By Andrew Whittaker
Few international locations rival the wealthy background, creative success and modern verve of england. yet who're the British? What does it suggest to be British and is there this kind of factor as British tradition? There hasn't ever been a time whilst the query has occasioned loads debate.
Speak the tradition: Britain peels again the layers of this wealthy and complicated historical past, exploring the standards – old, political, cultural, inventive – that make the British tick.
British tradition is strewn with names that ring a bell across the world: Shakespeare, Churchill, Dickens, Pinter, Hitchcock, Vivienne Westwood, Lennon and McCartney … communicate the tradition: Britain examines the folks, the historical past and the hobbies that experience formed Britain because it now could be, offering key info in simply digested, enjoyable chunks.
It additionally finds the tradition of lifestyle, exploring adaptations among the English, Scots and Welsh, and dissecting their lifestyle: how they devour, socialise, vote, gown and chortle.
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Extra info for Speak the Culture: Britain
Sample text
1 Language lessons: how the British talk Text matches Old English Beowulf Middle English Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales Early Modern English King James Bible Shakespeare Word counts As many as 4,300 words of modern English derive from Old English, 1,000 are from Old Norse and 10,000 are from Norman French. Where does English come from? Like most strands of British culture, the national tongue has twisted this way and that across the centuries. The Romans didn’t establish the English language. For that we look to the Angles and Saxons of north-west Germany.
However, variations in local accents can be noticeable within a distance of ten miles. Ah dinnae unnerstaun ye: Scots dialect Scots, or Lallans (meaning ‘Lowlands’), contains bits of Gaelic but derives largely from English. While Lallans reflects the old vernacular language of the Scottish lowlands, its evolution has been partly synthetic. Poets like Robert Burns, and later Hugh MacDiarmid in the Scottish Renaissance of the early 20th century, attempted to ‘clean up’ the Scottish tongue, establishing Scots.
Performing arts 5. Cinema, photography and fashion 6. Media and communications 7. Food and drink 8. Living culture: the state of modern Britain Going to the polls between the wars The divisions in British society had always been obvious, but prior to the First World War most people simply accepted their place in the pecking order. However, the gulf between the elite, often behind the lines giving orders, and the largely disenfranchised multitude, doing the dying up at the front, became glaring during the conflict.