ABSTRACT
Sheridan was Irish, Buchanan was a Scot; it is no small irony that it is from the edges of the dominant culture that these two prominent elocution masters arrive with their prescriptions for 'proper English'. No small irony but perhaps too not really a surprise since it was precisely those who were the marginalised but aspirant who were most sensitive to the indices of linguistic and social identity in a turbulent culture. However, if Sheridan's prescriptions were couched in terms of the desirability of laying down the foundations for successful communication, then Buchanan's know no such pretensions. The intentions of his work announce themselves in his title: the task is to establish a mode of pronunciation, uniform of course, but elegant too, throughout the different countries which constitute Britain. And naturally it is to be the pronunciation practised by the learned and polite. Again then what we find in this text is the imposition of a certain form of pronunciation as the model and once more this has a long-standing precedent. As early as Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589) for example, there is a clear social and geographical delimitation of the acceptable form of the language: 'that which is spoken in the King's court, or in the good townes and cities within the land, than in the marches and frontiers, or in port townes, where strangers haunt for traffic's sake.' In Buchanan's case, however, the imposition of the standard of pronunciation is not justified in terms of the ease of communication, but by the political prestige it would bring to the nation, the clear demarcation of the form of speech to be used in public speaking, and the social unity it would engender amongst the nation's subjects.
