Seeing an article about language use appear in Michael Gove’s The Spectator is usually a bad sign to begin with. Seeing that its title is ‘Celebrities can’t speak properly’ and the strapline that follows is ‘I fear for the language of Shakespeare and Jane Austen’ sets alarm bells ringing further. But actually reading Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s article (archived version here) is something of an experience to say the least…
All three surviving Traitors in the flame-lit final episodes of the BBC’s Celebrity Traitors pronounced the word ‘traitor’ as ‘trai’or’. They’d been ‘recrui’ed’, for better or for worse, and had ‘had the hea’ pu’ on them’ at various times throughout the series. ‘This is the final murder and it’s really impor’an,’ said Maya Jama at midnight in the turret. ‘I’m not goin’ down wivou’ a figh’. I’m ge’in’ shivers,’ said Kenny.
I’ve left Word’s spellcheck on here to show the effect of using eye dialect in a written text. It’s designed to make it look like the speech is ‘wrong’, that something is missing or incomplete. But also, what else do you notice? It’s not just the ‘t’ sound that Graham has chosen to render differently: it’s also the alveolar consonant at the end of ‘getting’ (the g-dropping as it’s sometimes called by non-linguists) and the th-fronting in without rendered as a ‘v’. Why does that matter? Well, if her argument is that it’s the glottalised ‘t’ that’s the problem, then she’s also lumping it in with a whole set of other phonological bugbears she sees as wrong. And that somewhat undermines her argument.
To me, the lack of a ‘t’-consonant really lets these celebrities down. Of course, they can and sometimes do pronounce the letter ‘t’: they always say it at the beginning of any ‘t’-word. But among a large swathe of this country’s celebrities (‘celebri’ies’), the glottal stop now comes as standard mid-word or at the end of a word.
Straight away a deficit model is used: there’s a ‘lack’ of something here. But is it really an absence that we’re hearing? Not really. It’s a substitution of one sound for another, in this case a glottal stop for a ‘t’ consonant. Casting this pronunciation as an absence makes it appear to be less than the ‘ideal’ non-glottalised ‘t’ and the speakers as perhaps too lazy to make a sound where one should be. And what is the effect of this? It ‘lets these celebrities down’. They’ve let themselves down, they’ve let their schools down, they’ve let their families down. Frankly, they should be ashamed. But she is at least right on one point: we almost never hear glottalisation in t-initial words. That’s because we use sounds as part of a system and the use of a glottal stop is much more likely in the middle of a word, the medial position.
It's even common for RP speakers to produce glottal stops... even the author of this piece. How do I know? Because I listened to an interview with her and within the first 10 seconds she had said the word 'favourite' twice using both a /t/ and a glottal stop. And then we’re into the prettiness – or otherwise - of certain sounds and the relationship between those sounds and the prettiness – or otherwise – of the speakers who use them.
And it’s not pretty. Maya looks serenely beautiful, and I expected an elegant voice to come out of her, worthy of her regal appearance. But, over the final breakfast, she said, ‘We go’a for-ge’ our friendship for a momen’. It’s an open ba’lefield.’
That relationship – beautiful language and beautiful people versus ugly language and ugly people – is as old as standardised English itself. It creates a kind of moral aesthetic around language use, one that the linguist Jean Aitchison tackled in her influential series of Reith Lectures in 1996 and one she describes as a tangled ‘web of worries’. As she put it, ‘Again and again etiquette, morals and speech are confused. Groombridges’ Annual Reader, a manual of recitation for the use of schools, said in 1867: “Speech is a gift of God, and the habit of speaking correct English next to good morals is one of the best things in the world”. We might laugh at this quaint confusion of morals and speech, except that it is still found nowadays.’
And while Aitchison’s nowadays was 1996, we see it 30 years on. Just look at those evaluative adjectives - ‘elegant’ and ‘regal’ – both words with class connotations and both used to describe what we should expect to hear from the ‘serenely beautiful’ Maya Jama. But what is this I hear? Nothing elegant and regal, but the crooning of a bilious pigeon.
Long after the show is over, the ‘t’-less words will be ringing in my ears. I’ll hear Leigh-Anne saying, ‘I had a feelin’ the boys were going to vo’ me ou’.’ I’ll hear Romesh Ranganathan saying, ‘You’ve go’a look at the posi’ive.’ I’ll hear Rob Rausch, on being banished, saying, ‘Liber’y, innit?’
The next point is a wider one that links to many other issues that lurk beneath the surface of this piece and others like it. We can (broadly) see the main target of the author’s distaste (the ‘absence’ of a ‘t’ sound) but we can also see that it’s not just the sound that upsets her: it’s also the people who use it and the mental image that she has of those speakers – that they’re deficient in some way, or as she claims later on, using it because they want to project a certain image. And it’s certainly instructive to see that out of all the speakers in Celebrity Traitors that she singles out for using the glottal stop, the first four are not white and the fifth wasn’t even in The Traitors and never has been. Did (white) Eastenders hardman, Ross Kemp, not glottalise once? How pronounced was his /t/ when he shouted ‘Get in there!’ or told Bash ‘It’s only a little bit of poo – it’s not going to kill you’. Did Bash never once spill his ‘t’? And what about Jerry Hall? Surely her Texan speech features (a bit of t-tapping, perhaps?) registered on Graham’s gigacounter? Apparently not. Weird that.
But hang on, let’s cut the writer some slack. ‘Enunciation is a tricky subject. You can be branded as snooty for even mentioning it,’ she tells us. I think therefore we should salute her bravery in engaging with this class-riddled conundrum rather than attacking her as a snob. Because she’s not a snob, right? She’s an equal-opportunities pedant.
But is it snobbish to mourn the demise of the ‘t’-sound, purely for aesthetic reasons? It’s certainly snobbish to mock British regional accents, and I do not. I cherish them. It’s right and proper not to enunciate your mid-word ‘t’-sounds if that really is an essential element of the regional accent you happen to speak in. And posh pronunciation can be just as ugly as non-posh – a phenomenon Craig Brown nailed in his list of words the upper classes pronounce in extreme accents, such as ‘ears’ for ‘yes’, ‘nair’ for ‘no’, and ‘barn-glare’ for the single-storey house the lower classes live in. ‘Ears’ and ‘nair’ are arguably just as jarring on the ear as ‘ner’ (which is how Tom from Halifax in the current series of The Great British Bake-Off pronounces the word ‘no’).
Like many prescriptivists, Graham claims to love linguistic variation, cherish it even. But only if it’s regional, apparently. If it’s connected to social class, then it’s ugly and ‘just as jarring’. But t-glottaling *is* regional: it has spread more widely from its local roots but it was originally a regional feature (the Survey of English Usage, using data gathered from the 1950s, suggests it was then quite common in Buckinghamshire and Norfolk).
And wait: if she likes regional variation then why would Tom from Bake-off’s ‘ner’ for ‘no’ be ‘as jarring on the ear’ as a posh person saying ‘nair’? Surely, she can’t be saying that because Tom is from Halifax he’s got to be working class? Or does it just reveal that whatever she claims to believe, she just can’t produce a consistent argument because her judgements are rooted in prejudice?
But I think that, in the case of too many celebrities, the habitual dropping of the ‘t’-sound is an affectation, even if a subconscious one. They’re desperate not to sound too wealthy or middle-class, and ‘t’-dropping is an easy way of being seen to be down wiv da kidz.
And it’s here that we get to the heart of the problem for Graham. She doesn’t like glottal stops, because she sees them as a sloppy habit (like, as she later opines, ‘slouching about in… tracksuit bottoms and eating lunch off [their] laps’) but also as an affectation borne out of a desperation not to appear posh or stuffy and middle class. Linguistically speaking, glottal stops are both a feature of regional variation (influenced by place) and social variation (influenced by social identity factors such as class, gender and ethnicity), so there is maybe some element of truth in the idea that we can use them to perform a different aspect to our identity.
Many speakers will use fewer glottal stops in the kind of ‘careful speech’ (ie reading from a script) and more in ‘casual speech’ (ie informal conversation) that Peter Trudgill noted in parts of his influential 1974 study of linguistic variation in Norwich – that’s perfectly normal – but is that what’s happening here in Celebrity Traitors? I don’t think so. This is just what actual human beings do when they use language in different situations. We don't know - and Graham certainly doesn't - how these celebrities speak at other times, so how does she know whether the glottal stop is a 'natural' part of their speech or not?
But there’s a jaw-dropping moment at the end of that paragraph that needs a few moments to really sink in. Beautiful, regal and elegant Maya Jama might just have picked it up from her rapper ex-boyfriend, who has infected her with this filthy habit.
(Maya Jama’s former boyfriend was the rapper Stormzy, and it may well be that his ‘t’-less rapper habit was infectious.)
Was it Stormzy who made her talk like this? We’ll never know, because Graham isn’t interested enough to listen to Stormzy to determine if he glottalises or not, because why would you bother researching language when you’re writing an article about language, and why would you show intellectual curiosity when a mental stereotype is much more simple to stick to? In fact, yes Stormzy does glottalise, but he also uses voiced th-stops at times (dat instead of that) as well as unvoiced stops (like ting rather than thing). Did he ‘infect’ Maya with these features too?
The whole discourse of decline – one much loved by the conservative right and their fellow-travellers on the even further rightward fringe (so beloved by The Spectator) – is one that seeps through in the last few paragraphs of this appalling article. As if it’s not enough that BBC1 has fallen victim to the sloppy habit of t-dropping, now it even appears on that bastion of probity and correctness, BBC Radio 4. Surely the barbarians (or Mackems, even worse) are at the gates when Lauren Laverne uses the glottal stop (a feature of her Sunderland accent, actually) and members of The Archers cast – lesbians! rural lesbians! – succumb to its degenerate allure. It’s an ‘uglification’ and just one aspect of a wider decline in values. We’ve already seen that eating food off your lap and wearing tracksuit bottoms signal a decline in Western civilisation, but now we can add that a pressure not to discriminate and to appear ‘kinder’ to lesser language users have also hastened this decline, along with that ubiquitous bugbear technology.
But what can save us from this descent into linguistic anarchy, I wonder? Well, hymn-singing, apparently. It’s not a stretch to see a moral undercurrent to much of Graham’s argument. From the bad language of bad people, through to the ugliness of the sounds, expressions and eternal souls of the speakers of this litany (sorry li’any) of corruptions, and even the use of the pre-creation Genesis line ‘without form and void’ (‘The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep’) to describe the state of the ‘spoken British language’ (there’s hyperbole for you!), Graham ties together language use, language users and morality into one tendentious bundle. So, in this moral universe, hymn-singing is probably the most sensible response.
I could go on, and I feel that I’ve probably put more thought into this response to Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s article than she ever did when she actually wrote it, but I’ll have to stop before I lose my mind. Suffice to say, if you want a brilliantly terrible example of a text that reheats some of the most lazy prescriptive discourses around language use, that recycles half-arsed stereotypes about language users, that conflates how we write with how we speak and lobs in a whole load of crypto-Christo-fascist declinist bullshit, this is the piece for you.
With thanks to Amanda Cole and Rob Drummond for their input into drafts of this.
