EL1102 Studying English in Context
Lecture No. 1 (Part 2)
There was a Web site (The
Audio Archive) which included sound samples of English speakers from around
the world but which is now, unfortunately, temporarily unavailable.
There
is also a site maintained by Marcus Laker discusses British accents using the
International Phonetic Alphabet and distinguishes it from other (eg
American) accents. There are some interesting sound samples: http://homepages.tcp.co.uk/~laker/ipa/index.html
We start off with a recording of an older woman
from Glasgow. (From Hughes & Trudgill 1996)
You don’t know the way I was brought up. When I
think on it now … I think that it was kind of strict … because eh … it was an
awful … oh a terrible lot of them living yet [= still], and they’re in
the flats and they’re all round about, they’ve been meeting me with ‘Bella, you
never … got doing what we did’. And yet we were happy. We were quite happy in
the house with my mother and father. And we were sitting in that room with the
wee screens, keeking [= peering] out at them all playing, in the summer
at nine o’ clock. We were gone to our bed [= we had gone to bed]. Never
done us any harm. Now, I think it’s right, to be like that. And we’d to ask my
father if, if we’d a boyfriend, we’d to ask my father. He would’ve died. I went
with him for a year afore we got engaged. And I went for other five year … I
was feared to tell my father. My mother said ‘Belle, you need to tell your
father’. I says ‘You know what he is.’ Cos I was handy, I was the last lassie,
you know, and I done everything. She says ‘You’ll need to tell him.’ I says
‘No’. But Willy’s mother … he was eh … the youngest, and, ach, there were years
atween the one next to him, they were all married, and she was a widow, and … I
think they only got ten shillings then for a widow’s pension. Oh, she would be
awful old the now [= very old now]. So we just made it up that we would stay
single like that the now. ‘You help your mother, and I’ll help mine’. That the
right way? And then he got to know.
What is your impression of her accent?
What is phonology?
Phonology is that branch of linguistics
which studies the sound system of languages. Interest in:
- the way the English
language is pronounced by different people,
- how individuals
might also modify the way they speak in different situations and
- how pronunciations
have changed through time.
The sound system involves
- the actual
pronunciation of words,
- prosody – pitch,
loudness, tempo and rhythm – the ‘music’ of speech.
The IPA
Phonologists generally have to use special symbols – usually
the IPA, or International Phonetic Alphabet
This
module does not attempt to teach you the IPA. EL1101 (Patterns in English) introduced
you to some of this. You can go to a web page maintained by Michael Quinion for
a quick introduction: http://www.quinion.com/words/pronguide.htm
You
can also go to Peter Ladefoged’s website that also contains sound files for you
to listen to how the phonetic symbols are pronounced: http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsandConsonants/Vowels
and Consonants/contents.html (Peter Ladefoged is a British-born linguist in
the University of California, Los Angeles.)
An
example: ‘butter’
One
standard spelling today, but in the past these were also possible spellings: butere,
buttere, boter, botere,
botter, butre, buttur, butture, buttir, buttyr,
botyr, boture, bottre and butyr.
(a) Does
everyone pronounce the <r>? If it is pronounced, are there different ways
of pronouncing the <r>?
(b) Almost
everyone pronounces the <t>, but it can be done in various ways.
(c) Everyone
pronounces the <u>, but it can be done in various ways.
Model
accents: Received Pronunciation (RP)
- ‘Received’ here is
used in its older sense to mean ‘generally accepted’ – cf. the ‘received
wisdom of the time’.
- other names: Queen’s
English, BBC English, Oxford English, the Oxbridge accent, posh accent or
la-di-da.
- in the UK, the RP
accent has been associated with educated, southern English accent, and was
thought of as the language of authority and power.
- reinforced by the
BBC when it began broadcasting in the 1920s. However, since then, RP has
been on the wane.
- According to one
estimate, less than 3 per cent of British people speak RP in its pure form
- RP has lost a lot of
its prestige in recent years, and regional accents are very common over
the BBC, particularly over the home service (as opposed to the world
service)
- RP speakers are
being influenced by the Cockney accent (the local London, especially East
London, accent) to form what is known as Estuary English (‘Estuary’ = the
estuary of the River Thames) – some Cockney characteristics, eg the
glottal stop in words like assortment and airport.
Another model accent: General American (GA)
- Not every
American speaks GA, just as not every British person speaks RP
- GA is a
‘negative’ accent, defined as much by a lack of striking features that
characterise some of the regional accents as by the presence of specific
identifying features
- Other
well-known American accents include: the Southern accent (with pin
and pen pronounced alike, buy pronounced bah, no ‘r’
sound in car, etc.); the Black English accent (them
pronounced dim, something pronounced somefin, buy
pronounced bah, no ‘r’ sound in car, etc.); the New York
accent and the Boston accent.
Comparing accents: Different sounds
Comparing
different sounds 2
- different accents might
have different sounds (as represented by the phonetic symbols)
- the differences are
generally systematic: cf. pronunciations of hot and shop in
the various accents based on the table
- distinctions made in
one accent are not necessarily made in others. There are eight different
sounds in RP, but only; but there are only five different symbols used in
the table for Scottish English, six for South-western American English,
and six for Singaporean English too. – Is it true that the more
distinctions there are, the better?
- what the diagram
cannot explain: eg the ‘ah’ (cart) v ‘a’ (cat)
sound in pasture, rather, cast, bath, pasta, transfer, Pakistan.
The distribution of sounds: Rhoticity 1
It is not only the case that different accents make use of
different ranges of sounds. The ‘rule’ as to where a sound might occur might
also differ.
rhoticity.
An accent that has the r sound in farm is called a rhotic accent, and an accent
that hasn’t the r sound is called a non-rhotic accent. To proceed with this
discussion you need to know the distinction between a consonant and a vowel
sound. Here is a definition. (Please note that we are talking about sounds
rather than spellings here.)
Tentative
definition. Speech sounds are either consonants or vowels. A consonant
is a sound made by closing or narrowing the vocal tract, whereas a vowel
is a sound made when the air escapes evenly through the mouth or nose.
Examine the words below. How do you pronounce them? Can you
hear the ‘r’ sounds in them?
1 Words with a vowel sound immediately after <r> in
spelling: care of, roving, drive, carol, barrel, lecturing, forensic, furry,
pair of shoes, Cadbury
2 Words without a vowel sound immediately after <r> in
spelling: cart, star light, market, cordial, pear juice, party, Mars bar
chocolate
A
person with a rhotic accent would pronounce the ‘r’ wherever there is an
<r> in the spelling in all the words in both lists.
Other ‘rules’ of distribution:
·
(Singaporean English – within the non-rhotic rule)
if the vowel sound that occurs after the <r> spelling is from another
word, then you don’t pronounce the <r> either: – therefore: don’t
pronounce the rs in care of and pair of shoes – no linking /r/
·
(Caribbean English – within the rhotic rule) if the
<r> occurs together with other consonants (technically: it is part of a
consonant cluster), then don’t pronounce the <r>: car v cart
rhotic
accents
GA, Scottish English, Irish English, ‘West Country’ English,
Canadian English, Jamaican English
non-rhotic
accents
RP, Southern American English, Black American English, Boston
English, Singaporean English, Australian English, New Zealand English
Note
that the table does not respect national boundaries always
Isoglosses
Rhoticity as a feature can also be recorded on the map. Lines,
called isoglosses, can be drawn to separate the regions with one feature and
regions without that feature — in this case, rhoticity.
Rhoticity:
Labov’s experiment in New York
Not
a question of rhotic v non-rhotic, but variable rhoticity. High
‘rhoticity index’ = more r’s.
Rhoticity
in NY depends on (a) social class and (b) style.
Labov’s
experiment
In NY: an underlying assumption that the rhotic pronunciation
is more ‘correct’ or ‘accurate’ in some way
in very, very careful speech, the level of rhoticity of the
lower middle class speaker outstrips that of all the other speakers! It has
been suggested that this indicates the insecurity of the lower middle-class
speakers, and their attempt to ‘improve’ their behaviour, including their
linguistic behaviour, in careful situations.
Social
stratification in Singapore by accent?
No matter how you dress to merge into the crowd at a Queen
Astrid Park [an ‘upper class’ area in Singapore] party, they can easily pick
out the outsider, ‘cos everybody knows each other.… Rich kids are not snobbish,
and Singlish [informal Singaporean English] is spoken for fun.… A public school
[British fee-paying school] accent [therefore, RP accent] is okay, but an MTV
[Music television, a satellite station, where Americanised accents are used]
accent is not so cool. [Wong Sing Yeong, 8 Days, 30 August 1997]
Rhoticity
- regional variation
(eg national differences: Australian and Canadian English accents;
internal differences: Boston and Los Angeles English accents)
- social variation
(accents of speakers of different social classes in New York).
Rhythm
- There is also
considerable difference in terms of rhythm, intonation and pitch in the
different varieties of English.
- Tay makes a contrast
between stress-timed and syllable-timed rhythm (or, informally, Morse-code
and machine-gun rhythm).
- English in its RP
pronunciation is said to have a ‘stress-timed’ rhythm; this means that
stressed syllables recur at equal intervals but unstressed syllables are
unequally spaced in time (Pike 1946: 35; Abercrombie 1967: 97). This type
of rhythm has also been called ‘Morse-code rhythm’ (James 1940: 25).
- English in its
Singaporean pronunciation … however, has a ‘syllable-timed rhythm’; this
means that all syllables recur at equal intervals of time, stressed or
unstressed. This ‘machine-gun rhythm’ (James 1940: 25) is one of the most
prominent features of Singaporean English. [Mary Tay, p. 27]
Rhythm: stress-timed or syllable-timed?
- Graddol
(1996) illustrates the difference by using two sentences:
- No cat caught
a mouse.
- No cat caught
any mice
- You can try these
too:
- I saw a bee
today.
- I saw an
elephant today.
Intonation
Accents of English might use intonation differently. British
accents generally show more pitch variation than American English. English in
its Singaporean pronunciation is generally more monotonous than in its British
or American pronunciation. Some accents might also use intonation patterns (eg
rising or falling patterns) differently. One pattern that has been commented on
is the Australian Questioning Intonation. This refers to the use of a rising
tone at the end of a sentence or clause, where in RP a falling tone would have
been expected. This can be found not only in Australian English, but also in
other varieties of English (British, New Zealand, Canada and the USA), where
the term upspeak might be used.
‘You’ll need some air-mail stickers?’. (I use the symbol ? to
indicate upspeak.)
Pronunciation
changes
- Pronunciation
has not been a stable feature. Many people have commented on the
inconsistent nature of English spelling. In fact, much of English spelling
records an earlier pronunciation, fixed when printing began around 1500.
- Many of our
‘silent letters’ were actually pronounced in the past. All the ks
and ghs in words like knob, knight, plough and dough would
have been pronounced. (German is a language related to English; the German
forms are Knobbe, Knecht, Pfleg and Teig. All
the initial <k>s are sounded, together with <ch> and
<g>.) If we consider 5 ‘two’, and compare it to related words like twice,
twelve, twenty, the archaic twain and the Scottish twa,
where the <w>s are pronounced, we can be quite certain that
originally, the <w> in two was also pronounced.
·
A systematic change to the vowel sounds from around
the 15th century. This is known as the Great Vowel Shift or GVS.
The vowel sound in two, shoe and do would have been roughly like
that in show (Singaporean, northern English or Scottish pronunciation;
IPA symbol: o:); and the vowel sound in cow, loud and mouth would
have been roughly like that in mousse or route [IPA symbol: u:].
Effect
of pronunciation changes
Some of the differences in accents are due to some accents
having some new pronunciations, and others having old
pronunciations. And some accents might have intermediate pronunciations.
Before 1700, all English accents were rhotic; so non-rhoticity is a new
feature. Some Northern English and Scottish accents have vowel sounds that are
closer to the old (pre-GVS) pronunciations for cow, loud and mouth.
Summary
- English accents vary
in different aspects — the actual sounds (technically, phonemes) used; or
the prosody (rhythm and intonation).
- The differences are normally
systematic (and not random); distinctions made in one accent are not
necessarily made in another accent.
- Two important
distinguishing features of different English accents are whether they are:
(a) rhotic or non-rhotic; (b) stress-timed or syllable-timed.
- There are not only
regional or geographical accents; there are also social or class accents.
Accents can change as they are influenced by other regional accents or
other social accents.
- English was
pronounced quite differently in the past. One phenomenon that has been
described in many textbooks is the Great Vowel Shift. One problem
is that textbooks often describe the change as if all accents of English
underwent the changes; some didn’t, or only went part of the way.
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©
2000 Peter Tan