Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (review)

In 1955, the novelist the Hon. Nancy Mitford introduced the terms ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ to popular discourse about English in Britain; in her essay these labels distinguished ‘upper class’ usage from all others, and her article began a rage of ‘teases’ (to use one of her words) about which linguistic forms were ‘U’ and which were not. She was drawn to this topic by an article in a Finnish philological journal by the professor of linguistics at the University of Birmingham, Alan S. C. Ross (1907–1980), in which he cited, among many other examples, a novel Mitford had published in 1945 in which a character—a barely fictionalized portrait of her father, Lord Redesdale—fulminated against the non-U stationery employed in the place of the U-usage, letter paper (Ross 1954:45).

The following year Ross’s essay was anthologized (in a much abbreviated version) in Noblesse oblige (Ross 1956) along with Mitford’s ‘English aristocracy’, a letter by Mitford’s intimate friend Evelyn Waugh, and some other light-hearted sallies upon the subject. Playful accounts of the contrast in behavior between U-speakers and others flourished. Mitford’s younger sister, Jessica—accurately described by her in a letter to Waugh of 2 September 1955 as ‘my Communist sister’ (Mosley 1996:37)—even self-published a little jeux d’esprit on the difference between ‘L’ (left-wing) and ‘non-L’ expressions: ‘Time will tell whether that plan was O.K.’ (non-L); ‘The correctness of that policy will be tested in the crucible of struggle’ (Treuhaft 1956:7). With some justice, Mitford described Ross as ‘lovely & dotty’ (Mosley 1996:370), and he continued to pursue the matter after most people had tired of it (see Ross 1969, 1970).

Ross’s neglected sociolinguistic essay illustrates the astonishing preoccupation of the British with the details of accent, and it is unfortunate that the reprinting of it in Noblesse oblige omitted nearly everything about pronunciation that had appeared in the original. In part this was because Mitford did not care for the phonetic alphabet or the sounds it represented. Writing in 1968 to another sister, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, she opined: ‘I don’t think pronunciation matters much, it changes every 50 years or so’ (Mosley 1993:470). Ross seems to have come to the same conclusion after closely examining the ideas of H. C. Wyld, ‘a gentleman and a philologist’, in Ross’s words, of an earlier day (Ross 1954:23). The essays by Ross and Mitford seem to have achieved status as conduct guides, and some aspiring parvenus apparently stood in front of the looking-glass (U for mirror) and practiced the formation of the vowel in girl in order to pass themselves off as armigerous.

Now comes Lynda Mugglestone to write a proper history of this English obsession, a neglected and rich aspect of British culture. She says little about the emergence of the idea that English was a language worth speaking (in comparison to French or Latin); this idea is covered for the Early Modern period by Richard Foster Jones (1953). Anxiety about the adequacy of English continued to provoke English intellectuals, however, and in 1664 a French visitor outraged the English by describing their speech as ‘effeminate’ because they barely moved their lips when speaking (see Sorbière 1709:70). Gnashing consonant clusters and an overabundance of monosyllables seemed fatal flaws to the excellence of the language, and these ideas about English continued to vex opinion-makers at least until the middle of the eighteenth century.

Not until then were there organized efforts to do something about accent, and M makes clear how a cultural shift took place that can be summed up in the words rank and class. A RANK indicated the social stratum into which one was born, and one’s linguistic habits would be typical of that rank. A CLASS, by contrast, was a social layer to which people...