2. Pronunciation

A regional survey

English is not at all uniform in pronunciation, but one advantage of English spelling is that it is more or less the same across the English-speaking world. Indeed, if we followed the principle that spelling should closely reflect pronunciation, we would have to start coping with alarmingly divergent spelling practices.

Britain itself reveals considerable diversity of pronunciation. What many people think of as traditional and correct pronunciation — and what is sometimes referred to as ВВС English or Oxford English - is the accent of a very small minority. Known to phoneticians as Received Pronunciation, or RP for short, this way of pronouncing English was spread through the prestigious private schools in England and has thus become a pronunciation with high social status. It continues to be important, not only because the minority who speaks it includes highly influential people, but also because descriptions of English pronunciation and the pronunciations given in British dictionaries are often based on RP. Many learners of English around the world, especially in areas where Britain is still regarded as the home of the English language, are introduced to RP as the 'best' or 'normal' pronunciation of English.

RP was first described by the British phonetician Daniel Jones in his English Pronouncing Dictionary of 1917, when it was already well established as a prestigious pronunciation. Jones was actually more interested in describing RP than in promoting it, and in the introduction to his dictionary he wrote that 'RP means merely 'widely understood pronunciation', going on to say that 'I do not hold it up as a standard which everyone is recommended to adopt'.

Many of the older regional pronunciations have been heavily modified over the last hundred years or so, partly because mobility and urbanization have broken down the older closer-knit communities that sustained marked regional diversity, and partly because school teachers have often encouraged children to eliminate some of the most obvious regional features oft heir speech. But there are still identifiable regional pronunciations across Britain, even if their precise characteristics and the boundaries among them are not as clear cut as they once were. Because of the high status of RP, regional pronunciations have sometimes been regarded as 'lower class' accents; but this in turn has meant that many citizens of Britain have reacted against RP as 'posh'. Many Britons probably now want (consciously or not) to speak something like 'standard English' but without abandoning all the features of their local speech. An important illustration of this newer kind of regionalism is Estuary English, spoken in much of southeastern England and named after the Thames Estuary. Viewed phonetically, this is a compromise between RP and London speech. Many people in southeastern England would consider it an 'ordinary' way to talk, neither affected (as RP might seem to be) nor uneducated (as a strongly regional accent might be thought to imply).

Scotland, Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Wales have traditions and regional or national identities that make them more independent of RP than areas of England. In Scotland, for example, while there is a very small minority of RP speakers, most of the population has an identifiably Scottish pronunciation (phonetically quite different from RP or Estuary). Within Scotland, there is substantial regional differentiation, but the factors alrecady noted above — mobility, urbanization and so on — have tended to reduce the extent of variation.

In both Australia and New Zealand, English-speaking settlers seem to have developed a local pronunciation quite early, but the precise mechanism of this development is not known. Both countries have lived under the shadow of RP in much the same way as many parts of Britain, Both countries have had an educational and cultural tradition of decrying local speech and admiring an (often highly idealized) English model. In Australia in particular, the most distinctively local end is known as Broad Australian, while the other end is sometimes referred to as Cultivated Australian. Between Broad and Cultivated is a range of pronunciations that can be labelled General Australian. In both Australia and New Zealand it is probably fair to say that most speakers have forms of speech of the General kind, which are distinctively local but which lack or constrain (he traditionally stigmatized features of Broad.

The pronunciation of English in the USA is noticeably different from RP (and in some respects shows more similarities with Irish, Scottish and regional British forms of speech than with RP). Regional diversity is not as marked in the USA as in Britain, but is certainly evident. As a very rough generalization, two areas stand out as divergent from most of the USA. One is the northeast USA (loosely New England, but sometimes including New York); the other is the southeast, sometimes referred to simply as 'the South'. These two regions stand apart from what some linguists call 'General American'. One interpretation of the term General American would see it as a somewhat idealized standard form of American accent, spoken widely through the USA; a more negative but probably more realistic interpretation would see General American as the kind of pronunciation that most Americans would consider neither markedly New England (or New York) nor markedly southern.

Canadian English is similar to that of the USA, partly for the historical reason that many North Americans moved into Canada after the USA won its independence from Britain in the late eighteenth century. Canadian English thus shares many phonetic features with General American, and many people from outside North America find it hard to distinguish between a Canadian and an American accent. But, like the USA, Canada also shows some regional variation from an otherwise rather negatively defined standard. It is in eastern Canada, in the Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland that the most obvious regional variation is found, while the rest of the country is more uniform.

Consonants

I n general, consonants vary less than vowels, but there is a major division between those who pronounce the so-called 'post-vocalic r' and those who don't. In RP, Aus and NZ, there is no V'-sound in words such as 'car, card, four, fort, spur, spurt, beer, beard, stare, stairs'. The V standing after a vowel (post-vocalic) and either at the end of a word or before a consonant is simply not pronounced. Thus in RP, Aus and NZ, sometimes called non-rhotic pronunciations, each of the following pairs of words is pronounced identically: 'spa/spar, та/таг, tuba/tuber, fought/fort'. By contrast, General American (GenAm) and Canadian (Can) are rhotic. (Note that Scotland, Ireland and a large area of western and southwestern England are also rhotic, while one of the features that make New England і and the South distinctive within the USA is that those regions are typically non-rhotic.)

1n non-rhotic accents, the post-vocalic V is pronounced if immediately followed by a vowel. Thus while RP, Aus and NZ have no V in 'car, star, fur, stare, four', there is a so-called linking 'r' not only in words like 'starry, furry, staring' but also in connected speech where a vowel follows, as in 'a carengine', 'a star is born', 'don'tstare at me', four and a half, four o'clock'.

Vowels

English has a relatively large number of different vowel sounds, including several diphthongs (vowels which move quickly from one vowel quality to another). The four diphthongs in words like the following vary considerably across the English-speaking world. It would be a'valuable exercise to have these words read by speakers from different parts of the English-speaking world and to listen carefully to the pronunciat\oh. .

say, bay, bait, made, main

so, toe, boat, mode, moan

sigh, buy, bite, side, sign

sow (female pig), bough, bout, loud, crown

In RP the diphthong illustrated by 'so' is quite distinctive, and is Muneiimes mimicked as if it began with a vowel like the short 'e' of 'bet' and then moved towards the vowel of 'boot' In Aus and NZ (especially broad varieties) the diphthongs in 'say' and 'so' begin with the tongue relatively low in the mouth, so much so that others sometimes claim that 'say' sounds like 'sigh' and 'so' sounds like 'sow'.

The three vowels illustrated by 'bit, bet, bat' have the tongue positioned і datively forward in the mouth in most varieties of English, but in NZ all three vowels are shifted relative to RP, with 'bit' more central and 'bet' and 'hat' noticeably higher. This leads to mimicry by outsiders (again, as in ninny popular perceptions of speech variation, not entirely accurately) of NZ 'bit, bet, bat' as if they had been shifted to 'but, bit, bet'. Aus shows a similar tendency to raise the vowels of 'bet' and 'bat' but not to the same extent as NZ. In fact Australians often joke about NZ pronunciation, accusing New Zealanders (quite unfairly) of saying 'fush and chups' or 'thenk hivvens', instead of 'fish and chips' and 'thank heavens'.

There are many other features of vowel pronunciation which distinguish varieties of English speech, for example the vowel of words like 'tипе, student, dune, duke', which is typically pronounced like 'you' [u:] in RP, Aus and NZ but simplified to fu:] in GenAm (General American) (as if 'toon, stoodent', etc. ); and the vowel ofwords like 'after, laugh, path, bath, pass, fast' which is typically a long vowel in RP, Aus and NZ (the same as in 'spa, start, sparse'), but in GenAm is either the same as or similar to the vowel of 'bat, bad'.

The tendency of most varieties of spoken English is to make a major difference between stressed and unstressed syllables and to show vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. In the word 'banana', for example, the middle vowel (which is stressed) is very different from the first and last (unstressed) vowels. In RP, the combined effect of non-rhotic pronunciation and of vowel reduction is such that the words 'China, diner, minor' all end in the same indeterminate vowel (sometimes called "schwa"). But the details of vowel reduction do vary across the English-speaking world. GenAm tends not to reduce the penultimate vowel of words like 'secretary, February' (so that these words are pronounced as іf ending in 'erry' or 'any') whereas RP usually does show reduction and may even omit the vowel altogether (yielding something like 'secretly' and 'fobniry' or even 'febyuri' — in all cases with prominent stress on the first syllabic of the word). RP does maintain a distinction between 'schwa' and a short 'i' vowel in unstressed syllables. For example the words 'carrot, chattered, fishers' have 'schwa' in the second (unstressed) syllable, it does still happen that and Australian or a New Zealander speaks with distinction, so that a pair of words like 'chatted/chattered' is pronounced identically, with 'schwa' in the second syllable. (Remember that there is no V'-consonant in the pronunciation of words like 'chattered' and 'fishers' in RP, Aus or NZ.)

Given the characteristic rhythm of spoken English, in which stressed syllables are much more prominent than unstressed, it is surprising that vowel reduction (and omission of unstressed vowels and even syllables) has not progressed further than it has. I indeed, highly reduced versions of what you might expect from the spelling are quite common in English place names (for example 'Gloucester' pronounced as 'Gloster', 'Worcester' as 'Wooster' and 'Norwich' as 'Norritch' or 'Norridge') and in some areas of vocabulary (such as nautical terms like 'boatswain' pronounced as 'bosun' and 'forecastle' as 'focsle'). It is probable that reduced pronunciations of this kind were once more common in English, and that increasing knowledge of, and respect for, the written form of the language in the last 200 years has led to the adoption of many 'spelling pronunciations', that is pronunciations motivated by the written form rather than by the traditional pronunciation. A simple example is the word 'author', which used to be pronounced 'autor' (compare the French auteur). Because of 1 he 'ill' spelling, it is now normal to pronounce the word with the same fricative sound that occurs in words like 'north' and 'fourth'. (But obviously not all 'spelling pronunciations' are acceptable. Pronouncing the name of the river in London as 'Thames', as it is written, rather than as 'Temms', might sometimes be done jokingly but will usually count as a plain error; while pronouncing 'parliament' as if it had an 'i'-vowel in it, rather than just as 'parlament', will be judged wrong or substandard by most speakers )

In some instances, the choice between reduced and unreduced vowels in unstressed syllables reveals regional preferences. Thus where RP has 'hostel' with a reduced second syllable, Aus commonly has a full vowel, more or less as if 'hos-tell' (but still with the stress on the first syllable). Speakers of GenAm usually have a reduced second syllable in 'a record', but RP generally has a full vowel, more or less as if 'reck-awd'.

Most of these very general statements could be qualified and refined but they offer a brief overview, particularly of those features that are often commented on and mimicked by other speakers who find the features noticeable and characteristic.