II. Welsh English

Yorkshire accents

Yorkshire and Bradford accents are identical with northern vowel features in points 1, 3, 4 (only many speakers pronounce words which have "ow", "ou" in spelling with [so]: know [пзо]); with northern consonant features in point 3.

Now having accomplished the description of regional non-RP accents of England we would like to say that we didn't attempt to give a detailed account of all the regional differences in accents of remote rural areas. Rather we concentrated on urban accents which can be heard when one travels throughout the country and which are most likely to be encountered by foreign tourists. Intonational features were not dealt with.

As everyone probably knows Wales is a bilingual area. This speech situation in linguistics is known as exoglossic. In Wales English dominates over Welsh in urban areas, in the west and north-west of the country the balance being in favour of Welsh, where English is learnt at schools as a second language. At the moment nationalistic feelings are rather strong in Wales and we are witnessing a movement in favour of the revival of the Welsh language and its spread in all areas of Wales.

However, Welsh English at the level of educated speech and writing is not much different from that of English English. Most differences are found at the level of more localized dialects.

In this chapter we shall give a brief outline of Welsh English pronunciation standard.

The principal phonological differences between WE and RP are the following:

In vowels

1. The distribution of [as] and [a:] is as in the north of England. Lost, dance, chance, etc. tend to have [as] rather than [a].

2. unstressed orthographic "a" tends to be [ae] rather than [a], e.g.: sofa ['so:fae];

3. there is no contrast between {a] and [э]: rubber ['rabaj;

4. [i] at the end is a long vowel: city I'siti];

5. in words like rune, few, used we find [iu] rather than [ju:]: rune [tiun];

6. [ei], [so] may become monophthongs: boie [be:k], boat [bo:t];

7. the vowel [з:] as in girl is produced with rounded lips approaching [o:];

8. the vowels [ia], [ua] do not occur in many variants ofWelsh English: fear is ['ftja], poor is ['pu:wa].

In consonants

V. W. E. is non-rhotic, [r] is a tap, or it is also called a flapped [r]. Intrusive and linking [r) do occur.

1. Consonants in intervocalic position, particularly when the preceding vowel is short are doubled: city ['sittk].

2. Voiceless plosives tend to be strongly aspirated: in word final position they are generally released and without glottalization, e.g. pit [p^hit^h].

2. [1] is clear in all positions.

3. Intonation in Welsh English is very much influenced by the Welsh language.

Дата добавления: 2015-05-31