4.5 English accents

In this section we'll look at various English accents and how theydiffer from one another.The point, aside from learning some important aspects of the Englishlanguage, is to get a deeper understanding of the concepts introducedin this chapter and the last one by comparing several similar phonologicalsystems.We'll see that the ways in which the accents differ correspondto the kinds of knowledge about linguistic form that we've been discussing: the form that particular words take, the distinctions between phonemes,the detailed realization of individual phonemes, the allophones of phonemes that appear in different contexts, and phonotactics.

Accents revisited

Let's first remind ourselves what an accent is: the set of pronunciation conventions of some speech community.Where we draw the boundaries between accents is pretty arbitrary;if we call General American a single accent, for example, we'll have todeal with the range of variation that exists among speakers within thatlarge community.And any boundaries we drawwill be wrong in another sense because the group ofpeople who have one pronunciation convention may not coincide neatly withthe group of people who have the other set of conventions that belong tothe accent we're considering.For example, the group of speakers who pronounce the wordspin andpen the same includes speakers of Southern US accent but also some speakers of General American, which isin may other ways a very different accent from Southern.The point is that conventions of pronunciationtend to cluster together;this is what allows us to talk about "accents" at all.

Another point to keep in mind is that in most countries there is a standard, prestigeaccent alongside a number of accents associated with particular regions, socialclasses, or ethnic groups.Each of these non-standard accents can be described in its "broad" form, theform that is most different from the standard in the country where it is spoken,but what many people are speaking much of the timeis somethingin between a particular non-standard accent and the relevant standard.In this section I'll be mostly concerned with broad variants of non-standard accents because they illustrate the range of possible differences best.

When comparing two dialects or accents, one possibility is to see one of them asdeviating from the other.A biased view of non-standard dialects often starts this way:the speakers of these dialects are seen asjust making mistakes with the standard whenwhat they say is non-standard.But of course this is not what is actually happening.Speakers of non-standard dialects learned the conventions of these dialectsby hearing other speakers speak them, just as the speakers of standard dialectslearned the conventions of their dialects.They are no more speaking the standard wrong than the speakers of the standard dialectare speaking their dialect wrong.

But there is one situation in which it does make sense to speak of dialect Aas diverging from dialect B.Dialects of a single language always started out as a single dialect at somepoint in the past, and for a given convention, one of the dialects may have changedwhile the other preserved the original convention.Some people seem to have the sense that standard dialects are conservative, andthat non-standard dialects are more likely to change, that is, to introduce"innovations".Sometimes this does happen.In fact some of the conventions that eventually become standard started out asinnovations innon-standard dialects.We can see this process going on in England now as features from Londan accentare starting to creep into the speech of people in situations where we'd expectthe standard accent of England.But it seems just as likely that the old conventions get lost in a standardbefore a non-standard.In North America, the distinction between /ɔ/ and /ɑ/ is in the process ofdisappearing in General American and (standard) Canadian English, while thisdistinction is maintained (conservatively)in all of the major non-standard dialects.Of course if we are not interested in history when comparing two dialects,which is more conservativedoesn't really matter, and we can just treat the dialects as different fromone another.

Overview of English accents

Before looking at examples of differences between accents,it might help to have a sense of what the major accents are and where they'respoken.But you can safely skip this subsection if you prefer.

The British Isles

There is no "British" accent. England, Scotland, Ireland, and possibly Walesall have their own unofficial standard accents, and the standards of Scotlandand Ireland in particular are as different from that of England as Americanaccents are.The standard, or prestige, accent of England is usually referred to asReceived Pronunciation (RP).This is what the royal family, all recent Prime Ministers, and most BBC announcersspeak.It is probably what most Americans think of as an "English" accent, though itis spoken as a native accent by no more than about 10% of the English population.It differs most noticeably from General American in the pronunciation of a fewvowels and in the way /r/ is treated following vowels.For example, in RP there would be no [r] sounds at all in the phrasethe northern fourth of the park.

Within England there are many identifiable regional accents, probably more than in theUnited States in fact.Among these, London accent (sometimes called "Cockney") stands out because itis familiar to many Americans through film and drama characters such as Eliza Dolittlein "Pygmalion/My Fair Lady" and because it has a number of very characteristic features.Many of the vowels in this accent differ considerably from RP (and General American).Other very striking features are the loss of initial /h/("'e 'as an 'ard 'eart" = "he has a hard heart") and the frequent glottalstops in place of other stops in other accents("iʔ'll taʔe a loʔ o' time to seʔle" = "it'll take a lot of time to settle").Perhaps the other major accent boundary in England separates the accents of thenorth from those of the south.Americans may be familiar with northern England English through the speech ofthe Beatles or the characters in films such "The Full Monty".These accents can be identified fairly easily because they make no distinction betweenthe vowels /ʌ/ and /ʊ/; both are pronounced like /ʊ/.

Scottish and Irish English share one feature with northern England English;the tense vowels /i/, /u/, /e/ and /o/ are not pronounced as diphthongs, as theyare in RP (and General American).In addition, these accents are like General American, and unlike most accentsof England, in how they treat /r/ after vowels.

The Western Hemisphere

The unofficial standard accent of the United States is usually called GeneralAmerican (GA).This is the accent of much of the Midwest and the West and the most frequentaccent for US newscasters, though, interestingly, only five of the last ten USPresidents have spoken it.As the prestige accent, it has been encroaching on some regional accents, forexample, in the northeast, but at the same time, changes within GA are creatingwhat amount to new accents.One striking example of this is Northern Cities accent, spoken in citiessuch as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Rochester, and distinct from GAin the pronunciation of lax vowels.

Almost everyone is familiar with Southern US accent, spokenby people mainly in the southeastern part of the country.Like London accent, this accent has strikingly different vowels from other Englishaccents.African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a dialect associated with anethnic group rather than a region,though of course you don't have to be African-American to have learned it.The accent associated with this dialect is similar in many ways to Southern USaccent, while the grammar has its own characteristic properties.

People from the northeastern US are often easy to identify by their accents;the accent of New York City stands out within this region, again mostly for its vowels.Some other US cities, especially Pittsburgh, are known for particularpronunciation conventions.In Pittsburgh, for example, [a] may be used where GA has /aw/, sodowntownmay be [,dan'tan].

StandardCanadian English (except in the province of Newfoundland) is very similar to General American, and it doesn't vary much from place to place.Two features that can help identify Canadians are theirpronunciation of /ay/ and /aw/, which we'll learn about later,and a tendency to use rising pitch at the end of some statements as wellas questions.

English is the native language of much of the Caribbean, with somefeatures common to the region and others specific to particular islands.Americans may be familiar with Caribbean English through the speechof Jamaican performers of reggae music.As with other accents, there are characteristic vowels in these accents,and in addition, atendency in the Caribbean, as there is in some US accents, to make nodistinction between /t/ and /θ/ and between /d/ and /ð/.Jamaican English in particular also has quite striking intonation patterns.

The Southern Hemisphere

English is the native language of most Australians and New Zealandersand a sizable minority of South Africans.While the standard English accents of these countries tend to approachRP, the broad accents of most English speakers in all three countrieshave tense (long) vowels similar to those in London accent.The lax (short) front vowels of Australian and New Zealand Englishdiffer from those in other accents.Americans are likely to be familiar with these features from the speech ofactors such as the Australian Paul Hogan.

Non-native accents

English is spoken as a second language by millions of people, especially inregions that were once colonized by Britain in South Asia and Africa.In some of these regions there are particular English pronunciation conventionsthat derive from the phonology of the local languages.So in the English of South Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Nepalese, Bhutanese, and Maldivians),the alveolar consonants /t/, /d/, /n/, and /l/tend to be replaced by retroflex consonants, an important place of articulationfor consonants in the languages of this region.Some of these conventions may be viewed as belonging to a kind of non-nativeregional or national English standard.These non-native standards are one of the ways in which English is becoming even moreof an international language.

Phonetic differences

Probably the most common sort of difference between accents is purelyphonetic.A phoneme in one accent corresponds perfectly to a phoneme in anotheraccent, so we can consider it to be thesame phoneme,but it differs in its precise realization, that is,how it is articulated and perceived.

Take the vowel /o/.In GA, this is pronounced as a diphthong beginning as arounded mid back vowel and ending as a rounded high back vowel (or semivowel):[oʊ].In RP, on the other hand, this same phoneme has a slightly different realization.It begins as anunrounded midcentral vowel and ends as a rounded high back vowel:[əʊ].In other accents, such as Irish, Scottish, and northern English,/o/ is not a diphthong at all; it is realized as[o].But since the set of words in GA with [oʊ] is the same as the set of words in RPwith [əʊ] (with perhaps a few exceptions) and theother accents with [o], we can see these as the same phoneme.If you're a speaker of GA, and you want to sound English, one thing you could dowould be to simply pronounce all instances of /o/ in your speech as [əʊ],just asa speaker of RP could pronounce all instances of /o/ as /oʊ/ as a part of affecting an American accent.

Another similar example concerns the vowel /ɑ/, as in the wordshot,sock, androb.In RP, this vowel is pronounced in roughly the same position as it is in GA(that is, with the same height and backness), but in RP it is somewhat rounded(leading some Americans to think that the RP vowel in these words is /ɔ/).Sometimes a different symbol is used for the vowel in fact.But this difference between the accents is a bit more complicated than this because,as we'll see below, it applies to only some instances of /ɑ/ in GA.

For English vowels, the pattern of phonetic differences between accents is oftenmore extensive than just the correspondences between individual phonemes.The realization of a number of vowel phonemes in one accent may correspond to differentrealizations for all of those phonemes in another accent.This may be true for the lax ("short") vowels or the tense ("long") vowels or both.

Let's compare the tense vowels, including the diphthongs, of GA and London accent.These accents have the same set of tense vowel phonemes, which we have been writingusing the symbols /i, e, u, o, ay, aw, ɔy/, but each is realized differently in thetwo accents, in some cases, very differently.The first figure below summarizes what you already know about the tense vowels ofGA.Recall that each of these vowels is actually pronounced like a diphthong, thoughthis is not reflected in the symbols used for /i, e, o, u/ and it may be difficultto hear or feel for /i/ and /u/.Each linerepresents one of the phonemes, and it is labeled with a word containing the phoneme(written in the same color as the line).Circles at one end or the other of an arrow represent rounding,and the arrows next to the words show the direction of the diphthong.The second figure shows the corresponding vowels in London accent.Click on the words to hear my imitation of a Londoner saying them.The colors in the two figures represent phonemes that correspond, though insome cases they differ considerably in their phonetic realization, as youcan see.

The main point to note here is that there is a clear correspondence betweenthe GA and London vowel phonemes, even though the correspondences might notbe reflected in the symbols that we use to represent the phonemes.For example, we have been using /e/ to represent the vowel inbait,but [e] is very far from the vowel in this word in London; for London accent,a better symbol would be [aɪ], which of course is the realizationofa completely different phoneme in GA, the one in the wordbite.So when we are talking about two phones in different accents, there aretwo ways we can compare them,phonetically and phonemically/lexically.Phonetically, the vowel [aɪ] in London,as in the wordbait, is quitesimilar to the vowel [aɪ] in GA, as in the wordbite.But phonemically or lexically, the vowel [aɪ] in London functions the sameway as the vowel [eɪ], that is, /e/, in GA.

Phonemic differences

Another possibilitity is that two accents may differ in the number ofphonemes.That is, a distinction that is made in one accent and used contrastivelyis not made in the other accent.This means that some words that contrast in one accentmay sound the same in the other accent.

I have already mentioned two examples of this phenomenon.Many, perhaps most, speakers of GA and Canadian English do not make a distinctionbetween the phonemes /ɔ/ and /ɑ/; they have a single phoneme instead.The actual phonetic character of the soundvaries somewhat; it is more like [ɑ] for Americansbut more like [ɔ] for many Canadians.The point is that the speakers do not distinguish words from one anotherusing a distinction between [ɑ] and [ɔ].Pairs of words like the following are distinct in otherEnglish accents, but they sound the same for these speakers.

1. awed,odd
2. dawn,Don
3. cawed,cod
4. caught,cot

Because these pairs of words sound the same in this accent, there is a potential problemfor the hearer that does not exist in an accent where the distinction is made.We know that this feature of this accent is relatively new; that is,the earlier distinction made in this and other accents has been lost (and isapparently being lost by more and more speakers).Given the problem that hearers have distinguishing words like the pairs above,how can such a change take place?In fact it turns out that there are very few such pairs.The additional burden on the hearer is apparently small enough that theloss of the distinction is tolerated by speakers and hearers of the accent.

Another example was also mentioned earlier, the lack of a distinction betweenthe phonemes /ʌ/ and /ʊ/ in accents of northern England.For these speakers there is a single phoneme, normally pronounced [ʊ].So the following words, which sound different in most other accents,are pronounced in the same way by these speakers.

5. cud,could
6. buck,book
7. luck,look
8. putt,put
9. stud,stood

In this case, unlike that of /ɑ, ɔ/ in North America, it is the accent thatfails to make the distinction that is more conservative; Middle Englishdidnot make a distinction between /ʌ/ and /ʊ/.In any case, as before, the lack of a distinction does not leave hearers forthis accent handicapped becausethere are not many pairs of words distinguished only by this difference.

As a final example of phonemic differences in English vowels, considerhow the vowel /ɑ/ in GA corresponds to vowels in RP.In GA this vowel appears in words where it is spelled "o" —hot,shock,stop — and words where it isspelled "a" —father,part,carve.In RP, on the other hand, these sets of words have different vowels,a short, rounded, low, back vowel in the first set (which I'll write with /ɑ/ even thoughit differs a little from GA /ɑ/)and a long, unrounded, low, back vowel in thesecond set (which I'll write /ɑ:/).That is, in RP, the wordsfather andbother do not rhyme.Most of the words with /ɑ:/ in RP have an /r/ in GA that does not appear in RP,as we'll see below.This means that, even though RP has two vowel phonemes where GA has one, thereare few if any words that are distinguished in RP but not in GA.For example, a pair such aspot andpart is distinguished by theconsonant (/r/) in GA but by the vowel in RP (GA: /pɑt/, /pɑrt/;RP: /pɑt/, /pɑ:t/).

But RP /ɑ:/ also corresponds to many words that have /æ/ in GA.Some words are pronounced with /æ/ in both accents, for example,gas,bad,can, andlamp.Other words with /æ/ in GAare pronounced with /ɑ:/ in RP, for example,glass,rather,can't, andlaugh.Note that there is in general no way to predict from the context which wordswill have /æ/ and which will have /ɑ:/ in RP.Thus an American trying to imitate an RP accent will have to remember whichwords have which phoneme.This is difficult and leads to frequent over-generalization mistakes such as thepronunciation ofgas as /gɑs/ orstand as /stɑnd/in American attempts at imitating RP.

Differences in the number of English consonant phonemes are not as common, butthere are some.In a number of accents, especially in the Caribbean, in London, in AAVE, andin some US cities, the dental fricatives /θ, ð/ do not exist as separate phonemes.Where other accents have these phonemes, these accents have either /t/ and /d/or /f/ and /v/.So in accents where /θ/ is not distinguished from /t/ and /ð/ is not distinguishedfrom /d/, each of the following pairs of words would sound the same.

10. tin,thin
11. tie,thigh
12. boat,both
13. true,through
14. tread,thread
15. den,then
16. ride,writhe

In these accents an older distinction has been lost, but as with /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ in NorthAmerica, the loss apparently does not seriously interfere with communicationbecause there are not too many pairs of words that end up as homophones with the lossof the distinction.

Going back and forth between two accents is more complicated when the numberof phonemes differs than when there are only phonetic differences.Say a speaker of GA or Canadian English who does not make the distinctionbetween /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ wants to learn or to imitate the speech of someone fromLondon or New York or Houston, all places where the distinction between thesetwo phonemes is made.The problem is that words with these phonesin this person's mental lexicon are all representedin terms of one vowel category, whereas the same words are represented in termsof two different categories in the mental lexicons of speakers of other accents.For each word, say,caught orhawk orhot orlock,the speaker will have to figure out which vowel in the other accent is appropriate.But unless the speaker has learned this for each word, this will be impossible.In this situation, speakers often make mistakes, over-extending either oneor the other phone.For example, a North American speaker might overuse /ɔ/ in trying to speak withan RP accent, using this vowel for words likehot andlock.In the same way, a speaker from northern England trying to speak with an RPaccent, might over-extend the vowel /ʌ/, using it for words normally containing/ʊ/ such assugar andcushion.

Note that a speaker going in the other direction would not have the same problem.A speaker of RP would just have to rememberto pronounce both /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ in the same way when imitating GA and to pronounce/ʌ/ and /ʊ/ in the same way when imitating an accent of northern England.

Allophonic differences

A further possibility is for two accents to differ in the way a phonemeis realized in different phonetic contexts.The allophones of the phoneme may differ, or the contextsin which they apply may differ.Let's consider /t/ again, a phoneme with a wide range of allophones inmany English accents.In the context where it is surrounded by vowels and does not begin a stressedsyllable, this phoneme is realized as a tap, [ɾ], in GA, Canadian, Australian,and New Zealand accents, for example, in words likebutter,settle, andcity and phrases likeput it onandat a glance.Speakers of most accents of England never use this allophone, however.Instead, some of them, especially London speakers and others whose speech is underthe influence of London accent, use a glottal stop, [ʔ], in this same context.The glottal stopis a possible allophone of /t/ in GA, but only inthe context where it follows a vowel and precedes a consonant, for example,inoutright chaos andlet me go.In these contexts, even more speakers in England also have glottal stops.

Another place where English accents often differ with respect to their allophonesis the pronunciation of /l/.All English accents have an /l/ phoneme, but it may be realized differently.In many accents, including GA and RP, there are two allophones, a "clear" one,for which the tongue body is pushed up and forward, and a "dark" one, forwhich the tongue body is pulled backwards.Most GA speakers use the clear allophone only when it comes at the beginningof a syllable (possibly at the end of a consonant cluster), for example,inlive,play, andrelate.(For comparison, here's how these words would sound with very dark /l/s:live,play,relate.)In other contexts, for example, infull,old, andsilly,GA speakers use the dark allophone.(For comparison, here's how these words would sound with very clear /l/s:full,old,silly.)(Note that this description of the contextsrequires that we treat the syllable boundary insillyas occurring between the /l/ and the /i/.)In RP, the clear allophone is generally even clearer than in GA (a phoneticdifference), and it is used in word such assilly as well, though notinfull andold.That is, in RP, we can say that the clear allophone of /l/ occurs generallybefore vowels.In other accents, one or the other variant of /l/ may be used always.In Irish English and Caribbean English, the clear /l/ tends to appear in all contexts, while in Scottish English, the dark /l/ tends to appear everywhere.So in these accents we can say that /l/ has only a single allophone.

Accents may also differ in their vowel allophones.The Southern US accent has unusually complex lax ("short") vowel phonemes.In fact "short" is not at all appropriate for this accent since these vowelsare often longer than the "long" vowels.In particular, each of the front lax vowel phonemes, /ɪ/,/ɛ/, and /æ/, has a widerange of possible realizations, depending on the place of articulation of thefollowing consonant, the backness of the next vowel, and whether the vowelis in a word consisting of one syllable.Each of these vowels has at least one diphthong allophone.Listen to the vowels indicated in bold in the following sentence:

17. Deb lives in the lab.

Each is realized as a diphthong. When these same vowel phonemes appear before/k/, however, they have (non-diphthongal) allophones close to the GA vowels.

18. Mick wrecked the jack.

Since all of these allophonic differences concern realization and not how wordsare represented in the lexicon, they are more like the phonetic than thephonemic differences discussed above.If a GA speaker wanted to imitate a London speaker's use of the glottal stop allophoneof /t/, they would only have to worry about what context each /t/ occurred in,using a glottal stop whenever the /t/ occurred after a vowel and not at the beginningof a stressed syllable.Words in the GA speaker's lexicon with /t/ would also have /t/ in the lexicon of aLondoner, so there would be no need to remember new properties of individualwords.

Phonotactic differences

Accents can also differ from one another in their phonotactics,that is, in the way in which consonants and vowels combine to make syllables.The most noticeable place in English where there is this sort of variationis in the distribution of the phoneme /r/.In most accents, /r/ can occur freely at the beginnings of words, bothalone (rat) and in clusters (brat).In GA, however, there are restrictions on which vowels can occur before /r/ within a word.For many speakers, the vowels /i, e, u, o, ʌ/ cannot occur before /r/.In RP (and many other accents, including AAVE and some southern and northeasternUS accents), the restrictions are even more severe:/r/ can only occur before a vowel.That is, in words such asharm,port,hurt, andweird,there is no [r] sound at all in these accents. And in words such ascar,pour,her,hair,here,fire, andpower, there is no[r] sound unless the words immediately precede a vowel in the following word.So the following sentence has no [r] sounds in RP, imitated here by me.

19. Arnold carelessly poured the sour yogurt on the fire.

In fact the situation in RP is more complicated than this.First, where there used to be /r/ after a vowel, and where there still is today in most accents, RP sometimes has a [ə], resulting in the diphthongs /ɪə/,/ɛə/ and /ʊə/.These diphthongs are considered to be separate vowel phonemes in some descriptions of RP.There are also pairs of homophones in RP that differ in GAand other accents, for example,farther/father andsource/sauce.One further complication is that [r] getsinserted in some contexts in RP.But I'll save this for a later section.

Another example of restrictions on the distribution of a phoneme concernsthe vowels /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ in Southern US English (and also the Englishof some neighboring regions), which we've run into before.In these accents, the distinction between /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ isneutralized before [n];only /ɪ/ occurs in this context.So in these accents, the following pairs of words are pronounced the same.

20. pin,pen
21. tin,ten
22. since,sense
23. sinned,send
24. mint,meant

As with other cases of the loss of a contrast, there is the possibility ofa burden on the Hearer because of the words that are no long distinguished.This loss may explain why speakers of these accents seem to replacepen andpin with longer expressions such asfountain pen,ballpoint pen, andstraight pin.Note thatpen andpin are both nouns referring to physicalobjects, so there might be some confusion on the part of a hearer for thesetwo words.

Finally, English accents may differ in what sorts of consonant clusters are possible.AAVE and Caribbean accents, for example, have more restrictions on what canoccur at the ends of words than GA or RP do.For example, word-final consonant clusters ending in /p/, /t/, /k/, or /d/ inother accents are simpler or different in these accents:wasp /wɑs/,list /lɪs/,left /lɛf/,act /æk/,desk /dɛs/,ask /æks/,find /fayn/,cold /kol/,loved /lʌv/.

Lexical differences

A final way in which accents can differ is lexically, that is, in theconventional pronunciation for particular words.For example, a small number of words are pronounced differently by GA andand RP speakers (and most other speakers on the two sides of the Atlantic).Examples includeschedule (GA: /'skɛǰəl/, RP: /'šɛǰəl/),tomato (GA: /tə'meto/, RP: /tə'mɑ:to/),laboratory (GA: /'læbrə,tɔri/, RP: /lə'bɔrətri/),lieutenant (GA: /lu'tɛnənt/, RP: /lɛf'tɛnənt/),figure (GA: /'fɪgyər/,RP: /'fɪgə/,beta (GA: /'betə/,RP: /'bitə/).Note that none of these differences is related to any more general differencebetween the accents; that is, it could not be predicted from what we knowabout the phonetic, phonemic, allophonic, or phonotactic differences betweenGA and RP.

There are also lexical differences between GA and other US accents, especiallybroad Southern and AAVE.Some examples arepolice (/pə'lis/ vs. /'polis/),wash (/wɑš/ or /wɔš/ vs. /wɔrš/),yellow (/'yɛlo/ vs. /'yælər/), andcatch (/kæč/ vs. /kɛč/).

Other lexical differences may apply to larger sets of words.One way this can happen is with the pronunciation ofparts of words that recur in many words.The word ending spelled-ile occurs in many English words suchasfertile,docile,mobile, andsterile.This ending is normally pronounced /əl/ in GA but /ayl/ in RP.A more familiar example is the pronunciation of the word ending spelled-ing in words of more than one syllable, that is, words likeplaying,eating, andsomething, but notthingandsing.Some speakers, located in various places in the English-speaking world,always pronounce this ending /ən/.Many other speakers have two pronunciations for the ending, one reserved for moreformal situations, the other for more informal situations.For RP speakers and many GA speakers (including me), the formal pronunciationis /ɪŋ/ and the informal pronunciation /ən/.For other GA speakers (a group that appears to be growing), the moreformal pronunciation is /in/.

Even though these differences in pronunciations of word parts such a-ileand-ing apply to large numbers of words, they still need to be seen aslexical differences since there is nothing in what we know about the phonetic,phonemic, allophonic, or phonotactic differences between the accents that would allowus to predict the different pronunciations from the contexts of the phones.

Learning to change your pronunciation of particular words, for example, if youwant to make your pronunciation more standard or want to imitate a differentaccent, is not too difficult, as long as there are no differences of othertypes (phonetic, phonemic, allophonic, phonotactic) to worry about.On a word-by-word basis, you just have to remember the new pronunciation interms of the phonemes that are part of your native accent.

Suprasegmental differences

Inthe section on syllables, we saw that languagesvary in terms of how they use the dimensions of pitch, loudness, and duration.One very noticeable difference between English accents is in the details ofhow these dimensions interact with the structure and the meanings of sentences,that is, in theirintonation.Because of the inherent difficulty of describing intonation, however, theseaccent differences are apparently not as well studied as differences at thelevel of consonants and vowels.

One difference between GA and RP is in the typical pitch pattern used foryes/no questions, that is, questions that can be answered withyes orno, rather than with phrases likeFelix oron Tuesday.In GA, the usual pattern for these questionsinvolves a pitch rise on the stressed syllable of the laststressed word in the sentence followed by a continuing high pitch on succeedingsyllables.In RP, the syllables leading up to the stressed syllable of the last stressedword in the sentence are relatively high, and the pitch falls on that stressedsyllable and then rises to a high pitch again, remaining high for the rest of the sentence as in GA.Consider the following question in the two accents.

1.   Has shewritten to you?
2.  Has shewrittentoyou?

This difference in intonation is similar to phonetic, rather than phonemic, differencesat the level of consonants and vowels because it does not involve more distinctionsmade in one or the other accent.It is just therealization of theyes/no pattern that differs for thetwo accents.

We've seen that accents within a language can differ in all of the characteristicways that languages differ from one another.What makes accent differences special is the fact that the different dialectsare related to one another; they ultimately derive from the same dialect in thepast.This means that either phonemes in one accent correspond directly to phonemesin the other accent, or, if phonemes have split or merged in one of the accents,one phoneme in one accent corresponds to multiple phonemes in the other.These correspondences are easy to observe because of the correspondences betweenwords in the different accents.The wordcat is [k^hæt], [k^hat],[k^hɛət], and [k^hɛt] in different accents(GA/RP, Scottish/Northern English, Northern Cities,Australian/New Zealand),and from the lexical correspondences we can discover the vowel correspondences.One interesting kind of information that we can infer from these sorts ofcorrespondences is the history of the dialects, how the parent dialect turnedinto the different daughter dialects.Of course the same is true for related languages.That is, we could learn something about the history of Spanish phonologyby looking at correspondences between words in modern Spanish and related languagessuch as French and Portuguese.We'll see more about how this works inthe section on phonological change.