Northern and Midland accent

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 434.

Southern accents

Regional types of English pronunciation. Major differences between regional variants of English pronunciation and Received pronunciation.

British Pronunciation Standards and Accents comprise English English, Welsh English, Scottish English and Northern Ireland English.

Roughly speaking the non-RP accents of England may be grouped like this:

Southern accents (Greater London, Cockney, Kent Essex, Buckinghamshire)

East Anglia accents (Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire)

South-West accents (Avon, Somerset, Wiltshire)

1. Northern accents (Durham, Cleveland)
2. Yorkshire accent
3. North-West accents (Cheshire, Lancashire)
4. West Midland (Birmingham, Wolerhampton).

Considerable changes are observed in the sound system of the present-day English, which are most remarkable since the well-known Great Vowel Shift in the Middle English period of the language development. It is a well-established fact than no linguistic modification can occur all of a sudden. The appearance of a new shade in pronunciation of a sound results in the coexistence of free variants in the realization of a phoneme.

The regional accents of England grouped into southern and northern ones. This division is very approximate of course, because there are western and eastern accents but their main accent variations correspond either with southern or northern accentual characteristics.

One of the main differences between these groups is in the phoneme inventory – the presence or absence of particular phonemes. Another well-known feature which distinguishes northern and southern accents concern the vowels [ae] and [a:]. Before the voiceless fricatives [f, O, s] and certain consonant clusters containing initial [n] or [m], [ae] is pronounced in the northern instead of [a:]. Dance = [da: ns] – south; [daens] – north. In the south, however, [ae] is often pronounced as [a:]. One more major north-south differentiating feature involves the final [i:] like in words city, money etc. In the north of England they have [i]. In the south of England these words are pronounced with [i:].