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Unit 17: Connected English Speech: Accent

differences. This probably reflects the fact that the vowel systems of all English varieties are relatively Notes
large, so that a considerable number of vowels occupy a rather restricted articulatory and perceptual
space; in consequence, whenever and wherever one vowel changes, it is highly likely to start to
encroach on the territory of some adjacent vowel. It follows that a development beginning as a fairly
minor change in the pronunciation of a single vowel will readily have a knock-on effect on other
vowels in the system, so that accent differences in this area rapidly snowball. In addition, as we saw
in earlier chapters, the phonetics of vowels is a very fluid area, with each dimension of vowel
classification forming a continuum, so that small shifts in pronunciation are extremely common, and
variation between accents, especially when speakers of those accents are not in day-to-day
communication with each other, develops easily.
Systemic differences in the case of vowel phonemes can be read easily from lists of Standard Lexical
Sets and the systems plotted from these on vowel quadrilaterals. If for the moment we stick to the
four reference accents introduced in the last chapter, namely SSBE, GA, SSE and NZE, we can see that
SSBE has the largest number of oppositions, with the others each lacking a certain number of these.
Comparing GA to SSBE, we find that GA lacks /Z/, so that LOT words are produced with /Y+/, as
are PALM words, while CLOTH has the /]+/ of THOUGHT. In this respect, SSBE is ‘old-fashioned’:
it maintains the ancestral state shared by the two accents. However, in GA realisations of the earlier
/Z/ have changed their quality and merged, or become identical with the realisations of either /Y+/
or /]+/. GA also lacks the centring diphthongs of SSBE, so that NEAR, SQUARE, CURE share the
vowels of FLEECE, FACE, GOOSE respectively, but since GA is rhotic, the former lexical sets also
have a realisation of /r/, while the latter do not. In this case, however, the historical innovation has
been in SSBE. At the time of the initial settlement of British immigrants in North America, most
varieties of English were rhotic, as GA still is; but the ancestor of SSBE has subsequently become non-
rhotic. The loss of /r/ before a consonant or a pause in SSBE has had various repercussions on the
vowel system, most notably the development of the centring diphthongs.
In systemic terms, NZE lacks only one of the oppositions found in SSBE, namely that between /I/
and / c /; in NZE, both KIT and LETTER words have schwa. There are more differences in symbols
between the SSBE and NZE lexical; but these typically reflect realisational, and sometimes
distributional, rather than systemic differences, as we shall see in the next two sections. That is to say,
I have chosen to represent the vowel of NZE TRAP as / ε / and DRESS as /e/, FLEECE as /Ii/ and
FACE as / ε w/, to highlight the typical realisational differences between the two accents. However,
in phonemic terms, the TRAP and DRESS vowel, and the FLEECE and FACE vowel, still contrast in
NZE just as they do in SSBE. That is, the pairs of vowel phonemes in (1) are equivalent: they are
symbolised differently because they are very generally pronounced differently (and we could equally
well have chosen the same phonemic symbols in each case, to emphasise this parity, at the cost of a
slightly more abstract system for NZE; see the discussion in Section above), but the members of the
pairs are doing the same job in the different accents.
(1) SSBE NZE
e e DRESS
ae e TRAP
i+ Ii FLEECE
eI eI FACE
When we turn to SSE, however, we find a considerably reduced system relative to SSBE. As we might
expect, given that SSE is rhotic, it lacks the centring diphthongs, so that NEAR, SQUARE, CURE
share the vowels of FLEECE, FACE, GOOSE, though the former will have a final [‹] following the
vowel. SSE also typically lacks the / ε +/ vowel of NURSE, with [• r] appearing here instead; so the
NURSE and STRUT sets share the same vowel. Leaving aside vowels before /r/, however, there are
three main oppositions in SSBE which are not part of the SSE system, as shown in (2).
(2) SSBE SSE
a a TRAP
Y+ a PALM

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