Evolving English: Great for Geeks

I was quite excited by this British Library exhibition and project when I stumbled across an article about it on the BBC website a while back. For a start, it initiated a nice little chat thread on Facebook which kept me amused each time I checked back between appointments. One of the aims of the "Map Your Voice" element of this project is to see how much variation there is in the way we pronounce certain words and how these pronunciations may have changed over time, such as "schedule", "migraine", "garage" and "scone" (it's got a magic e, for goodness sake! If it was meant to be pronounced "skon" it wouldn't have a magic e, would it? Crikey, did you never watch Look and Read?!) A friend of mine rightly pointed out that he must have a different version of Mr Tickle, the book they make you read out as some sort of test on these things, to the one in the British Library, as his doesn't at any point get a migraine due to his stressful schedule and end up going to sleep in his garage. But anyway, I digress...

So yes, the laudable and rather interesting aims are to map voices to presumably see how pronunciation varies and how much it's changed. But I have a few issues with this, and as I haven't whined a lot on this blog recently I thought now was about time.

Firstly, there are two ways you can contribute to the study. You can go to the - free - exhibition... if you live in London or you happen to be there, and if the booths are working on the day you go (when we went they weren't - a recorded woman with a slightly stern voice got half way through the set of instructions then gave up.) This does possibly skew the results slightly favouring the south of England, tourists and migrants from both home and abroad, which possibly makes for an interesting if unrepresentative melting pot of accents. But the good people of the British Library have thought of that, and have allowed you to take part remotely, via the means of technology. This is great, if you have a computer, with a microphone, a gadget-obsessed husband to help you out and are not phobic about downloading then registering your details on the programme you need to use to do the recording. This potentially skews the results to the a.) young, b.) wealthy (just the other day various newspapers commented on just how many kids don't have access to a computer) and c.) less remote, and in doing so probably loses out on some interesting data, and consequently, something of the great variety of voices they are trying to "map" in the first place.

And finally - and this is what irrirated me most for purely personal reasons - the way they ask you to label your recording once you've done it doesn't really allow you to acount for and explain the very diversity they are investigating in the study. Perhaps this is all part of the plan, and the whole project is staffed by modern day Henry Higginses trying to work out every inch of every participants' past purely by their way of speaking. If so, good luck to them, because social mobility is such that this must be pretty difficult nowadays, even for an expert.

The instructions ask you to state on your recording title where you spent most of your childhood, and then asks you to pinpoint on a map where you made the recording - not necessarily where you live now, but just where you happened to be at the time. This is fine if you're, say, from Liverpool and never moved. It's less fine if you're from a Bradford-based family but spent part of your childhood in Lancashire and your teenage years dividing your time between Guernsey and Yorkshire, with a brief spell at a boarding school with people from all over the world before setting down roots of a sort in London. And I suspect some people who originated overseas have even more of a problem than I did. Despite the very obvious fact that putting down "Lancashire" as a place of origin made my whole being shudder to its core (and my apologies to the British Library, who at the end of my recording will have heard a little snippet of "Put Lancashire", "But I don't have a Lancashire accent" at the end of the recording before I pressed the "pause" button), it's also misleading. Accents - as David Crystal, my favourite Linguistics Professor (what? You don't all have a favourite linguistics professor?)and whose own accent is a mix of RP with splashes of Liverpool and North Wales - has pointed out, are formed as a result of all sort of different things: where you're from, where your family is from, where you live, where you study, what you do... and they adapt depending on where you are and to whom you're speaking. This is why, when I go north, my husband tells me I sound Northern, whilst my Bradford-based family think I sound posh. Having an accent that isn't RP (which IS an accent, by the way, there's no such thing as "not having an accent", unless you spend your days blissfully silent) can be a mixed blessing. Dickheads like this will actively not recruit someone with a "working class accent" (and I put that in brackets because I'd love to see their definition of what makes an accent "working class", and perhaps back it up with some sort of evidence, which they should be able to do, what with being lawyers and all that?) At the same time, some accents apparently make you sound more trustworthy than others and also more intelligent - but obviously these are not qualities top law firms are keen to portray. And others are just, well, dead sexy. (Um, sorry, but on this, like many other topics, the Telegraph and I differ here. I'd go for Irish every time. Mmm...)

The exhibition, though, is superb. It's perfect for geeks like me who want to gaze at Very Old Books and murmur "hmm, that book is very old" and feel smugly intellectual about their Anglo-Saxon content, some of which I can still actually understand! (I realise my BA dissertation in the decline in use of the "be" prefix in post Anglo-Saxon word formation does little for my image, carefully honed to no avail throughout this blog...) It also includes a Tony Harrison poem, a section on the history of word games and lots of very lovely recordings from speakers all over the world, including, bizarrely, Guernsey. It's open til April, so do go along, and do map your voice online, while I go and rewrite Mr Tickle....