Varieties of English pronunciation

There was some discussion of different types of English pronunciation and the reasons for choosing the accent. We will return to this topic to look in more detail at differences in pronunciation.

The study of variety

Differences between accents are of two main sorts: phonetic and phonological. When two accents differ from each other only phonetically, we find the same set of phonemes in both accents, but some or all of the phonemes are realized differently. There may also be differences in stress or intonation, but not such as would cause a change in meaning. As an example of phonetic differences at the segmental level, it is said that Australian English has the same set of phonemes and phonemic contrasts as BBC pronunciation, yet Australian pronunciation is so different from that accent that it is easily recognized.

Many accents of English also differ noticeably in intonation without the difference being such as would cause a difference in meaning; some Welsh accents, for example, have a tendency for unstressed syllables to be higher in pitch than stressed syllables. Such a difference is, again, a phonetic one. An example of a phonetic (non-phonological) difference in stress would be the stressing of the final syllable of verbs ending in '-ise' in some Scottish and Northern Irish accents (e.g. 'realize' rɪə'laɪz).

Phonological differences are of various types: again, we can divide these into segmental and suprasegmental. Within the area of segmental phonology the most obvious type of difference is where one accent has a different number of phonemes (and hence of phonemic contrasts) from another. Many speakers with northern English accents, for example, do not have a contrast between a and u, so that 'luck' and 'look' are pronounced identically (both as lʊk); in the case of consonants, many accents do not have the phoneme h, so that there is no difference in pronunciation between 'art' and 'heart'. The phonemic system of such accents is therefore different from that of the BBC accent. On the other hand, some accents differ from others in having more phonemes and phonemic contrasts. For example, many northern English accents have a long e: sound as the realization of the phoneme symbolized eI in BBC pronunciation (which is a simple phonetic difference); but in some northern accents there is both an eI diphthong phoneme and also a contrasting long vowel phoneme that can be symbolized as e:. Words like 'eight', 'reign' are pronounced eIt, reIn, while 'late', 'rain' (with no 'g' in the spelling) are pronounced le:t, re:n.

A more complicated kind of difference is where, without affecting the overall set of phonemes and contrasts, a phoneme has a distribution in one accent that is different from the distribution of the same phoneme in another accent. The clearest example is r, which is restricted to occurring in pre-vocalic position in BBC pronunciation, but in many other accents is not restricted in this way. Another example is the occurrence of j between a consonant and u:, ʊ or ʊə. In BBC pronunciation we can find the following: 'pew' pju:, 'tune' tju:n, 'queue' kju:. However, in most American accents and in some English accents of the south and east we find that, while 'pew' is pronounced pju: and 'queue' as kju:, 'tune' is pronounced tu:n; this absence of j is found after the other alveolar consonants; hence; 'due' du:,'new' nu:. In Norwich, and other parts of East Anglia, we find many speakers who have no consonant + j clusters at the beginning of a syllable, so that 'music' is pronounced mu:zɪk and 'beautiful' as bu:tɪfl.

We also find another kind of variation: in the example just given above, the occurrence of the phonemes being discussed is determined by their phonological context; however, sometimes the determining factor is lexical rather than phonological. For example, in many accents of the Midlands and north-western England a particular set of words containing a vowel represented by 'o' in the spelling is pronounced with a in BBC but with Q in these other accents; the list of words includes 'one', 'none', 'nothing', 'tongue', 'mongrel', 'constable', but does not include some other words of similar form such as 'some' sΛm and 'ton' tΛn. One result of this difference is that such accents have different pronunciations for the two members of pairs of words that are pronounced identically (i.e. are homophones) in BBC - for example, 'won' and 'one', 'nun' and 'none'. In my own pronunciation when I was young, ɪ had ɒ instead of a in these words, so that 'won' was pronounced wΛn and 'one' as won, 'nun' as nΛn and 'none' as nɒn; this has not completely disappeared from my accent.

It would be satisfying to be able to list examples of phonological differences between accents in the area of stress and intonation but, unfortunately, straightforward examples are not available. We do not yet know enough about the phonological functions of stress and intonation, and not enough work has been done on comparing accents in terms of these factors. It will be necessary to show how one accent is able to make some difference in meaning with stress or intonation that another accent is unable to make. Since some younger speakers seem not to distinguish between the noun 'protest' and the verb 'protest', pronouncing both as ^jprəʊtest, we could say that in their speech a phonological distinction in stress has been lost, but this is a very limited example. It is probable that such differences will in the future be identified by suitable research work.