5. Northern England English

These are the accents and dialect spoken north of the midlands, in cities like Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool. Related accents also found in rural Yorkshire, although there are some unique dialect features there that I won’t get into now.

Features:

• The foot-stut merger: (see the Midlands description above).

• Non-rhoticity, except in some rural areas.

• The dipthong in words like kite and ride is lengthened so that kite can become something like IPA ka:ɪt (i.e. it sounds a bit like “kaaaait”)

• Unique vocab includes use of the word mam to mean mother, similar to Irish English.

6. Welsh English

This refers to the accents and dialects spoken in the country of Wales. The speech of this region is heavily influenced by the Welsh language, which remained more widely spoken in modern times than the other Celtic languages.

Features:

• Usually non-rhotic.

• English is generally modelled after Received Pronunciation or related accents, but with many holdovers from the Welsh language.

• Syllables tend to be very evenly stressed, and the prosody of the accent is often very “musical”.

• The letter r is often trilled or tapped.

• Some dialect words imported from the Welsh language.

7. Scottish English

This is the broad definition used to describe English as it is spoken in the country of Scotland. Note that Scottish English is different than Scots, a language derived from Northumbrian Old English that is spoken in Scotland as well. That being said, Scots has a strong influence on how English in Scotland is spoken.

Features:

• Rhotic, with trilled or tapped r’s.

• Glottal stopping of the letter t when in between vowels (similar to Cockney and related accents).

• Monopthongal pronounciations of the /ei/ and /ou/ dipthongs, so that that face becomes IPA fe:s and goat becomes IPA go:t.

37 American English pronunciation.

American English is a set of dialects of the English language used mostly in the United States. Approximately two-thirds of the world's native speakers of English live in the United States.^[2]

Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into:

• differences in accent (i.e. phoneme inventory and realisation). See differences between General American and Received Pronunciation for the standard accents in the United States and Britain; for information about other accents see regional accents of English speakers.

• differences in the pronunciation of individual words in the lexicon (i.e. phoneme distribution). In this article, transcriptions use Received Pronunciation (RP) to represent BrE and General American (GAm) and to represent AmE.

In the following discussion

• superscript ^A2 after a word indicates the BrE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in AmE

• superscript ^B2 after a word indicates the AmE pronunciation of the word is a common variant in BrE

38) Aspects of Speech Sounds

Speech sounds can be analysed from the viewpoint of three as­pects: (1) acoustic, (2) physiological and articulatory, (3) functional,

- Articulatoty – it is the way when the sound-producing mechanism is investigated, that is the way the speech sounds are pronounced  - Acoustic – speech sound is a physical phenomenon. It exists in the form of sound waves which are pronounced by vibrations of the vocal cords. Thus each sound is characterized by frequency, certain duration. All these items represent acoustic aspect.  - Functional – every language unit performs a certain function in actual speech. Functional aspect deals with these functions. 

ACOUSTIC ASPECT OP SPEECH SOUNDS

Speech sounds have a number of physical properties, the firsf of them is frequency, i.e. the number of vibrations per second.

The vocal cords vibrate along the whole of their length, producing fundamental frequency, and along the varying portions of their length, producing overtones, or harmonics. When the vibrations pro­duced by the vocal cords are regular they produce the acoustic impression of voice or musical tone. When they are irregular noise is produced. When there is a combination of tone and noise, either noise or tone prevails. When tone prevails over noise sonorants are produced. When noise prevails over tone voiced consonants are produced.

The complex range of frequencies which make up the quality of a sound is known as the acoustic spectrum. Bands of energy which are characteristic of a particular sound are called the sound's for-mants..

Perception of the pitch of a speech sound depends upon the fre­quency of vibration of the vocal cords. The higher the pitch of vibra­tions, the higher the pitch level. A male voice may have an average pitch level of about 150 cps.¹ and a female voice—a level of about 240 cps. The total range of a speaking voice varies from 80 to 350 cps. but the human ear perceives frequencies from 15 cps. to about 20,000 cps. The frequency of sound depends on certain physical properties of the vibrator, such as mass, length and tension.' ,'

The second physical property of sound is intensity. Changes in intensity are perceived as variation in the loudness of a sound. The greater the amplitude of vibration, the greater the intensity of a sound; the greater the pressure on the ear-drums, the louder the sound. Intensity is measured in decibels (dbs).

Any sound has duration, it is its length or quantity of time during which the same vibratory motion, the same pattern of vibration, are; maintained. The duration of speech sounds is usually measured im milliseconds (msecs).

ARTICULATORY AND PHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF SPEECH SOUNDS

To analyse a speech sound physiologically and articulatorily some articulatory mechanism and its work should be introduced.

Speech is impossible without the following four mechanisms:

1. the power mechanism,

2. the vibrator mechanism,

3. the resonator mechanism,

4. the obstructor mechanism.

The power mechanism (Fig. 2) consists of the diaphragm (1), the lungs (2), the bronchi (3), the windpipe (or trachea) (4), the glottis (5), the larynx (6), the mouth cavity (7), and the nasal cavity (8).

The vibrator mechanism (the voice producing mechanism) consists of the vocal cords, they are jn, the larynx,, or, voice box. The vocal ■cords are two horizontal folds" off elastic tissue.'They may be opened or closed (completely or incompletely}, , The pitch of the voice is controlled mostly by the ten&on of the vocal cords. Voice produced by the vocal cords ^vibration is modified by the shape and volume of the air passage.'

H. A. Gleasori mentions three sounds in the English language that are produced by the vocal cords /h, f[, ?/. /h/ is the glottal voiceless fricative and /fj/ is its voiced allophone. He states that "during the pronunciation of /h, fy ?/ the mouth may be in position for almost any sound."³

When both parts of the glottis are firmly closed, the sound pro­duced at separating the glottal stop position, is called the glottal stop /?/. It sounds like a soft cough.

Thorough acoustic investigations show that besides the vocal cords there are two more sources that participate in the production

of speech sounds: (a) the turbulent noise, which results from some constriction in the flow of air and (b) the impulse wave, which is

formed when the complete ob­struction to the flow of air in the mouth cavity is suddenly broken. These sources of speech sounds may work separately or simulta­neously. For example: (1) the vocal cords produce vibrations in the articulation of vowel sounds, (2) the turbulent noise helps to produce voiceless constrictive consonants, such as /f, s, J7, (3) the impulse source helps to pro­duce voiceless plosiye consonants „ such as /p, t, k/.

The two sources—vocal and turbulent participate in the pro­duction of voiced constrictive consonants, such as /v, z, 5/, the vocal and impulse sources partici­pate in the production of voiced plosive consonants, such as /b, d, g/.

III. FUNCTIONAL ASPECT OF SPEECH SOUNDS Separate segments of speech continuum have no meaning of their own, they mean something only in combinations, which are called words. Phonetics studies sounds as articulatory and acoustic units, pho­nology investigates sounds as units, which serve communicative pur­poses. Phonetics and phonology are closely connected. The unit of phonetics is a speech sound, the unit of phonology is a phoneme. Pho­nemes can be discovered by the method of minimal pairs. This method consists in finding pairs of words which differ in one phoneme. For example, if wereplace /b/ by /t/ in the word ban we produce a new word tan, ban — tan is a pair of words distinguished in meaning by a single sound change. Two words of this kind are termed "minimal pair". It is possible to take this process further, we can also produce can, ran, man, fan — it is a minimal set. The change of the vowel Izd in ban provides us with another minimal set: bun, bone, Ben, burn, boon, born. The change of the final /n/ in ban will result in a third minimal set: bad, bat, back, badge, bang. To establish the phonemes of the lan­guage the phonologist tries to find pairs that show which sounds oc­cur or do not occur in identical positions —■ commutation test. The phonemes of a language form a system of oppositions, in which any one phoneme is usually opposed to any other phoneme in at least one position in at least one lexical or grammatical minimal or sub-minimal pair. If the substitution of one sound for another re­sults in the change of meaning, the commuted sounds are different phonemes, speech sounds, which are phonologically significant. The founder of the phoneme theory was I.A. Baudouin de Courte-ney, the Russian scientist of Polish origin. His theory of phoneme was developed гпб. perfected by L.V. Shcherba — the head of the Leningrad linguistic school, who stated that in actual speech we ut­ter a much greater variety of sounds than we are aware of, and thai in every language these sounds are united in a comparatively smalt number of sound types, which are capable of distinguishing the mean­ing and the form of words; that is they serve the purpose of social intercommunication. It is these sound types that should be included into the classification of phonemes and studied as differentiatory units of the language. The actually pronounced speech sounds are va­riants, or allophones of phonemes. Allophones are realized in con­crete words. They have phonetic similarity, that is their acoustic and articulatory feautures have much in common, at the same time they differ in some degree and are incapable of differentiating words.