginning each chapter with helpful [End Page 282] summaries of the major events of the war. She and her subject share a command of the Queen's English—the result of their Canadian educations—which American audiences will find irresistible. [End Page 283] Andrew McIlwaine Bell U.S. Coast Guard Academy...

The Socio-poetic Soundscape of Geraldine Monk

THOUGH WELL-EDUCATED, Geraldine Monk decided quite consciously not to let education smooth over or erase texture of her Lancashire accent and local dialect. In an interview with Leonard Schwartz, she comments that when come over to America it's not evidently clear that actually speak with a very broad northern English working-class accent. A lot of people think talk Queen's English, which amuses me greatly, and it's very very nice to be away from England, people think talk posh, which don't. I've never got rid of my accent, because realized that wanted to use it. So think in that way it's almost a political statement--that might be educated, but I'm not going to betray where come from and my class background. Monk thus creates in her work a socio-poetic soundscape where place and class and gender are matters of rhyme, quantity, pitch, and pronunciation. Both physical dimensions and mutability of as sound units are highly important in her poetic practice I do love sound of words she notes to Schwartz, the way you can manipulate them, and tie them in knots--and kind of malleability and physicality of word is very important, as well as sense of it, connotation, denotation of it Her sound ranges from musical playfulness of a piece like 'Angles (with its fractured words, percussive finale, and references to musical terms) to daily journal pieces like Sky Scrapers sequence (luxuriating in Lancashire diphthongs, speech rhythms, thick consonantal clusters, and slowed syllables) to intense, sensuous, and political articulations of Interregnum and Escafeld Hangings that grab us by neck and rattle our bones. To insist on speaking in a manner labeled accented in privileged arena of literature (traditionally open only to wealthy classes) is immediately to establish a cultural space that acknowledges social realities, including reality of gender-based or class-based marginalization and whitewashing by normative, schooled modes such as BBC or CBC or Oxbridge English. Monk's defiance has a precedent in poetry of John Keats, who as part of Cockney School of Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, was vilified for his low-birth accent and liberal politics. In whitewash of page, Keats's accent is mostly forgotten, but Monk has taken pains to score her work so that reader can't avoid it, as in lines Mary Queen of Scots banged-up in slimmer in Sheffield. // Lizzy mi Luv call off yr creepsy guards (Airport Security, Escafeld 27; see also recording on CD track 9). Or following from Katherine Hewit Replies: E was newt budda Jimmy-bum-licker. E lived down't lane in a big owse wi iz porky fatted fingers drippin rings and blottin copy after nervous copy--and for what? A right royal smile? The patronising smirk of ultimate noble birth to charm iz drab and impotent circle (Interregnum) Interregnum and Escafeld Hangings explore compellingly voices of condemned women--in first case voices of so-called witches (but actually very poor and disadvantaged people) and their associates who were hanged at Pendle Hill in 1612, and in second case voice of imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots. By extension these texts explore condemnation of all women to second-class status; in these texts, however, women speak back to power structure that imprisons them, just as Monk's northern English dialect challenges southern English power structure represented by Queen Elizabeth II. Men and women in her cotton-mill town of Blackburn, Monk recalls, actually spoke different dialects: Generally speaking women spoke more slowly and deliberately than men because they spent their days word-miming and lip-reading in deaf-out of weaving sheds. …

What the PLAB did not teach me

What the PLAB did not teach me

Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion (review)

Reviewed by: Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion Whalen Lai Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion. By Eric Reinders. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 266 + xvi pp. For a long time, Sinology was dominated by scholars with direct or indirect missionary backgrounds, going all the way back to the founding of the discipline by James Legge. Legge occupied the first university chair in the China field in Britain. Legge's vision of China has recently been placed into historical context by Norman Girardot (The Victorian Translation of China [2002]). There were other early figures whose records of Chinese beliefs and folk customs we still use. Beginning with Timothy Richard, more came around to seeing how China needed more than soul saving for the hereafter. China needed urgent sociopolitical reforms in the here and now. In time, the YMCA and the missionary schools would help chaperone in a whole generation of "modern Chinese"; some of them, though exposed to the Gospel, would, in the May Fourth Movement, pit science and democracy against any and all religions. For all that, scholars still do count on the missionary records for understanding the "old China." By exploring what the majority of these men of God saw in China—or thought they saw, since their perception could well be colored by cultural biases—this book by Eric Reinders proves quite refreshing. Instead of holding up those records as a mirror on a Chinese reality, Reinders (to wit) "reversed the light so that it would reflect upon" the Protestant missionaries themselves. For one thing, these Protestant evangelicals reported on China using rhetoric borrowed from their long-standing complaints against the Catholics. For another, they painted the Chinese "body language" in light of their own proud Victorian manners. These missionaries were no James Legge, who was tutored into classical Chinese by erudite Confucians and who then presented the Confucian Classics with appreciative classical (Latin and Greek) references. They were no Arthur Waley either, Waley being one who could "without leaving the door [as to live in China], know all the affairs of the (Chinese) world." By steeping himself in Chinese language and its written culture, Waley could render the Confucian "chun-tzu" into the familiar English "gentleman," and doing so with due sympathy for two land-owning gentry cultures. There is no such sympathy from the Protestant missionaries who lived among the common people. They purported to know the "real" (rural) China that was opened to the inland mission. The China they reported on was not found in library books, the Confucian classics, or some Mandarin's manicured garden. Theirs is not the Good Earth depicted later by Pearl Buck, either. These nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries, flourishing in the heydays of the British Empire, held few illusions about the once fabled Cathay. Their reports sent home served, in the end, both God and country. As means for raising funds for their missionary efforts, the reports probably had to fan high hopes for the Gospel in relation to a very deprecating assessment of the pagan, heathen culture they encountered. The reports also reflected the hard times these zealous missionaries did have [End Page 226] to face. They were living in the backwater, among often illiterate peasants and in isolated enclaves surrounded by what they saw as a huddling mass of faceless humanity. Their frustration at learning the vernacular tongue well enough to communicate with the people led to the still popular joke about the inscrutable Chinese. But the conclusion the missionaries drew, about how the Chinese language is inherently "godless," is more theological than philological. That the many Chinese tongues (local dialects?) were deemed a living Babel assumes somehow that the Queen's English is divinely inspired. This book does not tell us often what China was really like, for so much of that reality is woefully "lost in translation." Above all, "Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies" is about how the Protestants transposed their endless bouts with Rome into seeing the errors of the Chinese way as copies of the Catholic way. The Chinese were mindless in their idolatry; they kept up blindly this ritualistic gesture with little or...

The Queen's English dethroned

The Queen's English dethroned

Does the Queen speak the Queen's English?

Elizabeth II's traditional pronunciation has been influenced by modern trends. The pronunciation of all languages changes subtly over time1, mainly owing to the younger members of the community2. What is unknown is whether older members unwittingly adapt their accent towards community changes. Here we analyse vowel sounds from the annual Christmas messages broadcast by HRH Queen Elizabeth II during the period between the 1950s and 1980s. Our analysis reveals that the Queen's pronunciation of some vowels has been influenced by the standard southern-British accent of the 1980s which is more typically associated with speakers who are younger and lower in the social hierarchy.

The Queen's English

The Queen's English

On the Origin and Nature of Standard English

This paper looks at: the origin in the Middle Ages of the word standard and how it came to be applied to language; the emergence in classical times of the concept of the ‘best’ Greek and Latin, and an account of how this concept later had a profound influence on the development of the ‘high’ vernaculars of Europe; the establishment of le bon fran¸ais and good English, and in due course the application of the terms standard and Standard English to ‘good English’ (also known as the King's or Queen's English); and perceptions of the standard language in the UK, the US, and the English‐speaking world generally.

Melodramatic Tactics: Theatricalized Dissent in the English Marketplace, 1800-1885

Introduction: staging the melodramatic mode 1. Unromantic melodrama 2. The old price wars: melodramatising the public sphere in early nineteenth-century England 3. Storming the Bastille: Oliver Twist and the melodramatic resistance to the new Poor Law of 1834 4. The Queen's English: melodramatic rhetoric in Victoria's England 5. Blows into whispers: the melodramatic mode and intellectual culture in the 1870s and 1880s.

'One' and the pun: how newspapers keep the monarchy in its place

British tabloid newpapers regularly represent 'the Queen's English' in their stories about the Royal Family. Mimicking pronunciation, and often using the pronoun one, these comic formulations are usually based on puns or clashes of register, and appear to challenge the Royals' status and authority. This article presents examples of tabloid 'royalese', and considers two functions of this playful language: attacking the Royals by mocking their speech, and contributing to the creation of a tabloid readership community.

Biology and the Queen's English

Biology and the Queen's English

Queen Elizabeth's English: a response to Katie Wales

I may not be alone among readers of ET in finding Katie Wales' article ‘Royalese: the rise and fall of “The Queen's English’” (July 1994) frequently muddled, misleading, and inaccurate.