Theme: English dialect and pronunciation

Abai Kazahk National Pedagogical University
Institute of philology
SIW
Theme: English dialect and pronunciation

Performed by: Uktamova Dinora 203

Checked by:Badanbekqizi Zada

Let’s face it, learning English pronunciation is infamously tricky. The trouble is, English is not a phonetic language – meaning the way words are spelled doesn’t easily translate to how they are pronounced.

While some languages, like Italian and Japanese, offer simple ways to figure out proper pronunciation of a word based on how it’s written, English can be unpredictable from written to spoken word. Fortunately, unpredictable does not mean impossible! The good news is that there are a finite number of possibilities for how each letter or letter combination can be pronounced and a finite number of standard sounds. In this article, we’ll break down vowel sounds, consonant sounds, and share some sneaky tricks to help you improve your English pronunciation.
Mastering the vowels and consonants of the English alphabet can take a bit of practice, there’s no time like the present to start tackling the building blocks of natural pronunciation.
The basics/overview
Getting started
Learn how to learn language pronunciation and it’ll help you with all languages! In this article, we’ll be using something called IPA. No, it’s not a particularly hoppy beer – it’s the International Phonetics Alphabet.
IPA is an alphabet specifically for sounds. It’s used in linguistics (and for actors who need to do an accent!) so we have a shared way to represent the sounds of human speech. That means anyone who can read it can see how a word is pronounced, even if they don’t speak (or read!) the language. You’ve probably seen it in use next to words in the dictionary or on Wikipedia. You can recognize it in your lessons by the slashes on either side of it, like /əʊ/ or /z/.
While we’re not going to make you memorize the whole of the IPA right this instant, it can be a fantastic tool if you’re someone who enjoys learning new languages.
Worth noting: We’re going to go over the basic building blocks of sounds in English, but the reality is that different parts of the English-speaking world have very different accents. The good news is, you can have some variation in your pronunciation and still be fairly well understood. The bad news is, there really are no hard and fast answers for how to correctly pronounce some words. That’s why, when you use learn English with Busuu, you’ll hear examples from a variety of different accents to help you get acclimated to the wide range of English pronunciation.
Mastering English vowels
Alright, with that out of the way, let’s talk about vowels!
The written English vowels are: a, e, i, o, u. (Sometimes y can also act as a vowel when it behaves like an i, as in rhythm or fly.)
As you can see, there are 5 vowels, but there are actually a whopping 20 different vowel sounds in the English language. (In fact, this sentence alone contains a wide variety of pronunciations for each vowel!)

Accent refers to pronunciation

Dialect refers to a whole group of language features, including pronunciation, but also differences in vocabulary, grammar, and how the language gets used (like the rules of what counts as polite)
So if you and I speak different dialects of English, we probably have some differences in what words we use (maybe I say zucchini and you say courgette), some grammatical rules (maybe I say Do you have any tea? instead of Have you any tea?), and how we use those words (some English dialects say Pardon? and I could too… but more natural for me is Excuse me?).

If you and I have different accents in English, we very probably have other differences too, like the ones mentioned above, but if we're specifically mentioning our accents, we mean only the pronunciation differences.

Communities that use a particular dialect or accent can range in size; some dialects include millions of people, and others only a hundred (and some probably even fewer!). For example, North American English refers to the dialect of English used in much of the U.S. and Canada by hundreds of millions of people—but within that enormous super-region are lots of smaller dialects of varying sizes, including African American English, Pittsburgh English, and Southern English.
How accents and dialects work
If you use language, you have an accent. And if you use language, you are using a dialect of the language. That includes everyone!

It's not uncommon for people to feel that they don't have an accent, particularly if most people around them speak the same way, and especially if the people in power around them speak similarly to them. Instead, a language can be thought of as a collection of dialects, all more or less understandable to each other. Or, as internet linguist and 2021 Duocon speaker Gretchen McCulloch recently tweeted, "A language is just some dialects in a trenchcoat."

Ok, so where do they come from, all these accents and dialects? First, it's useful to remember that language is one of many parts of shared culture and traditions that we have as humans, and so people use language in ways that match their communities and identities. Our clothes, interests, gestures, hair styles, and aspirations are shaped by our surroundings (even when those surroundings lead us to want to rebel against them and leave our community behind!). And as for language, we're creatures that like to sound like people we perceive as similar to us, or who we want to be more similar to.
The second thing to know is that accents and dialects typically evolve gradually, so any drastic differences you notice today probably started as smaller differences or were only used by a part of the community before they spread. Remember that game Telephone, where someone whispers a word to you, and you have to whisper it to the next person? Typically, after a word gets through the whole group, it's turned into another word entirely! You can think of language and dialects like a large-scale game of Telephone: two neighboring communities might have a small difference in a word, and the next two communities might have a different small difference in that word, and the next two have yet another difference, etc. And if that can happen for every single word, imagine how different dialects can get when you account for phrases, grammar, conversation rules, and–yes–accents!
Over time, dialects can become so divergent, or different from one another, that they stop being easily understood by each group. This often coincides with other changes, culturally and politically, and you might end up calling them different languages. In fact, Romance languages started as just different dialects of Latin!