What you’re describing as well-spokenness is mastery of what’s known as Standard English, a contested term that we’ll just decide to live with for now.  Standard English began to develop in the late 14^th c. as the English of the London Chancery, the office particularly responsible land litigation in the wake of the Black Death that afflicted most of Europe in the middle of the century.  This dialect gained further support in the 15^th c. with the introduction of the printing press to England.  When William Caxton set up his London printing business around 1480, he chose the prestige dialect of the literate classes in SE England as the dialect he would print, and his spelling, the foundation of modern spelling, reflected their pronunciation.  Grammars started being written at about that time and a tradition developed that fostered what we call Standard English until in the 18^th c., with the rise of the Middle Class, educated London English became the Standard.  This Standard English was passed along in educated families, and as more families became educated it spread farther.  Certain features of Standard English grammar, like the grammar of wh-relative clauses and the more frequent use of other subordinate clauses, not to mention the use of more Latinate and Franco-Latin vocabulary, became markers of Standard English.  Children in these households were exposed to such English from birth, and so when they started school they had an advantage over the classmates who had a working class background.

 

Children from a working class background may acquire Standard English in school, but many don’t.  One question I’ve had my undergrads consider is the English spoken by them, the ones who went on to higher education, as opposed to those who did not, and they recognized immediately an important divide between the two that shows up in mastery of Standard English.  With it you can go on to higher education and prestigious careers; without it it’s much more difficult to do so.

 

There was a fascinating and poignant article in the Chronicle of Higher Education some years back, an autobiographical piece by a young faculty member who had come from a working class background.  She was the first of her family to go beyond high school.  She was still uncomfortable with her mastery of Standard English, and she wrote about how the few faculty colleagues of hers who came from working class backgrounds shared her sense of linguistic insecurity and fear of committing a linguistic faux pas.  She mentioned that there were words found in educated spoken vocabulary that she and her friends had never confronted in speech and they ran the risk of mispronouncing them.  In a higher education faculty environment, as she found out, mispronunciation of certain words can be seriously stigmatizing, even in a career threatening way.

 

So much for the classless society.

 

Herb

 

 

 

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