A regional survey

Pronunciation

English is not at all uniform in pronunciation, but one advantage of English spelling is that it is more or less the same across the English-speaking world. Indeed, if we followed the principle that spelling should closely reflect pronunciation, we would have to start coping with alarmingly divergent spelling practices.

Britain itself reveals considerable diversity of pronunciation. What many people think of as traditional and correct pronunciation — and what is sometimes referred to as ВВС English or Oxford English - is the accent of a very small minority. Known to phoneticians as Received Pronunciation, or RP for short, this way of pronouncing English was spread through the prestigious private schools in England and has thus become a pronunciation with high social status. It continues to be important, not only because the minority who speaks it includes highly influential people, but also because descriptions of English pronunciation and the pronunciations given in British dictionaries are often based on RP. Many learners of English around the world, especially in areas where Britain is still regarded as the home of the English language, are introduced to RP as the 'best' or 'normal' pronunciation of English.

RP was first described by the British phonetician Daniel Jones in his English Pronouncing Dictionary of 1917, when it was already well established as a prestigious pronunciation. Jones was actually more interested in describing RP than in promoting it, and in the introduction to his dictionary he wrote that 'RP means merely 'widely understood pronunciation', going on to say that 'I do not hold it up as a standard which everyone is recommended to adopt'.

Many of the older regional pronunciations have been heavily modified over the last hundred years or so, partly because mobility and urbanization have broken down the older closer-knit communities that sustained marked regional diversity, and partly because school teachers have often encouraged children to eliminate some of the most obvious regional features oft heir speech. But there are still identifiable regional pronunciations across Britain, even if their precise characteristics and the boundaries among them are not as clear cut as they once were. Because of the high status of RP, regional pronunciations have sometimes been regarded as 'lower class' accents; but this in turn has meant that many citizens of Britain have reacted against RP as 'posh'. Many Britons probably now want (consciously or not) to speak something like 'standard English' but without abandoning all the features of their local speech. An important illustration of this newer kind of regionalism is Estuary English, spoken in much of southeastern England and named after the Thames Estuary. Viewed phonetically, this is a compromise between RP and London speech. Many people in southeastern England would consider it an 'ordinary' way to talk, neither affected (as RP might seem to be) nor uneducated (as a strongly regional accent might be thought to imply).

Scotland, Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Wales have traditions and regional or national identities that make them more independent of RP than areas of England. In Scotland, for example, while there is a very small minority of RP speakers, most of the population has an identifiably Scottish pronunciation (phonetically quite different from RP or Estuary). WithinScotland, there is substantial regional differentiation, but the factors alrecady noted above — mobility, urbanization and so on — have tended to reducethe extent of variation.

In both Australia and New Zealand, English-speaking settlers seem to have developed a local pronunciation quite early, but the precise mechanism of this development is not known. Both countries have livedunderthe shadow of RP in much the same way as many parts of Britain, Both countries have had an educational and cultural tradition of decrying local speech and admiring an (often highly idealized) English model. In Australia in particular, the most distinctively local end is known as Broad Australian, while the other end is sometimes referred to as Cultivated Australian. Between Broad and Cultivated is a range of pronunciations thatcan be labelled General Australian. In both Australia and New Zealand it is probably fair to say that most speakers have forms of speech of the General kind, which are distinctively local but which lack or constrain (he traditionally stigmatized features of Broad.

The pronunciation of English in the USA is noticeably different from RP (and in some respects shows more similarities with Irish, Scottish and regional British forms of speech than with RP). Regional diversity is not as marked in the USA as in Britain, but is certainly evident. As a very rough generalization, two areas stand out as divergent from most of the USA. One is the northeast USA (loosely New England, but sometimes including New York); the other is the southeast, sometimes referred to simply as 'the South'. These two regions stand apart from what some linguists call 'General American'. One interpretation of the term General American would see it as a somewhat idealized standard form of American accent, spoken widely through the USA; a more negative but probably more realistic interpretation would see General American as the kind of pronunciation that most Americans would consider neither markedly New England (or New York) nor markedly southern.

Canadian English is similar to that of the USA, partly for the historical reason that many North Americans moved into Canada after the USA won its independence from Britain in the late eighteenth century. Canadian English thus shares many phonetic features with General American, and many people from outside North America find it hard to distinguish between a Canadian and an American accent. But, like the USA, Canada also shows some regional variation from an otherwise rather negatively defined standard. It is in eastern Canada, in the Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland that the most obvious regional variation is found, while the rest of the country is more uniform.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11