# Transcript

James Clackson

But the changes which take place, even so, are just fashionable changes, aren’t they? The words come into the language. One year we have a word like ‘bling’ or ‘chav’ which everyone seems to use and next year they disappear. Even now ‘bling’ is on its way out, it seems.

Geoffrey Horrocks

Well, that’s certainly true, I mean, particularly individual slang words, they do tend to be short-lived in the spoken language but that’s not the full story. Other changes take hold, can take hold, and then become quite general amongst the whole population. Most English people don’t pronounce an R sound now after vowels in words like ‘for’ and ‘farm’. There are of course still some dialects of English where that is the norm but these are now seen as somehow substandard. But if you went back over a hundred years, not pronouncing the R would be seen as a mistake, and an example of laziness and sloppiness, so things do change. The R-less variety is now absolutely the standard, it’s the way BBC announcers speak, it’s the way the royal family speaks. And that just goes to show, there’s nothing inherently good or bad about anything. Things change, full stop.