1. Answer the following questions after your reading the chapter.
Who is the Head of State in Britain?
Find out which countries in Europe have a monarchy.
Make a list of three things you think a king or a queen should do.
2. Please, express your opinion on the idea of a monarchy:
Do you think a royal family should set an example? Why?
Look at the caricatures of King George IV in 1792 and the present royal family. Should the mass media show the royal family in this way?
Does our country have a monarchy? What was the attitude to this aspect in our country?
Do you think the idea of a monarchy is out of day?
Queen Elizabeth II with her husband Prince Philip and their dogs,
as seen on a satirical television programme.
British life and institutions
The origins of English
English is basically a Germanic language with a lot of Latin words in it. In simple terms, that means that the grammar and many of the most frequent words are Germanic, and the more formal or technical vocabulary in Latinate. There is so much of this Latinate vocabulary that English is sometimes called a semi-Romance language.
This linguistic mixture is a result of historical events. But the simple historical facts appear not to explain everything about the development of the language. One interesting question is why did the British not learn Latin from the Romans? After all, France, Spain, Portugal and Romania all kept the imperial language after the end of the Roman Empire. The answer may be the distance from Rome; the province of Britannia was on the wild and uncooperative margins of Europe. Although the Romans were here for 400 years, they did not leave very much the Celtic language of the Britons on a Latin flavour. Actually its living descendant, Welsh, has a lot of Latin roots in it, so perhaps in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, they were on their way to creating another great Romance language. But it was not to be. The Anglo-Saxons who took over from the Romans in Britain were relatively untouched by Latin influences, so Celtic was replaced by Germanic, and the British romance with Romance was, temporarily, over.
In 1066, the French-speaking Normans invaded England. Over the next 300 years, their French merged with Anglo-Saxon to create a new language: the writing of Chaucer (1343-1400) is not very far from modern English. As in the rest of Europe, Latin, especially in its written form, remained for a long time the language of science, philosophy and the Church. But English was growing stronger; it was soon not only the language of everyday life but also that of a flowering literature. Caxton introduced printing into the country in 1476, and that did much to standardize forms – spelling was very inconsistent at that time. Latin and Greek classics and the Bible were translated into English. By the time of Shakespeare (1564-1616), the language was highly developed and very healthy indeed.
Britain’s other languages
The Celtic people who gave way to the Anglo-Saxons did not disappear – they moved north and west, and their descendants live today in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man and Cornwall. They went on speaking their Celtic languages, but of course shared the islands with a very dominant majority culture. From the 17th century onwards, the English imposed their language on huge areas of the world, from the north of Canada to the south of New Zealand, so the chances of the Celtic language surviving in Wales were pretty slim.
In fact, it is the Welsh who have preserved their linguistic identity more than any of the other Celtic peoples. The last native speaker of Cornish died in 1777 and of Manx (the language of the Isle of Man) in 1974. Gaelic in Scotland is spoken by no more than 80,000 people, most in the Irelands off the north-west coast; the only monolingual speakers are young children who have not yet been exposed to English. Irish Gaelic has about 100,000 speakers confined to small areas on the west coast. The Welsh language, by contrast, has a solid heartland in the north-west of the country and is spoken by half a million people: there is a TV channel and a lot of radio in Welsh, it is taught in schools and used by the national political party, Plaid Cymru.
It is hard to find evidence that English actually tried to kill off the Celtic languages in a systematic way – to commit linguicide. Their decline has been more a result of indifference from London, and a lack of will to preserve them on the part of the Celtic speakers themselves. But there have been abuses. In the 19th century, the English education system was imposed, and children were not allowed to speak Welsh at school: if they did they were forced to wear a wooden board across their shoulders. Echoing this, a Welsh nationalist wrote: “Dy aith ar ein bysgwyddau megis pwn” (“Your language is like a burden on our shoulders”).
All official publications in Wales are produced in two languages.
It came as a surprise to many people when in 1987, a census showed that 172 languages were spoken by children in London schools: Chinese, Turkish, Italian, Ga, Yoruba, Thai, Spanish, Gujarati, Punjabi and 163 others. Some of these, like the West African language Ga, have only a couple of hundred speakers. But others, like Punjabi, are quite significant linguistic communities, with their own linguistic communities, radio programmes, newspapers and videos, and classes for children – to ensure that they do not forget the language of their parents and grandparents.
Attitudes to the ancestral language differ a lot within immigrant communities. Among the Sikhs in west London, for example, it is only the older people who find it impossible to learn English, and who carry on speaking exclusively Punjabi. Everyone else is bilingual, some feeling more at home in Punjabi, and others, especially children who were born in Britain, preferring English. Many are perfectly at ease in either language, and switch between them effortlessly; it is common to hear a sentence begin in Punjabi and end in English.
After the English, the biggest language communities in Britain are the Welsh and then Asian languages such as Urdu, Punjabi, Gujarati and Bengali; Chinese, Greek, Arabic, Polish and Turkish are also quite well represented, as are the West African languages such as Yoruba.
Dialects of English
A nasty shock awaits many visitors to Britain. Imagine you have learnt English for years, you can read newspapers and you have no problem following the television, but when you go into a fish or chip shop in Newcastle, you can not understand a word they are saying. The language has been standardized for a very long time, and regional dialects in Britain have largely died out – far more so than in Italy or Germany, for example. That is to say, the vocabulary of the dialects has died out, but the accents and a few bits of distinctive grammar remain. It is the accent which gives the visitor a problem in the fish or chip shop. Some accents are so strong that they present problems for British people, too. Variations within the British are so great that accents from New York or Texas are often easier to follow than ones from Liverpool or Glasgow.
It is mostly the vowels which differ from one dialect to another. Intonation patterns also differ between regions.
There is a kind of standard British English pronunciation, based on a confusing way on class and geography. It is the accent of the south-east, but not that of London itself. It could be said that the upper classes have a dialect of their own, with a pronunciation known as RP (Received Pronunciation). The majority of middle-class people speak a sort of classless, democratic version of RP, with a slight admixture of the local regional accent.
People’s attitudes to the various regional accents depend on a whole range of historical and social factors. The Birmingham accent is considered ugly, cockney is associated with criminals, Scottish is thought of as serious and sensible, Irish as poetic. An interesting case is that of the so-called Westcountry accent. This comes from the south and west, which is the least industrial region; consequently the accent is identified with farm-workers, sometimes considered stupid by city folk. While all the other varieties of English have been increasingly accepted on mainstream TV and radio, Westcountry remains the Cinderella among accents, confined to comedy and gardening programmes.
A world language
A billion people speak English, two-thirds of the world’s scientists write in English, and 80% of the world’s electronic information is stored in English. One result is that the British are terribly lazy about learning other languages. The most important factor in language learning is motivation, and the British just do not have it. …
Which historical events have been important in the development of English? (Russian?)
Languages change over time; do you think this is a good or bad thing?
What different languages are spoken in Britain? (Russia?)
In Russia, do older people criticise the language of young people?
How do you feel about the spread of English? Is it a threat or an opportunity?
What’s in a name?
The full name of the country is, of course, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Very briefly the history is as follows.
Wales was merged with England by King Henry VIII in 1543.
Scotland followed with the Act of Union in 1707, after which the country was known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
The Act of Ireland in 1801 united Britain and Ireland, but that unhappy union finally broke up in 1921, with only six mainly Protestant counties in the north of Ireland remaining in the UK. This remains the situation today.
The monarchy
By far the strangest feature is the role of the monarch. The Queen appears on paper to have tremendous power, but in fact has hardly any at all. The country is a kingdom, the government is Her Majesty’s Government, laws are made by the Queen in Parliament, criminals are tried in the name of the Queen, and the Queen is the head of state. She dissolves the Parliament before an election and she appoints the new Prim Minister (PM); she has a business meeting with the PM once a week, usually on Tuesdays; at the annual State Opening of Parliament she makes the Queen’s Speech, which outlines the government’s plans. She is the head on the Commonwealth (which includes 51 countries and a quarter of the world’s population), and she is actually Head of State in 16 countries including Canada, Papua New Guinea and Jamaica. All this seems to add up to a dominant role within the system. But it does not: the key word here is symbolic.
The American President is both head of the government and head of state. this is also the case in France and in Russia, while in most countries around the world these two roles are separate. The all-but-powerless, ceremonial head of state is most commonly a president, but in a few places such as Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK, the job is done by a king or queen. Queen Elizabeth signs all laws that are presented to her, she can not pick and choose. She appoints the leader of the majority party as Prime Minister, automatically. The Queen’s Speech is in fact written for her by the government. Any power she may have is strictly personal: if PMs respect her opinion on something, they will her advice. Constitutionally, she has the right only, “to be consulted, to encourage, and to warn”.
The separation of powers
In the USA the constitution enforces a strict separation between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. Britain has some separation but not very much. The legal system is independent to a large degree: although the government of the day appoints the judges, it cannot interfere with their work and it cannot get rid of those appointed by the previous government. But the executive and the legislature are not separate at all: in fact, the former is part of the latter. The law-making body is Parliament – the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The Commons is made up of all the MPs chosen by election – about 650 of them. Within that there is the majority party, and within the majority party there is a group of ministers who are the government. The leader of the majority party is the head of the government, the Prime Minister.
