14. Differences between Southern and Northern groups of dialect.

We grouped regional accents of England into southern and northern ones. This división is very approximate of course, because there are western and eastern accents but their main accent variations correspond either with southern or northern accentual characteristics. Thus we would like to point put here the main differences between southern and northern accents. Welsh English.

As every one probably knows Wales is a bilingual área. In Wales English dominates over Welsh in urban áreas, in the west and north-west of the country the balance being in favour of Welsh, where English is learnt at schools as a second language.

However, Welsh English at the level of educated speech and writing is not much different from that of English English. Scottish English.

We must first make clear that the status of Scottish English is still debated. Some linguists say that it is a national variant. Others say that it is a dialect.

English has been spoken in Scotland for as long as ii has been spoken in England. In the Highlands and islands of northern and western Scotland, however, Gaelic is still the native language of thousands of speakers from these regions.

Nowadáys educated Scottish people speak a form of Scottish stabdard English which grammaticálly and lexically is not different from English used everywhere, although with an obvious Scottish accent. Northern Ireland English.

The English of northern parts of the island with its centre in Belfast has its roots in Scotland. Now speaking about Northern Ireland, it is true to say that English here is not homogeneous. Áreas of the far north are heavily Scots-influenced. Other parts are marked by less heavily Scots-¡nfluenced varieties of English.

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15. The socio-linguistic situation in the usa. The varieties of American English.

The sociolinguistic situation in the USA moulded by certain historic, geographic, demographic, political, cultural and linguistic factors may be characterized as exoglossic, i.e. having several languages on the same territory with the predominance of American English. The starting point of American English was the English language of the early 17th century which has developed under particular circumstances into an independent variety - the national variant of English in America. The foundations of most diversities in American pronunciation were laid during the colonial period. Some of the present differences in American pronunciation are attributed to that period as well. American English shows a lesser degree of dialect that British English; three main types of cultivated speech are recognized: the Eastern type, the Southern type and Western or General American which do not conflict with each other. The most widespread type of American standard pronunciation is General American. GA is the form of speech used by radio and TV and also in all forms of official intercourse, it is the language of educated people. The total number of AE consonants of the three major types, GA, Eastern American, Southern American, in general coincides with the inventory of RP consonants with the only exception being the AE /hw/ phoneme which is not listed in the system of RP consonants. The differences mainly concern the pronunciation of the individual consonant phonemes and their occurrence, or distribution. The most marked differences between GA and RP are in the articulation and distribution of vowel phonemes. GA vowels do not exhibit consistent relationships between vowel length and quality as are found in RP. AE vowels are not divided into historically short and historically long monophthongs. Many differences involve the pronunciation of individual words or group of words. The major point of accentual differences concerns the distribution of stress within the stress pattern to which a given word belongs. The differences comprise two-, three-, four-, five-syllable words. Intonational divergencies between GA and RP mainly concern the emotionally neutral speech. Here the nomenclature of pitch contours display structural differences which lead to functional differences, namely, in the attidunal function of intonation.