Local Accents

Less educated people use numerous local accents which can be either urban (characteristic of a city like Liverpool or New York) or rural (spoken in the countryside, like South Wales or the Appalachians).

In the old time a natural barrier like a river or a mountain would be enough to make the speech of two villages different, thus geographical proximity was a very important factor to human contacts and innovations development. But today, as recent research has shown, communication, education, media and mobility of the population have increased immensely. The powerful factor to facilitate innovations spreading geographically and socially consists in social contacts of population in big urban centers. Innovations then "leap" from big cities to small towns over the intervening countryside. Comparison between the data of the Linguistic Atlas of North America collected in the fifties and the data presented in the Phonological Map of the U.S.A. completed by the end of the century has demonstrated that the accents of the major cities in the U.S.A. have diverged greatly, i.e. have become more different than they used to be fifty years ago (Labov 1999).

6.2. Major accent types: British and American

Generally speaking, the main defining feature of British-oriented accents is the absence of post-vocalic r which makes them all non-rhotic (л- less) compared to North-America-oriented accents which are predominantly rhotic (r-ful). However, within each country there are regionally marked accents: the Scottish, the Irish and some other provincial accents on the British Isles are rhotic; in the U.S.A. the Southern, the Eastern and Afro-American types of English accents are non-rhotic. These distinctive features become social markers. In the States they describe Bostonians as pronouncing the phrase with a long a but without r. The cah was pahked in Hahvahd yahd.

Another important point should be made about the speech communities of the U.K. and the U.S.A.: at present they are described as multicultural, which is especially true of the USA, the country of immigrants, with the Anglo-Saxon culture dominating and the English language being a unifying power in the nation. In spite of the diversity of languages and accents of various ethnic groups, as well as the differences in regional standards we can still describe American standard accent as that of GA (General American). We will compare GA (American Network English) with RP (BBC English). The difference in cultural norms across the two nations is also reflected in the status of the pronunciation models: RP is a social prestige accent spoken by a tiny minority of the population, estimated at 3-5% only, while the proportion of GA speakers in the U.S.A. is much higher, estimated at 33% of the population.

Most of the distinctions are found in the system of vowels which was affected by the preservation of r in GA (as is known from history, in Southern British English it was vocalised).

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