Let me introduce myself, Bernard Shaw.

I am asked to give you a specimen of spoken English. But first let me give you a warning. You think you are hearing my voice. But unless you know how to use your gramophone properly, what you are hearing maybe grotesquely unlike any sound, that has ever come from my lips.

A few days ago I heard a gramophone record of a speech by Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, the parliamentary chief of the British Labour Party, who has a fine deep Scottish voice and a remarkably musical and dignified delivery. What I heard was a high pitched, sharp, cackling voice, most unmusical, suggesting a small, egotistical, very ill mannered man, complaining of something. I said, "That is not Mr. MacDonald, I know his voice as well as I know my own." The gramophone operator assured me that it was and showed me the label on the record to prove it. I said, "No, that is not Ramsay MacDonald. But let me see whether I cannot find him for you." Then, as the record started again, I took the screw, which regulates the speed, and slowed the record down gradually until the high pitched yapping changed to the deep tones of Mr. MacDonald's voice. And the unmusical, quarrelsome self-assertion became the melodious rhetoric of the Scottish orator. "There," I said, "that is Mr. MacDonald."

So you see what you are hearing now is not my voice unless your gramophone is turning at exactly the right speed. I have records of famous singers and speakers who are dead; but whose voices I can remember quite well: Adelina Patti, Sarah Bernard, Charles Santley, Caruso, Tamagno. But they sound quite horrible and silly until I have found the right speed for them as I found it for Mr. MacDonalds.

Now the worst of it is that I cannot tell you how to find the right speed for me. Those of you, who have heard me speak, either face to face with me or over the wireless, will have no difficulty. You have just to change the speed until you recognize the voice you remember. But what are you to do, if you have never heard me? Well, I can give you a hint that will help you. If what you hear is very disappointing and you feel instinctively, that must be a horrid man, you may be quite sure the speed is wrong. Slow it down, until you feel that you are listening to an amiable old gentleman of 71 with a rather pleasant Irish voice. Then that is me. All the other people, whom you hear at the other speeds, are impostors, sham Shaws, phantoms who never existed.

I am now going to suppose that you are a foreign student of the English language, and that you desire to speak it well enough to be understood when you travel in the British Commonwealth or in America or when you meet a native of those countries. Or it maybe that you are yourself a native, but that you speak in a provincial or Cockney dialect of which you are a little ashamed or which perhaps prevents you from obtaining some employment, which is open to those only who speak what is called correct English.

Now whether you are a foreigner or a native the first thing I must impress on you is that there is no such thing as ideally correct English. No two British subjects speak exactly alike.

I am a member of a committee established by the British Broadcasting Corporation, for the purpose of deciding how the utterances of speakers employed by the corporation should be pronounced, in order that they should be a model of correct English speech for the British islands.

All the members of that committee are educated persons, whose speech would pass as correct and refined in any society or any employment in London. Our chairman is the poet laureate who is not only an artist, whose materials are the sounds of spoken English, but a specialist in their pronunciation. One of our members is Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, famous not only as an actor, but for the beauty of his speech. I was selected for service on the committee because as a writer of plays I am accustomed to superintend their rehearsals. And to listen critically to the way in which they are spoken by actors who are by profession trained speakers, being myself a public speaker of long experience.

That committee knows as much as anyone knows about English speech. And yet its members do not agree as to the pronunciation of some of the simplest and commonest words in the English language.

The two simplest and commonest words in any language are yes and no. But no two members of the committee pronounce them exactly alike. All that can be said is that every member pronounces them in such a way that they would not only be intelligible in every English speaking country, but would stamp the speaker as a cultivated person, as distinguished from an ignorant and illiterate one.

You will say, "Well, that is good enough for me. That is how I desire to speak." But which member of the committee will you take for your model? There are Irish members, Scottish members, Welsh members, Oxford University members, American members. All recognizable as such by their differences of speech. They differ also according to the country in which they were born. Now as they all speak differently it is nonsense to say that they all speak correctly. All we can claim is that they all speak presentably. And if you speak as they do you will be understood in any English speaking country and accepted as a person of good social standing.

I wish I could offer you your choice among them all as a model. But for the moment I am afraid you must put up with me, an Irish man.

I have said enough to you about the fact that no two native speakers of English speak it alike. But perhaps you are clever enough to ask me whether I myself always speak it in the same way. I must confess at once that I do not. Nobody does.

I am at present speaking to an audience of many thousands of gramophone listeners. Many of whom are trying hard to follow my words syllable by syllable. If I were to speak to you as carelessly as I speak to my wife at home this record would be useless. And if I were to speak to my wife at home as carefully as I am speaking to you she would think that I was going mad. As a public speaker I have to take care that every word I say is heard distinctfully at the far end of large halls containing thousands of people.

But at home, when I have to consider only my wife sitting within six feet of me at breakfast, I take so little pains with my speech, that very often, instead of giving me the expected answer, she says, "Don't mumble and don't turn your head away when you speak . I can't hear a word you are saying". And she also is a little careless. Sometimes I have to say, "What?" two or three times during our meal. And she suspects me of growing deafer and deafer. So she does not say so, because as I am now over 70 it might be true. No doubt I ought to speak to my wife as carefully as I should speak to a queen and she to me as carefully as she would speak to a king. We ought to, but we don't. Don't by the way is short for do not.

We all have company manners and home manners. If you were to call on a strange family and to listen through the key hole, not that I would suggest for a moment that you are capable doing of such a very unladylike or ungentlemanlike thing. But still, if in your enthusiasm for studying languages you could bring yourself to do it, just for a few seconds to hear how a family speak to one another, when there is nobody else listening to them, and then walk into the room and hear how very differently they speak in your presence, the change would surprise you.

Even when our home manners are as good as our company manners, and of course they ought to be much better, they are always different. And the difference is greater in speech than in anything else.

Suppose I forget to wind my watch and it stops I have to ask somebody to tell me the time. If I ask a stranger I say, "What o'clock is it?" The stranger hears every syllable distinctly. But if I ask my wife all she hears is "Clock's it". That is good enough for her, but it would not be good enough for you.

So I am speaking to you now much more carefully than I speak to her. But please don't tell her.

I am now going to address myself especially to my foreign hearers. I have to give them another warning of quite a different type. If you are learning English, because you intend to travel in England and wish to be understood there do not try to speak English perfectly. Because if you do no one will understand you.

I have already explained that 'though there is no such thing as perfectly correct English, there is presentable English, which we call good English. But in London 999 out of every thousand people not only speak bad English, but speak even that very badly. You may say, that even if they do not speak English well themselves, they can at least understand it when it is well spoken. They can when the speaker is English. But when the speaker is a foreigner, the better he speaks, the harder it is to understand him.

No foreigner can ever stress the syllables and make the voice rise and fall in question and answer, assertion and denial, in refusal and consent, in inquiry or information, exactly as a native does. Therefore the first thing you have to do is to speak with a strong foreign accent and speak broken English. That is English without any grammar. Then every English person, to whom you speak, will at once know that you are a foreigner and try to understand you and be ready to help you. He will not expect you to be polite and to use elaborate grammatical phrases. He will be interested in you, because you are a foreigner and pleased by his own cleverness in making out your meaning and being able to tell you what you want to know.

If you say, "Will you have the goodness, sir, to direct me to the railway terminus at Charing Cross," pronouncing all the vowels and consonants beautifully, he will not understand you. And will suspect you of being a beggar or a confidence trickster. But if you shout, "Please, Charing Cross, which way?" you will have no difficulty. Half a dozen people will immediately overwhelm you with directions. Even in private intercourse with cultivated people you must not speak too well.

Apply this to your attempts to learn foreign languages and never try to speak them too well. And do not be afraid to travel, you will be surprised to find out how little you need to know or how badly you may pronounce. Even among English people to speak too well is a pedantic affectation. In a foreigner it is something worse than an affectation; it is an insult to the native who cannot understand his own language when it is too well spoken.

That is all I can tell you. The record will hold no more. Good bye.

......
This speech was recorded in 1927.