Types of English pronunciation

2. English pronunciation in Great Britain

There are many educated people in Britain who do not speak RP, though their English is good and correct as well. They speak Standard English with a regional type of pronunciation.

D. Abercrombie divides English people by the way they talk into three groups:

(1) RP speakers of Standard English (those who speak Standard English without any local accent);

(2) non-RP speakers of Standard English (those who speak Standard English with a regional accent);

(3) Dialect speakers.¹

Scholars often note that it is wrong to assume that only one type of pronunciation can be correct. If a particular pronunciation is well-established and current among educated speakers, it should not be treated as incorrect.

The types of pronunciation that are widely used by educated people in Britain, besides RP and Southern English Pronunciation (which have much in common ), are the Northern type and the Scottish type of English pronunciation.

The Northern regional type of English pronunciation is characterized by features that are common to all the dialect used in the northern part of England.

Thus, the main distinctions of the Northern type of English pronunciation, as opposed to RP, are as follows:

1. 
   the vowel /æ/ is more open and more retracted back, as in /a/ (e. g. “back, bad”).
   
2. 
   /ɑ:/ is fronted compared with /ɑ:/ in RP and it approximates to /æ/ (e. g. “glass, fast, after”),
   
3. 
   /u/ is used instead of /ʌ/ (e.g. “cup, love, much”),
   
4. 
   /ou/ is pronounced as a monophthongal /o:/ (e.g. “go, home”),
   
5. 
   /e/ or /ɛ: / are pronounced instead of /eI/ (e. g. “may, say, take”)¹.
   
6. 
   All tones are drawled.
   

The Scottish type of English pronunciation is based on the dialects spoken in Scotland which vary among themselves in some respects. Some of their common features, which distinguish the Scottish type of pronunciation from RP, are as follows²:

(a) the use of the rolled /r/ not only between and before vowels (as in “hurry, brown”), but also after vowels (as in “born”);

(b) the use of the back-lingual fricative /x/, which resembles the corresponding Russian sound (e. g. “loch”);

(c) the use of the dark /l/ in all positions (“like, least”);

(d) the use of monophthongs instead of diphthongs before /r/ (as in “beard, there, pure, poor, sure”);

(e) the pronunciation of all the vowels short. There is no distinction in length between the vowels in words like “food-good”, with the exception that the vowel in inflected words is not as short as the vowel in non-inflected words (“road-rowed, greed-agreed”).

There are certain peculiarities in the intonation of the Scottish type of English pronunciation, such as

1. 
   Special Questions may end with a high level tone after a fall on the interrogative word, e.g.
   

RP ˈWho’s ˈhaving the `grape fruit?

Scot. `Who’s ˌhaving the ˈgrape fruit?

2. 
   A final vocative does not necessarily continue the tune of the General Question,
   

e.g.

RP ˈWill you ˈin to ˊlunch, Mr. Brown?

Scot. ˈWill you be ˌin to ˊlunch, ˌMr. ˎBrown?

We may now summarize by saying that one should distinguish between RP and “educated” regional types of pronunciation (such as Southern, Northern and Scottish types of English pronunciation), of the one hand, and local dialects, on the other.

One of the best examples of uneducated local dialects is Cockney.

Cockney is used by the manual workers, in the region of London, Cockney has not been investigated, but there are certain striking peculiarities that should be mentioned here. In Cockney:

1. 
   a nasalized /aI/, or /ɛI/, is used for /eI/ (as in “railway”, “take”);
   
2. 
   a nasalized /ɔI/ is used for /aI/ ( as in “I”, “right”, “night”);
   
3. 
   /h/ is omitted in “ his, her”;
   
4. 
   /p, t, k/ are over aspirated;
   
5. 
   the final /ŋ/ sounds like /n/ ( as in “evening, havening”).
   

English is spoken not only in the British Isles. It is the national language in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and of a great part of the population in Canada. Each of those national has its own orthoepic norm which exists a long side of regional types and numerous dialects.

Though those national languages have distinctive features of their own which differentiate them from British English and from each other, they have much more in common. That is why they are considered to be variants of the same language, the English language.