The Queen's English: changes through the years

The Queen’s English has changed over 60 years, and much for the better, argues the 'Countdown’ word guru.

The notion of “Queen’s English” is usually applied to our pronunciation. Taking the term at its most literal, our monarch’s own sounds are enlightening when it comes to language change during her reign. Phoneticians have noted subtle but distinct changes in Her Majesty’s voice over the past 60 years, amounting to a more democratic style of pronunciation. .

In the middle of the 20th century, aspirations to sound “proper” were passionately pursued. Dictionaries as late as the Seventies include many pronunciations that could cut the proverbial glass. Sixty years on from the Queen’s accession, a person’s individual pronunciation patterns stand as much for their social identity as their class or background.

When it comes to grammar and spelling, the modern judgment is loud and clear: English is spiraling downwards. Newspaper headlines scream of shrinking vocabularies and of text-blinded teens who can no longer write full sentences. Swearing is now sanctioned on our televisions – even, unthinkable in 1952, by the BBC, whose English had come to sit alongside the Queen’s as the model for correctness. But no century in the history of English has been without fears of its degradation.

Equally well-established is the use of the wrong word in place of the established one. The Oxford English Corpus, a vast database of current English that enables lexicographers to track even the subtlest of shifts in the way we speak and write, provides many examples of linguistic mishearing’s. My favorites include “putting the cart before the horse”, and “like a bowl in a china shop” (I stop just short of “going at it hammer and thongs”); but there are many less frivolous cases that are fast becoming the “standard”. The evidence for “homing in” (“honing” is now rare), “trending towards”, and (purists look away now) “disinterested” for “uninterested”, is gathering speed. For those like me who snarl at the latter, it is worth reminding ourselves that “not interested” was in fact one original meaning of “disinterested”, four centuries ago — when, the Queen may be surprised to know, monarchs also used “ain’t” quite liberally.

The habits of the Face bookers and Twittered were nowhere on the Fifties radar; the revolution of our communication channels has brought unprecedented changes to our language. The most dramatic is speed: a word coined today can be across the world within hours and their fate as they burst and fizzle is fascinating to see. The communities of bloggers and tweeters have each developed their own lexicon and grammar, as autonomous as the shorthand of office and factory workers.

Of all the changes to English over the past 60 years, perhaps the greatest has been its expanding multi-cultureless. English has always been a mongrel tongue, snapping up words from every continent its speakers encountered. Today, its loanwords come from within, from its own communities that are introducing their own rich vocabularies.