U and non-U English - Definition and Overview

U and non-U English usage, with U standing for upper class, and non-U representing the rest, were part of the terminology of popular discourse of social dialects (sociolects) in 1950s Britain and the American Northeast.

The debate was set in motion in 1954 by the British linguist Alan Ross. He coined the terms U and non-U in an article on the difference that social class makes to English language usage, which was published in a relatively obscure professional journal (Ross 1954). His article covered differences of pronunciation and writing style, but it was his attention to differences of vocabulary that received the most attention.

The English author Nancy Mitford was alerted and immediately took up the usage in an essay, “The English Aristocracy” that was published by Stephen Spender in his magazine Encounter in 1954. Mitford provided a glossary of terms used by the upper-classes some of which are in the table at right, unleashing an anxious national debate about English class-consciousness and snobbery, which involved a good deal of humourless soul-searching that itself provided fuel for the fires. The essay was reprinted, with contributions by Evelyn Waugh, John Betjeman and others, as well as Ross's original article, as Noblesse Oblige: an Inquiry into the Identifiable Characteristics of the English Aristocracy in 1956. Betjeman's poem Phone for the fish-knives, Norman concluded the collection, and still remains popular.

It should all have been a lark. However, U and non-U English reflects the anxiety of the middle class in 1950s Britain, recently emerged from post-war austerities, who perhaps ought to have been basking in their cultural triumphancy, as they would a decade later, with the new Mod culture in "Swinging London". In the meantime, the idea that one might "improve oneself" by adopting the culture and manner of one's "betters", instinctively assented to before World War II, was now greeted with resentment.

Refinements of language usage that identify the speaker are nothing new: see Shibboleth, Précieuses. Aristocrats are not the only social group that define themselves by linguistic usages that identify outsiders: compare US Ebonics and the Southern US Good ol' boy network. See also "Street credibility"

References

• Ross, Alan Strode Campbell. 1954. U and non-U, an essay in sociological linguistics in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen.
• Mitford, Nancy (ed.). 1956. Noblesse oblige. London: Hamish Hamilton. ISBN 019860520X.
• John Betjeman's How to get on in society or Phone for the fish-knives, Norman (http://195.40.123.23/vl/poem.asp?id=188)