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Unit 17: Connected English Speech: Accent

route, or /e/ in lever; Americans find British English /ru+t/ and /li+v c (‹)/ equally odd. Some Northern Notes
English English speakers have /u+/ rather than /• / in look and other <oo> words; and it is fairly
well-known in Britain that words containing /Y+/ vary in English English, with grass, dance, bath, for
instance, having /a/ for many northern speakers, but /Y+/ in the south, though both varieties have
/Y+/ in palm. Similarly, in SSE, weasel has /w/, and whelk / /; but in Borders Scots, where these
phonemes also contrast, and where indeed most of the same minimal pairs (like Wales and whales,
witch and which) work equally well, the lexical distribution in these two words is reversed, with / /
in weasel and /w/ in whelk.
On the other hand, a difference in the distribution of two phonemes may depend on the phonological
context rather than having to be learned as an idiosyncracy of individual lexical items. For instance,
in GA there is a very productive restriction on the consonant /j/ when it occurs before /u+/. Whereas
in most British English [j] surfaces in muse, use, fuse, view, duke, tube, new, assume, in GA it appears
only in the first four examples, and not in the cases where the /u+/ vowel is preceded by an alveolar
consonant. There is also, as we have seen, a very clear division between rhotic accents of English,
where /r/ can occur in all possible positions in the word (so [‹], or the appropriate realisation for the
accent in question, will surface in red, bread, very, beer, beard, beer is), and non-rhotic ones, where /r/
is permissible only between vowels (and will be pronounced in red, bread, very, beer is, but not the
other cases).
Again, vowels follow the same patterns. For instance, in many varieties of English, schwa is only
available in unstressed positions, in about, father, letter; in NZE, however, its range is wider, since it
appears also in stressed syllables, in the KIT lexical set. Similarly, in some varieties words like happy
have a tense /i/ vowel in the second, unstressed syllable; this is true for Tyneside English, SSE, GA
and NZE. In SSBE, however, only lax vowels are permitted in unstressed syllables, so that /I/ appears
in happy instead. Not all these distributional restrictions have to do with stress; some are the result of
other developments in the consonant or vowel systems. For instance, the presence of the centring
diphthongs before historical /r/ in SSBE (and other non-rhotic accents) means that non-low
monophthongs cannot appear in this context. On the other hand, in rhotic accents like SSE and GA,
there are no centring diphthongs, and the non-low monophthongs consequently have a broader
range, with the same vowel appearing in FLEECE and NEAR, FACE and SQUARE, GOOSE and
CURE.
In defining how accents differ, then, we must consider all three types of variation: systemic,
realisational, and distributional. Although some of these (notably the systemic type) may seem more
important to a phonologist, since they involve differences in the phoneme system, we must remember
that one of the phonologist’s tasks is to determine what speakers of a language know, and how their
knowledge is structured. It follows that we must be able to deal with the lower-level realisational and
distributional differences too, since these are often precisely the points native speakers notice in
assessing differences between their own accent and another variety of English. In any case, all of
these types of variation will work together in distinguishing the phonological systems of different
accents, and as we have seen, variation at one level very frequently has further implications for other
areas of the phonology.
1. Plot your vowel system on a vowel quadrilateral. (You may wish to use one diagram for
monophthongs, and one for diphthongs; or even more than one for diphthongs if you have a
system with a large number of these.)
2. What is your phonemic consonant system? Provide minimal pairs to establish the contrasts
involved. Pay particular attention to whether your accent is rhotic or non-rhotic, and whether
your system includes / / and /x/ or not. Do any of the consonant phonemes of SSBE fail to
contrast in your accent? Why might this be?
3. Set out the differences between your variety, for both vowel and consonant systems, and (a) SSBE,
(b) GA, (c) SSE, (d) NZE, (e) SgE. In each case, classify the discrepancies as systemic, realisational,
or distributional. If you are a non-native speaker of English, or bilingual in English and another
language, can you identify aspects of your native language(s) which might be responsible for
some of the differences you have identified?

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