PRONUNCIATIN VARIETIES OF BRITISH ENGLISH

There is a wide range of pronunciation varieties of the English lan­guage. These varieties reflect the social class the speaker belongs to, the geo­graphical region he comes from, and they also convey stylistic connotations of speech. Some of these varieties are received pronunciations, others are not.

Every national variant of the English language has an orthoepic norm of its own: RP, or Southern English, for British English, GA for American English, the Australian Standard Pronunciation for Australian English. Each of these orthoepic norms tolerates a definite range of phonemic variation, and each of them has its own peculiarities of combinatory phenomena. It is generally conceded that the orthoepic norm of British English is "Received Pronunciation", though, as many scholars state, it is not the only variety of British English pronunciation that is recognized as the ortho-epic norm in present—day Britain.

Received Pronunciation (RP) was accepted as the phonetic norm of Eng­lish about a century ago. It is mainly based on the Southern English regional type of pronunciation, but has developed its own features which have given it a non—regional character, i.e. there is no region in Britain to which it is native. RP is spoken all over Britain by a comparatively small number of Eng­lishmen who have had the most privileged education in the country — public school education. RP is actually a social standard pronunciation of English. It is often referred to as the prestige accent.

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

Scholars divide 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.

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. This primarily concerns the Northern and the Scottish types of pronunciation which are used by many educated people in Britain.

One should distinguish between RP and "educated" regional types of pronunciation (such as Southern, Northern and Scottish types of English pronunciation), on the one hand, and local dialects, on the other.

One of the best examples of a local dialect is Cockney. It is used by the less educated in the region of London.

Studies of regional and dialectal pronunciations generally concentrate on the phonemic structures of words and differences in the realizations of de­finite phonemes. But it appears that these pronunciations, besides that, have differences in their phoneme inventories. For example, the Northern type of pronunciation has no / ʌ /, whereas it has /рэ/. The Scottish pronunciation di­stinguishes between voiced /w/ and voiceless /m/, but it has no /3: /. Cockney has no [θ] и [ ð] phonemes. There are many /h/—less dialects in England. Therefore there are distinctions in the phoneme inventories of various types of pronunciations. Scholars have recently given more attention to the phono­logical systems of British English varieties of pronunciations, yet much re­mains to be done.

(+ see Northern & Scotish dialects)

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