Describing Spoken English

An Introduction

Charles W. Kreidler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134747078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Describing Spoken English provides a practical and descriptive introduction to the pronunciation of contemporary English. It presumes no prior knowledge of phonetics and phonology.
Charles Kreidler describes the principal varieties of English in the world today. Whilst concentrating on the phonological elements they share, the author sets out specific differences as minor variations on a theme. Although theoretically orientated towards generative phonology, theory is minimal and the book is clear, comprehensive and accessible to undergraduate and postgraduate students of linguistics and English Language. Numerous exercises are included to encourage further study.

Chapter 1
The pronunciation of English

• 1.1 Dialects
• 1.2 English outside of England
• 1.3 Differences and commonalities
• 1.4 Plan of this book

The purpose of this book, as the title suggests, is to describe how English is pronounced by native speakers of the language. Native speakers now number approximately 350 million and they live in widely separated parts of the world. There are differences in the way these people speak English, of course, but the varieties are mutually intelligible to a high degree: Australians understand Canadians and vice versa, Londoners and New Yorkers, residents of Dublin and Johannesburg communicate successfully.

1.1 Dialects

When people who have the same native language can understand one another and at the same time notice consistent differences in each other’s speech, we say that they speak different dialects of the same language. The term ‘dialect’ is, unfortunately, not a very precise one. Any two people have differences in their way of talking. How different must ways of speaking be in order for us to call them different dialects? Professional linguists who specialize in dialectology use various criteria of pronunciation, vocabulary, or grammatical expressions to make a distinction between one dialect area of a country and another dialect area, but no one assumes that the way of speaking is completely uniform within a single dialect area.

Any language that has a large number of speakers develops variation in the ways that people use that language, especially if there are barriers that make frequent communication difficult. One kind of barrier is geographic—mountains, swamps, oceans, or simply distance. Up until modern times few people ever went far from the place where they were born and had little to do with others who lived, say, fifty miles away or less; or, if they migrated to another area, they moved just once and stayed where they settled. Thus in England there were once rather numerous regional dialects reflecting the feudal society of the Middle Ages, and these have by no means disappeared. Today there is still a distinction between Northern and Southern dialects. One prominent feature distinguishing the two is that Northern speakers pronounce nut, some, young, for example, with the same vowel sound as in put, bush, full, whereas these are two distinct vowels in Southern pronunciation—and in the rest of the English-speaking world. (There is something more about this matter in Chapter 5.)

Today more people are able to travel back and forth without migrating, and in our times communication does not require face-to-face exchanges. Through cinema, radio, and television we are constantly exposed to voices from far away. We understand what we hear even while noting differences of pronunciation or word usage, and in time we take these differences for granted. However, we should note that the media— or at least the producers of radio and television programs that are broadcast nationally and internationally—do a certain amount of editing; they eliminate linguistic features that have only local acceptance. Thus they contribute to the establishment of usage that is supradialectal.

While such forces are at work to promote greater uniformity, other forces pull in the opposite direction. Humans form social bonds. Two small examples of social differentiation are sex and age: men and women use different speech forms, and each generation of adolescents introduces new words and new meanings for old words, which distinguish their way of talking from that of their elders. More relevant in a discussion of dialectology is the fact that complex societies consist of several groups, perhaps overlapping, distinguished from one another on the basis of wealth, education, occupations, ethnicity, religion, or some combination of these. In varying degrees people want to be identified as belonging to specific groups. Some individuals aim for ‘upward mobility’ and try to imitate those who seem to be better off; others want to promote the ‘upward mobility’ of the group they already belong to; still others have no desire for change of any kind but want to maintain whatever keeps their group separate from others. Group identification can take the form of some common preference in clothing, jewelry, vehicles, mannerisms, or way of talking. Recent investigations in Glasgow, Liverpool, Philadelphia, Toronto, and Sydney, among other large cities, have shown the growth and spread of indigenous language forms among such groups.

Variation in language is not only a matter of geographic and social dialects. All of us vary in what we say in a range from the most formal situations to the most casual, depending on the situation and the people we are conversing with. In Chapter 7 we consider how faster, more casual speech differs from more formal pronunciations. And written language—especially printed language—is unlike most speech. Speakers, in conversations or in more formal addresses, can usually find out what their listeners know and aim their words accordingly, and they can correct themselves if necessary; some of what is communicated will be in the speaker’s tone of voice and in the situation where speaking is going on. Authors of written material, on the other hand, have to exercise more care with each sentence, not knowing what they can count on their intended audience to supply.

Discussion of dialects frequently leads to the question of a standard (or standards), a term which, like ‘dialect,’ is easily tossed around in ordinary conversation but not so easily defined for serious descriptive work. Just as producers of radio and television programs today may filter out the language forms that are local in order to gain wide acceptance for their productions, in a similar way publishers of books and newspapers began centuries ago to establish standards for grammar and spelling. Along with the need, or desirability, of some standardization goes the matter of prestige. In making choices among forms that were in current use, publishers quite naturally chose the usage of the upper classes. So the standard for written English is essentially based on the dialect of London as spoken by members of ‘the Establishment.’ For written English, notice. A prestige way of speaking, based on the same upper-class dialect, has come to be called Received Pronunciation (generally abbreviated as RP). RP now typifies the speech of educated people, not restricted to any particular area of England. Until recently all voices heard on the British Broadcasting Corporation spoke RP, and RP has been the form of English taught to foreigners wherever British influence has been strong. For all that, less than 5 percent of the English population speak it.

The distinction between Northern and Southern dialects in England has been mentioned. Within these broad divisions urban varieties, quite distinct in character, can be noted; for example, Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Norwich. London not only gave birth to the standard form of English but is also the home of Cockney, the dialect associated with the working classes of that city.

1.2 English outside of England

English has been spoken in Wales since the Norman Conquest, and Wales has been politically united with England since the middle of the sixteenth century. Since then, and especially with the advent of industrialization in the early nineteenth century, English has become dominant over the Welsh language. However, there are strong efforts today to keep the latter alive by promoting bilingualism.

When Scotland became united with England in the seventeenth century, the lowlands of that country were inhabited by people speaking Scots, which, depending on one’s viewpoint, is either a dialect of English or a closely related language. Speakers of Scots Gaelic peopled the highlands and outer islands. Scots Gaelic has all but disappeared. The language now spoken throughout Scotland is clearly English (though many Scots would refuse to call it so), but it is also clearly a form different from that spoken in England, with a great deal of distinctive vocabulary and a pronunciation distinct from that of RP.

Ireland, the island, is two separate political entities and two rather different dialect areas. Ulster, or Northern Ireland, is part of the United Kingdom. The speech of many of its inhabitants is close to that of Scotland in pronunciation since their ancestors came from there in the seventeenth century. The original inhabitants of what is now the Republic of Ireland spoke Irish Gaelic, and Irish English has been influenced by that language.

Wales, Scotland, and the Republic of Ireland show considerable linguistic diversity throughout their respective territories but there are no clear dialect boundaries within those territories. It should be pointed out here that Scottish English and Irish English retain features that have been lost in RP—the pronunciation of R in words like car and card, for example.

English has been spoken in North America (Canada and the United States) since the beginning of the seventeenth century. In both countries the original settlements by colonists from the British Isles have been augmented by migrants from other parts of the world, who—or whose children—learned English in the new world. In Canada the island province of Newfoundland has had a separate history from the rest of the country and forms a dialect area apart. So too do the maritime provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island), the area of earliest settlement on the mainland by speakers of English. The rest of the country shows— or is said to show—remarkable linguistic uniformity for so large a country.

The dialect situation in the United States is somewhat similar: fairly clear dialect areas on the east coast and greater homogeneity as one goes west, reflecting the separate settlement of the original colonies and the mixing of populations in their westward movements. A Northern dialect area includes all New England, New York, and northern New Jersey, then stretches westward across the Great Lakes and along the Canadian border to the Pacific coast. A Southern dialect area begins in Delaware and Maryland and extends on the eastern side of the Appalachian Mountains to Florida, then westward along the Gulf coast to southern Texas. The remainder, called the Midland area, includes only Pennsylvania and New Jersey on the Atlantic coast but, past the Appalachians, expands to include nearly all the country. What is sometimes called ‘General American’ is a Midland dialect.

English is spoken in and around the Caribbean Sea: Bermuda in the Atlantic Ocean; Belize in Central America, Guyana in South America, and the Bahamas, Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, St Kitts, Nevis, Monserrat, Anguilla, Antigua, Dominica, St Lucia, Barbados, St Vincent, Grenada, and Trinidad and Tobago. In this area it was first established as the masters’ language, serving as the only means of communication among a population of slaves forcibly carried from West Africa to the insular and literal plantations engaged in producing a single crop (monocultivation). As first established, the language used was a pidgin—a simplified form of the language of the dominant social group. When a pidgin has been learned by a generation of children, it expands greatly and becomes a Creole. In the Caribbean area today there are varieties of English ranging from standard forms of English to Creoles, which are not comprehensible to speakers of a standard form. (There are also Creoles of French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese.)

Australia, where English colonization began at the end of the eighteenth century, is quite uniform linguistically. It has vocabulary items which are uniquely Australian, drawn mainly from the languages spoken there indigenously, but its close ties to Britain and the recency of settlement keep it linguistically close. Pronunciation ranges from RP to something close to ‘Broad Australian,’ which has similarities with Cockney.

English and Scottish settlement of New Zealand dates only from the 1820s and, except that South Island supposedly shows more Scottish influence than North Island, there is not much linguistic diversity within the country. As with Australia, there are words in use that are not known elsewhere (borrowed from Maori) but British English has been the model of prestige in other matters of usage.

Only 10 percent of South Africa’s population speak English as a native language, but English is the preferred language in business, education, journalism, and public life generally. Thus linguistic differences among South Africans who are native speakers of English are not great, but the English spoken by members of other ethnic groups for whom it is a second language, shows great diversity. Among native speakers, Broad South African shows interesting differences of pronunciation from the English spoken elsewhere in the world. Chapter 5 has some notes on these distinctive traits.

While this book can deal only with native-speaker varieties of English, it would be wrong not to take notice of the fact that it is an important language for commerce, education, and administration — even having status as the official language or one of the official languages—in countries which have no large population of native English-speakers. Apart from Liberia and the Philippines, which have been influenced by American English, these countries are territories of the former British Empire, now independent, whether members of the Commonwealth or not. Naturally English becomes somewhat different in the various places where it is spoken, under the influence of these different native languages. So the plural term ‘New Englishes’ is appropriate for the kinds of English that are developing in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka), Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong), West Africa (Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia, Cameroon), and East Africa (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe).

1.3 Differences and commonalities

If speakers of different dialects communicate successfully while noticing differences in each other’s way of talking, then obviously what they have in common, linguistically, is much more than what they do not share. What has to be alike and what can be different?

When we listen to people who come from a dialect area different from our own, we notice the ways in which their speech differs from ours. The most striking things may not be part of language itself but rather certain characteristics of their delivery—speaking fast or slowly, in a shrill voice or a hoarse one, in a monotone or with a wide range of pitch. These features of speech are called paralanguage; they occur in speech and they may influence our impression of the speaker and therefore our interpretation of what the speaker says, but they are not part of language: they do not communicate anything in themselves. Section 11.1 deals with paralanguage.

We may notice that other speakers use words that we do not use or use them with different meanings than what we give them (vocabulary differences). Differences of vocabulary can lead to misunderstandings, but misunderstandings arise among people who know each other well, who live together. Speakers may use different word forms, for example, dove or dived as the past of dive, got or gotten as the past participle of get (differences of morphology). It is possible that we will observe a difference in the way words are put together to express a meaning (differenc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Symbols and typographic conventions
• Chapter 1: The pronunciation of English
• Chapter 2: Speech
• Chapter 3: The structure of language
• Chapter 4: English consonants
• Chapter5: English vowels
• Chapter 6 Syllables
• Chapter 7: Strong and weak syllables
• Chapter 8: Word stress
• Chapter 9: Stress in compound words and phrases
• Chapter 1 0: The role of accent in discourse
• Chapter 1 1: Intonation
• Chapter 1 2: Morphemes that vary in form
• Feedback on exercises
• Bibliography