map / I had to live by that I spend night in your bredrin’s
months ahead, bringing down the patrician accents of
flat.”
the Ed Stourtons of this world a social notch or two, to
Mr Stryder’s real name is Kwasi Danquah, for he was
make them acceptable to déclassé employers.
born in Ghana. His English forms part of that global
As for politicians, their idiolects are now as awash with
tongue being celebrated in a big exhibition called
glottal stops as high tide in Canvey Island. Ed Balls was
Evolving English: One Language, Many Voices at the
educated at Oxford and Harvard, but there’s no’ a lo’ of
British Library. A two-and-a-half hour event at the end of
evidence in his pronunciation. The Conservatives are as
November linked to the exhibition is called “Voices of rap
bad in their profligate manipulation of the upper trachaea
and hip hop”. The evening includes “a discussion of how
to produce this substitute for orthodox consonants.
words impact at street level”. It is already sold out.
Henry Higgins himself could hardly detect traces of
But of course, Tinchy Stryder’s lyrical language is not
George Osborne’s roots in the Irish Ascendancy or his
Ghanaian English. He was educated at St Bonaventure’s
studious hours in the schoolrooms of St Paul’s and the
Catholic Comprehensive School in Forest Gate, once in
lecture rooms of Magdalen, if Magdalen has lecture
Essex, now in the London Borough of Newham. His
rooms. Mr Osborne might look like the dastardly baronet
lyrics are not in the English of Essex (which centuries
of Victorian melodrama, but he talks like a Brentwood
ago influenced so strongly the language of the court, and
boy from the HR department.
hence that of the upper classes).
It’s funny that politicians feel they have to do this in order
No, Tinchy Stryder’s argot is carefully acquired from the
to get on. Tony Blair is much to blame for the trend,
mixture of West Indian dialects and the black gangsta
gliding as he did in his actor’s way into what he imagined
slang of the United States.
was the speech pattern of the audience before him. But
Enjoy it or loathe it, hip-hop lingo is a cultural construct.
if politicos are so linguistically sensitive to the imagined
In this it is identical with the sporting slang embraced by
sensibilities of class, how is that they talk such awful
the fast set at Oxford in the 1840s, as retailed in the
bilge by way of administrators’ jargon. It’s worse than
bestselling Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (1853).
management-speak. They are forever rolling out flagship
“There’s a squelcher in the bread-basket that’ll stop your
proposals and rafts of measures, or deliverin g targets on
dancing, my kivey,” exclaims their pugilistic hero during
renewables, going forward.
a Town and Gown punch-up.
That is a disease of the mind far more alarming than
Of course, the language of Tinchy Stryder is as much to
dropping your t’s or over-aspirating your aitches. That is
do with class as that of Verdant Green’s fashionable
not to say pronunciation doesn’t matter. I have on the
sportsmen. The funniest sketch in the Armstrong and
shelf beside me Broadcast English, first published in
Miller show on television depicts in black and white two
1928 as the fruit of a committee that included Robert
wartime RAF pilots conversing in clipped tones, but with
Bridges (the Poet Laureate), George Bernard Shaw, and
the vocabulary of street bredren: “Hurricane pilots are,
Professor Daniel Jones (the phonetician who inspired
like, you know – their Mums go down the chippie in their
Shaw’s Henry Higgins). In 51 pages it lists some
slippers. Isn’it?” Class has changed.
“recommendations to announcers regarding certain
“See this creature with her kerbstone English,” says
words of doubtful pronunciation”.
Henry Higgins of Eliza in Pygmalion, “ – the English that
Among them are the still troublesome kilometre, which
will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days.” Today,
they correctly recommended to be stressed (with the
Higgins, the practical phonetician, would be booked up
stress-mark before the stressed syllable): 'kilometre. It is