Let me start here with a definition of the Collins Cobuild Advanced Dictionary (my favorite dictionary by the way): In linguistics, the register of a piece of speech or writing is its level and style of language, which is usually appropriate to the situation or circumstances in which it is used [p. 1309].
Language, as we all know, has always a
purpose -> Communication and the conveying of a message, whereupon the
limits of the term message in this case are widely spread. Now, let’s take a
look at these two sentences:
1. Good evening,
Sir, unfortunately I have solely dissatisfactory tidings for you this evening. I
fear I have to apprise you of the imprisonment of your business associate,
Mister Perkins. Ostensibly he is indicted for participation at illegal
narcotics trade.
2. Yo dude,
what’s up?!! Hey have ya already heard, ye old fella that Perkins guy or
whatever got busted for dealing with drugs, geez, bad news, bad news pal, ain’t
they.
Apparently these two sentences are intended
to pass on the same message; nevertheless these are two completely different
leagues of language. Which one would you say to the Queen and which one would
you tell one of your close friends?! This is the matter that register deals
with. The above stated examples are, as you might have guessed already,
extremely opposed, although neither of them is completely artificial and
somehow excluded from the English language, in that no one would use this
vocabulary.
What do we, however, associate with the first sentence? In my mind, pictures of a butler or a servant appear, speaking to a lord or a lady of the British upper class, after they arrived at their noble residence in an English shire. Sounds like a stereotype (noble sounding English is somehow always associated with British upper class English) but actually that is exactly how I think about it.
While reading
the second sentence a completely different circumstance comes into my mind. I
imagine a park or an urban settlement of block houses in which environment two
teenagers or young people meet on the street and greet themselves before having
a little chat about this and that.
The important thing here is that neither of
these sentences is wrong in any respect. The second might not sound ‘English’
to the majority of you but it is indeed. It is youth language, some sort of
dialect which is spoken between young people up to the age of 20 (from that age
on the usage of this language sounds more and more ridiculous and if you should
use it in our forties you automatically are perceived as in the middle of your
midlife crisis). Somehow all of us use a certain dialect at least I cannot
figure out that there is actually anyone who talks all day and night long in
the highest of high registers even under familiar circumstances, and that’s the
point: under familiar circumstances!
The average guy will immediately change his
style of language and therefore ascend into a higher register if he leaves his
familiar environment and gets in touch with different circumstances and
situations e.g. during a stay at his parents-in-law, at his work place
(especially if there’s customer contact), at an encounter with the police or
any other person with civil servant status and with a person of a higher ‘status’
or let’s say of a higher class (an aristocrat for example), while these
examples are ordered in a scale from 1 (higher register than average but still
low in comparison) to 10 (highest available register), according to my opinion
of course. Right below is an example of a very very high register - of course, overall it's the Queen herself.
Now, after a little introduction to the
term and scope of register per se, there is still the question why students of
the English language got their little problems with register or rather adapting
the concept of register in their active usage of language especially when
facing it for the first time as something you have to learn and know to use.
Well, to start with, I’m pretty sure that
you have realized that I didn’t form the first (highly formal) sentence off the
top of my head, as it sounds completely artificial and made up. And that’s
exactly what I did. I thought about the message I wanted to convey (someone
telling another one that an acquaintance was arrested for dealing drugs) and
searched purposely for extreme synonyms, by going to http://www.thesaurus.com (a very useful
site indeed), typing in the word that I knew as being of a neutral register and
finally increasing the scale called ‘complexity’ to the highest point, that’s
it. Thus I get phrases of both the very low and the very high register. Like:
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| I made this on my own on Word but unfortunately Blogger doesn't accept these SmartArt's!!! |
As you see the verbs of a higher register are
usually longer and consist of only one part (unlike phrasal verbs for example
which count mostly as informal) and somehow they even sound more formal, don’t
they? You could better imagine a judge saying detain instead of rounding so. up
am I right?
Anyway, let’s finally put our attention
towards the problems that students have with adapting register. For that we have
to go back into high school. I remember my teacher handing out sheets with a variety
of random linking words, without making any mention of register at all. They
wanted you to use them as often and as good as possible. The more moreover’s
and furthermore’s and on top of that’s occurred, the better the grade and the
better the feeling of getting one step closer to the ‘real English’. Our
English teachers (at least in my school) simply didn’t bother teaching us
register at all, maybe because they really didn’t have the time to do so as nowadays
they have to stick to a very tight curriculum or whatever. Fact is, as you come
to university and suddenly have to cope with something like register in
addition to several other items of the English language you feel like being
thrown in at the deep end. All at once, the grade of your text isn’t scaled at
the variety and flamboyant usage of all the linking words, you’ve learned by
heart so bravely at school. That’s problem number one – you are being told that
something that obviously worked at school doesn’t work anymore at university.
Another example that I can remember just
too good would be how you write your texts. At some point you have to or want
to look up new vocabulary inevitably. Let us now look through the eyes of an average
(or maybe not so average) student. In his opinion he doesn’t want to use the
word ‘forbid’ twice (that’s so poor), so he looks up some synonyms. There is ‘to
disallow’ but, well, no better not, sounds too A1-English-like, hmm, but hey,
there is ‘to impede’ and ‘to embargo’ or even better ‘to preclude’, that’s it, very long and sounds greatly
complex, better use that so that my teacher thinks I have a great style. Now he
simply adds the word ‘to preclude’ in his homework, without thinking about
looking it up and checking if it has really the same meaning, because why, it’s
listed as a synonym to forbid thus it has to mean exactly the same as ‘to forbid
‘of course (it doesn’t by the way). The homework, however, was to write a
letter to a close friend and so the verb ‘to preclude’ stands in the middle of
the letter, decorated by many surrounding ‘it’s’ and ‘ain’t’s’ and ‘ya’s’ and ‘gonna’s’
and so forth. In other words we combine words (both familiar and unfamiliar) of
any register. It must be horrible for an
English teacher to read through this.
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| Click on it to enlarge it! |
It gets even worse if some words are in a completely different register than you expect them because you have used them all the time without thinking about this problem. The word ‘therefore’ for example is one of the traps that I always get caught in because I have adapted this word long ago in my active vocabulary and I use it for ‘deshalb’ in every single context under any circumstances. I know that there are other expressions like ‘that is why’ or ‘thus’ or just ‘so’ but I have never really thought about using them because I got really familiar with ‘therefore’. Now I know that it is of a very high register and can’t always be used.
Unfortunately I haven’t found a dictionary
or a website that deals solely or especially with the register of words, something
where you can put in the word and it tells you of which register it is. That’s
a problem in my opinion, as I don’t know of which register new words and
especially phrases and conjunctions are when I find or look them up in a
dictionary. There are however some helpful keys to somehow deduce the register.
- In a dictionary, if you see the abbreviations coll. (colloquial), sl. (slang) or vulg. (vulgar) next to a word, than it’s definitely of a low(er) register.
- If a word is very long and sounds complex (like ostensibly) or French (like resemble) than it’s mostly of a high(er) register
- Phrasal verbs like ‘get trough’ (pass) or ‘to get across’ (communicate) are mostly considered as of a lower register.
Well,
guys I think I should end here, nevertheless I want to give you a link to a useful page concerning ‘How to use register properly’. I hope you liked
this (rather not that) ‘short’ introduction and hopefully some day we will
laugh about our current issues with that damn register!
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