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Linguistics

Notes equally adept at making these identifications, of course. Speakers of other varieties may succeed in
placing accents only within a very wide geographical boundary: thus, a speaker of GA may have
difficulty in distinguishing a Scottish from an Irish speaker, while conversely, a Scot may confuse
Americans and Canadians. Within groups, however, much more subtle distinctions are perceived
and have geographical or social meaning: hence, one speaker of SSE may identify another as coming
from Glasgow rather than Edinburgh, and perhaps even from a particular area of the city; and may
well base assumptions to do with social class and level of education on those linguistic factors.
Accent is clearly extremely important, as one of the major tools we use in drawing inferences about
our fellow humans, and in projecting particular images of ourselves. Phonologists should, then, be
able to do as speakers do, in identifying and classifying accents, but with a more technical rather than
emotional classification of the differences and similarities between them. An accent, in phonological
terms, is an idealised system which speakers of that variety share. Although slight differences in its
use may be apparent, both across and within individuals, its speakers will still share more in common
with one another, and with that idealised accent system, than with speakers of any other idealised
accent system. Standard accents should also be described in just the same way as non-standard ones,
as they provide just the same sort of social and geographical information about their users: that is,
although it is quite common for speakers of a standard accent, such as SSBE in the south of England,
to claim that they have no accent, other speakers (and phonologists) know different.
A more detailed appreciation of the cues speakers attend to in different accents, and the social
judgements they make on that basis, is a matter for sociolinguistics and dialectology rather than
phonology. The main contribution a phonologist can make is to produce a classification of types of
differences between accents, which can then be used in distinguishing any set of systems; and that is
the goal of this chapter. In the next three sections, then, we shall introduce a three-way classification
of accent differences, and illustrate these using examples involving both consonants and vowels.
First, the systems of two accents may contain different numbers of phonemes, so different phonemic
oppositions can be established for them: these are systemic differences. Second, the same phonemes
may have different allophones: these are realisational differences. Finally, there are distributional
differences, whereby the same lexical item may have different phonemes in two different varieties;
or alternatively, the same phoneme may have a phonological restriction on its distribution in one
variety but not another.
17.7 Systemic Differences

The first and most obvious difference between accents is the systemic type, where a phoneme
opposition is present in one variety, but absent in another. Consonantal examples in English are
relatively rare. As we have already seen, some varieties of English, notably SSE, Scots and NZE, have
a contrast between /w/ and / /, as evidenced by minimal pairs like Wales and whales, or witch and
which. Similarly, SSE and Scots have the voiceless velar fricative /x/, which contrasts with /k/ for
instance in loch versus lock, but which is absent from other accents. NZE speakers will therefore tend
to have one more phoneme, and Scots and SSE speakers two more, than the norm for accents of
English.
Conversely, some accents have fewer consonant phonemes than most accents of English. For instance,
in Cockney and various other inner-city English accents, [h]-dropping is so common, and so
unrestricted in terms of formality of speech, that we might regard /h/ as having disappeared from
the system altogether. This is also true for some varieties of Jamaican English. In many parts of the
West Indies, notably the Bahamas and Bermuda, there is no contrast between /v/ and /w/, with
either [w] or a voiced bilabial fricative [ β ] being used for both, meaning that /v/ is absent from the
phonemic and phonetic systems. The same contrast is typically missing in Indian English, but the
opposition is resolved in a rather different direction, with the labio-dental approximant [υ ] very
frequently being used for the initial sound of wine and vine, or west and vest. Again, there is only a
single phoneme in this case in Indian English.
The number of accent differences involving vowels, and the extent of variation in that domain, is
very significantly greater than in the case of consonants for systemic, realisational and distributional

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