I. English English

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 471.

British English Accents

British English

ENGLISH-BASED PRONUNCIATION STANDARDS OF ENGLISH

As was mentioned before, BEPS (British English Pronuncia­tion Standards and Accents) comprise English English, Welsh English, Scottish English and Northern Ireland English (the corre­sponding abbreviations are EE, WE, ScE., NIE).

Table 1

In this chapter we are going to look in greater detail at the Received Pronunciation (RP) and at the regional non-RP accents of England.

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

1. Southern accents.

1) Southern accents (Greater London, Cockney, Surray, Kent, Es­sex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire);

2) East Anglia accents (Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cam­bridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire;

3) South-West accents (Gloucestershire, Avon, Somerset, Wilt­shire).

2. Northern and Midland accents.

1) Northern accents (Northumberland, Durham, Cleveland);

2) Yorkshire accents;

3) North-West accents (Lancashire, Cheshire);

4) West Midland (Birmingham, Wolverhampton).