There is an account in English medieval records of two fishermen from Hull who had a frustrating experience. They ended up in London and went into a pub and tried to order a meal. All they wanted was a plate of eggs and potatoes. Unfortunately it took them a very long time to get served because there were major communication difficulties.
Although London and Hull are part of the same country, at that time, the variety of English spoken north of the Humber was very different to the variety spoken in the south. There weren’t just different accents, but different grammars and vocabulary - although both were speaking English.
Although such differences of vocabulary and grammar have been largely ironed out in modern English (though retained in dialect), strong differences of accent prevail even today. Broadly speaking they represent the different kingdoms that existed when English was first being spoken, and the influence of different peoples on the language. The Vikings can still be heard in the accents North of the Humber, and these are different from the accents of the Saxon south.
A few years ago I went into a pub in London and managed to order a plate of egg and chips without too much difficulty. However, I still sometimes struggle to communicate with people in my own country who have strong regional accents.
I am not a linguistic imperialist believing that one variety (my own) is best and that other varieties are inferior and should be banned. I actually quite like regional variation. When I speak with others face-to-face, any problems can be resolved by speaking more slowly and by taking meaning from accompanying non-visual cues. But when speaking on the phone, usually to someone from Scotland, Newcastle, Liverpool, or Birmingham wanting to sell me insurance, it can become very frustrating.
Of course, when you think about it, it is a miracle that I can communicate with these people at all. There are age differences - they speak 3000 words a minute, whereas I can only usually manage three. There are time differences - they are under pressure to move quickly and talk to at least 100 customers a minute, whereas I have been patiently waiting in the queue for hours, and now that my time has come, am intent on pedantically getting my point across. There are physical differences - they have perfect sight and hearing, whereas I now need a ‘handbag’ to cope with carrying all my aids around. And when you throw in a different accent, it really does take a conscious effort to understand and communicate meaning.
There are now, of course, many different varieties of English, not just from within the UK, but from around the world - each with their own vocabularies, grammars, and accents. In the UK we have known for a long time that there are more English speakers in the United States than in Britain, but it may come as a shock to some to discover that there are more English speakers in China than in England. People in the UK can be mildly amused watching American TV ‘programs’ (not ‘programmes’) as they hear references to the ’sidewalk’ and to people who ‘have gotten’, but when trying to talk on the phone to someone speaking Indian English, the benign amusement can soon turn to frustration.
It came to me as no surprise, therefore, to read that English speakers working in non-UK call centres, are experiencing record levels of sickness (high level of heart attacks, depression, suicides and diabetes among workers in their twenties). Many UK companies have out-sourced their customer service departments to the cheaper graduate labour on the Indian subcontinent. In theory there ought to be no problems because everyone is speaking the same language.
However, in addition to the pressure problems of having to process customers quickly to keep costs even lower, the centre workers are facing other problems. Apparently stressed out callers are struggling to have importantly detailed conversations (about bank accounts and computing, for example) with workers speaking in a very different variety of English. Such work often attracts abuse at the best of times, but when you throw in a different accent and latent racial prejudice, the simmering frustration often ignites.
The long-term future may be brighter or more bland, depending on your point of view. Communication inevitably leads to differences being ironed out as pressure is put on the language to adjust to the lowest common denominator. So increased cross-cultural communication facilitated by technology (TV, internet, for example) may lead to accent changes that are more easily understood by all English speakers. And the inevitable arrival of the video phone will provide non-linguistic cues to meaning and remove the need to rely simply on the spoken word. However, not everyone would welcome the homogenisation of English worldwide (the linguistic equivalent of McDonalds), or would want to check what they looked like before answering the phone.
This is the sort of topic that we discuss on our Language Group message board.
Language evolves continually, as evidenced by the fact that we find Chaucer and Shakespeare, and even later writers, difficult to understand today despite the fact that they wrote the “received” English of the day.
Like you, I am a “language liberal” and value all varieties of English. I think that “mistakes” are not always mistakes but may be the standard form in that speaker’s variety of English.
I don’t think English will become homogenized into a single form. I think what happens is that local varieties are developing all the time (sometimes quite deliberately as the speech of an exclusive group) but there also tend to be various standard forms (standard American, standard Australian, etc) that dialect speakers understand (more or less) and can take a shot at speaking (more or less) when necessary.
The problem with call centres in Bangalore is that though the operators may manage to speak the local standard English this differs from the caller’s standard English. I still remember with affection seeing slow-moving lorries in India with a notice on the rear reading “Horn please”.
It’s encouraging to find someone else taking a descriptivist, rather than a prescriptivist view of language.
Yes, there are not too many of us about!