The orthoepic norm of English and its types. Phonetic changes in the present- day standard English. Regional and social variants in the British English pronunciation

Dialectology and dialect studies. The linguistic atlas of England and the United States.National pronunciation standards of English in the English-speaking countries.Orthoepic Norms and the choice of the teaching norm.

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).

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".

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). Dialectology in its traditional form is principally interested in geographical differences. 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 manygeneralisations about geographical variation, but they have serious weaknesses, which will be dis­cussed later. Dialect is the variant of a language which is different from not only in phonetics but also in such matters as vocabulary grammar and word-order. Differences between accents are of 2 main sorts: phonetic and phonological.When two accents differ from each other only phonetically, we find the same number of phonemesin 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.In every language there are some several variants of pronunciation and English has a greater number of them than any other l-ge in the world. The national l-ge had developed on the basis of the London dialect, because London became the center of commerce industry and learning as early as the 14century. Thanks to the economic, political and social factors, London dialect became the literary language of the country and the pronunciation of this dialect became an orthoepic standard. It happened in 1599, when the speech of the court was recognized as the neutral (standard) accent. The word orthoepic is derived from the Greek words orihos (correct) - epos (speech) Thus, by the orthoepic standard we understand the standard, normative, literary pronunciation devoid of any dialectical features. But within the standard pronunciation of a language there may be variants and types which are considered equally correct and acceptable. When such types of standard pronunciation are spread in large regions of the country and are used by educated people there, they may be called regional variants. When a language is the mother tongue of more than one nation, we may speak of national variants or types of pronunciation. The number of native speakers of English in the whole world is estimated more at about 250 mln people, and all the English speaking nations have their own stan­dard variants of English pronunciation. National types: 1) British Isles type2)American type3)Canadian type4) New Zealand type5) Australian type 6) Republic of South Africa type. Varieties of English: English based (British – English English, Welsh E, Scotish E, Northern Ireland E), Irish English, Australian E,New Zealand E. American based ( American and Canadian E). These variants may have in their form educated regional and uneducated local types of pronunciation. Pronunciation refers to the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect. The pronunciation of American and British English are basically similar, the fundamental sound patterns of BE and AE are far more like each other than they are like the sound of consonants is the same, permissible consonant-clusters and vowel-consonant sequences are similar prosodic combinations of weak and strong stresses, the relation between stress and vowel-length is of the same general type, and so is the basis set of contrasting intonation “tones”.

The Linguistic Atlas of the United States has become a classic resource for linguists and others interested in the English language.Hans Kurath (1891-1992) Hans Kurath, a native of Austria, who immigrated to the United States in 1907, was the leading figure in American geographical linguistics, a field of study dedicated to the identification and mapping of distinctive speech or dialect areas.Kurath's chief research interest was historical linguistics and his primary goal was to use the Linguistic Atlas to reconstruct the evolution of American English from the relatively "pure" forms of English brought to the United States by early settlers to the regional dialects that existed in the contemporary United States.Kurath was convinced that language held a living record of events like the growth of trade and transport systems, urbanization and population movements. By plotting regional differences in vocabulary and pronunciation on maps, Kurath and the other researchers were assembling what they hoped was a visual record of the social processes that had transformed American English over the past 200 years.The results of these interviews were plotted on dozens of maps, each showing the distribution of regional vocabularies, pronunciations and forms of grammar. The Word Geography of the Eastern United States (1949), for instance, contained maps showing areas in which residents said "stoop" instead of "porch" or "pavement" instead of "sidewalk." The teams also compiled their data into regional and national maps showing the isoglosses, or word boundaries, that delimited distinctive speech areas.

In every language there are some several variants of pronunciation and English has a greater number of them than any other l-ge in the world. The national l-ge had developed on the basis of the London dialect, because London became the center of commerce industry and learning as early as the 14century. Thanks to the economic, political and social factors, London dialect became the literary language of the country and the pronunciation of this dialect became an orthoepic standard. It happened in 1599, when the speech of the court was recognized as the neutral (standard) accent.The word orthoepic is derived from the Greek words orihos (correct) - epos (speech) Thus, by the orthoepic standard we understand the standard, normative, literary pronunciation devoid of any dialectical features.But within the standard pronunciation of a language there may be variants and types which are considered equally correct and acceptable. When such types of standard pronunciation are spread in large regions of the country and are used by educated people there, they may be called regional variants. When a language is the mother tongue of more than one nation, we may speak of national variants or types of pronunciation. The number of native speakers of English in the whole world is estimated more at about 250 mln people, and all the English speaking nations have their own stan­dard variants of English pronunciation. National types: 1) British Isles type2)American type3)Canadian type4) New Zealand type5) Australian type 6) Republic of South Africa type. Varieties of English: English based (British – English English, Welsh E, Scotish E, Northern Ireland E), Irish English, Australian E,New Zealand E. American based ( American and Canadian E). These variants may have in their form educated regional and uneducated local types of pronunciation. All the national types of English pronunciation have many features in common, because they are of common origin. At the same time they have a number of differences, due to the new condi­tions of their development after separation from British English and due to the degrees of their con­nection with British English after this separation.A world known phonetician A.C. Gimson sticks to the point, that there is no standard for the pronunciation. There are three main accents of English in Great Britain (RP, Scottish and Northern) and a great number of accents which are an integrated part of numerous British dialects. All these accents of English also differ noticeably in intonation without the difference being such as would cause a difference in meaning. Considerable changes are observed in the sound system of the pre­sent-day English, which are most remarkable since the well-knownGreat Vowel Shift in the Middle English period of the language devel­opment. It is a well-established fact that no linguistic modification can occur all of a sudden. The appearance of a new shade in the pronun­ciation of a sound results in the coexistence of free variants in the re­alization of a phoneme. The choice between permissible variants of [w] or [/л] in wh-words is an illustration of what is meant by the process of variability and free variants. In Russian we observe free variants of the pronunciation of the words of энергия, темп type: non-palatalized and palatalized vertions of [н] - [н'] and [т] - [т']. The degrees of vari­ability are different. The most perceptible and stable changes are de­scribed in the works of British linguists and have been investigated by Soviet phoneticians. The RP of recent years is characterized by a greater amount of permissible variants compared to the "classical" type of RP described by D. Jones, L. Armstrong, I. Word.The phenomenon is significant both from the theoretical and practi­cal viewpoint. The variability concerns mainly vowels. Most of English vowels have undergone definite qualitative changes. The newly appeared variants exhibit different stability and range.The qualitative distinctions manifest new allophonic realizations of the vowel phonemes. Ch. Barber comes to the conclusion that a defi­nite trend towards centralization is observed in the quality of English vowels at present. I. According to the stability of articulation. 1) It is generally ac­knowledged that two historically long vowels [i:], [u:] have become diphthongized and are often called diphthongoids; the organs of speech slightly change their articulation by the very end of pronunciation, be­coming more fronted. Ch. Barber tries to draw a parallel with the Great Vowel SMft which took place in Middle English, where diphthongization was just one part of a complete change of pattern in the long vowels. He claims that there is some resemblance to this process today and other phonemes may move up to fill the places left vacant.2) There is a tendency for some of the existing diphthongs to be smoothed out, to become shorter, so that they are more like pure vowels.

7This is very often the case with [ei], particularly in the word fi­nal position, where the glide is very slight: [ta'dei], [sei], [mei].

8 Diphthongs [ai], [au] are subject to a smoothing process where they are followed by the neutral sound [a]:

2. According to the horizontal and vertical movements of the tongue. Very striking changes occur in the vowel quality affected by the horizontal movements of the tongue. In fact the general tendency is marked by the centering of both front and back vowels:

1 the nuclei of [ai], [au] tend to be more back, especially in the male variant of the pronunciation;

2 the vowel phoneme [ae] is often replaced by [a] by younger speakers: [haev] - [hav], [send] - [and];

3 the nucleus of the diphthong [3u] varies considerably, ranging from [ou] among conservative speakers to [3u] among advanced ones:

This tendency is so strong that the transcription symbol has been recently changed in many British books: [ou] - [3u].

4 Back-advanced vowels [ a], [u ] are considerably fronted in the ad­vanced RP: but [bAt] - [bat], good [gud] - [gad].

3. Combinative changes. It is general knowledge that when sounds are in company they influence each other. These changes are called combinative. They take place only in certain phonetic contexts. In a diacritic study, however, there is no sharp boundary between isolative and combinative changes.

Changes in [j + u:], [1 + u:]. Words like suit, student, super, bulletin may be pronounced either [sju:t] or [su:t]

4. Changes in length. The lengthening of [i] is often heard in big, his, is; of [u] in good; [a ] in come. It should also be mentioned that [i] is often lengthened in the final syllable, i.e. very, many: [‘veri:], [‘meni:].

5. Voicing and Devoicing. As is well known, there is no opposition of final RP consonants according to the work of the vocal cords. They are all partially devoiced, particularly stops. Such devoiced sounds are clearly heard after long vowels and diphthongs as in deed: [di:d]. How­ever, these partly devoiced consonants are never identical with their voiceless counterparts, because the latter are pronounced with strong breath-force.

6. Loss of [h]. In rapid speech initial [h] is lost in form words and tends to die out from the language. Even most highly educated people subconsciously drop it completely. So instead of: He wants her to come [hi- ~*w»nts h3- ta ₍kAm] one hears: [i: ""wants 3- ta,ltAm]. It is evident, of course, that the loss of [h] in stressed syllables sounds wrong.

7. Initial "hw". Some conservative RP speakers pronounce words like why, when, which with an initial weak breath-like sound [h] - ]. The general tendency is, however, to pronounce [w].

8. Loss of final [n ]. The pronunciation of [in] for the termination [irj] has been retained as an archaic form of the RP: slttln', lookln'. These occasional usages are not likely to become general.

9. Spread of "dark" [1]. This tendency is evidently influenced by the American pronunciation and some advanced RP speakers are often heard saying [1] instead of [1] as in believe, for example. There is no threat in spreading it widely yet but it is quite common for pop singers now. It should also be mentioned that sometimes final [f] tends to be vocalized as in people, for instance, but is not likely to becom a norm.

10. Glottal stop. In RP the glottal stop [?] can appear only in the following two environments: a) as a realization of syllable-final [t] be­fore a following consonant as in batman ['bsetman - ['bae?mn] or not quite ['nx»t 'kwait] - fmo? 'kwait]; b) in certain consonant clusters as in box, simply [b»?ks], [¹si?mpli], where it is known as "glottal rein­forcements". The use of glottal stop by advanced RP speakers produces a "clipped" effect on a foreigner.

11. Palatalized final [k'] is often heard in words week, quick, etc.: [wirk'j, [kwik'].

12. Linking and intrusive [r]. It has been estimated that all English accents are divided into "rhotic" or "r-full" and "non-rhotic" or "r- less". Rhotic accents are those which actually pronounce |r] corre­sponding to orthographic "r". RP is a non-rhotic accent but most speakers of it do pronounce orthographic "r" word-finally before a vowel: It is a far_w away country. It is known as linking "r". Failure by students to pronounce it does not usually affect comprehension but may result in their sounding foreign.

13. Combinative changes. Sound combinations [tj, dj, sj] are pro­nounced as [tj, d3, /1 respectively, e.g. actualI'aektjual ] - faektjual], graduate fgrsedjueit] - [ grsed3ueit|, issuefisju:] - ['iju:].

Pronunciation refers to the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect. The pronunciation of American and British English are basically similar, the fundamental sound patterns of BE and AE are far more like each other than they are like the sound of consonants is the same, permissible consonant-clusters and vowel-consonant sequences are similar prosodic combinations of weak and strong stresses, the relation between stress and vowel-length is of the same general type, and so is the basis set of contrasting intonation “tones”.

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