By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal

local speech – new words, sentence patterns, sounds, tones of voice. They will still sound ‘foreign’ to the locals, and they may not notice that their speech has changed. But if after a while they pay a visit to where they lived before, it’s a typical experience to hear their old friends say they sound different.

      My wife comes from Hertfordshire, and people in Holyhead, where we now live, readily notice the southern accent in her voice. When she goes back to Hertfordshire, they say she sounds Welsh.

      Mixed accents are the norm these days. My own accent is a mix of the places I have lived in – Wales, Liverpool, London, Berkshire. That means it isn’t an entirely consistent accent. Sometimes I say example, with a short a, sometimes exahmple. I never know which it is going to be. It depends a lot on who I’m talking to.

      Generational differences are an influence. My children all say schedule beginning with sk–, as Americans do. When I was their age, I always said shedule. Today, I say both. If I’m talking to them, I join their skedule community. Otherwise I say shedule. They swap about a bit too, depending on who they’re talking to.

      Mixed accents mean that it isn’t so easy to identify where people come from any more, just by listening to their voices. Quite often, when I meet someone for the first time, and they learn I am a linguist and discover what linguists do, they say smugly: ‘I bet you can’t tell where I’m from.’ I never take the bet.

      Radio programmes sometimes include quizzes or games with such names as ‘Where Are You From?’. A team listens to guests and tries to work out which part of the country they come from. It wasn’t too difficult to get the right answer a few decades ago. It’s much harder now. Impossible, with many speakers.

      I left the fruit and veg market and drove to the edge of Welshpool, where I had an appointment with another accent. I was keen to explore the identity question again. Here were people who had no Welsh language ability and whose accent lacked some of the most distinctive features of the English accents people associate with Wales. Would they feel as Welsh as their compatriots from the Snowdon hillsides or the Rhondda valleys?

      Indeed they would, and the lady I had come to see proved it in a most unorthodox style. Halfway through the interview she began to take her clothes off – Huw the cameraman couldn’t believe his lens – and displayed a Welsh dragon tattooed below her shoulder. She waxed lyrical about Wales. She was pregnant, and was determined that her baby would be born in Wrexham hospital and not in Shrewsbury, even though Wrexham was twice the distance away. Her speech had the English r in it again. To my ears, she hardly sounded Welsh at all. Evidently there isn’t always a correlation between the national recognizability of a person’s accent and the strength of the speaker’s feeling about national identity.

      Henry Higgins would have loved all this. Or rather, Henry Sweet would. Or rather, Daniel Jones would. Was there a real-life model for Henry Higgins?

      Henry Sweet was the leading English philologist and phonetician at Oxford in the late nineteenth century. Daniel Jones was Professor of Phonetics at University College London a generation later. Phonetics, as Higgins, said, is the science of speech – or, slightly more precisely, of human soundmaking. Phoneticians spend all their time happily analysing how people speak, how speech sounds are carried through the air, and what happens when people listen to them.

      What phoneticians don’t do is work with people like Eliza Doolittle in the way that Higgins did. No phonetician these days would dream of trying to change someone’s natural pronunciation so that it sounds more like the upper-class accent of a country. Traditionally, the people who would do that sort of thing are called elocutionists. And even they value regional accents more these days than they used to. Audibility and clarity of speech are still important goals, but they can be achieved in any accent.

      Shaw had had a great deal of correspondence with Sweet over the years, but he says quite plainly in the Preface to Pygmalion that ‘Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet.’ Yet he adds: ‘still… there are touches of Sweet in the play’. Shaw was puzzled that Sweet had not achieved greater public recognition, given his scholarly achievements. ‘With Higgins’s physique and temperament,’ he says, ‘Sweet might have set the Thames on fire.’ Shaw felt the reason was the way phonetics as a subject was being seriously underrated at Oxford, and he concludes: ‘if the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians and that they are among the most important people in England at present, it will serve its turn’.

      Phoneticians among the most important people in England? Could there be any doubt? But when non-phoneticians say so, it makes you think, well, maybe they are. And Shaw is not alone in his opinion. The novelist Anthony Burgess states just as firmly, in the epilogue to his language memoir A Mouthful of Air: ‘Phonetics, phonetics, and again phonetics. There cannot be too much phonetics.’

      It was probably Shaw’s correspondence with Sweet, along with supposed similarities between the characters of Higgins and Sweet, who didn’t suffer fools gladly, that led people to assume that the one was based on the other. In fact, if Shaw is making a bow in the direction of a real phonetician at all, it has to be Daniel Jones, who in his youth had worked with Sweet.

      Jones helped Shaw in several ways. He gave him advice on phonetic detail, corresponded with him several times, and invited him to see his department at University College London. The technology used in Higgins’ laboratory in the play is close to what would have been in a phonetics department of the day. After Pygmalion was completed, Shaw offered Jones an unlimited supply of complimentary tickets to see it.

      Where did the name of Higgins come from? By all accounts, it was borrowed from a London shop sign. By whose accounts? Jones himself, via one of his students. It seems that Shaw was riding on the deck of a bus through South London, wondering what name he should give his character, and saw the shop name ‘Jones and Higgins’. The student recalled Jones saying: ‘he could not call me Jones, so he called me Higgins’.

      If Shaw’s bus route was through Peckham, he couldn’t have missed the shop. Jones and Higgins was the largest and most prestigious department store in the area, in Rye Lane. It closed down in 1980, but the distinctive building is still there.

      Why couldn’t Shaw call his character Jones? It would have been very risky to portray a living character as a fictional one. Flattering as the idea might seem at first, we can immediately imagine the real-life source being unflattered by aspects of Higgins’ character. The plot contained taboo language. Higgins, moreover – to put it in modern terms – has an affair with one of his students. Not the best set of associations for a career academic.

      Furthermore, the play wasn’t doing phonetics many favours. True, it brought the word phonetics to the attention of millions who might not otherwise have heard of it, but – as Jones himself remarked – ‘In Pygmalion phonetics is represented as providing a key to social advancement,’ and he adds, drily, ‘a function which it may be hoped it will not be called upon to perform indefinitely.’ His dryness, it seems, was replaced by fury when he saw the play on the first night. This was not how he wanted phonetics to be seen.

      In The Real Professor Higgins, Jones’s biographers conclude that he wanted to distance himself from the character and the play, and that Shaw agreed. Shaw then went further, writing a preface which made no reference to Jones but hinted at a portrayal of the now-deceased Sweet. The ruse was successful. Nobody publicly associated Jones with Higgins, and Sweet remained the link in the public mind.

      And in mine. For many years I thought it was Sweet, and I say so in a book or two. I recant.

      There is a lot of recanting to be done. Type ‘Henry Sweet and Henry Higgins’ into Google and you will get over 800,000 hits. Start scrolling down and you will see the Sweet claim asserted over and over.

      Another of Jones’s students was David Abercrombie, who later became Professor of Phonetics at Edinburgh. He passed his recollections of Jones on to one of his students, Peter Ladefoged. And this brings the story up to date. Because it was Ladefoged who acted as the phonetics consultant for My Fair Lady,