Northern accents

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 560.

Northern and Midland Accents

Midland accents, Yorkshire, for example. West Midland and North-West accents have very much in common with Northern ones. Therefore they are combined in this book into one group; peculiar realization of vowels and consonants will be marked, of course, when each subgroup is described separately.

The counties of northern England are not far from the Scot­tish border, so the influence of Scotch accent is noticeable, though there are of course many features of pronunciation char­acteristic only of northern English regions. The most typical rep­resentative of the speech of this area is Newcastle accent. It dif­fers from RP in the following:

in vowels

1. RP [ʌ] is realized as [u]:love [lʌv] — [luv];

2. RP final [ı] sounds like [i:]: city ['sıtı] — ['siti:];

3. words like dance, chance which in RP have [a:] are pro­nounced with [æ]: [dæns], [ʧæns];

4. [ei], [ɜu]are either monophthongs, or much narrower diph­thongs than the ones in the south of England, or they may even sound as opening diphthongs [ıe], [uo]: bay [be:], [bie], plate [ple:t], [plıet], boat [bo:t], [buot];

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

6. RP words with [ɜ:] are pronounced with [ɔ:] in a broad Ty-neside accent: first [fɔ:st], shirt [ʃɔ:t]; so first, forced; shirt, short are homonyms;

7. [ai] is [ɛi]: right [rɛit];

8. words which in RP have [au] may have [u:], e.g. about ['əbu:t].

ln consonants

1. [1] is clear in all environments;

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

3. -ing is [ın]: shilling ['ʃılın];

4. [p, t, k] between vowels are accompanied by glottal stop [ʔ]: pity ['pıtʔi:];

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).