Дипломная работа: Territorial varieties of English pronunciation

In vowels

1. RP [¬] is realized as [u]: love [l¬v] – [lªv];

2. RP final [i] sounds like [i:]: city [siti] – [siti:];

3. words like dance, chance which in RP have [a] are pronounced with: [dns], [t©ns];

4. [ei], [ª] are either monophthongs, or much narrower diphthongs than the ones in the south of England, or they may even sound as opening diphthongs [le], [ªo]: bay [be:], [bie], plate [ple:t], [phet], boat [bo:t], [bªo t];

5. words that have «al» in spelling – talk, call, all, are pronounced with [a]: [ta:k], [ka:l], [a:l];

6. RP words with [3:] are pronounced with in a broad Tyneside accent: first [fist], shirt [f:t]; so first, forced; shirt, short are homonyms;

7. [ai] is [i]: right [rit];

8. words which in RP have [au] may have [it], e.g. about [abut].

In consonants

1. [1] is clear in all environments;

2. [h] is usually present in all positions;

3. – ing is [in]: shilling [©ilin];

4. [p, t, k] between vowels are accompanied by glottal stop [?]: pity [pit? i:];

5. in parts of Northumberland and Durham [r] may be uvular (in its production the tongue and the uvular, not the tongue and the alveolar ridge take part),

Yorkshire accents

Yorkshire and Bradford accents are identical with northern vowel features in points 1, 3, 4 (only many speakers pronounce words which have «ow», «ou» in spelling with [au]: know [nau]; with northern con-sonant features in point 3.

Now having accomplished the description of regional non-RP ac-cents of England we would like to say that we didn't attempt to give a detailed account of all the regional differences in accents of remote ru-ral areas. Rather we concentrated on urban accents which can be heard when one travels throughout the country and which are most likely to be encountered by foreign tourists. International features were not dealt with.

Welsh English

As everyone probably knows Wales is a bilingual area. This speech situation in linguistics is known as exoglossic. In Wales English dominates over Welsh in urban areas, in the west and north-west of the country the balance being in favor of Welsh, where English is learnt at schools as a second language. At the moment nationalistic feelings are rather strong in Wales and we are witnessing a movement in favor of the revival of the Welsh language and its spread in all areas of Wales.

However, Welsh English at the level of educated speech and writing is not much different from that of English. Most differences are found at the level of more localized dialects.

In this chapter we shall give a brief outline of Welsh English pronunciation standard.

The principal phonological differences between WE and RP are the following:

In vowels

1. The distribution of [‚] and [a] is as in the north of England. Last, dance, chance, etc. tend to have rather than [a].

2. unstressed orthographic «a» tends to be [se] rather than [a], e.g.: sofa [so:f];

3. there is no contrast between [¬] and [a]: rubber [rəbə];

4. [i] at the end is a long vowel: city [siti:];

5. in words like tune, few, used we find [iu] rather than [ju:]: tune [tiun];