Regional Variation/ Accent and Dialect Flashcards
What is standard English?
The generally accepted, prestigious form of the language; particularly lexis and grammar
What is dialect?
Variation in words and grammatical structures associated with a particular geographical region
What are prescriptive attitudes?
The enforcement of a rule of method; insistence on particular lexis, grammar and phonetics
What are descriptive attitudes?
Describing what actually occurs in an objective and non judgemental way
What is received pronunciation?
- A social accent rather than a regional accent
- Sometimes considered to be a standard accent of British English
- Usually regarded as the most prestigious of British accents
- The accent on which the IPA and phonemic transcriptions are based
- Widely used around the world for teaching English as a foreign language
How many British people still use received pronunciation?
Around 2%
How popular is received pronunciation around other parts of Britain than just England?
- Negligible presence in Scotland and Northern Ireland
- Falling number of speakers in Wales
What is the origin of received pronunciation?
- 14th century regional accent of the East Midlands
- By the 16th century, many of these accent features were adopted by the social elite further South
- Soon became the prestigious accent of the royal court
- Oxford and Cambridge spread the accent among the wealthy educated elite
- By the 19th century it became the accent of public schools in England
- In 1932 the BBC began broadcasting in English overseas using the RP accent
What are the 3 types of received pronunciation?
- Conservative
- Mainstream
- Contemporary
What is conservative received pronunciation?
Very traditional variety particularly associated with older speakers and the aristocracy
What is mainstream received pronunciation?
An accent we might consider extremely neutral in terms of signals regarding age, occupation or lifestyle of the speaker
What is contemporary received pronunciation?
Speakers using features typical of younger RP speakers
What did Jonathon Harrington et al find about received pronunciation?
Found evidence of RP accent change and influence of less prestigious Southern accents within Christmas broadcasts made by Queen Elizabeth II
What was the Matched Guise Experiment and who conducted it?
- Giles
- Found that RP speakers tend to be rated more highly than speakers with a regional accent in terms of their general competence
- RP speakers earned respect but weren’t associated with personal integrity
- RP speakers tend to receive high ratings for qualities such as: intelligence, self confidence, ambition
- RP speakers emerge less favourably than speakers with a regional accent in terms of personal qualities
- RP scores less well for qualities such as: friendliness, warmth, sense of humour
What are the 3 negative attitudes to regional accents as summarised by Dennis Freeborn?
- The incorrectness view
- The ugliness view
- The impreciseness view
What is the incorrectness view and who defined it this way?
- Dennis Freeborn
- All regional accents are incorrect compared to the accent of RP
What is the ugliness view and who defined it this way?
- Dennis Freeborn
- Some accents don’t sound nice
What is the impreciseness view and who defined it this way?
- Dennis Freeborn
- Some accents are described as lazy and sloppy
What did Andersson and Trudgill argue?
Attitudes towards accents are based more on social connotations and prejudices surrounding the location or social group associated with that accent than on the sound itself
What is the ITV Tonight and ComRes study?
- Found that 28% of Britons feel they have been discriminated against because of their regional accent
- 80% of employers admit to making discrimination decisions based on regional accents
What is William Labov’s Martha’s Vineyard study?
- Conducted on an isolated island in Massachusetts which had lots of tourism
- Labov was in pronunciation of diphthongs /aʊ/ and /aɪ/ (concrete nouns ‘mouse’ and ‘mice’)
- Interviewed 69 people from different social groups and asked specific questions to encourage participants to use words containing these vowels
- Found certain group pronounced diphthongs differently: small group of fishermen, people aged between 31-45 and uplanders
- Concluded this was done to establish an identity of themselves as vineyards, distancing themselves from tourists
- There was a need to retain identity and a create a ‘them and us’ mentality by using language
What are the types of phonetic variation?
- /ʌ/ absence in North and Midlands
- /a:/ vs /æ/
- Post vocalic /r/
- Final nasal: /ŋ/ or /n/
- velar fricative /x/ and uvular fricative /χ/
What is the /ʌ/ absence in North and Midlands?
- Accents in the North and Midlands don’t have the /ʌ/ phoneme et all
- Where RP is pronounced /Pʌt/ in Northern and Midlands accents, we would expect /pʊt/, where the /ʊ/ phoneme is realised instead
What is the /a:/ vs /æ/?
- RP includes the /a/ phoneme in words such as path, laugh and grass
- Northern, Midlands, Scottish and Welsh accents realise the /æ/ vowel instead
