Estuary English

is supposed to be a new kind of English that is due to take over as a new standard English replacing RP. It is characterized as "a variety of modified regional speech, a mixture of non-regional and local South-Eastern English pronunciation and intonation". If one imagines a continuum with RP and London speech at either end, estuary English speakers are to be found grouped in the middle round.

The phonetic characteristics of Estuary English are as follows:

• many of the features that distinguish it from RP are features it shares with Cockney;

• things that may mark it as being distinctively South-Eastern las against RP which is non-localizable within England.

But these features are spreading geographically and socially, thus losing their localizability and thus to some extend justifying the claim that EE is "tomorrow's RP". Unlike Cockney EE is associated with standard grammar and usage.

EE may be the result of confluence two social trends - an up-market movement (designed to appeal or to satisfy people in the higher social classes) of originally Cockney speakers and a down-market trend towards "ordinary" (typical of (or belonging to) the upper-class of society a posh-accent) speech by the middle class.

If you were unlucky enough to have such an accent (RP), you would lower it, you would try to become more consumer friendly. The variety is distinctive as a dialect, not just as an accent which can be seen from the selection of features which are becoming increasingly widespread.

Estuary English is characterized by the following features:

• Non-rhoticity.

• Use of linking R

• A broad A (ɑː) in words such as bath, grass, laugh, etc.

• T-glottalization: realizing non-initial, most commonly final, /t/ as a glottal stop instead of an alveolar stop, e.g. water (pronounced /wɔːʔə/).

• H-dropping, i.e., Dropping [h] in stressed words (e.g. [æʔ] for hat)

In the first edition of the English Pronouncing Dictionary Daniel Jones described the type of pronunciation as a kind of standard, having its base in the educated pronunciation of London and the Home Counties.

But in recent times the original concept of RP has been diluted due to particular changes in the British society. There are, nevertheless, two limiting factors in defining the model: firstly, the dictionary represents the pronunciation current in usage among speakers of the middle generation while the speech of the young is likely at any time to be unstable, often reflecting transitory fashion; secondly, certain bounds are provided by the nature of the phonological system itself.

13. Dialects in England.

Dialect or variety is distinguished for its vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. In this sense the two major varieties of English, the british English and the American English, as well as any two local varieties, like Lancashire or New York Brooklyn speech, may be treated as “dialects”

Accent is atype of pronunciation or a feature on one which can be found in the speech of any individual or the whole speech community. We can speak an American accent, a French accent in english, and by that we mean only the sound of spoken English, for ex vowels, consonants, stress, rhythm…

We are going to look in greater detail at the RP and at the regional non-RP accents of England.

Roughly speaking the non-RP accents of England may be grouped like this: Southern accents: 1) southern accents (Greater London, Cockney, Kent, Essex, Buckinghamshire); 2) East Anglia accents (Norfolk, Suffolk, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire); 3)South-West accents (Avon, Somerset).

Northern and Midland accents: 1) Northern accents (Northumberland, Cleveland); 2) Yorkshire accents (Lancashire, Cheshire); 4) West Midland (Birmingham)

For certain political, geographical, economic and cultural reasons one of the dialects becomes the standard language of the nation and its accent - the Received Standard Pronunciation. This was the case with London Dialect or, broader, the Southern type of pronunciation variously known as the RP of Britain. In Britain RP stands in strong contrast to all the other ways of pronouncing standard English pronunciations put together. English people are divided by the way they talk into 3 groups: 1)RP-speakers of standard English (without accent); 2)non-RP-speakers (with an accent); 3)who speaks dialects.

The existence of RP gives accent judgements a peculiar importance in England and makes the English more sensitive. It's England alone that standard English speakers are divided by accent bar, on one side of which is RP and on the other - all the other accents.

Outside England (Britain) though it seems to have no prestige and it appears just as a regional as any other way of pronouncing English the existence of RP is a bad rather than a good thing.

Educated Southern speech is very much near-RP accent whereas non-standard accents are very much near Cockney.

It has been long established that Cockney is a social accent - the speech of working-class áreas of the Greater London.

The counties of northern England are not far from the Scottish border, so the influence of the Scotch accent is noticeable, though there are of course many features of the northern English regions. The most typical representative of the speech of this área is Newcastle área.

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