British English Dialects Research Articles

Strength of British English accents in altered listening conditions

This work is concerned with the processing or representational level at which accent forms learned early in life can change and with whether alteration to a speaker's auditory environment can elicit an original accent. In Experiment 1, recordings were made of an equal number of (1) speakers living in the home counties (HC) of Britain (around the London conurbation) who claimed to have retained the accent of the region that they originally had come from, (2) speakers who stated that they had lost their regional accent and acquired an HC accent, and (3) native HC speakers. They read two texts in a normal listening environment. Listeners rated the similarity in accent between each of these texts and all the other texts. The results showed that in the normal listening conditions, the speakers who had lost their accent were rated as being more similar to HC English speakers than to those speakers from the same region who had retained their accent. In Experiment 2, recordings of the same speakers under frequency-shifted and delayed auditory feedback, as well as the normal listening conditions used earlier, were rated in order to see whether the manipulations of listening environment would elicit the speaker's original accent. Listeners rated similarity of accent in a sample of speech recorded under normal listening against a sample read by another speaker in one of the altered listening conditions. When listening condition was altered, the speakers who had lost their original accent were rated as more similar to those who had retained their accent. It is concluded that accent differences can be elicited by altering listening environment because the speech systems of speakers who have lost their accent are more vulnerable than those of speakers who have not changed their original accent.

Diphthongization as cue for the automatic identification of British English dialects

The degree to which a given speaker of British English diphthongizes her/his vowels has been known for decades to be a good indicator of this speaker’s dialectal origin: for instance, some Northern varieties tend to have variants perceived as monophthongs where Standard Southern English has a perceived diphthong in the word GOAT. A portion of the recently released Accents of the British Isles database (14 dialects recorded throughout the British Isles, 20 speakers per dialect) is investigated to determine whether this view still holds at least acoustically for contemporary dialects. Several metrics (based on formant-frequency estimation) are proposed in an attempt to capture a ‘‘degree’’ of diphthongization. In a preliminary and rather oversimplified study, the standard deviation of F2 was measured over the whole duration of the vowel in the word BOAT for all speakers and dialects. A nonparametric one-way analysis of variance was performed to test the effect of ‘‘dialect’’ on diphthongization. The effect turned out to be significant at the 0.01 level. More elaborate procedures (including all first three formants) will be shown in the final presentation.

The difference between a question and a statement: A cross-dialect survey

Seven British English dialects were studied to see what prosodic distinctions are made between statements and questions in read speech. A set of Bayesian classifiers was built upon feature vectors obtained from a spectral analysis of measures of (1) f0, (2) loudness, (3) spectral slope and (4) voicing periodicity. It was found that the prosodic information useful for the question/statement distinction is distributed broadly across the utterance, and that loudness and spectral slope can be nearly as informative as f0 (voicing is less informative). The three important acoustic features carry somewhat less than one bit of information each, so prosodic information could be valuable to the listener, and the listener may be able to make the question/statement decision early in the utterance. The contrast differs from one acoustic property to the next: f0 is marked primarily by slow variations. Conversely, the spectral slope and loudness measurements primarily use shorter-wavelength features, corresponding to structures that are a syllable or two long. We also find substantial differences in the prosodic information that different dialects use, and substantial differences between speakers of the same dialect. [Research supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, Grant RES 00-23-1049.]

Influence of syllable-coda voicing on the acoustic properties of syllable-onset /l/ in English

Properties of syllable onset /l/ that depend on the voicing of the syllable coda were measured for four speakers, representing different nonrhotic British English accents that differ in their phonetic realization of onset /l/ and in their system of phonological contrast involving onset /l/ and /r/. Onset /l/ was longer before voiced than voiceless codas for all four speakers, and darker for two of them as measured by lower F 2 frequency, and for these two and one other as measured by spectral center of gravity (COG). There were no coda-dependent differences in f 0 in the /l/, and F 1 frequency differed only for the fourth speaker. The vowel was also longer for all four speakers when the coda was voiced (as expected), while F 1 was lower and F 2 normally higher. One speaker provided data with fricative or affricate onsets: fricated segments were longer before voiced codas, but no coda-dependent COG differences were found. At least when the onset includes /l/, phonological voicing of the coda seems to be reflected in complex acoustic–phonetic properties distributed across the whole syllable, some properties being localized, others not. We describe these properties as variations in a bright–somber dimension. In most accents, when the coda is voiceless, the syllable is relatively bright: small proportions of periodic energy which is relatively high frequency at the syllable edges, and a high proportion of silence or aperiodic energy. When the coda is voiced, the syllable is relatively somber: a high proportion of periodic energy which is relatively low frequency at the syllable edges, and relatively small amounts of silence and aperiodic energy. Other accents use other combinations, dependent on the phonetic and phonological properties of liquids in the particular accent. The association of onset darkness and coda voicing does not seem to be ascribable to anticipatory coarticulation of features essential to voicing itself; this observation provides support for nonsegmental models of speech perception in which fine phonetic detail is mapped directly to linguistic structure without reference to phoneme-sized segments.

The origin of Definite Article Reduction in northern English dialects: evidence from dialect allomorphy

The phenomenon of Definite Article Reduction (DAR) is the realization of the definite article in northern British English dialects in a range of vowel-less forms, usually written t' in literature. The origin of DAR is assumed to be the assimilation of the initial fricative of the Middle English definite article þe to produce a te form, a sound change recorded for many dialects of Middle English. This article examines the validity of this hypothesis by analysing the distribution of fricative allomorphs in the modern dialects in comparison with the details of the Middle English change. The predicted distribution of fricative forms is not found at most localities, indicating that the development hypothesis is incorrect, but the available data are too scanty to suggest an alternative model.

The English History of African American English (review)

Reviewed by: The English history of African American English ed. by Shana Poplack John M. Lipski The English history of African American English. Ed. by Shana Poplack. Malden, MA & Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Pp. xix, 277. The eight essays in this volume deal with the reconstruction of African American vernacular English and the determination of its possible origins in an earlier ‘plantation creole’. All make use of contemporary evidence from vestigial speech communities representing the African American diaspora of the nineteenth century, in Nova Scotia, Liberia, and the Samaná Peninsula of the Dominican Republic, as well as the WPA ex-slave recordings, and attestations of earlier AAE. Taking different paths and applying different methodologies, all converge on a single conclusion, that AAE was never a creole, and while intersecting with pidgins and creoles throughout its history, it always drew more heavily on British roots. Many of the relevant features have disappeared from modern standard British English while some divergences between contemporary AAE and other American and British dialects are relatively recent, with the divergence continuing to increase. The volume begins with an extensive introductory chapter by the editor, in which the debate over the origins of AAE is summarized and critiqued, the various AAE diaspora varieties are presented, and relevant linguistic variables are introduced. Poplack stresses the tenacity of enclaves in resisting contact-induced linguistic changes which makes these diaspora communities ideal candidates in the reconstruction of AAE. This essay and the remaining contributions are predicated on the feasibility of using the diasporic communities as essentially undistorted specimens of earlier AAE, a task to which P devotes considerable attention. The following two chapters form a section of morphophonological variables. James Walker’s ‘Rephrasing the copula: Contraction and zero in early African American English’ uses AAE diaspora data to question the creole origins of modern AAE copula deletion. Walker isolates prosodic factors that condition both copula contraction and deletion and calls for a finer-grained approach to the historical reconstruction of the copula in all earlier forms of English. Shana Poplack, Sali Tagliamonte, and Ejike Eze offer ‘Reconstructing the source of early African American English plural marking: A comparative study of English and creole’. Using data from Nova Scotia, Samaná, and the ex-slave recordings, the authors find plural marking to be more variable than in contemporary AAE and present disambiguation and phonological context as criteria for maintaining English plural marking. Comparative data from Nigerian pidgin English reveal no phonological conditioning. The authors claim that early AAE inherited a variable plural marking from English, to which phonological conditioning was added. Darin Howe and James Walker make the first contribution to the section on morphosyntactic variation with ‘Negation and the creole-origins hypothesis: Evidence from early African American English’. Howe and Walker also examine data from Afro-Nova Scotian English, Samaná English, and the slave recordings to demonstrate common patterns which in turn differ from negation patterns found in most English-based creoles. The authors dispute the creole-origins theory of AAE while pointing out parallels between early AAE negation and nonstandard white English dialects; they trace both AAE and nonstandard white English negation to colonial English antecedents. Sali Tagliamonte and Jennifer Smith compare isolated British English dialects and earlier AAE varieties in ‘Old was, new ecology: Viewing English through the sociolinguistic filter’. Invariant was (I was, we was, etc.) occurs not only in AAE but also in other English dialects; as an example, an isolated Scottish dialect is compared with Afro-Nova Scotian and white Nova Scotian dialects. After tracing the historical demographics of the three communities, the authors conclude that invariant was in AAE is more likely to stem from earlier (in this case, Scottish) English dialects rather than from an AAE-internal development. In their view, the study casts doubt ‘about the extent to which ethnicity is the basic underlying factor which best accounts for linguistic differences between AAVE and other varieties of North American English’. The first study of syntactic variables is Gerard Van Herk’s ‘The question question: Auxiliary inversion in early African American English’. Using data from Samaná, Nova Scotia, and the...

RP: Received or Reference Pronunciation?

The paper deals with the issue of Received Pronunciation. Though still widely regarded as the Standard British English accent especially by the ELT world, this accent is gradually being rejected by contemporary phonologists. In the first part of this paper a brief description of RP is given. In addition, a historical perspective is offered in order to show how it came to be the accepted standard accent, in the period from the end of the nineteenth century until the first few decades of the twentieth century. A brief description of the different viewpoints among phonologists then follows. Finally, attention is focused on the issues related to some recognised and recognisable changes which concern RP, even if the latter is still treated as an ‘unvaried and unvariable’ accent by most phonology coursebooks both for teachers and learners of English.

On the segmental phonology of a South Welsh accent of English

In their book on British English accents and dialects, Hughes & Trudgill (1979: 51–3) include a brief study of the South Wales variety of English, based on the speech of informants from Neath and Pontypridd. Although in the main their description rings true, it does leave some gaps and contain some inaccuracies, sufficient to prompt me to offer the following, somewhat fuller notes on the South Welsh pronunciation of English, with particular reference to the speech of my native West Glamorgan (WG). My comments relate primarily to the Port Talbot variety of WG, but since this variety is similar in most respects to those found in nearby Neath and Swansea and their surrounding areas, my remarks may, for the most part, be taken as applying to WG speech in general. The accents found in the adjoining south-western part of the county of Mid Glamorgan, in towns such as Maesteg or Porthcawl, are also similar to the Port Talbot variety, and thus share most of the characteristics attributed here to WG speech.