PRONUNCIATIN VARIETIES OF BRITISH ENGLISH
There is a wide range of pronunciation varieties of the English language. These varieties reflect the social class the speaker belongs to, the geographical region he comes from, and they also convey stylistic connotations of speech. Some of these varieties are received pronunciations, others are not.
Every national variant of the English language has an orthoepic norm of its own: RP, or Southern English, for British English, GA for American English, the Australian Standard Pronunciation for Australian English. Each of these orthoepic norms tolerates a definite range of phonemic variation, and each of them has its own peculiarities of combinatory phenomena.
It is generally conceded that the orthoepic norm of British English is "Received Pronunciation" , though, as many scholars state, it is not the only variety of British English pronunciation that is recognized as the ortho-epic norm in present—day Britain.
Received Pronunciation (RP) was accepted as the phonetic norm of English about a century ago. It is mainly based on the Southern English regional type of pronunciation, but has developed its own features which have given it a non—regional character, i.e. there is no region in Britain to which it is native. RP is spoken all over Britain by a comparatively small number of Englishmen who have had the most privileged education in the country — public school education. RP is actually a social standard pronunciation of English. It is often referred to as the prestige accent.
But there are many educated people in Britain who do not speak RP, though their English is good and correct. They speak Standard English*with a regional type of pronunciation.
Scholars divide English people by the way they talk into three groups:
(1) RP speakers of Standard English (those who speak Standard English without any local accent) ;
(2) non—RP speakers of Standard English (those who speak Standard English with a regional accent);
(3) Dialect speakers.
Scholars often note that it is wrong to assume that only one type of pronunciation can be correct. If a particular pronunciation is well—established and current among educated speakers, it should not be treated as incorrect. This primarily concerns the Northern and the Scottish types of pronunciation which are used by many educated people in Britain.
One should distinguish between RP and "educated" regional types of pronunciation (such as Southern, Northern and Scottish types of English pronunciation), on the one hand, and local dialects, on the other.
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One of the best examples of a local dialect is Cockney. It is used by the less educated in the region of London.
Studies of regional and dialectal pronunciations generally concentrate on the phonemic structures of words and differences in the realizations of definite phonemes. But it appears that these pronunciations, besides that, have differences in their phoneme inventories. For example, the Northern type of pronunciation has no / ʌ /, whereas it has / рэ /. The Scottish pronunciation distinguishes between voiced /w/ and voiceless /m/, but it has no /3: /. Cockney has no [θ] и [ ð] phonemes. There are many /h/—less dialects in England. Therefore there are distinctions in the phoneme inventories of various types of pronunciations. Scholars have recently given more attention to the phonological systems of British English varieties of pronunciations, yet much remains to be done.
(+ see Northern & Scotish dialects)
The Northern regional type of English pronunciation
The Northern regional type of English pronunciation is characterized by features that are common to all the dialects used in the northern part of England.
The main distinctions of the Northern type of English pronunciation, as opposed to RP, are as follows:
(a) /æ/ is more open and more retracted back, as in /a/ (e.g."back","bad").
(b) /ɑ:/ is fronted compared with RP /ɑ:/ and it approximates to /æ/ in
words which do not contain "r" in spelling (e.g. "glass", "after"),
(c) /ʊ/ is used instead of /ʌ/ (e.g. "cup", "love", "much"), so there is no
distinction between words like "could" and "cud", "put" and "putt".
(d) / ǝʊ / is pronounced as a monophthongal / ɔ:/ (e.g. "go", "home").
(e) /e/ or are pronounced instead of /ei/ (e.g. "may", "say", "take").
(f) /ɒə/ is widely used, so they distinguish words like "pore" and "paw"
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(g)All tones are drawled and speech is generally slower than in Southern English. The Low Rising Tone is used much oftener than in RP. For example, "Lancashire is the most thickly populated county in England" is pronounced with the Low Rise on the word “Lancashire “. All that tends to give a sing—song quality to speech.
(h) The Scottish type of English Pronunciation
The Scottish type of English Pronunciation is also based on the dialects spoken in Scotland which vary among themselves in some respects. Their common features, which distinguish the Scottish type of pronunciation from RP, are as follows:
(a) / ɜ:/ is not used in the Scottish type of pronunciation, instead of RP /ɜ:/ they use the sequences /ir/, /er/ or /ʌr/ (e.g. "bird"/bird/ "heard /herd/, "word" /wʌrd/. Similarly monophthongs are used instead of diphthongs in "beard", "there", "pure", "poor", "sure", etc.
(b) /u/ is used instead of /au/ (e.g. "down" /dun/).
(c) The Scottish pronunciation does not distinguish between /æ/ and / ɑ:/; words like "bad", "path", "grass", "dance", "half", "part" are pronounced with /æ/, /a/ or /ɒ/.
(d) All vowels are short. There is no distinction in the length of the vowels in words like "pull" and "pool", "cot" and "caught", with the exception that the vowel in inflected words is not as short as the vowel in non—inflected words ("road" — "rowed", "greed" — "agreed")
(e) /r/ is an alveolar flap not only between and before vowels, as in "hurry" and "brown", but also after vowels, as in "word", "born".
(f) A voiceless labiovelar fricative /m/ is used to distinguish between "which" and "witch", "whine" and "wine", e.g. /hwiʧ/ for which, etc.
(g) In the Scottish type of pronunciation there appears a backlingual fricative /x/, which resembles the corresponding Russian sound (e.g. "loch"). There are certain peculiarities in the intonation of the Scottish type of English pronunciation, such as
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(a) Special Questions may end with a high level tone after a fall on the interrogative word, e.g.
RP 'Who's 'having the `grape fruit?
Scot. `Who’s having the 'grape fruit?
(b) A final vocative does not necessarily continue the tune of the General Questions, ..
15. AMERICAN ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION
English is spoken not only in Britain. It is the national language in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and of a great part of the population in Canada. Each of those nations has its own orthoepic norm which exists alongside of regional types and numerous dialects.
Though the national languages have peculiar features of their own, which differentiate them from British English (BE) and from each other, they have much more in common. That is why they are considered to be variants of the same language, the English language.
American English (AE), which is a variant of the English language, has developed its own peculiarities in vocabulary, grammatical structure and pronunciation. American English embraces a wide range of pronunciation varieties. With the beginning of the 19th century the mobility of the population in the USA increased greatly: there was migration to the west of the country, and with the growth of industrial centres a considerable proportion of the farm population moved to the cities. As a result of that, dialectal differences have been reduced to fewer, more or less general, regional types. The most widely used regional types of AE pronunciation are the Eastern, the Southern, and the General American types, the latter spoken mainly in the Middle Atlantic States Region.
The GA (General American) pronunciation is usually referred to as the standard pronunciation of AE, though it is often debated whether there is a standard pronunciation in the USA. Nevertheless it is the GA that has the greatest "acceptability" if not prestige, in the United States.
The peculiarities of GA lie in 1) the pronunciation of sounds and sound combinations; 2) differences in the stress patterns of words, and 3) differences in intonation.
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1) Peculiarities of pronunciation of GA sounds and sound combinations as compared to those of RP.
(a)/r/ in GA is retroflexive, i.e. the tip of the tongue is curled back;
(b)/t/ is voiced between a vowel and a sonorant (as in "battle", "twenty") , or between two vowels the second of which is unstressed (as in "pity", better"). But the distinction between /t/ and 1d1 is not neutralized, because the voiced [t] is extremely short and resembles a one—tap alveolar /r/. Americans easily distinguish between "writer" and "rider", "latter" and "ladder";
(c) /l/is always dark, even before vowels (e.g. "film, look");
(d)/ʃ/ is voiced in words like "excursion" lʒnl, "version" /ʒn/;
(e)/h/ is often dropped in weak syllables, but it is retained when the syllable is stressed (e.g. "I saw him"/ai 'so :im/, but "him" /him/);
(f) /j/ is omitted before /u/ (e.g. "duty" /duti/, "student" /studnt/,
"new"/nu:/);
(g) /d/ is dropped after /l/ and /n/( e.g. "cold", "old", "individual");
(h) /k/ is omitted before /t/ (e.g. "asked" )
(i) The glottal stop /?/ is used instead of /t/ before /m, n, I, r, j, w/ (e.g. "certainly" / S3:? nli/, "that one" / ða?wA n/, etc.)
All American vowels are long.
(f) / æ / instead of /a:/ in words which do not contain "r" in spoiling (e.g. "path", "glass", "laugh", "can't", "last", "grass" etc. Exceptions: "father, palm, balm, alms")'
(I) / æ / in GA is wider and longer than RP / æ /, the Americans pronounce it with a twang (e.g. "man", "pass");
(m) /o u / is much less diphthongal than in RP. It may be represented as /o:/. Thus to represent Englishmen on the American stage the actors very often exaggerate the diphthongal character of /ou/,
(n) /u ǝ/ tends to be monophthongized. (e.g. "usually" / juʒali/, "rural"/'rural/).
The GA /ǝ/phoneme occurs both in stressed syllables (as in "but", "son", "blood") and in unstressed syllables (as in unstressed "of", "was", "does").
2) Peculiarities in the stress patterns of words in GA as compared to RP. American speakers make much greater use of secondary stress in polysyllabic words than British speakers do. In words which end in "-ary", "-ory". "—ery", "—mony", "-ative" the first syllable in the suffix bears tertiary stress (i.e. stress which is somewhat weaker than secondary stress). E.g.'dictioֽnary, 'terriˌtory.
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