Variation across Englishes

Abstract

There is substantial variation in the pronunciation of Englishes around the world. However, at the same time, varieties of English in the third diaspora, those in the outer circle which originated in colonial settings, often share a range of features of pronunciation, including the absence of dental fricatives, monophthongal realisation of the face and goat vowels, a relative absence of reduced vowels, syllable-based rhythm, and widespread occurrence of spelling pronunciation. In this chapter, short recordings of one speaker of English from each of Singapore, Nigeria and India illustrate these features of pronunciation. While their pronunciation is quite distinct, reflecting their national variety of English, they all exhibit these features of pronunciation, thereby setting such outer-circle styles of speech apart from inner-circle accents typically found in the UK, the USA and Australia. It is suggested that none of these outer-circle shared features of pronunciation interfere with successful international communication, and they may even enhance intelligibility in English as a Lingua Franca settings; and outer-circle Englishes may be at the forefront in developing trends in the ways English is spoken around the world.