Variants of English pronunciation
English is a global language spoken by approximately 1,500 million people. This has been caused by a number of geographical, historical, and socio-cultural factors: the British colonization, the impact of American power in political life and in business, esp. in computer software and entertainment industries. As a result of this spread over the world English is not uniform, there are many “Englishes” while the written forms have a lot more in common.
Geographically native English accents are divided into British-oriented (the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) and North- America-oriented (the USA and Canada).
Most of the countries have their national pronunciation standards, regional standards and local dialects.
National Standards:
RP (Received Pronunciation), or BBC English, Public School pronunciation, King’s English, in the UK;
GA (General American), or American Network English, in the USA;
Gen Can (General Canadian) in Canada;
Gen Aus (General Australian) in Australia.
National pronunciation standards are associated with radio and TV newsreaders and presenters of serious channels (Channel 3 and 4 on BBC, CBS and NBC on American Network). These are also professional groups and public figures whose speech is symbolic of certain types of accents.
Regional Standards are smaller geographical divisions, which are the accents of educated people in a certain area:
Southern, Northern, Scottish and Northern Irish on the British Isles (the Welsh educated accent is confused either with the Scottish or the Southern type);
Northern, Northern Midland, Southern Midland, Southern, Western in the USA.
Regional standards show a certain degree of regional deviation from the standard. In the UK people in the South-East of the country are closest to RP since this area was the origin of the national standard.
In the USA it is people from the North, North Midland and the West who show the least differences from GA, since the origin of the American standard is the Great Lakes area, i.e. the North. Newsreaders for American radio and TV are selected from people who are from the North, North Midland and the West or they are trained to sound as if they are. American national news agencies and radio stations are located in the North-East, while the entertainment industry is stationed in the West (in Hollywood).
British regional features:
Northern /u/ in such words as cut, much, love; Scottish /a/ in words like bad, bath; /hw/ in words beginning with wh: which, where, etc.; /х’/ in words like light; trilled /r/; Irish: /r/ in all positions, clear /l/.
American regional features:
Southern /r/ is vocalized after a vowel, as in river (Americans say that the second /r/ is gone with the wind); Southern drawl: a specific way of pronouncing vowels when monophthongs are diphthongized while diphthongs are monophthongized, i.e. their nuclei are prolonged and their glides are dropped, e.g. side[sa:d], tide [ta:d]; [ɪ] in men, ten.
Local accents are used by less educated people. They can be either urban (characteristic of a city, like Liverpool or N.Y.) or rural (spoken in the countryside, like South Wales).