Accents (1): Varieties of English

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 608.

UNIT 1. DEVELOPING INTERCULTURAL SKILLS

Exercises

1.1 Listening. You will hear speakers from Britain (Speaker 1), the USA (Speaker 2), Canada (Speaker 3), Australia (Speaker 4) and South Africa (Speaker 5) talking about what they enjoy doing in their spare time. Distinguish between the accents you will hear and trace the differences in the pronunciation of vowels and consonants, in the word stress and intonation.

audiofile: Exercise 1.1.mp3 (English Pronunciation in Use)

Canadian English

Description

Canada has a population of 29 million people, but a sizeable minority of these are French speakers while many recent immigrants don't have English as their mother tongue. Nevertheless, this still leaves perhaps as many as 18 million English native speakers. The overwhelming influence on Canadian pronunciation is USA English, but Scottish and Irish influences are also claimed. In fact, Canadian English, although recognisably a distinct variety, is much closer to General American than are many regional varieties of the USA itself. Within Canada, there is considerable variation on the Atlantic seaboard, notably the ‘Newfie' speech of Newfoundland.

Like most American English, Canadian accent is h-pronouncing, rhotic and has t-voicing, bath words have the trap vowel. /l/ is dark in all positions. Front vowels, kit, dress and trap are all rather open. The thought and lot vowels are merged and sound like British NRP palm. Perhaps the most recognisable feature of Canadian is the central starting- point of the diphthongs mouth and price before fortis consonants (house, out, right, like).

Australian English

Description

Australia, with a present-day population of over 20 million and growing, appears set to become one of the chief standard forms of English of the future. Until recently, most of its population came from the British Isles, with a majority from southern England, and this is reflected in the nature of Australian speech today. Australian is a relatively young variety of English, and there are as yet no distinct regional accents in Australia; all over this vast country, people sound surprisingly similar.

Australian English is non-rhotic. Broad accents have some h-dropping, but this is much less common than in England. Systemically, the Australian vowel inventory is identical to that of NRP. Lexical variation is found in some bath words, where the trap vowel rather than palm is found in words like dance. There is considerable realisational variation, dress and trap vowels are close. Wide glide realisations are found in face and goat . The palm vowel is very fronted [a:] while nurse is close and fronted, sometimes with rounding.

South African English

Description

Some people may still be surprised to hear that mother-tongue English speakers are very much in the minority in South Africa, numbering no more than about three and a half million speakers. The English of South Africa has been very much influenced by the other major South African language of European origin, Afrikaans (with perhaps as many as five million speakers). It has been said that South African English ranges all the way from broad accents strongly influenced by Afrikaans to upper-class speech which sounds very similar to British traditional RP (Crystal 1997: 40). In the new South Africa many black south Africans who speak African languages, such as Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho, now speak English as a second language.

There is no h-dropping (but broad South African accents have voiced /h/) and the accent is non-rhotic. The distribution of clear vs. dark I is as in NRP and many other varieties. /t/I is strongly affricated, perhaps a slight over-compensation for the lack of aspiration in much South African English.

dress and trap are close. In certain words, the kit vowel is central resembling [ə], strut is relatively front, lot is open and unrounded. The happY vowel is said with a close short fleece vowel. The palm vowel is very back, price and mouth have relat­ively narrow glides, square is very close. The palm vowel is used in bath words (can't).

More recording of these accents: