108-580: Trousers ( British English ), slacks , or pants ( American , Canadian and Australian English ) are an item of clothing worn from the waist to anywhere between the knees and the ankles, covering both legs separately (rather than with cloth extending across both legs as in robes , skirts , dresses and kilts ). In some parts of the United Kingdom, the word pants is ambiguous: it can mean underpants rather than trousers. Shorts are similar to trousers, but with legs that come down only to around
216-576: A West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands. The resident population at this time was generally speaking Common Brittonic —the insular variety of Continental Celtic , which was influenced by the Roman occupation. This group of languages ( Welsh , Cornish , Cumbric ) cohabited alongside English into
324-433: A belt or suspenders (braces). Unless elastic, and especially for men, trousers usually provide a zippered or buttoned fly . Jeans usually feature side and rear pockets with pocket openings placed slightly below the waist band. It is also possible for trousers to provide cargo pockets further down the legs. Maintenance of fit is more challenging for trousers than for some other garments. Leg-length can be adjusted with
432-458: A fly or fall front opening. As a modernization measure, Tsar Peter the Great of Russia issued a decree in 1701 commanding every Russian man, other than clergy and peasant farmers, to wear trousers. Western dress shall be worn by all the boyars, members of our councils and of our court...gentry of Moscow, secretaries...provincial gentry, gosti,[3] government officials, streltsy,[4] members of
540-446: A hem , which helps to retain fit during the adolescent and early adulthood growth years. Tailoring adjustment of girth to accommodate weight gain or weight loss is relatively limited, and otherwise serviceable trousers may need to be replaced after a significant change in body composition . Higher-quality trousers often have extra fabric included in the centre-back seam allowance, so the waist can be let out further. In Scotland ,
648-692: A sari amounts to cruelty inflicted by the husband and can be a ground to seek divorce. The wife was thus granted a divorce on the ground of cruelty as defined under section 27(1)(d) of the Special Marriage Act, 1954. Until 2016 some female crew members on British Airways were required to wear British Airways' standard "ambassador" uniform, which has not traditionally included trousers. In 2017, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced that its female employees could wear "professional pantsuits and dress slacks" while at work; dresses and skirts had previously been required. In 2018 it
756-559: A century as Received Pronunciation (RP). However, due to language evolution and changing social trends, some linguists argue that RP is losing prestige or has been replaced by another accent, one that the linguist Geoff Lindsey for instance calls Standard Southern British English. Others suggest that more regionally-oriented standard accents are emerging in England. Even in Scotland and Northern Ireland, RP exerts little influence in
864-508: A greater movement, normally [əʊ], [əʉ] or [əɨ]. Dropping a morphological grammatical number , in collective nouns , is stronger in British English than North American English. This is to treat them as plural when once grammatically singular, a perceived natural number prevails, especially when applying to institutional nouns and groups of people. The noun 'police', for example, undergoes this treatment: Police are investigating
972-406: A lesser class or social status and often discounted or considered of a low intelligence. Another contribution to the standardisation of British English was the introduction of the printing press to England in the mid-15th century. In doing so, William Caxton enabled a common language and spelling to be dispersed among the entirety of England at a much faster rate. Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of
1080-516: A more conservative and increasingly rural Northern sound, while "younger" refers to a more mainstream Northern sound largely emerging just since the twentieth century. The vowel systems of Northern and Southern Middle English immediately before the Great Vowel Shift were different in one way. In Northern Middle English, the back close-mid vowel /oː/ in boot had already shifted to front /øː/ (a sound change known as fronting ), like
1188-659: A process called T-glottalisation . National media, being based in London, have seen the glottal stop spreading more widely than it once was in word endings, not being heard as "no [ʔ] " and bottle of water being heard as "bo [ʔ] le of wa [ʔ] er". It is still stigmatised when used at the beginning and central positions, such as later , while often has all but regained /t/ . Other consonants subject to this usage in Cockney English are p , as in pa [ʔ] er and k as in ba [ʔ] er. In most areas of England and Wales, outside
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#17327724585881296-520: A regional accent or dialect. However, about 2% of Britons speak with an accent called Received Pronunciation (also called "the King's English", "Oxford English" and " BBC English" ), that is essentially region-less. It derives from a mixture of the Midlands and Southern dialects spoken in London in the early modern period. It is frequently used as a model for teaching English to foreign learners. In
1404-562: A role in the worldwide dissemination of trousers as a fashion. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sailors wore baggy trousers known as galligaskins . Sailors also pioneered the wearing of jeans – trousers made of denim . These became more popular in the late nineteenth century in the American West because of their ruggedness and durability. Starting around the mid-nineteenth century, Wigan pit-brow women scandalized Victorian society by wearing trousers for their work at
1512-431: A synonym for breeches , that is, trousers. In these dialects, the term underdrawers is used for undergarments. Many North Americans refer to their underpants by their type, such as boxers or briefs . In Australia , men's underwear also has various informal terms including under-dacks , undies , dacks or jocks . In New Zealand , men's underwear is known informally as undies or dacks . In India, underwear
1620-598: A type of tartan trousers traditionally worn by Highlanders as an alternative to the Great Plaid and its predecessors is called trews or in the original Gaelic triubhas . This is the source of the English word trousers . Trews are still sometimes worn instead of the kilt at ceilidhs, weddings etc. Trousers are also known as breeks in Scots , the cognate of breeches . The item of clothing worn under trousers
1728-446: A waistband, belt -loops, and a fly -front. In these dialects, elastic-waist knitted garments would be called pants , but not trousers (or slacks ). North Americans call undergarments underwear , underpants , undies , or panties (the last are women's garments specifically) to distinguish them from other pants that are worn on the outside. The term drawers normally refers to undergarments, but in some dialects, may be found as
1836-406: A working-class costume including ankle-length trousers, or pantaloons (named from a Commedia dell'Arte character named Pantalone ) in place of the aristocratic knee-breeches ( culottes ). (Compare sans-culottes .) The new garment of the revolutionaries differed from that of the ancien regime upper classes in three ways: Pantaloons became fashionable in early nineteenth-century England and
1944-725: Is also due to London-centric influences. Examples of R-dropping are car and sugar , where the R is not pronounced. British dialects differ on the extent of diphthongisation of long vowels, with southern varieties extensively turning them into diphthongs, and with northern dialects normally preserving many of them. As a comparison, North American varieties could be said to be in-between. Long vowels /iː/ and /uː/ are usually preserved, and in several areas also /oː/ and /eː/, as in go and say (unlike other varieties of English, that change them to [oʊ] and [eɪ] respectively). Some areas go as far as not diphthongising medieval /iː/ and /uː/, that give rise to modern /aɪ/ and /aʊ/; that is, for example, in
2052-458: Is also referred to as innerwear . The words trouser (or pant ) instead of trousers (or pants ) is sometimes used in the tailoring and fashion industries as a generic term, for instance when discussing styles, such as "a flared trouser", rather than as a specific item. The words trousers and pants are pluralia tantum , nouns that generally only appear in plural form—much like the words scissors and tongs , and as such pair of trousers
2160-547: Is apparently no universal, overarching classification. There is some evidence, from figurative art , of trousers being worn in the Upper Paleolithic , as seen on the figurines found at the Siberian sites of Mal'ta and Buret' . Fabrics and technology for their construction are fragile and disintegrate easily, so often are not among artefacts discovered in archaeological sites. The oldest known trousers were found at
2268-411: Is based on British English, but has more influence from American English , often grouped together due to their close proximity. British English, for example, is the closest English to Indian English, but Indian English has extra vocabulary and some English words are assigned different meanings. Great Vowel Shift The Great Vowel Shift was a series of pronunciation changes in the vowels of
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#17327724585882376-711: Is called pants . The standard English form trousers is also used, but it is sometimes pronounced in a manner approximately represented by [ˈtruːzɨrz] , as Scots did not completely undergo the Great Vowel Shift , and thus retains the vowel sound of the Gaelic triubhas , from which the word originates. In North America, Australia and South Africa, pants is the general category term, whereas trousers (sometimes slacks in Australia and North America) often refers more specifically to tailored garments with
2484-545: Is called a push chain . However, according to professor Jürgen Handke , for some time, there was a phonetic split between words with the vowel /iː/ and the diphthong /əi/ , in words where the Middle English /iː/ shifted to the Modern English /aɪ/ . For an example, high was pronounced with the vowel /iː/ , and like and my were pronounced with the diphthong /əi/ . Therefore, for logical reasons,
2592-740: Is included in style guides issued by various publishers including The Times newspaper, the Oxford University Press and the Cambridge University Press . The Oxford University Press guidelines were originally drafted as a single broadsheet page by Horace Henry Hart, and were at the time (1893) the first guide of their type in English; they were gradually expanded and eventually published, first as Hart's Rules , and in 2002 as part of The Oxford Manual of Style . Comparable in authority and stature to The Chicago Manual of Style for published American English ,
2700-506: Is pronounced with the vowel /eɪ/ as in mate rather than the vowel /iː/ as in meat . This is a simplified picture of the changes that happened between late Middle English (late ME), Early Modern English (EModE), and today's English (ModE). Pronunciations in 1400, 1500, 1600, and 1900 are shown. To hear recordings of the sounds, click the phonetic symbols. Before labial consonants and also after / j / , /uː/ did not shift, and /uː/ remains as in s ou p . The first phase of
2808-526: Is the usual correct form. However, the singular form is used in some compound words, such as trouser-leg , trouser-press and trouser-bottoms . Jeans are trousers typically made from denim or dungaree cloth. In North America skin-tight leggings are commonly referred to as tights . There are several different main types of pants and trousers, such as dress pants , jeans , khakis , chinos , leggings , overalls , and sweatpants . They can also be classified by fit, fabric, and other features. There
2916-547: The Chambers Dictionary , and the Collins Dictionary record actual usage rather than attempting to prescribe it. In addition, vocabulary and usage change with time; words are freely borrowed from other languages and other varieties of English, and neologisms are frequent. For historical reasons dating back to the rise of London in the ninth century, the form of language spoken in London and
3024-659: The braccae , loose-fitting trousers that were closed at the ankles. Both garments were adopted originally from the Celts of Europe, although later familiarity with the Persian Near East and the Germanic peoples increased acceptance. Feminalia and braccae both began use as military garments, spreading to civilian dress later, and were eventually made in a variety of materials, including leather, wool, cotton and silk. Trousers of various designs were worn throughout
3132-450: The pane-pain merger ) monophthongised to /ɛː/ , and merged with Middle English /aː/ as in mate or /ɛː/ as in meat . During the 16th and 17th centuries, several different pronunciation variants existed among different parts of the population for words like meet , meat , mate , and day . Different pairs or trios of words were merged in pronunciation in each pronunciation variant. Four different pronunciation variants are shown in
3240-658: The East Midlands became standard English within the Court, and ultimately became the basis for generally accepted use in the law, government, literature and education in Britain. The standardisation of British English is thought to be from both dialect levelling and a thought of social superiority. Speaking in the Standard dialect created class distinctions; those who did not speak the standard English would be considered of
3348-576: The English language in England , or, more broadly, to the collective dialects of English throughout the British Isles taken as a single umbrella variety, for instance additionally incorporating Scottish English , Welsh English , and Northern Irish English . Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English acknowledges that British English shares "all the ambiguities and tensions [with]
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3456-719: The Regency era . The style was introduced by Beau Brummell (1778–1840) and by mid-century had supplanted breeches as fashionable street-wear. At this point, even knee-length pants adopted the open bottoms of trousers (see shorts ) and were worn by young boys, for sports, and in tropical climates. Breeches proper have survived into the twenty-first century as court dress , and also in baggy mid- calf (or three-quarter length) versions known as plus-fours or knickers worn for active sports and by young schoolboys. Types of breeches are also still worn today by baseball and American football players, and by equestrians. Sailors may have played
3564-493: The Royal Spanish Academy with Spanish. Standard British English differs notably in certain vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation features from standard American English and certain other standard English varieties around the world. British and American spelling also differ in minor ways. The accent, or pronunciation system, of standard British English, based in southeastern England, has been known for over
3672-439: The Scots language or Scottish Gaelic ). Each group includes a range of dialects, some markedly different from others. The various British dialects also differ in the words that they have borrowed from other languages. Around the middle of the 15th century, there were points where within the 5 major dialects there were almost 500 ways to spell the word though . Following its last major survey of English Dialects (1949–1950),
3780-573: The University of Leeds has started work on a new project. In May 2007 the Arts and Humanities Research Council awarded a grant to Leeds to study British regional dialects. The team are sifting through a large collection of examples of regional slang words and phrases turned up by the "Voices project" run by the BBC , in which they invited the public to send in examples of English still spoken throughout
3888-610: The West Country and other near-by counties of the UK, the consonant R is not pronounced if not followed by a vowel, lengthening the preceding vowel instead. This phenomenon is known as non-rhoticity . In these same areas, a tendency exists to insert an R between a word ending in a vowel and a next word beginning with a vowel. This is called the intrusive R . It could be understood as a merger, in that words that once ended in an R and words that did not are no longer treated differently. This
3996-606: The draped clothing of Greek and Minoan ( Cretan ) culture as an emblem of civilization and disdained trousers as the mark of barbarians. As the Roman Empire expanded beyond the Mediterranean basin, however, the greater warmth provided by trousers led to their adoption. Two types of trousers eventually saw widespread use in Rome: the feminalia , which fit snugly and usually fell to knee length or mid-calf length, and
4104-460: The 1960s, André Courrèges introduced long trousers for women as a fashion item, leading to the era of the pantsuit and designer jeans and the gradual erosion of social prohibitions against girls and women wearing trousers in schools, the workplace and in fine restaurants. In 1969, Rep. Charlotte Reid (R-Ill.) became the first woman to wear trousers in the US Congress . Pat Nixon was
4212-629: The 21st century. RP, while long established as the standard English accent around the globe due to the spread of the British Empire , is distinct from the standard English pronunciation in some parts of the world; most prominently, RP notably contrasts with standard North American accents. In the 21st century, dictionaries like the Oxford English Dictionary , the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English ,
4320-515: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . More than one thousand women participated in 2012. In 2013, Turkey's parliament ended a ban on women lawmakers wearing trousers in its assembly. Also in 2013, an old bylaw requiring women in Paris, France to ask permission from city authorities before "dressing as men", including wearing trousers (with exceptions for those "holding a bicycle handlebar or
4428-836: The English Language (1755) was a large step in the English-language spelling reform , where the purification of language focused on standardising both speech and spelling. By the early 20th century, British authors had produced numerous books intended as guides to English grammar and usage, a few of which achieved sufficient acclaim to have remained in print for long periods and to have been reissued in new editions after some decades. These include, most notably of all, Fowler's Modern English Usage and The Complete Plain Words by Sir Ernest Gowers . Detailed guidance on many aspects of writing British English for publication
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4536-408: The English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English ), beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English. Through this massive vowel shift , the pronunciation of all Middle English long vowels altered. Some consonant sounds also changed, specifically becoming silent;
4644-666: The Germanic schwein ) is the animal in the field bred by the occupied Anglo-Saxons and pork (like the French porc ) is the animal at the table eaten by the occupying Normans. Another example is the Anglo-Saxon cu meaning cow, and the French bœuf meaning beef. Cohabitation with the Scandinavians resulted in a significant grammatical simplification and lexical enrichment of the Anglo-Frisian core of English;
4752-531: The Great Shift slightly earlier. Still, the spelling was changed accordingly (e.g., Middle High German bīzen → modern German beißen "to bite"). This timeline uses representative words to show the main vowel changes between late Middle English in the year 1400 and Received Pronunciation in the mid-20th century. The Great Vowel Shift occurred in the lower half of the table, between 1400 and 1600–1700. The changes after 1700 are not considered part of
4860-427: The Great Vowel Shift affected the Middle English close-mid vowels /eː oː/ , as in beet and boot , and the close vowels /iː uː/ , as in bite and out . The close-mid vowels /eː oː/ became close /iː uː/ , and the close vowels /iː uː/ became diphthongs. The first phase was completed in 1500, meaning that by that time, words like beet and boot had lost their Middle English pronunciation and were pronounced with
4968-551: The Great Vowel Shift in Northern and Southern English is shown in the table below. The Northern English developments of Middle English /iː, eː/ and /oː, uː/ were different from Southern English. In particular, the Northern English vowels /iː/ in bite , /eː/ in feet , and /oː/ in boot shifted, while the vowel /uː/ in house did not. These developments below fall under the label "older" to refer to Scots and
5076-717: The Great Vowel Shift. Pronunciation is given in the International Phonetic Alphabet : [REDACTED] Before the Great Vowel Shift, Middle English in Southern England had seven long vowels, /iː eː ɛː aː ɔː oː uː/ . The vowels occurred in, for example, the words mite , meet , meat , mate , boat , boot , and bout , respectively. The words had very different pronunciations in Middle English from those in Modern English: In addition, Middle English had: After around 1300,
5184-933: The Middle Ages in Europe, especially by men. Loose-fitting trousers were worn in Byzantium under long tunics , and were worn by many tribes, such as the Germanic tribes that migrated to the Western Roman Empire in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages , as evidenced by both artistic sources and such relics as the fourth-century costumes recovered from the Thorsberg peat bog (see illustration). Trousers in this period, generally called braies , varied in length and were often closed at
5292-922: The Oxford Manual is a fairly exhaustive standard for published British English that writers can turn to in the absence of specific guidance from their publishing house. British English is the basis of, and very similar to, Commonwealth English . Commonwealth English is English as spoken and written in the Commonwealth countries , though often with some local variation. This includes English spoken in Australia , Malta , New Zealand , Nigeria , and South Africa . It also includes South Asian English used in South Asia, in English varieties in Southeast Asia , and in parts of Africa. Canadian English
5400-712: The South East, there are significantly different accents; the Cockney accent spoken by some East Londoners is strikingly different from Received Pronunciation (RP). Cockney rhyming slang can be (and was initially intended to be) difficult for outsiders to understand, although the extent of its use is often somewhat exaggerated. Londoners speak with a mixture of accents, depending on ethnicity, neighbourhood, class, age, upbringing, and sundry other factors. Estuary English has been gaining prominence in recent decades: it has some features of RP and some of Cockney. Immigrants to
5508-550: The UK in recent decades have brought many more languages to the country and particularly to London. Surveys started in 1979 by the Inner London Education Authority discovered over 125 languages being spoken domestically by the families of the inner city's schoolchildren. Notably Multicultural London English , a sociolect that emerged in the late 20th century spoken mainly by young, working-class people in multicultural parts of London . Since
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#17327724585885616-576: The United Kingdom , as well as within the countries themselves. The major divisions are normally classified as English English (or English as spoken in England (which is itself broadly grouped into Southern English , West Country , East and West Midlands English and Northern English ), Northern Irish English (in Northern Ireland), Welsh English (not to be confused with the Welsh language ), and Scottish English (not to be confused with
5724-465: The West Scottish accent. Phonological features characteristic of British English revolve around the pronunciation of the letter R, as well as the dental plosive T and some diphthongs specific to this dialect. Once regarded as a Cockney feature, in a number of forms of spoken British English, /t/ has become commonly realised as a glottal stop [ʔ] when it is in the intervocalic position, in
5832-596: The Yanghai cemetery, extracted from mummies in Turpan , Xinjiang , western China, belonging to the people of the Tarim Basin ; dated to the period between the thirteenth and the tenth century BC and made of wool, the trousers had straight legs and wide crotches, and were likely made for horseback riding. Trousers enter recorded history in the sixth century BC, on the rock carvings and artworks of Persepolis , and with
5940-410: The adjective little is predominant elsewhere. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within the United Kingdom, and this could be described by the term British English . The forms of spoken English, however, vary considerably more than in most other areas of the world where English is spoken and so a uniform concept of British English is more difficult to apply to
6048-530: The appearance of horse-riding Eurasian nomads in Greek ethnography. At this time, Iranian peoples such as Scythians , Sarmatians , Sogdians and Bactrians among others, along with Armenians and Eastern and Central Asian peoples such as the Xiongnu / Hunnu , are known to have worn trousers. Trousers are believed to have been worn by people of any gender among these early users. The ancient Greeks used
6156-534: The area of the knee, higher or lower depending on the style of the garment. To distinguish them from shorts, trousers may be called "long trousers" in certain contexts such as school uniform , where tailored shorts may be called "short trousers" in the UK. The oldest known trousers, dating to the period between the thirteenth and the tenth centuries BC, were found at the Yanghai cemetery in Turpan , Xinjiang ( Tocharia ), in present-day western China . Made of wool,
6264-488: The award of the grant in 2007, Leeds University stated: that they were "very pleased"—and indeed, "well chuffed"—at receiving their generous grant. He could, of course, have been "bostin" if he had come from the Black Country , or if he was a Scouser he would have been well "made up" over so many spondoolicks, because as a Geordie might say, £460,000 is a "canny load of chink". Most people in Britain speak with
6372-426: The close vowels /iː uː/ could have diphthongised before the close-mid vowels /eː oː/ raised. Otherwise, high would probably rhyme with thee rather than my . This type of chain is called a drag chain . The second phase of the Great Vowel Shift affected the Middle English open vowel /aː/ , as in mate , and the Middle English open-mid vowels /ɛː ɔː/ , as in meat and boat . Around 1550, Middle English /aː/
6480-411: The close-mid vowels /eː oː/ were the first to shift. As the Middle English vowels /eː oː/ were raised towards /iː uː/ , they forced the original Middle English /iː uː/ out of place and caused them to become diphthongs /ei ou/ . This type of sound change, in which one vowel's pronunciation shifts so that it is pronounced like a second vowel, and the second vowel is forced to change its pronunciation,
6588-622: The country. The BBC Voices project also collected hundreds of news articles about how the British speak English from swearing through to items on language schools. This information will also be collated and analysed by Johnson's team both for content and for where it was reported. "Perhaps the most remarkable finding in the Voices study is that the English language is as diverse as ever, despite our increased mobility and constant exposure to other accents and dialects through TV and radio". When discussing
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#17327724585886696-427: The cuff or even had attached foot coverings, although open-legged pants were also seen. By the eighth century there is evidence of the wearing in Europe of two layers of trousers, especially among upper-class males. The under layer is today referred to by costume historians as drawers , although that usage did not emerge until the late sixteenth century. Over the drawers were worn trousers of wool or linen, which in
6804-523: The diphthongs /ei ou/ shifted to /ɛi ɔu/ , then /əi əu/ , and finally to Modern English /aɪ aʊ/ . This sequence of events is supported by the testimony of orthoepists before Hodges in 1644. However, many scholars such as Dobson (1968) , Kökeritz (1953) , and Cercignani (1981) argue for theoretical reasons that, contrary to what 16th-century witnesses report, the vowels /iː uː/ were immediately centralised and lowered to /əi əu/ . Evidence from Northern English and Scots ( see below ) suggests that
6912-436: The example of Byzantium led to the increasing use of long tunics by men, hiding most of the trousers from view and eventually rendering them an undergarment for many. As undergarments, these trousers became briefer or longer as the length of the various medieval outer garments changed, and were met by, and usually attached to, another garment variously called hose or stockings . In the fourteenth century it became common among
7020-492: The first American First Lady to wear trousers in public. In 1989, California state senator Rebecca Morgan became the first woman to wear trousers in a US state senate. Hillary Clinton was the first woman to wear trousers in an official American First Lady portrait. Women were not allowed to wear trousers on the US Senate floor until 1993. In 1993, Senators Barbara Mikulski and Carol Moseley Braun wore trousers onto
7128-630: The floor in defiance of the rule, and female support staff followed soon after; the rule was amended later that year by Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Martha Pope to allow women to wear trousers on the floor so long as they also wore a jacket. In Malawi women were not legally allowed to wear trousers under President Kamuzu Banda 's rule until 1994. This law was introduced in 1965. Since 2004 the International Skating Union has allowed women to wear trousers instead of skirts in ice-skating competitions. In 2009, journalist Lubna Hussein
7236-495: The general population. Men's clothes in Hungary in the fifteenth century consisted of a shirt and trousers as underwear, and a dolman worn over them, as well as a short fur-lined or sheepskin coat. Hungarians generally wore simple trousers, only their colour being unusual; the dolman covered the greater part of the trousers. Around the turn of the sixteenth century it became conventional to separate hose into two pieces, one from
7344-521: The guilds purveying for our household, citizens of Moscow of all ranks, and residents of provincial cities...excepting the clergy and peasant tillers of the soil. The upper dress shall be of French or Saxon cut, and the lower dress...--waistcoat, trousers, boots, shoes, and hats--shall be of the German type During the French Revolution of 1789 and following, many male citizens of France adopted
7452-458: The idea of two different morphemes, one that causes the double negation, and one that is used for the point or the verb. Standard English in the United Kingdom, as in other English-speaking nations, is widely enforced in schools and by social norms for formal contexts but not by any singular authority; for instance, there is no institution equivalent to the Académie française with French or
7560-528: The job demanded it. In the post-war era, trousers became acceptable casual wear for gardening, the beach, and other leisure pursuits. In Britain during World War II the rationing of clothing prompted women to wear their husbands' civilian clothes, including trousers, to work while the men were serving in the armed forces. This was partly because they were seen as practical for work, but also so that women could keep their clothing allowance for other uses. As this practice of wearing trousers became more widespread and as
7668-403: The last southern Midlands accent to use the broad "a" in words like bath or grass (i.e. barth or grarss ). Conversely crass or plastic use a slender "a". A few miles northwest in Leicestershire the slender "a" becomes more widespread generally. In the town of Corby , five miles (8 km) north, one can find Corbyite which, unlike the Kettering accent, is largely influenced by
7776-518: The later Norman occupation led to the grafting onto that Germanic core of a more elaborate layer of words from the Romance branch of the European languages. This Norman influence entered English largely through the courts and government. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility and with a huge vocabulary . Dialects and accents vary amongst the four countries of
7884-455: The local coal mines . They wore skirts over their trousers and rolled them up to their waists to keep them out of the way. Although pit-brow lasses worked above ground at the pit-head, their task of sorting and shovelling coal involved hard manual labour, so wearing the usual long skirts of the time would have greatly hindered their movements. The Korean word for trousers, baji (originally pajibaji ) first appears in recorded history around
7992-581: The long ö in German hören [ˈhøːʁən] "hear". Thus, Southern English had a back close-mid vowel /oː/ , but Northern English did not: In Northern and Southern English, the first step of the Great Vowel Shift raised the close-mid vowels to become close. Northern Middle English had two close-mid vowels – /eː/ in feet and /øː/ in boot – which were raised to /iː/ and /yː/ . Later on , Northern English /yː/ changed to /iː/ in many dialects (though not in all, see Phonological history of Scots § Vowel 7 ), so that boot has
8100-578: The long vowels of Middle English began changing in pronunciation as follows: These changes occurred over several centuries and can be divided into two phases. The first phase affected the close vowels /iː uː/ and the close-mid vowels /eː oː/ : /eː oː/ were raised to /iː uː/ , and /iː uː/ became the diphthongs /ei ou/ or /əi əu/ . The second phase affected the open vowel /aː/ and the open-mid vowels /ɛː ɔː/ : /aː ɛː ɔː/ were raised, in most cases changing to /eː iː oː/ . The Great Vowel Shift changed vowels without merger , so Middle English before
8208-457: The mass internal migration to Northamptonshire in the 1940s and given its position between several major accent regions, it has become a source of various accent developments. In Northampton the older accent has been influenced by overspill Londoners. There is an accent known locally as the Kettering accent, which is a transitional accent between the East Midlands and East Anglian . It is
8316-529: The men of the noble and knightly classes to connect the hose directly to their pourpoints (the padded under jacket worn with armoured breastplates that would later evolve into the doublet ) rather than to their drawers. In the fifteenth century, rising hemlines led to ever briefer drawers until they were dispensed with altogether by the most fashionable elites who joined their skin-tight hose back into trousers. These trousers, which we would today call tights but which were still called hose or sometimes joined hose at
8424-466: The men's clothing wore out, replacements were needed. By the summer of 1944, it was reported that sales of women's trousers were five times more than the previous year. In 1919, Luisa Capetillo challenged mainstream society by becoming the first woman in Puerto Rico to wear trousers in public. Capetillo was sent to jail for what was considered to be a crime, but the charges were later dropped. In
8532-400: The mid-twentieth century, trousers have increasingly been worn by women as well. Jeans , made of denim , are a form of trousers for casual wear widely worn all over the world by people of all genders. Shorts are often preferred in hot weather or for some sports and also often by children and adolescents. Trousers are worn on the hips or waist and are often held up by buttons, elastic,
8640-408: The modern period, but due to their remoteness from the Germanic languages , influence on English was notably limited . However, the degree of influence remains debated, and it has recently been argued that its grammatical influence accounts for the substantial innovations noted between English and the other West Germanic languages. Initially, Old English was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting
8748-451: The reins of a horse") was declared officially revoked by France's Women's Rights Minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem . The bylaw was originally intended to prevent women from wearing the pantalons fashionable with Parisian rebels in the French Revolution . In 2014, an Indian family court in Mumbai ruled that a husband objecting to his wife wearing a kurta and jeans and forcing her to wear
8856-413: The same vowel as feet . Southern Middle English had two close-mid vowels – /eː/ in feet and /oː/ in boot – which were raised to /iː/ and /uː/ . In Southern English, the close vowels /iː/ in bite and /uː/ in house shifted to become diphthongs, but in Northern English, /iː/ in bite shifted but /uː/ in house did not. If the vowel systems at the time of the Great Vowel Shift caused
8964-475: The same vowels as in Modern English. The words bite and out were pronounced with diphthongs, but not the same diphthongs as in Modern English. Scholars agree that the Middle English close vowels /iː uː/ became diphthongs around 1500, but disagree about what diphthongs they changed to. According to Lass, the words bite and out after diphthongisation were pronounced as /beit/ and /out/ , similar to American English bait /beɪt/ and oat /oʊt/ . Later,
9072-682: The shift did not operate on the long back vowels because they had undergone an earlier shift. Similarly, the dialect in Scotland had a different vowel system before the Great Vowel Shift, as /oː/ had shifted to /øː/ in Early Scots . In the Scots equivalent of the Great Vowel Shift, the long vowels /iː/ , /eː/ and /aː/ shifted to /ei/ , /iː/ and /eː/ by the Middle Scots period and /uː/ remained unaffected. The first step in
9180-401: The spoken language. Globally, countries that are former British colonies or members of the Commonwealth tend to follow British English, as is the case for English used by European Union institutions. In China, both British English and American English are taught. The UK government actively teaches and promotes English around the world and operates in over 200 countries . English is
9288-408: The table below. The fourth pronunciation variant gave rise to Modern English pronunciation. In Modern English, meet and meat are merged in pronunciation and both have the vowel /iː/ , and mate and day are merged with the diphthong /eɪ/ , which developed from the 16th-century long vowel /eː/ . Modern English typically has the meet – meat merger : both meet and meat are pronounced with
9396-633: The tenth century began to be referred to as breeches in many places. Tightness of fit and length of leg varied by period, class, and geography. (Open legged trousers can be seen on the Norman soldiers of the Bayeux Tapestry .) Although Charlemagne (742–814) is recorded to have habitually worn trousers, donning the Byzantine tunic only for ceremonial occasions, the influence of the Roman past and
9504-426: The term Great Vowel Shift is occasionally used to include these consonantal changes. The standardization of English spelling began in the 15th and 16th centuries; the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often deviate considerably from how they represent pronunciations . The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a Danish linguist and Anglicist , who coined
9612-462: The term ἀναξυρίδες ( anaxyrides ) for the trousers worn by Eastern nations and σαράβαρα ( sarabara ) for the loose trousers worn by the Scythians. However, they did not wear trousers since they thought them ridiculous, using the word θύλακοι ( thulakoi ), pl. of θύλακος ( thulakos ) 'sack', as a slang term for the loose trousers of Persians and other Middle Easterners . Republican Rome viewed
9720-403: The term. The causes of the Great Vowel Shift are unknown and have been a source of intense scholarly debate; as yet, there is no firm consensus. The greatest changes occurred during the 15th and 16th centuries, and their origins are at least partly phonetic. The main difference between the pronunciation of Middle English in the year 1400 and Modern English ( Received Pronunciation ) is in
9828-603: The theft of work tools worth £500 from a van at the Sprucefield park and ride car park in Lisburn. A football team can be treated likewise: Arsenal have lost just one of 20 home Premier League matches against Manchester City. This tendency can be observed in texts produced already in the 19th century. For example, Jane Austen , a British author, writes in Chapter 4 of Pride and Prejudice , published in 1813: All
9936-429: The time, emerged late in the fifteenth century and were conspicuous by their open crotch which was covered by an independently fastening front panel, the codpiece . The exposure of the hose to the waist was consistent with fifteenth-century trends, which also brought the pourpoint/doublet and the shirt , previously undergarments, into view, but the most revealing of these fashions were only ever adopted at court and not by
10044-403: The traditional accent of Newcastle upon Tyne , 'out' will sound as 'oot', and in parts of Scotland and North-West England, 'my' will be pronounced as 'me'. Long vowels /iː/ and /uː/ are diphthongised to [ɪi] and [ʊu] respectively (or, more technically, [ʏʉ], with a raised tongue), so that ee and oo in feed and food are pronounced with a movement. The diphthong [oʊ] is also pronounced with
10152-730: The trousers had straight legs and wide crotches and were likely made for horseback riding. A pair of trouser-like leggings dating back to 3350 and 3105 BC were found in the Austria–Italy border worn by Ötzi . In most of Europe , trousers have been worn since ancient times and throughout the Medieval period , becoming the most common form of lower-body clothing for adult males in the modern world. Breeches were worn instead of trousers in early modern Europe by some men in higher classes of society. Distinctive formal trousers are traditionally worn with formal and semi-formal day attire . Since
10260-487: The turn of the fifteenth century, but pants may have been in use by Korean society for some time. From at least this time pants were worn by both sexes in Korea. Men wore trousers either as outer garments or beneath skirts, while it was unusual for adult women to wear their pants (termed sokgot ) without a covering skirt. As in Europe, a wide variety of styles came to define regions, time periods and age and gender groups, from
10368-498: The unlined gouei to the padded sombaji . See also: the Laws section below. In Western society, it was Eastern culture that inspired French designer Paul Poiret (1879–1944) to be one of the first to design pants for women. In 1913, Poiret created loose-fitting, wide-leg trousers for women called harem pants, which were based on the costumes of the popular ballet Sheherazade . Written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1888, Sheherazade
10476-488: The value of the long vowels . Long vowels in Middle English had " continental " values, much like those in Italian and Standard German ; in standard Modern English, they have entirely different pronunciations. The differing pronunciations of English vowel letters do not stem from the Great Shift as such but rather because English spelling did not adapt to the changes. German had undergone vowel changes quite similar to
10584-750: The varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon , eventually came to dominate. The original Old English was then influenced by two waves of invasion: the first was by speakers of the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who settled in parts of Britain in the eighth and ninth centuries; the second was the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Old Norman and ultimately developed an English variety of this called Anglo-Norman . These two invasions caused English to become "mixed" to some degree (though it
10692-404: The vowel /iː/ . Words like great and steak , however, have merged with mate and are pronounced with the vowel /eɪ/ , which developed from the /eː/ shown in the table above. Before historic /r/ some of these vowels merged with /ə/ , /ɛ/ , /ɪ/ , /ʊ/ The Great Vowel Shift affected other dialects and the standard English of southern England but in different ways. In Northern England ,
10800-509: The vowel shift had the same number of vowel phonemes as Early Modern English after the vowel shift. After the Great Vowel Shift, some vowel phonemes began merging. Immediately after the Great Vowel Shift, the vowels of meet and meat were different, but they are merged in Modern English, and both words are pronounced as /miːt/ . However, during the 16th and the 17th centuries, there were many different mergers, and some mergers can be seen in individual Modern English words like great , which
10908-444: The waist to the crotch which fastened around the top of the legs, called trunk hose, and the other running beneath it to the foot. The trunk hose soon reached down the thigh to fasten below the knee and were now usually called " breeches " to distinguish them from the lower-leg coverings still called hose or, sometimes stockings . By the end of the sixteenth century, the codpiece had also been incorporated into breeches which featured
11016-402: The word 'British' and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity". Variations exist in formal (both written and spoken) English in the United Kingdom. For example, the adjective wee is almost exclusively used in parts of Scotland, north-east England, Northern Ireland, Ireland, and occasionally Yorkshire , whereas
11124-568: The world are good and agreeable in your eyes. However, in Chapter 16, the grammatical number is used. The world is blinded by his fortune and consequence. Some dialects of British English use negative concords, also known as double negatives . Rather than changing a word or using a positive, words like nobody, not, nothing, and never would be used in the same sentence. While this does not occur in Standard English, it does occur in non-standard dialects. The double negation follows
11232-530: Was announced that female missionaries of that church could wear dress slacks except when attending the temple and during Sunday worship services, baptismal services, and mission leadership and zone conferences. British English British English (abbreviations: BrE , en-GB , and BE ) is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland . More narrowly, it can refer specifically to
11340-501: Was based on a collection of legends from the Middle East called 1001 Arabian Nights. In the early twentieth century, women air pilots and other working women often wore trousers. Frequent photographs from the 1930s of actresses Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn in trousers helped make trousers acceptable for women. During World War II , women employed in factories or doing other "men's work" on war service wore trousers when
11448-517: Was fined the equivalent of $ 200 when a court found her guilty of violating Sudan's decency laws by wearing trousers. In 2012 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police began to allow women to wear trousers and boots with all their formal uniforms. In 2012 and 2013, some Mormon women participated in "Wear Pants to Church Day", in which they wore trousers to church instead of the customary dresses to encourage gender equality within
11556-422: Was never a truly mixed language in the strictest sense of the word; mixed languages arise from the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, who develop a hybrid tongue for basic communication). The more idiomatic, concrete and descriptive English is, the more it is from Anglo-Saxon origins. The more intellectual and abstract English is, the more it contains Latin and French influences, e.g. swine (like
11664-451: Was raised to /æː/ . Then, after 1600, the new /æː/ was raised to /ɛː/ , with the Middle English open-mid vowels /ɛː ɔː/ raised to close-mid /eː oː/ . During the first and the second phases of the Great Vowel Shift, long vowels were shifted without merging with other vowels, but after the second phase, several vowels merged. The later changes also involved the Middle English diphthong /ɛj/ , as in day , which often (but not always, see
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