British Speech--Regional or Historical?

I'd say the lack of "the" in some sentences is when they're referring to the actual person but not directly by name, so it sounds less detached than "the baby" and a bit more personal... I'm not doing a very good job with this - I'll blame the stinking cold I picked up at work.

I'm trying to think whether it's something I'd do, but I'm not from East London (spent most of my childhood living in the London end of Kent, fwiw). It wouldn't strike me as odd and I'm not sure I'd even notice if someone spoke like this, even if I wouldn't say it myself. Or would I?

Methinks I'll disappear now as I'm confusing myself. Perhaps someone whose head isn't full of crud could chip in with something useful (or something that even just makes sense)??!

Orianna2000 said:

I've been reading and watching "Call the Midwife" lately, and one thing that stands out this time (more than the first time I read the books/watched the show) is how the midwives don't use "the" when referring to the babies they deliver, or to doctors, or even other nurses. It's never, "Hold the baby," or "Get the doctor." It's always, "Let me just give Baby a bath," or "Doctor needs you to push now." I found this rather strange, but I'm not sure whether it's a British thing, or a 1950s thing, or what. (It's set in London's East End, during the late 1950s.)

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I have no idea whether this is common now, but dropping "the" makes the word Baby or Doctor into a name. Could it be that the midwife doesn't recall the names all of the time? It is quite common for people to address strangers with general term: "Hey Kid:, "Hey Moron", and so on. The term used would depend on the amont of respect the speaker wanted to show.

I do know "the" is dropped for Hospital.

I go to the hospital.

Brits, today, go to hospital.

Los Pollos Hermanos said:

I'd say the lack of "the" in some sentences is when they're referring to the actual person but not directly by name, so it sounds less detached than "the baby" and a bit more personal... I'm not doing a very good job with this - I'll blame the stinking cold I picked up at work.

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I was going to suggest the same thing, though I would have been less charitable and called it "being cutesy poo." In fact, a number of contemporary parenting books and websites also omit the "the" or "your" when referring to babies, as if "baby" were a proper noun.

When baby won't go down for her nap...

I can't say whether there's also a generational or regional element to this, however.

ULTRAGOTHA said:

I do know "the" is dropped for Hospital.

I go to the hospital.

Brits, today, go to hospital.

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This is true for University in the UK and Canada as well (people talk about their time at/in University). It makes these things feel more like states of being than specific locations.

In the US we go to the hospital or attend/are at the university (as if there were only one available to choose from), though we do talk about being "in/at college" as a sort of generic, article-less state of existence. I haven't heard that expression used by people from the UK or Canada. Colleges in these countries seem to exist only as entities within universities, never as independent, stand-alone schools. In the US, colleges can be parts of universities (though there are generally fewer colleges per university than at British universities, and they're organized by discipline), but we also have stand-alone technical, liberal arts, or community colleges.

I don't know how much these reflect differences in the way we see these things in the US and how much is just a divergence in speech patterns.

ULTRAGOTHA said:

I do know "the" is dropped for Hospital.

I go to the hospital.

Brits, today, go to hospital.

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A little bit of that still lives on in American English. No one goes to THE school, for example, you just go to school. Same with houses of worship. You go to church, temple, mosque, etc. Not sure why we strayed with hospital. It seems to be limited to the medical profession--the hospital, the doctor, the emergency room, the clinic, the insane asylum. Odd. Maybe it comes from rural communities where there was literally just one hospital in the area.

It's a British thing.

It's sometimes called functional nominalization, wherein a noun becomes a title.

We do it too in the U.S. (go to work, go to school) but the prevalence in a medical context is particularly British.

It's related to the way some adults talk to small children:

"Give Mummy your toy."
"Kiss Nanna."

AW Admin said:

It's a British thing.

It's sometimes called functional nominalization, wherein a noun becomes a title.

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It's great to have a name for it. And now that I'm aware of what it is, I expect I'll notice it a lot more often.

The example that I remember being used in textbooks is that thing some people say for "luck" when they shake dice: "baby needs a new pair of shoes."

Given the context (gambling) I'm never sure if baby refers to an infant or an adult woman . . .

Bear in mind that there isn't really any such thing as "British speech". I lived in England for three years, and traveled widely, including a lot of time in Scotland. You can identify the birthplace of almost any Brit to great precision by the way they speak, even if they've been to University somewhere. The speech of somebody from Yorkshire, both in accent and regionalisms, is as alien from a Kentisher as somebody from Jamaica is from a person from da Bronx.

caw

I had my babies in 1995, 1999, and 2000. That first one was born in London, the other two in Sheffield. I noticed that all midwives at all the hospitals I went to said, "bath Baby now," rather than "bath your baby now": as others have said, I think "baby" here is used as a name. But I did notice that when we moved to Sheffield, people often don't use the word "the" when I would; but instead they'll introduce other words where I wouldn't use them. For example, my husband's parents (Derbyshire) refer to their daughter as "our Mel", rather than just using her name, and they do this for various other relationships. They refer to my sister as "your Sarah". I find it funny: it implies an ownership I don't feel, but it's very common here.

Roxxsmom said:

This is true for University in the UK and Canada as well (people talk about their time at/in University). It makes these things feel more like states of being than specific locations.

In the US we go to the hospital or attend/are at the university (as if there were only one available to choose from), though we do talk about being "in/at college" as a sort of generic, article-less state of existence. I haven't heard that expression used by people from the UK or Canada. Colleges in these countries seem to exist only as entities within universities, never as independent, stand-alone schools. In the US, colleges can be parts of universities (though there are generally fewer colleges per university than at British universities, and they're organized by discipline), but we also have stand-alone technical, liberal arts, or community colleges.

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I am English, and have lived most of my life in London. For the last twenty years I've lived in Sheffield, which is in Yorkshire.

We talk about "going to university" rather than "going to the university" because there are several to choose from, and if you're going to use "the" in this context you'd say, "going to the university at Edinburgh"--but you wouldn't say that. You'd say "going to Edinburgh University".

We do talk about going to college: but here, university and college offer very different things. Universities offer degrees; colleges offer more vocational courses, and are more common for people aged 16-18 rather than the 18-22 age band that most universities cater to. Unless, of course, you're talking about the various colleges which make up the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, or Imperial College, which is a London university (my son studies maths there, and it's wonderful).

blacbird said:

Bear in mind that there isn't really any such thing as "British speech". I lived in England for three years, and traveled widely, including a lot of time in Scotland. You can identify the birthplace of almost any Brit to great precision by the way they speak, even if they've been to University somewhere. The speech of somebody from Yorkshire, both in accent and regionalisms, is as alien from a Kentisher as somebody from Jamaica is from a person from da Bronx.

caw

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This is so true.

Whenever I see the phrase "British accent" I cringe just a little bit, because anyone attempting this is almost certainly going to end up sounding like a parody. You can have an English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish accent: but you're far more likely to have a London accent, an esturine one, a Yorkshire or Lancashire or West Country accent. I have a London accent, but am not broad. My husband has a Derbyshire accent; and our two sons have enough of my London accent to sound foreign in Sheffield, where they grew up, and enough of a Yorkshire accent to sound foreign in London, where our eldest now lives.

The division between the various areas is small. In Chesterfield, people from Sheffield are sometimes called "dee-dahs" because of their accent, which is very different to the Chesterfield accent: but I can drive to Chesterfield from here in less than half an hour. It's not far away.

Old Hack is spot on. I'm originally from a small village in Derbyshire (in the northwest of England). Growing up, I could easily tell if someone came from Buxton (a town around 12 miles east of where I lived) or Oldham (perhaps ten miles away in the opposite direction). Britain is a patchwork of micro-accents and dialects, so even the phrase 'Northern English accent' (never-mind just English or British) can be a bit misleading. I've always felt that these little micro-accents were more prevalent in the north of England than anywhere else in the country (although I may be biased, being northern), as it's always been the poorer part of England, and for a long, long time, people tended not to move very far from the place they were born. Also, I still say 'our Claire' when referring to my sister, even if I'm speaking to non-family.

With the 'baby' thing - the medical profession still drop the word 'the' or 'your' - it's not something from the past.

Midwives saying "Baby" still goes on, partly because the child does not offiicially have a name until the birth is registered.

Extending Old Hack's comments - it shifts with generation as well, possibly the influence of TV, people travelling more, and the accent-mixing effects of going to University.

I grew up in Bristol and the 'old' accent was disappearing. When I was a kid there was a humorous guide to the accent (supposedly one of the most incomprehensible in the UK) called 'Krek Waiter's Peak Bristle'. Although the 'old' accent has faded, I still hear bits of it when I go back, particularly the 'Bristol L': so people coming up with a good plan 'have a good ideal' and back when Ford still made them, they drove a 'Cortinal' around their local 'areal'.

People sometimes pick up on me having a trace of a Bristol accent, but my Welsh grandmother was very keen that her grandkids should speak correctly (or gert proper as a Bristolian might put it). Very occasionally I have had someone comment on my (utterly vestigial) Welsh accent.

Personally, I would be very wary of trying to write a regional/local UK accent that I didn't know.

Roxxsmom said:

This is true for University in the UK and Canada as well (people talk about their time at/in University). It makes these things feel more like states of being than specific locations.

In the US we go to the hospital or attend/are at the university (as if there were only one available to choose from), though we do talk about being "in/at college" as a sort of generic, article-less state of existence. I haven't heard that expression used by people from the UK or Canada. Colleges in these countries seem to exist only as entities within universities, never as independent, stand-alone schools. In the US, colleges can be parts of universities (though there are generally fewer colleges per university than at British universities, and they're organized by discipline), but we also have stand-alone technical, liberal arts, or community colleges.

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Colleges in Canada do exist as independent schools, but the term has a different meaning here. These are schools where people would go to get certificates or diplomas. Some of them have started offering bachelors degrees, too.

'Where you going?'

'Up to the college. University has a two for one on chips, down the caff.'

'Adios.'

...

I always get a 'nice feeling' if I can ditch a definite article or two in prose. I thought this was only natural ambition among great poets and such-like, guys like me, mm.

As for accents: working as I do among agricultural folk, I find it very curious but rare - in Sussex of all places - here, cockney borders W country ways, and vestiges of the Sussex accent spread a brother voice down through Souffampen on t' Plimuff and the border - thinking Booed [Bude, Englander] hew

Accents have fads & moments in the sun. Currently a 'cod Lancashire' is the voice of goodness in all political broadcasts: 'At ther Canservative party we suppert tha rights of haad werkin peeple.'

ahhh loverly.

[father was a Yorkshireman, I am schizolistic with the word soup, personally speak like a ponce.]

All best

For example, my husband's parents (Derbyshire) refer to their daughter as "our Mel", rather than just using her name, and they do this for various other relationships. They refer to my sister as "your Sarah". I find it funny: it implies an ownership I don't feel, but it's very common here.

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I'm Derbyshire too. My favourite form of this construction is "That Mel" for someone who is somehow beyond the pale. Pure shade.

Old Hack said:

We do talk about going to college: but here, university and college offer very different things. Universities offer degrees; colleges offer more vocational courses, and are more common for people aged 16-18 rather than the 18-22 age band that most universities cater to. Unless, of course, you're talking about the various colleges which make up the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, or Imperial College, which is a London university (my son studies maths there, and it's wonderful).

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That's what I was trying to get at. In the US we also have public and private stand-alone academic and liberal arts colleges (as the Claremont colleges or Reed College or the SUNY system colleges in New York state) that offer bachelor's degrees. We also have public community colleges, which offer a variety of two-year technical or vocational degrees but also have academic classes for people who want to transfer to a four-year college or university as juniors and/or get a two-year "AA" degree.

Universities in the US also have colleges within them, but they're generally different from the colleges at British universities. For instance, I graduated with a zoology degree from the college of letters and sciences at my alma mater. There were also colleges of agriculture, engineering, medicine, veterinary medicine, a graduate school (which encompassed grad students across different departments and disciplines), and a law school at this university. Each college would have many different divisions and departments within it.

As I understand it, British schools have a multitude of colleges that overlap greatly in their programs of study and departments within and that occupy distinct buildings on their campuses (or within a town, as with Oxford), and each have their own rules, requirements, faculty, eligibility and traditions.

Anyway, this was a digression. I'm not sure why we in the US say at the university instead of at university but say at college instead of at the college. Speech habits seem to take a life of their own once they get established.

Roxxsmom said:

Universities in the US also have colleges within them, but they're generally different from the colleges at British universities. For instance, I graduated with a zoology degree from the college of letters and sciences at my alma mater. There were also colleges of agriculture, engineering, medicine, veterinary medicine, a graduate school (which encompassed grad students across different departments and disciplines), and a law school at this university. Each college would have many different divisions and departments within it.

As I understand it, British schools have a multitude of colleges that overlap greatly in their programs of study and departments within and that occupy distinct buildings on their campuses (or within a town, as with Oxford), and each have their own rules, requirements, faculty, eligibility and traditions.
.

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Generally in UK if you refer to "school" you are talking about school for 5 to 18 year olds, not University.
But school can be used in the departmental sense, though department is more common for most subjects. Though Vet School tends to be the usual term, rather than department. So maths/physics/chemistry/biology department, but school of veterinary science...

Colleges - Oxford and Cambridge have departments for each subject, and with science subjects, there will be lab buildings. Each college has members of teaching staff in a given subject (though not necessarily every subject) plus students - but for lectures or lab sessions they are in a lecture theatre or lab - and the lecturer will be teaching the entire year for that subject regardless of which college they come from. Tutorials are most likely to be in the college where the lecturer is a don, but whether it is limited to students who are members of that college I don't know. An Oxbridge college is more about where you eat, sleep and study outside of formal lectures and lab sessions.


Oh and regarding referring to "baby" I too think it is horribly cutesy pie. Right up there with "and how are we today?" There was a thread a while back about how people addressed each other - Mr, Mrs, surname - and it seems a habit in hospital to be ultra-friendly and address a person by their first name, whether they want it or not.

... in the US say at the university instead of at university but say at college instead of at the college. Speech habits seem to take a life of their own once they get established.


In the UK if you said 'at the university...' I would think you meant the college down the road, unless you were semi-literate, then I'd compute and comprehend, you know? Generally, if you said 'at university' I might understand this to be anywhere in the world.

Orianna2000 said:

I've been reading and watching "Call the Midwife" lately, and one thing that stands out this time (more than the first time I read the books/watched the show) is how the midwives don't use "the" when referring to the babies they deliver, or to doctors, or even other nurses. It's never, "Hold the baby," or "Get the doctor." It's always, "Let me just give Baby a bath," or "Doctor needs you to push now." I found this rather strange, but I'm not sure whether it's a British thing, or a 1950s thing, or what. (It's set in London's East End, during the late 1950s.)

Since one of my novels is set in modern-day London, I need to know if this is something I should work in, or if I'm okay using "the" when the midwife refers to the MC's baby. Any thoughts?

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It's a midwife/nurse thing. My family's from London and no-one talks like this, however healthcare practitioners generally refer to babies as Baby (like a proper noun) until the baby's been named. (Or until Baby's been named, if you want to say it that way.)

Also, for legal/census purposes, if a baby's just been born and not named yet, they'll go down on records as Baby [family name], e.g. Baby Smith.

The thing of referring to the doctor as Doctor like it's their given name, it's kind of how people speak to children, and it's a bit patronising, but that's also how nurses tended to speak, at least in the 50s. I'd say it's more of a healthcare practitioner thing than any dialectual feature. Mostly people would say "the doctor", but when it comes to addressing people directly, they will be addressed as Doctor, Nurse, Vicar (what Church of England priests are called) etc, as in "more tea, Vicar?" but when not addressing someone you use the, as in "the vicar wants more tea".

Calling an unborn baby of indeterminate gender Baby goes down better than calling it It. So i've found.