Фонетики со смежными науками: акустикой, анатомией, физиологией, психологией

Territorial, social and stylistic varieties of English pronunciation.

The written form of language is usually a generally accepted standard and is the same throughout the country. The varieties of the language are conditioned by language communities ranging from small groups to nations. It’s clear that dialectology is inseparably connected with sociolinguistics, which deals with language variations caused by social difference and different social needs. Sociolinguistics is a branch of linguistics which studies differen aspects of the language – phonetics, lexics and grammar with reference to their functions in the society.

But spoken language may also vary from place to place. Such territorial distinct forms of language are called dialects.
Speaking about the nations we refer to the national variants of the language. According to A.D. Schweitzer national language is a historical category evolving from conditions of economic and political concentration which characterizes the formation of nation. In the case of English there exists a great diversity in the realization of the language and particularly in terms of pronunciation. Though every national variant of English has considerable differences in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar; they all have much in common which gives us ground to speak of one and the same language — the English language.
Every national variety of language falls into territorial or regional dialects. Dialects are distinguished from each other by differences in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. But pronunciation, above all, is subject to all kinds of changes. Therefore the national variants of English differ primaraly in sound, stress and intonation. When we refer to varieties in pronunciation only, we use the term accent. So local accents may have many features of pronunciation in common and are grouped into territorial or area accents. For certain reasons one of the dialects becomes the standard language of the nation and its pronunciation or accent - the standard pronunciation.
The literary spoken form has its national pronunciation standard. A standard may be defined as "a socially accepted variety of language established by a codified norm of correctness" (K. Macanalay). Standard national pronunciation is sometimes called "an orthoepic norm''. Some phoneticians however prefer the term "literary pronunciation". It’s generally accepted that for the English English It’s called “Received Pronunciation” or RP, for the American English it’s called “General American Pronunciation”, for The Australian English it’s “Educated Australian”. It’s due to certain geografical, economic, political and cultural reasons, that one of the dialects in a country becomes the standart language of the nation.
We have mentioned the vertical – social – diferentiarions of the language. are observed in relation to territorial criterion plus according to the individuelity of the speaker, his cultural values, sex and age differences. Individual speech of members of the society is thus called idiolects. The horisontal differentiations of the language are also occuring because of the situational variability. Hence situational varieties of the language are called functional dialects or functional styles.