Watching the English

by Kate Fox

The very upper-class i may become a long a, such that ‘I am’ sounds like ‘Ay am’.

But the upper class don’t say ‘I’ at all if they can help it: one prefers to refer to oneself as ‘one’.

In fact, they are not too keen on pronouns in general, omitting them, along with articles and conjunctions, wherev...

sending a frightfully expensive telegram. Despite all these peculiarities, the upper classes remain convinced that their way ...

their speech is the norm, everyone else’s is ‘an accent’ – and when the upper classes say that someone speaks with ‘an accent’, what...

What you may hear referred to as ‘BBC English’ or ‘Oxford English’ is a kind of ‘educated’ speech – but it is more upper-middle than upper: it lacks the haw-haw tones, vowel swallowing/drawling

drawling and pronoun-phobia of upper-class speech, and is certainly more intelligible to the uninitiated.

Most working-class people, however, and many lower middles, still regard ‘BBC English’

– and often the BBC itself and all its output – as ‘posh’.

We are frequently told that regional accents have become much more acceptable nowadays – even desirable, if you want a career in broadcasting – and that a person with, say, a Yorkshire, Scouse, Geordie or West Country accent is no longer looked down upon as automatically lower class. Yes, well, maybe. I am not convinced. The fact that many presenters of popular television and radio programmes now have regional accents may well indicate that people find these accents attractive, but it does not

prove that the class associations have somehow disappeared.

Speaking of ‘regional’ accents, it is worth mentioning (particularly in the context of my remarks about the influence of immigrants in the Introduction) that many young working-class people in London and surrounding areas now speak a hybrid dialect known as Multicultural London English (MLE), which incorporates elements of Caribbean, South Asian and African American speech patterns and vocabulary.

Nancy Mitford coined the phrase ‘U and Non-U’ – referring to upper-class and non-upper-class words – in an article in Encounter in 1955,

There is nothing wrong with the word ‘dinner’ in itself: it is only a working-class hallmark if you use it to refer to the midday meal, which should be called ‘lunch’. I’ve

you want to ‘talk posh’, you will have to stop using the term ‘posh’, for a start: the correct upper-class word is ‘smart’.

The opposite of ‘smart’ is ‘common’

‘Naff’ is a better option, as it is a more ambiguous term, which can mean the same as ‘common’ but can also just mean ‘tacky’ or ‘in bad taste’.

Officially, ‘chav’ refers only to a particular section of the working class – essentially the British version of what in the US would be called ‘white trash’, ‘trailer trash’ or just ‘trash’ (‘

We are clearly as acutely class-conscious as we have ever been,

and well-meaning upper-middles are the most squeamish of all. They will go to great lengths to avoid calling anyone or anything ‘working class’ – resorting to polite euphemisms such as ‘low-income groups’, ‘less privileged’, ‘ordinary people’, ‘less educated’, ‘the man in the street’, ‘tabloid readers’, ‘blue collar’, ‘state school’, ‘council estate’ and ‘popular’.

even more shamefully, to tar them all with the same ‘chav’ brush is one of the causes of the recent ‘identity shift’ whereby more and more working-class people are defining themselves as middle class (in surveys, about half of those who used to call themselves ‘working class’ no longer do so – a very significant shift). ‘Working class’ has become a more pejorative term, associated with, ironically, people who do not work, so-called ‘benefit scroungers’, ‘chavs’, etc.

But now the demonisation of ‘chavs’, and the blurring of these categories, is adversely affecting the whole working class.

The focus of governments for many years has been on promoting social mobility (which has remained stubbornly static at best), rather than improving conditions and life for the working class.

it is hardly surprising that many working-class people now choose to call themselves ‘middle class’, a term that, for some, has been radically redefined.

‘What does that mean to you,’ I asked, ‘that you’re middle class, rather than working class?’ She answered: ‘That I’ve got some class, I suppose – like, I dress nicely, I’ve got some ambition in life … I’m not just some lazy chav!’

With the decline of the manufacturing industry, many of the lowest-paid working-class jobs are now in service industries (call centres are the new coal mines) and can be seen as ‘white collar’, or ‘pink collar’, rather than traditional blue-collar manual labour.

the other way round: many people in what are classified as ‘middle-class’ occupations would identify themselves (correctly, and often proudly) as ‘working class’ when asked to state their social class in surveys.

the linguistic codes we have identified indicate that class in England has nothing to do with income or occupation.

There are other class indicators – such as one’s taste in clothes, furniture, decoration, cars, pets, books, hobbies, food and drink – but speech is the most immediate and most obvious.

The importance of speech in this context may point to another English characteristic: our love of words.

It has often been said that the English are very much a verbal rather ...

Words are our preferred medium, so it is perhaps significant that they should be our primary means of

This reliance on linguistic signals, and the irrelevance of wealth and occupation as class indicators, also reminds us that our culture is not a meritocracy.

Your accent and terminology reveal the class you were born into and raised in, not anything you have achieved thr...

Which brings me to another English characteristic: hypocrisy. Not that our pious denial of our class-obsession is specifically intended to mislead – it often seems to be more a matter of self-deception than any deliberate deception of others; a kind of collective self-deception, perhaps? I have a hunch that this distinctively English brand of hypocrisy will come up again, and might even turn out to be one of the ‘defining characteristics’ we are looking for.

talking loudly about banal business or domestic matters on one’s mobile while on a train is rude and inconsiderate.

other well-established English rules and inhibitions about talking to strangers, making a scene or drawing attention to oneself. The

Families and friends are scattered, and even if our relatives or friends live nearby, we are often too busy or too tired to visit.

We are constantly on the move, spending much of our time commuting to and from work either among strangers on trains and buses, or alone and isolated in our cars.

These factors are particularly problematic for the English, as we tend to be more socially inhibited than other cultures: we do not talk to stran...

Mobile phones – particularly the ability to send short, frequent, cheap text messages – restore our sense of connection and community, and provide an antidote to the pressures and alienation of modern urban life.

The English have a remarkable capacity for accepting the unacceptable – or, at least, appearing to accept it, and certainly not making a big noisy fuss about it.

If you are not English, a few frowns and sighs and a bit of frostiness may not seem very worrying. But these are indications that you have caused quite considerable offence, and should be taken seriously – assuming that you wish to fit in and get on with the English (and if you don’t, why on earth are you reading this book?).

The only remedy is to apologise, immediately and profusely. A simple ‘sorry’ will not suffice. The English say ‘sorry’ all the time,42. over anything or nothing, so a single ‘sorry’ does not count as an apology.

It is our reaction to breaches of these rules that is distinctive:

our squeamishness about confronting offenders, and the way we express our outrage in barely visible nano-gestures, tiny facial twitches and minimalist coughs, sniffs and sighs. There is a non-verbal dialect of disapproval that almost deserves to be called ‘body English’, rather than the generic ‘body language’.

The exquisite timing of our ‘frostiness’ is also a quintessentially English response – our own very tame and moderate version of the Law of Talion: not so much ‘an eye for an eye’ as ‘a five-minute snub for a five-minute snub’. Signs of social inhibition again, clearly – almost verging on passive-aggression here – combined with an acute sense of fairness.

those who feel more socially secure and confident are less likely to display their popularity and draw attention to their busy social life by constantly taking and making calls.

Excessive eagerness in social interaction is seen as embarrassing and frowned upon, and this applies to electronic hyper-sociability as well – particularly now that the novelty of mobile communication has worn off.

which showed that drinking is, in all societies, essentially a social activity, and that most cultures have specific, designated environments for communal drinking.