Raising the Standard: The Queen’s English, BBC English and Received Pronunciation. by Nicolas Hurst (Faculty of Letters, Porto) The English language has come a long way from its somewhat obscure origins many centuries ago on a rather small island off the coast of north-west Europe. Today, the language, or rather the people who use the language, occupy a huge diversity of geographical locations and perform an almost infinite multiplicity of functions with the language, both written and spoken. In this context, how is it possible to talk of a “Standard English”? The definition provided by Johnson and Johnson in their “Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Applied Linguistics” is a good starting point: “Standard English is a dialect with the most prestige and/or influence within the English speaking community, used to perform various official and ceremonial functions in spoken and written forms. It is the most widespread variety in education, though the extent to which children should be obliged to adhere to it at the expense of their own, is a much-debated issue. Due to its association with the upper and middle classes, it is considered to the “correct” version of English.” (1998: 303/304) Historically speaking, the term “standard” itself has an interesting origin. It appears to have been first used in relation to the rallying of English troops around a group of flags at the Battle of Cowton Moor in 1138 where the Scots invaders were defeated. Henceforth, the King’s Standard came to refer to the specific battle flag of the monarch. In later centuries, the term was applied to a series of weights and measures (standard foot, standard pint, etc) indicating something fixed and of value against which other items can be compared. With specific reference to langauge, McArthur has noted: “By the early 18 th century the term had come to be associated with literature and language, as when Henry Fulton wrote that ‘Among the Romans, Horace is the Standard of Lyric, and Virgil of Epic Poetry’ (1709), Jonathan Swift commented that if English ‘were once refined to a certain Standard, perhaps there might be Ways found to fix it forever’ (1712) , and the grammarian Joseph Priestly observed: ‘The English and the Scotch, had the kingdoms continued separate, might have been two distinct languages, having two different standards of writing.” (1999: 161/162). However, what is perhaps of more interest are the events and processes that led to the establishment of a “high” variety of English, a variety that came to be imbued with power, prestige and privilege. What constituted this “high” variety of English had already become clear in England by the 15 th century (and all around Britain in the next century): the East Midlands variety employed at the courtly, literary and administrative level. The geographical space associated with this variety is dominated by the “prestige triangle” formed by the cities of London, Cambridge and Oxford: “an area of high population, containing the main social and political centre, and the main seats of learning. This was a wealthy agricultural region, and the centre of the growing wool trade.” (Crystal, 2003: 55) The events and processes referred to above are complex and interrelated. For example, the rise and consolidation of the concept of the nation-state of