Role-play

14. Imagine a situation where you meet a first-year student of English who is entangled in the thickets of different varieties of English. This basically concerns vocabulary and pronunciation. Now in the light of your home summary and the preceding class discussions you clear the question for him/her. Mention the existing differences, current trends, puristic approach, obvious challenges and relevant dictionaries to suit the specific needs. The student is encouraged to ask the questions, express opinions, objections to support a fruitful conversation. Act this conversation out in pairs.

15. The English language is evolving faster than ever. How can dictionaries hope to keep up? Below you will see an excerpt from The Guardian newspaper article called “New Word Order” by DJ Taylor (July 2, 2001) on the never-ending struggle to pin down meaning. Read the paragraphs that follow before you offer to lend a helping hand to another person.

Lexicography also has its theorists: people who are anxious to take time out from the process of supplying definitions to words to reflect on the thornier problem of why one needs a dictionary in the first place. To provide a snapshot of something that will always exist in transition, or to lay down rules on what can or cannot be spoken and written? Like much else in English lexicography, the trail leads back to Johnson's dictionary, first published in 1755 and regarded as authoritative for almost a century.

In his preface, while praising the English simplicity of form, Johnson makes it plain that he … rejects the idea, common on the continent, that language should be fixed and maintained by the authority of an Academy. Language, according to the Johnsonian model, will always be self-governing, self-regulating, follow its own laws. Supervision by the language police, however well intentioned, will always fail.

Now you meet someone who lived in Britain or studied English about 20 years ago. That person suddenly finds out that the language has dramatically (?) changed. Below you find the text of what he/she hears and thinks. In a conversation, tell your interlocutor that you are a student of English and what you have been told about language laws, current trends, latest developments in lexicography and how you cope with learning the contemporary language. Act the conversation out as soon as you have skimmed the extract below.

Walk through central London today and within a few blocks you hear Arabic and Italian, French and Spanish, Urdu and German. Australian accents are almost as common as American ones.

The distinct class dialects I remember from my youth - the high vowels of the aristocracy; the rough, broad edges of cockney; the awkward flatness of mid-England - are far less distinct. Even the BBC is a cacophony of regional twang, with Scottish brogue and Welsh lilt more common than the plummy Queen's English of my teens.

Elsewhere, there is a kind of sonorous merging, the rise of a new accent that seems to have absorbed East End vowels with a southern English blandness. It is classless but at the same time fashionably downmarket. Tony Blair's voice captures it: he swings in one sentence from solid English propriety to sudden proletarian slang. The new England wired into the very vocal cords. When I was young, most immigrants still retained a Caribbean tilt or Pakistani staccato. Now they reflect lower Blair or the English region they come from.