43014 (Territorial varieties of English pronunciation), страница 2

According to British dialectologists (P. Trudgill, J. Hannah, A. Hughes and others (61, 78) the following variants of English are referred to the English-based group: English, Welsh English, Australian English, New Zealand English; to the American-based group: United States English, Canadian English.

Scottish English and Irish English fall somewhere between the two being somewhat by themselves.

On the whole this division seems rather reasonable and the «English» types of English will be treated first in this book, though it is safe to say that English, Welsh English, Scottish English and Northern Ireland English should be better combined into the British English subgroup, on the ground of political, geographical, cultural, psychological unity which brought more similarities than differences for those variants of pronunciation.

To our regrets, the lack of space gives us no chance to describe all the territorial and national variants of English pronunciation.

2.2 English-based pronunciation standards of English

2.2.1 British English

As was mentioned before, BEPS (British English Pronunciation Standards and Accents) comprise English English, Welsh English, Scottish English and Northern Ireland English (the corresponding abbreviations are EE, WE, ScE., NIE).

Table 1 British English Accents

2.2.2 English, English

In this chapter we are going to look in greater detail at the Received Pronunciation (RP) and at the regional non-RP accents of England.

Roughly speaking the non-RP accents of England may be grouped like this: 1. Southern accents.

1) Southern accents (Greater London, Cockney, Surray, Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire);

2) East Anglia accents (Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire;

3) South-West accents (Gloucestershire, Avon, Somerset, Wiltshire).

2. Northern and Midland accents.

1) Northern accents (Northumberland, Durham, Cleveland);

2) Yorkshire accents;

3) North-West accents (Lancashire, Cheshire);

4) West Midland (Birmingham, Wolverhampton).

It has long been believed that RP is a social marker, a prestige ac-cent of an Englishman. In the nineteenth century «received» was understood in the sense of «accepted in the best society». The speech of aristocracy and the court phonetically was that of the London area. Then it lost its local characteristics and was finally fixed as a ruling-class accent, often referred to as «King's English». It was also the ac-cent taught at public schools. With the spread of education cultured people not belonging to the upper classes were eager to modify their accent in the direction of social standards.

We may definitely state now that RP is a genuinely regionless accent within Britain; i.e. if speakers have it you cannot tell which area of Britain they come from; which is not the case for any other type of British accents.

It is fair to mention, however, that only 3–5 per cent of the population of England speak RP. British phoneticians (Ch. Barber (44),⁴ A.C. Gimson (57), A. Hughes and P. Trudgill (61) estimate that nowadays RP is not homogeneous. A.C. Gimson suggests that it is convenient to distinguish three main types within it: «the conservative RP forms, used by the older generation, and, traditionally, by certain profession or social groups; the general RP forms, most commonly in use and typified by the pronunciation adopted by the BBC, and the advanced RP forms, mainly used by young people of exclusive social groups – mostly of the upper classes, but also for prestige value, in certain professional circles.

«This last type of RP reflects the tendencies typical of changes in pronunciation. It is the most «effected and exaggerated variety» of the accent. Some of its features may be results of temporary fashion; some are adopted as a norm and described in the latest textbooks. Therefore, it is very important for a teacher and learner of English to distinguish between the two. RP speakers make up a very small percentage of the English population. Many native speakers, especially teachers of English and professors of colleges and universities (particularly from the South and South-East of England) have accents closely resembling RP but not identical to it. P. Trudgill and J. Hannah call it Near-RP southern. So various types of standard English pronunciation may be summarized as follows: Conservative RP; General RP; Advanced RP; Near-RP southern.

Changes in the Standard

As was stated above, changes in the standard may be traced in the speech of the younger generation of native RP speakers. These changes may affect all the features of articulation of vowel and consonant phonemes and also the prosodic system of the language.

Considerable changes are observed in the sound system of the pre-sent-day English, which are most remarkable since the well-known Great 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 [М] in 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 [H] – [H'] and [T] – [T']. 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. (44)

Changes of Vowel Quality

1. 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 Shift 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.

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

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

Conservative RP: [tauə], [faiə]

General RP: [taə], [faə]

Advanced RP: [tα:], [fα:]

c) Also diphthongs [oə], [uə] tend to be leveled to [o:]. Thus the pronunciation of the words pore, poor is varied like this:

older speakers: [poə], [puə]

middle-aged speakers: [po:], [puə]

younger speakers: [po:], [po:]

It should be mentioned, however, that this tendency does not concern the diphthong [iə] when it is final. The prominence and length shift to the glide, this final quality often being near to []; dear [diə] – [di].

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:

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

b) the vowel phoneme is often replaced by [a] by younger speakers: [hv] – [hav], [nd] – [and];

c) the nucleus of the diphthong [] varies considerably, ranging from [o] among conservative speakers to [] among advanced ones:

Conservative RP: [so], [fon], [not];

Advanced RP: [s], [fn], [nt].

This tendency is so stronp that the transcription symbol has been recently changed in many British books: [o] – [].

d) Back-advanced vowels [], [] are considerably fronted in the advanced RP: but [bt] – [bət], good [gd] – [gəd].

It should be mentioned here that there is a tendency for all short vowels to be made nearer the centre of the mouth, that is to move towards [ə], especially in unstressed position: honest [αnist] – [αnəst].

Thus the horizontal changes in vowel quality may be listed like this:

Centering of short vowels:

More back pronunciation of the nuclei of diphthongs: [ai] –» [ai], – [a] – [a]

More advanced pronunciation of the diphthong: [o] – [].

More fronted pronunciation of the diphthongoids: [i] – [i(j)], [u] – [u(w)].

Vertical changes in vowels may be traced in [e] and [o:] which tend to be closer in advanced RP. It has also been stated above that the nuclei of diphthongs [ei], [ea], [oa], [ua] become more open when these phonemes are being leveled, particularly the diphthong [ea] which is characterized by a great opening of the first element: careful [kəfl] – ['k:fl]. The first element of the diphthong [ə] can be lowered considerably. Thus several words with [ə] are given a shade pronunciation by some advanced RP speakers: poor, sure [pə] [ə] – [pə, ə].

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.

1) Changes in [j + u:], [1 + u:]. Words like suit, student, super, bulletin may be pronounced either [sju:t] or [sat], [stju:dant] or [stu:dnt], [sjuipa] or [su:pa]. The tendency is for middle-aged and younger speakers to omit the [j] after [s] before [u:]. Word-internally [j] tends to be retained as in assume [asju; m]. There is also fluctuation after [1]: word-initially lute [lu:t] is normal, but it is possible to pronounce [ilju:n] in illusion, for example. These recent developments in combinative RP changes bear remarkable resemblance to American Standard pronunciation.

2) Change of [:] to [α] before [f, s]. Where orthographic «o» occurs before the voiceless fricatives [f, s, ] older speakers pronounce the vowel [o:]: loss [lots]. This pronunciation is currently dying out in RP and being replaced by [α]: [lαs].

Words like salt and ault still may be pronounced with [:].

4. Changes in length.

It is an accepted fact that English vowels vary in length according to the phonetic context – the consonant they are followed by (voiceless, voiced), syllabic border, the degree of stress, the types of nuclear tone and so on.