George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion tells a story of a phonetics professor Henry Higgins, who makes a bet with Colonel Pickering that he can transform Eliza Doolittle, a thick-accented Cockney flower girl or a "squashed cabbage leaf" (as he himself describes her) into a fine duchess within three months. Professor Higgins is a man who can say where a person comes from by his or her accent. In the play (and film) the emphasis in changing one’s social class is more on learning to speak the right accent than on other significant factors. Higgins stresses that Eliza has to abandon her "Kerbstone English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days" and learn how to speak beautifully. In Shaw’s days (that is at the beginning of the 20^th century) Britain was a very class-ridden society, and accent was a very good marker of one’s social class.

In this essay I will analyse Eliza’s transformation from " Draggle-tailed guttersnipe" into an eloquent lady. I won’t mention anything special about the author or the play itself.

Stages in language development

1. The first stage, "the incarnate insult to the English Language"

A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech; that your native language is the language of Milton and Shakespeare and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon."

At that stage Eliza is a common flower girl from Lisson Grove. As John Honey stated in his book Does Accent Matter? Eliza’s accent is made to emphasise the ugliness of the Cockney speech. Cockney accent is regarded as being one of the least prestigious accents in Britain. The film has Eliza uttering strange expressions such as Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow and Garn to which Professor Higgins’s reaction is "Heavens, what a sound!" The following excerpt aims at illustrating what Eliza’s speech sounds like.

ELIZA. Nah then, Freddy: look wh' y' gowin, deah. 

All my voylets trod in the mad.

THE MOTHER. How do you know that my son's name is Freddy?   

ELIZA. Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, if fewd dan y' de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel's flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin.

Being a Cockney Eliza usually drops /h/, but it’s sporadically heard at the beginning of the word. As in the short excerpt of the dialogue above, she says "eez" for He’s, "e" for he and "eed" for He’d.

/h/-dropping in general is aptly presented in a scene in which a sarcastic bystander taunts Higgins by saying that he knows where Professor comes from. "Anwell’s Insane Asylum", he scoffs at him, but Higgins helpfully corrects "Hanwell’s Insane Asylum".

Eliza pronounces some vowels, diphtongs and consonants in a different way than she "should".

• /ʌ/ heard as /æ /

"All my violets trod in the mud" (mud close to /mæ d/, not /mʌd/)

"…hundreds of thousands of times!" (/hæ ndrəd/ /Ɵæ ʊzənd/)

• What is heard instead of /æ / is close to /e/

"Cheer up, Captain; and buy a flower off a poor girl" (Captain as /keptɪn/, not /kæ ptɪn/)

And Buckingham Palace for her is "Bucknam Pelis"

• /eɪ/ sounds like /æ ɪ/

"Thank you kindly, lady" (lady pronounced as /læ ɪdɪ/ and not /leɪdɪ/ )

"Will you pay me off then"(pay close to /pæ ɪ/, not /peɪ/)

• /aʊ/ is close to /æ ə/

"Oh, we are proud" ( /præ əd/ )

• Of the consonants /ɵ/ is sometimes heard as /f/

"But I ain’t done nothing wrong by speakin’ to the gentleman!" (nothing /nʌfɪŋk/.)

In the sentence above, the -ing ending sounds like -iŋk.

More often the -ing ending sounds as if it were written as -in’, so it’s pronounced as w n, not w ½ .

"gowin’ " (going), "payin’ " (paying)

Glottal stops are common sometimes at the end of a word like but, what…

It was also heard in the middle in words like her Bucknam Pelis /B § knc m pelw s/

There are many grammatical "mistakes" Eliza’s speech.

• The use of double negative is very common. She produces sentences like

"I am a good girl, I am; and I won’t pick up no free-and-easy ways"

"I don’t want no loonies teaching me"

• These double negations are often accompanied by the form ain’t.

"That ain’t proper writin’ "

"Eighteenpence ain’t no object to me"

"It ain’t decent"

Ain’t may stand for negative forms of the present tense of be (aren’t, isn’t, am not)

• Ain’t may also correspond to the negative present of the auxiliary verb have:

"I ain’t done nothing wrong…"

"I ain’t got sixty pounds!"

• Very often the auxiliary have is omitted in positive present perfect sentences resulting in sentences like "I always been a good girl." In some sentences the past tense is expressed using the present form as in "I come in a taxi" , not I came in a taxi.

• She uses the form was for were (you was…)

• There’s also a lot of repetition in her speech.

"I’m a good girl, I am"

"You’re a great bully, you are"

• In some of her sentences never stands for didn’t.

"I never asked to go to Bucknam Pelis, I didn’t"

Other grammatical mistakes include:

"I got my feelings the same as anyone else!"

Her vocabulary contains some words that are typically British.

• "…and I had to pay four-and-six a week" (shilling)
• "Eighteenpence ain’t no object to me"
• "A bob for two minutes!" (shilling)
• "He’s off his chump" (crazy)
• "Take the whole bloomin’ basket for sixpence!"

This was not heard in the film, but in the original play both Eliza and her father complain of being "worrited" in a sense of being harassed.

One feature of Cockney English is totally missing in Eliza’s speech. That’s the famous rhyming slang. But until the 1930s its prevalence was quite rare, and Shaw never used it.

2. The Second Stage

Higgins begins to teach Eliza to talk like a lady. The first thing is to get her pronunciation right.

 

Here Professor Higgins (Leslie Howard) puts marbles in Eliza’s (Wendy Hiller) mouth to improve her elocution.

-Now, repeat slowly after me: "The shallow depression in the west of these islands is likely to move in a more easterly direction"

 

 

• When Eliza is learning how to pronounce /ew / correctly she has to repeat the sentence :

"The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plains"

• In order to improve her /h/, Eliza has to repeat this sentence

"But in Hampshire, Hereford and Hartford hurricanes hardly ever happen".

She practises this with a gas flame, which shows when her /h/ is aspirated enough.

When Higgins is finished with fixing her basic pronunciation, he decides to test her on his mother. At first everything goes fine, except that her pedantic pronunciation sounds a bit too artificial. But then, as she starts to talk about her aunt, her pronunciation and articulation remain fine, but she starts to use some ungrammatical forms and slang words.

"Them what pinched it done her in" was quite a big mistake.

• Firstly, it’s totally ungrammatical. Here the demonstrative pronoun them corresponds to those. Hence "Them what…" means those who.

A similar structure was found in the sentence "Them she lived with…".

• Secondly, "done her in " is actually a past tense (did her in).
• And thirdly, the other listeners don’t understand the verb to do someone in (to kill someone). However, they do understand the other slang verb, to pinch (to steal) as it’s a slang term also in Standard English.

There were other ungrammatical sentences, such as " There’s lots of women has to make their husbands drunk…" Higgins decides that it’s time for Eliza to leave when she is about to say "What I always says…"

A feature that’s similar to her father’s "I wants my daughter, that’s what I want" . The third person singular "s" is put on all persons of the verb.

The most dreadful mistake, however, is Eliza’s last line there. When Eliza is leaving, Freddy asks whether she’s going to be walking across the park. "Not bloody likely, she exclaims, I’m going in a taxi". The strong effect of the word bloody is well presented here, as one guest is totally shocked and wonders "I shall never be able to bring myself to use that word". ( Higgins swears a lot in the film, but he uses the expression the devil all the time. )

But Higgins is kind enough to give her another chance, at the Embassy Ball. Now that Eliza has her pronunciation all right, she has to learn what to say in the right circumstances.

3. The Final Stage, "the Fine Duchess"

After hours and hours of hard work Eliza is finally transformed into a society lady. In addition to the right pronunciation she knows how to address prestigious people. At the Embassy Ball everything goes wonderfully. From the moment when she opens her mouth and says "How kind of you to let me come." everyone is fascinated by this young lady. Her speech is flawless, almost too perfect. They wonder who this remarkable young lady can be; who can speak such perfect English?

"… too perfect. Can you show me any Englishwoman, who speaks English as it should be spoken. There’s no such thing. The English don’t know how to speak their language. Only foreigners, who have been taught to speak it, speak it right."

This was the situation in Shaw’s days, and his famous line "it’s impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him" held true back then. Nowadays accent differences in Britain are not as crucial as in those days. Shaw’s play has been criticised for "over-simplification of the way accents can work in British society to transform people’s social status." (John Honey, p.181) Accent is a very good start, but people have to learn what to say in given situations.

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Reference works:

• Shaw, George Bernard PYGMALION (1912)
  • the original play as published
  • the film version of the play, directed by Anthony Asquith (1938)
• Honey, John DOES ACCENT MATTER? (1989)
• Hughes, Arthur; Trudgill Peter ENGLISH ACCENTS AND DIALECTS (1979)
• McCrum, Robert; THE STORY OF ENGLISH (1986) Cran, William; MacNeil, Robert