Principal types of english pronunciation

PRESENTATION

1. The principal types of English pronunciation .

2. The four components of the phonetic structure of ant language (phonemic, syllabic, accentual and intonational ) constitute its pronunciation. One of the things that everybody knows about languages is that they have different accents. Languages are pronounced differently by people from different geo­graphical places, from different social classes, of different ages and different educa­tional backgrounds. The word "accent" is often confused with dialect. We will use the word "dialect" to refer to a variety of a language, which is different from others not just in pronunciation but also in such matters as vocabulary, grammar and word-order. Differences of accent, on the other hand, are pronunciation differences only. Type of British English, most familiar as the accent used by most announcers and newsreaders on serious national and international BBC broadcasting channels, has for a long time been identified by the rather quaint name  Received Pronunciation  (usually abbrevi­ated to its initials, RP).

3. In talking about accents of English, the foreigner should be careful about the difference between England and Britain; there are many different accents in England, but the range becomes very much wider if the accents of Scotland, Wales and North­ern Ireland are taken into account. Within the accents of England, the distinction that is most frequently made by the majority of English people is between  Northern  and  Southern . This is a very rough division, and there can be endless argument over where the boundaries lie, but most people on hearing a pronunciation typical of someone from Lancashire, Yorkshire or other counties further north would identify it as "Northern".

4. Differences among accents of English are usually a subject that many students of English find interesting and wish to know more about. For a long time, the study of accents was part of the subject of dialectology, which aimed to identify all the ways in which a language differed from place to place. in its traditional form is principally interested in geographical differences (exploring rural areas, finding elderly speakers).

5. Dialectology Its best-known data-gath­ering technique has been to send researchers (usually called "field-workers") mainly into rural areas (where the speakers were believed to be less likely to have been influ­enced by other accents), to find elderly speakers (whose speech was believed to have been less influenced by other accents and to preserve older forms of the dialect) and to use lists of questions to find information about vocabulary and pronunciation, the questions being chosen to concentrate on items known to vary a lot from region to re­gion. Surveys of this kind can provide the basis for many generalisations about geo­graphical variation, but they have serious weaknesses, which will be discussed later.

6. Differences When two accents differ from each other only phonetically, we find the same number of phonemes in both accents, but some of all the phonemes are realised 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 RP, yet Australian pronunciation is so different from RP that it is easily recognised as such. A word of caution should be given here: it is all too easy to talk about such things as "Australian English", and ignore the great variety that inevitably exists within such a large community of speakers.

7. Every individual's speech We can find differences in pronunciation (as well as in other fields of linguistic analysis) resulting from various factors that we could call  static in­fluences In addition, various  situational factors Some people (who usually turn out to do well in phonetic training) find that in speaking to someone with a different accent their pronunciation gets progres­sively more like chat of the person they are speaking to, like a chameleon adapting its colour to its environment.

8. Every national variety of language falls into territorial or regional dialects. Dialects are distinguished from each other by differences in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. When we refer to varieties in pronunciation only, we use the term accent. So local accents may have many features of pronunciation in common and are grouped into territorial or area accents. For certain reasons one of the dialects becomes the standard language of the nation and its pronunciation or accent - the standard pronunciation.

9. The literary spoken form has its national pronunciation standard. A standard may be defined as "a socially accepted variety of language established by a codified norm of correctness" (K. Macanalay ). Standard national pronunciation is sometimes called "an orthoepic norm''. Some phoneticians however prefer the term "literary pronunciation".