LECTURE 6

SOCIOPHONETICS

6.1. Geographical variation

6.2. Major accent types: British and Amecican

6.2.1. Vowels

6.2.2. Consonants

6.2.3. Word stress

6.2.4. Rhythm

6.2.5. Intonation

6.2.6. British regional features

6.2.7. American regional features

6.3. Social factors and social markers

6.4. Situational variation

6.5. Language change in progress

Sociophonetics deals with the way language (or languages) and its varieties function in the speech community, in social environment. In other words, as Joshua Fischer put it, "who speaks, what language, with whom and to what end." Phonetics is interested in the way people's pronunciation forms vary in different social situations. Some of the phonetic changes are instantaneous, some take a long time in completing but most of them are done unconsciously. A phonetitian's task is to observe them, to record, process and analyse them with the purpose of correlating the results with socially significant factors.

Accent variation may be geographical, social and situational.

6.1. Geographical variation

A number of geographical-historical and socio-cultural factors caused English to become a global language spoken by approximately 1,500 million speakers. Among the factors are: the British colonization, the impact of American power in political life and in business, especially in computer software and entertainment industries. There is also a necessity for mutual intelligibility between nations, for a "lingua franca" to serve the needs of international trade, business, diplomacy, safety, media, cultural exchange and other domains of international communication. However, another side of this enormous spread over the world is that English is not uniform, that there are many spoken "Englishes" while the written forms have a lot more in common (Crystal 1997).

Thus English is a language which consists of many varieties, each distinctive in its use of sounds, grammar and vocabulary.

In geographical variation we have to distinguish two basic concepts:

1. 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".

2. Accent is a type of pronunciation or a feature of one which can be found in the speech of any individual or the whole speech community. We can speak of an American accent, a French accent in English, and by that we mean only the sounds of spoken English, i.e. vowels, consonants, stress, rhythm, voice quality and intonation. Thus phonetics is mainly concerned with accents of English, as spoken on different territories, in diverse social groups, by particular individuals.

Accents of English worldwide are grouped into:

• accents in the countries where English is the mother tongue of the majority of the population ("the inner circle"): the U.K., the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the white population of the Repub­lic of South Africa;

• accents in the new developing states, former British colonies, where English is one of the official languages ("the outer circle"): India and Singapore, for instance;

• accents in the countries where English is the most widely used foreign language taught at schools ("the expanding circle"), like Russia and China (Crystal 1997: 54).

So far we have only discussed the first group of accents because a native speaker's accent was the only model for education. More than that, to follow the European tradition, we selected only one British accent, RP (Received Pronunciation), which was better described in books and man­uals , codified in dictionaries and had a high social prestige. Although there are a few books on the phonology of English viewed internationally we still know very little about accents other than RP. But we are at least fully aware of the fact that most of international talk in English may be carried out between speakers of the outer and the wider circles of which we can be active participants.

Historical-geographical division of native English accents maybe based on the division into British-oriented (the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) and North-America-oriented (the U.S.A., Canada).

Most of the countries possess their national pronunciation standards, regional standards and local accents.

National Standards

• RP (Received Pronunciation), or BBC English, in the United Kingdom,

• GA (General American), or American Network English, in the U. S .A.,

• GenCan (General Canadian) in Canada,

• GenAus (General Australian) in Australia.

Smaller geographical divisions are regional standards which are the accents of educated population in a certain area. Regional linguistic division in each particular territory reflects the history of early settlement. In the U.S.A., for instance, the history of migration developed in three main routes which is reflected in the division into the North, the South and the Midland (further subdivided into North Midland and South Midland); the three strands merged in the West, with the northern one dominating, which accounts for the lack of any pronounced accent of the West except for a more advanced stage of one new tendency (cot/caught merger) which we will comment on in the next section.

Regional Standards

• Southern, Northern, Scottish and Northern Irish on the British Isles,

• Northern, Northern Midland, Southern Midland, Southern, Western in the USA.

National pronunciation standards are associated with radio and television newsreaders and presenters of serious channels (Channel 3 and Channel 4 on BBC, CBS and NBC on American Network). There are also professional groups and public figures whose speech is symbolic of certain types of accents which we will discuss in the social variation section.

Regional standards, as spoken by most educated people in the country, show a certain degree of regional deviation from the standard, often referred to as regionally "modified RP". The area which was the origin of the national standard determines to what extent speakers of regional standard sound distinctive. In U.K., it is the South-East, or London, that gave rise to RP and, therefore, speakers in that part of the country "slide from one social situation to the other", as Peter Tradgill put it, without a marked difference from what is perceived as the norm. Recently this particular regional standard called "Estuary English" attracted the attention of linguists. In essence there is evidence of a more advanced pronunciation type which occupies an intermediate position between RP and London Cockney.

Speakers from the North and the West of England are more often identified as having a northern regional accent. Among the Celtic areas the Scottish accent is more easily identified, next to it comes the Irish accent, while the Welsh educated accent is confused either with the Scottish or the Southern type.

In the United States, geographically, the situation is quite the reverse: it is the South and South Midland which stand out for their marked dif­ference from the standard pronunciation. Most of the negatively assessed social markers are in fact southern accent features. Another area which is identified by Americans for its accent is the East, with a prejudice against New York accent and a certain respect for "the old money" and the cultural distinction of Boston.

Although local patriotism is very strong, most of the people would agree that the true American accent is to be found in Western and Mid-Western parts of the country. Actually, this is the area where you cannot hear either a northern or a southern accent.

The linguists trace back the origin of the American standard to the Great Lakes area, i.e. the North. In fact, newsreaders for American radio and T.V. are selected from people who are from the North, North Midland and the West or they are trained to sound as if they are (Preston and Shuy 1988). American national news agencies and radio stations are located in the North-East, while the entertainment industry which ca­ters for the production of films and videos is stationed in the West (in Hollywood).

Local Accents

Less educated people use numerous local accents which can be either urban (characteristic of a city like Liverpool or New York) or rural (spoken in the countryside, like South Wales or the Appalachians).

In the old time a natural barrier like a river or a mountain would be enough to make the speech of two villages different, thus geographical proximity was a very important factor to human contacts and innovations development. But today, as recent research has shown, communication, education, media and mobility of the population have increased immensely. The powerful factor to facilitate innovations spreading geographically and socially consists in social contacts of population in big urban centers. Innovations then "leap" from big cities to small towns over the intervening countryside. Comparison between the data of the Linguistic Atlas of North America collected in the fifties and the data presented in the Phonological Map of the U.S.A. completed by the end of the century has demonstrated that the accents of the major cities in the U.S.A. have diverged greatly, i.e. have become more different than they used to be fifty years ago (Labov 1999).