Geographical variation

A number of geographical-historical and socio-cultural factors caused English to become a global language spoken by approximately 1,500 million speakers. Among the factors are: the British colonization, the impact of American power in political life and in business, especially in computer software and entertainment industries. There is also a necessity for mutual intelligibility between nations, for a "lingua franca" to serve the needs of international trade, business, diplomacy, safety, media, cultural exchange and other domains of international communication. However, another side of this enormous spread over the world is that English is not uniform, that there are many spoken "Englishes" while the written forms have a lot more in common (Crystal 1997).

Thus English is a language which consists of many varieties, each distinctive in its use of sounds, grammar and vocabulary.

In geographical variation we have to distinguish two basic concepts:

A) Dialect (or variety) is distinguished for its vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. In this sense the two major varieties of English, the British English and the American English, as well as any two local varieties, like Lancashire or New York Brooklyn speech, may be treated as "dialects".

B) Accent is a type of pronunciation or a feature of one which can be found in the speech of any individual or the whole speech community. We can speak of an American accent, a French accent in English, and by that we mean only the sounds of spoken English, i.e. vowels, consonants, stress, rhythm, voice quality and intonation. Thus phonetics is mainly concerned with accents of English, as spoken on different territories, in diverse social groups, by particular individuals.

Accents of English worldwide are grouped into:

• accents in the countries where English is the mother tongue of the majority of the population ("the inner circle"): the U.K., the U.S.A., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the white population of the Repub­lic of South Africa;

• accents in the new developing states, former British colonies, where English is one of the official languages ("the outer circle"): India and Singapore, for instance;

• accents in the countries where English is the most widely used foreign language taught at schools ("the expanding circle"), like Russia and China (Crystal 1997: 54).

So far we have only discussed the first group of accents because a native speaker's accent was the only model for education. More than that, to follow the European tradition, we selected only one British accent, RP (Received Pronunciation), which was better described in books and man­uals, codified in dictionaries and had a high social prestige. Although there are a few books on the phonology of English viewed internationally we still know very little about accents other than RP. But we are at least fully aware of the fact that most of international talk in English may be carried out between speakers of the outer and the wider circles of which we can be active participants.

Historical-geographical division of native English accents maybe based on the division into British-oriented (the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) and North-America-oriented (the U.S.A., Canada).

Most of the countries possess their national pronunciation standards, regional standards and local accents.

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