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MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY SPECIAL EDUCATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN ANDIZHAN STATE UNIVERSITY

THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHONETICS AND LEXICOLOGY

EXTRACT ON THE THEME: “Features of the Northern English type of pronunciation”

Done by Akbarova D group 409 Supervisor: Djumaboeva M

Introduction “The main objective of all our reforms in the field of economic policy is the individual. Therefore the task of education, the task of raising up a new generation capable of notional renaissance will remain the prerogative of the state and constitute a priority”. From the President I. A. Karimov

In the century of globalization and increasing competition, in which we live now, only as a result of persistent and determined progression ahead on the way of cardinal reforms and modernization we can achieve the perspective goal, which we have set before ourselves, i.e. to join the ranks of developed democratic and flourishing states, provide our people worthy living standards. An important question for every society—and most particularly for emerging as well as established democracies—is how to educate the young so that they become competent, responsible, and knowledgeable citizens. That is a challenge of overriding importance. Not only does the quality of life in a democracy depend upon how well that challenge is met. So, too, does the stability—indeed, the endurance of democracy itself is contingent on the competence, commitment, and caring of its citizens. An infant may be born a citizen in the eyes of the law, but transforming a human being into a citizen who can participate effectively and responsibly in a democratic society is a lengthy and demanding task. The government policies of Uzbekistan have build up 50,000 new educational institutes annually for the past few years. More schools are yet required to fulfil the public demand. All the educational institutes of Uzbekistan aim at educational development. They follow certain principles, such as: -Modifying and further improving the educational and socializing content -Developing new schools, curriculum and textbooks - on individual capability and talent -Vocational and Professional training, keeping in mind the changing economical needs -Raising Uzbekistan’s educational system to match the international standards The deep economic and social-political transformations currently taken place in Uzbekistan become a cornerstone for reestablishing and upgrading the whole system of education. And the foreign as general aid of communication is in the focus of our attention. Cooperation with international organizations, implementing new technologies, integration of our Republic into world’ economy- all of these suggests great possibilities for the youth, and especially for the English teachers and learners. The subject of my investigation is very interesting and worthy to discus: ―Features of the Northern English type of pronunciation‖.The problem of my work is concerned with Theoretical Phonetics and Dialectology. The aim of my course paper is to study deeply the works of well-known phoneticians, and analyze the peculiarities of Features of the Northern English type of pronunciation. This course paper consists of the introductory, two chapters, conclusion and the list of used literature. The chapters are: I RP/BBC English as the British national standard of pronunciation

II Dialects and accents and their history

III Northern English and its peculiarities

1. RP/BBC English as the British national standard of pronunciation

By the 19th century English had increasingly acquired social prestige losing be of its local characteristics. It was finally fixed as the pronunciation of the ruling class. According to Leither, in the mid 19th century there was an increase in education, in particular, there occurred the rise of public schools (since 1864 Public School Act). These schools became important agencies in the transmission of Southern English as the form with highest prestige. Since that time London English or Southern English was termed as Classroom English, Public School English or Educated English [Lither: 1982]. That was a forceful normalization movement towards the establishment of Educated Southern English as the standard accent. The major reasons for this were: 1) The need for a clearly defined and recognized norm for public and other purposes; 2) The desire to provide adequate descriptions for teaching English both as the mother tongue and a foreign language. Professor Daniel Jones described this variety as a hoped-for standard pronunciation in the first editions of his books "The Pronunciation of English" [1909] and "Outline of English Phonetics" [1917]. By 1930, however, any intention of setting up a standard of Spoken English was disclaimed by many phoneticians. The term "Standard Pronunciation" was replaced by "", which had been introduced for Southern Educated English by phonetician Ida Ward who defined it as pronunciation which " had lost all easily noticeable local differences" [Leitner: 1982]. According to Wells the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC) adopted RP for the use by its news-readers since 1920s. The country's population, for more than half a century, had been exposed through broadcasting to RP. Until the early 70s of the last century it was the only accent demanded in the BBC's announcers. For that reason RP often became identified in the public mind with BBC English. Only over the last 30 years, both the BBC and other British national radio and TV channels have been increasingly tolerant of the accent of their broadcasters. [Wells: 1982].

Now we will outline main segmental features of RP/BBC English. As for its inventory, Gimson states, that this accent has 20 vowels and 24 consonants. The system of vowels embraces 12 pure vowels or monophthongs: i:, i, æ, Λ, a:, o, o:, υ, u:, з:, ә and 8 : ei, ai, oi, әυ, aυ, iә, eә, υә. The system of RP consonants consists of the following two wide categories of sounds: 1) those typically associated with a noise component: p, b, t, d, k, g, f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ,з, h, tʃ,dз; 2) Those without a noise component which may share many phonetic characteristics with vowels - 7 : m, n, ŋ, 1, r, j, w. Measurements of text frequency of occurrence of RP vowels and consonants display the following picture: [Gimson: 2001]1 According to the phonotactic specification of /r/ occurrence, RP is a non-rhotic or r-less accent, i.e. /r/ does not occur after a vowel or at the end of the words. It may be claimed that /r/ in RP has a limited distribution, being restricted in its occurrence to pre-vocalic positions. Prof. J C. Wells in his article "Cockneyfication of RP" discusses several of recent and current sound changes in RP. He considers in turn: 1) The decline of weak /I/,

1. 11 Gimson, A. C. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. Sixth Edition. / Revised by Alan Gruttenden. London, New : Edward Arnold, 2001. – 339 p.

2) glottalling, A lot of bright examples of glottalling we can find in George Bernard Shaw’s ―Pygmalion‖ (film ―My Fair Lady‖): e.g. So cheer up, Captain; and buy a flower off a poor girl. / e.g. What’s that? That ain’t proper writing. /e.g. Buy a flower, kind gentleman. / 3) 1-vocalization, 4) intrusive /r/, 5) yod coalescence,

e.g. Then what did you take my words for? / e.g. Now you know, don’t you? I’m come to have lessons, I am. / e.g. Would you mind if I take a seat? / 6) assorted lexical changes. V. Parashchuk claims that there is a tendency towards the so-called smoothing (tightening, reduction) of the sequences / aiә /, /aυә/ ("thripthongs"), the medial element of which may be elided. They are sometimes reduced to a long , e.g. power /pa:/, tower /ta:/, fire /fa:/, our /a:/. Though the full forms have been retained in the latest edition of the LPD as the main variants, their reduced counterparts are very common in casual RP: /aυә - aә - a:/. There is a tendency, though not a very consistent one, to make the /υә/ a positional of /o:/ . It is increasingly replaced by /o:/ , e.g. the most common form of sure has /o:/ with a similar drift being true for poor, mour, tour and their derivatives. Rare words, such as gourd, dour tend to retain /υә/without a common /o: / variant. Words in which /υә/ is preceded by a consonant plus /j/ are relatively resistant to this shift, e.g. pure, curious, fury, furious. There is a yod-dropping tendency after /s/ in the words like suit, super and their derivatives, e.g. suitcase, suitable, supreme, superior, supermarket - these have the dominant form without /j/. In words, where /j/ occurs after the consonants other than /s/, it still remains the dominant form in RP, e.g. enthusiasm, news, student. [Parashchuk: 2005]

Chapter II. Dialects and accents and their history

British English or UK English or English English (BrE, BE), is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere. There is confusion whether the term refers to English as spoken in the British Isles or to English as spoken in Great Britain, though in the case of Ireland, there are further distinctions peculiar to Hiberno-English. There are slight regional variations in formal written English in the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, there is a meaningful degree of uniformity in written English within the United Kingdom, and this could be described as "". According to Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English (p. 45), "for many people...especially in [the phrase British English] is tautologous," and it shares "all the ambiguities and tensions in the word British, and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity" [11]2. English is a West Germanic language that originated from the Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to England by Germanic settlers from various parts of what is now northwest Germany and the northern Netherlands. Initially, was a diverse group of dialects, reflecting the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms of England. One of these dialects, Late West Saxon, eventually came to dominate. Thus, English developed into a "borrowing" language of great flexibility and with a huge . Professor Sally Johnson admits that dialects and accents vary between the four countries of the United Kingdom, and also within the countries themselves. There are also differences in the English spoken by different socio-economic groups in any particular region. The major divisions are normally classified as English English (or English as spoken in England, which comprises Southern English dialects, English dialects and Northern English dialects), , and the closely related dialects of the Scots language. The various British dialects also differ in the words that they have borrowed from other . The Scottish and Northern English dialects include many words originally borrowed from and a few borrowed from Gaelic. There is no singular British accent, just as there is no singular American accent; in fact, the United Kingdom is home to a wide variety of regional accents and dialects, to a greater extent than the United States. Stuart Jeffries claims that the form of English most commonly associated with educated speakers in the southern counties of England is called the "Received Standard", and its accent is called Received Pronunciation (RP). It derives from a mixture of the Midland and Southern dialects which were spoken in London during the Middle Ages and is frequently used as a model for teaching English to foreign learners. Although educated speakers from elsewhere within the UK may not speak with an RP accent it is now a class-dialect more than a local dialect. The best speakers of are those whose pronunciation, and language generally, least betray their locality. It may also be referred to as "the Queen's (or King's) English", "Public School English", or "BBC English" as this was originally the form of English used on radio and television,

2 Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English (p. 45) although a wider variety of accents can be heard these days. Only approximately two percent of Britons speak RP, and it has evolved quite markedly over the last 40 years [11]. Even in the South East there are significantly different accents; the London accent is strikingly different from RP and its rhyming slang can be difficult for outsiders to understand. Since the mass immigration to Northamptonshire in the 1940s and its close accent borders, it has become a source of various accent developments. There, nowadays, one finds an accent known locally as the Kettering accent, which is a mixture of many different local accents, including , East Anglian, Scottish, and Cockney. In addition, in the town of Corby, five miles (8 km) north, one can find Corbyite, which unlike the Kettering accent, is largely based on Scottish. This is due to the influx of Scottish steelworkers. As with English around the world, the English language as used in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland is governed by convention rather than formal code: there is no equivalent body to the Académie française or the Real Academia Española, and the authoritative dictionaries (for example, Oxford English Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Chambers Dictionary, Collins Dictionary) record usage rather than prescribe it. In addition, vocabulary and usage change with time; words are freely borrowed from other languages and other strains of English, and neologisms are frequent [11]. According to V. Parashchuk, an example of an accent representing much-localized, non- standard English is Cockney, the broadest London working-class speech. Historically, Cockney has been the major influence in the phonetic development of RP, and many of its current changes can be related to Cockney pronunciation. Let us summarize the most essential information on the origin of Cockney, the revealing features of its grammar, vocabulary, and major phonetic distinctions. Cockney is distinguished by its special usage of vocabulary - rhyming slang. Many of its expressions have passed into common language. It developed as a way of obscuring the meaning of sentences to those who did not understand the slang. It remains a matter of speculation whether this was a linguistic accident, or whether it was developed intentionally to assist criminals or to maintain a particular community [http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/cockneyrhyming slang]. Rhyming slang works by replacing the word to be obscured with the first word of a phrase that rhymes with that word. For instance, "face" would be replaced by "boat", because face rhymes with "boat race" [http//www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/cockneyrhymingslang]. Similarly "feel" becomes "plates" ("plates of meat"), and "money" is "bread" (a very common usage, from "bread and honey"). Sometimes the full phrase is used, for example "Currant Bun" to mean The Sun (often referring to the British tabloid newspaper of that name). Some substitutions have become relatively widespread in England, for example, to "have a butcher's" means to have a look, from the rhyming slang "butcher's hook".[Parashchuk: 2005] J. Gimson states that there are no differences in the inventory of vowel and consonant between RP and Cockney [Gimson: 2001:87] and there are relatively few differences of phoneme lexical distribution. There are, however, a large number of differences in realization of phonemes. Most striking realizational differences can be summarized as follows [Gimson: 2001:86-87]. In consonants: 1. H dropping. /h/ is not pronounced in initial positions in words which have this phoneme in RP, e.g. have, hat, horse = /av/, /æt/, /ho:s/. /h/ is used, however, in initial positions in words which in RP begin with a vowel. Thus the words air, atmosphere, honesty are ./honәsti׳/ ,/pronounced in Cockney as /heә/, /hætmæsfiә The following examples are taken from film ―My fair lady‖

e.g. You ain’t heard what I come for yet. /e.g. I’m come to have lessons, I am. /e.g. I won’t stay here if I don’t like. / e.g. He ain’t above giving lessons, not him: I heard him say so. /

2. TH fronting/stopping. The contrast between /θ/ and /f/ is completely lost and between / fa: vә /. When / ð/ occurs initially, it is׳/ ,/ð / and /v/ is occasionally lost, e.g. think, father - /fink either dropped or replaced by /d/, e.g. this and that = /'disn'dæt/. e.g. I ain’t got no mother.(FL) / 3. L vocalization. Dark [ł] (i.e. in positions not immediately before vowels) becomes vocalic [υ], e.g. milk, table = /miυk/, /teibυ/. When the preceding vowel is /o:/, /l/ may disappear completely, e.g. called = /kho:d/. 4. T glottalling is widely spread in Cockney accent. /t/ is realized as a following vowels, laterals, and nasals, e.g. butterfly = /'bΛ?tәflai/. /t/ between vowels is not aspirated, and is often replaced by /d/ or /r/ or the glottal stop /?/ ,e.g. get away, better = /'ged ./gerә'wei/, /'ge?ә'wei/; /'bedә/, /'berә/, /'be?ә׳/ ,/ә'wei There may be similar replacement of /p/. /k/ before a following consonant, e.g. soapbox /'sæυ?boks/, technical /'te?ni?u/ [Gimson 2001:88].

e.g. What that you say? /

5. yod-coalescence. There is coalescence of /t/, /d/ before /j/ into / tʃ /, and / dʒ/ , e.g. tube [tʃu:b], during [' dʒυәriŋ], but of /j/ following by/n/, e.g. news [nu:z]. e.g. I won’t let you wallop me! / Main distinctions in the realization of cockney vowels include [Gimson: 2001:87-88]: 1. The short front vowels /e/, /æ/ tend to be closer than in RP so much, that Cockney sat may sound as set and set like sit to the speakers of other accents. 2. Among the long vowels, most noticeable is the diphthongization of /i:/→/әi/, /u:/→/әu/, thus bead =/bәid/, boot =/bәut/. When /o:/ is final, it is pronounced as /owә/, sore, saw = /sowә/; when it is not final, its realization is closer/oυ/. 3. Diphthong shift. Cockney uses distinctive pronunciation of RP diphthongs:

/ei/ is realized as /ai/ e.g. lady = /'laidi/; /ai/ sounds as /oi/~/ai/, e.g. price= /prois/; /әυ/ sounds as /æυ/ e.g. load /læυd/; /aυ/ sounds as /a:/, e g loud /la:d/;

4. /i/ lengthening, /i/ in word final positions sound', as /i:/.e .g. city /'siti:/ 5. Weakening. RP diphthong /әυ/ in window, pillow is weakened to /ә/. You, to are pronounced as /jә/, /tә/, especially finally, e.g. see you, try to [Gimson:2001]. In this chapter we are going to look in greater detail at the Received Pronunciation (RP) and at the regional non-RP accents of England. Roughly speaking the non-RP accents of England may be grouped like this: 1. Southern accents. 1) Southern accents (Greater London, Cockney, Surray, Kent, Essex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire); 2) East Anglia accents (, Norfolk, , , Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire; 3) South-West accents (Gloucestershire, Avon, Somerset, Wiltshire). 2. Northern and Midland accents. 1) Northern accents (, Durham, Cleveland); 2) accents; 3) North-West accents (, Cheshire); 4) West Midland (Birmingham, Wolverhampton). It has long been believed that RP is a social marker, a prestige ac-cent of an Englishman. In the nineteenth century «received» was understood in the sense of «accepted in the best society». The speech of aristocracy and the court phonetically was that of the London area. Then it lost its local characteristics and was finally fixed as a ruling-class accent, often referred to as «King's English». It was also the ac-cent taught at public schools. With the spread of education cultured people not belonging to the upper classes were eager to modify their accent in the direction of social standards. We may definitely state now that RP is a genuinely regionless accent within Britain; i.e. if speakers have it you cannot tell which area of Britain they come from; which is not the case for any other type of British accents. It is fair to mention, however, that only 3–5 per cent of the population of England speak RP. British phoneticians (Ch. Barber (44),3 A.C. Gimson (57), A. Hughes and P. Trudgill (61) estimate that nowadays RP is not homogeneous. A.C. Gimson suggests that it is convenient to distinguish three main types within it: «the conservative RP forms, used by the older generation, and, traditionally, by certain profession or social groups; the general RP forms, most commonly in use and typified by the pronunciation adopted by the BBC, and the advanced RP forms, mainly used by young people of exclusive social groups – mostly of the upper classes, but also for prestige value, in certain professional circles. «This last type of RP reflects the tendencies typical of changes in pronunciation. It is the most «effected and exaggerated variety» of the accent. Some of its features may be results of temporary fashion; some are adopted as a norm and described in the latest textbooks. Therefore, it is very important for a teacher and learner of English to distinguish between the two. RP speakers make up a very small percentage of the English population. Many native speakers, especially teachers of English and professors of colleges and universities (particularly from the South and South-East of England) have accents closely resembling RP but not identical to it. P. Trudgill and J. Hannah call it Near-RP southern. So various types of standard English pronunciation may be summarized as follows: Conservative RP; General RP; Advanced RP; Near-RP southern.

3 Crystal D. Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English. - Cambridge, 1969 3. Northern Type of English pronunciation

Northern English is a group of dialects of the English language found in . It includes the dialects, Cumbrian (with a Westmorland sub-set in South Lakeland and a limited sub-set around the Barrow-in-Furness area), the various Yorkshire dialects and Lancashire (increasingly but incorrectly referred to as 'Lanky').

Some words occurring in 'far' Northern accents (Lonning (a Lane) in West Cumbria, Thorpe (a clear area, originally in woodland)in East Yorkshire)and North Eastern Dialects reflect Viking influence - Possibly because the area was all north of the Danelaw boundary. Norwegian has had a greater impact on most northern dialects than Danish, but the has been influenced more by Danish. Authoritative quantification is not readily available but estimates have suggested as many as 7% of West Cumbrian dialect words are original Norse or derived from Norse.

Northern English is one of the major groupings of English English dialects; other major groupings include , East and West Midlands English, West Country (Somerset, Devon, Cornwall/Cornish) and Southern English.

Varieties

Northern English contains:

 Cumbrian dialect  (spoken in the Newcastle/ area which includes southern parts of Northumberland and northern parts of )  the various Lancashire dialects and accents (see below)  (spoken in /)  Mancunian (spoken in Manchester, Salford, various other areas of Greater Manchester, parts of Lancashire and eastern Cheshire).... Although the original Salfordian accent was essentially a blend of Mancunian and East Lancashire, an increasing -like 'nasal projection' seems to be emerging.  Pitmatic (two variations; one spoken in the former mining communities of County Durham and the other in Northumberland)  Scouse (spoken in the Liverpool/Merseyside area with variations along the North Wales coast.)  Teesside  the various Yorkshire dialects and accents (spoken in Yorkshire)

In some areas, it can be noticed that dialects and phrases can vary greatly within regions too. For example the has many sub-dialects and varies noticeably from West to East and even from town to town. Within as little as 5 miles there can be an identifiable change in accent. The Society has always separated West Riding dialect from that in the North and East ridings.

Common features of most Northern English accents

There are several accent features which are common to most of the accents of Northern England (Wells 1982, section 4.4).

 The foot–strut split is absent in Northern English, so that cut and put rhyme and are both pronounced with /ʊ/. This has led to Northern England being described "Oop North" /ʊp nɔːθ/ by some in the south of England. Some words with /ʊ/ in RP can have /uː/ – book is often pronounced /buːk/ in Northern accents, while some conservative accents also pronounce look as /luːk/.  The accents of Northern England generally do not use an /ɑː/. so cast is pronounced [kast] rather than the [kɑːst] pronunciation of most southern accents. This pronunciation is found in the words that were affected by the trap–bath split.  For many speakers, the remaining instances of RP /ɑː/ instead becomes /aː/: for example, in the words palm, cart, start, tomato.  The vowel in dress, test, pet, etc. is slightly more open, transcribed by Wells as /ɛ/ rather than /e/.  The "short a" vowel of cat, trap is normally pronounced [a] rather than the [æ] found in traditional Received Pronunciation and in many forms of .  In most areas, the letter y on the end of words as in happy or city is pronounced [ɪ], like the i in bit, and not [i]. This was considered RP until the 1990s. The tenser [i] is found in the far north and in the Merseyside area.  The Received Pronunciation phonemes /eɪ/ (as in face) and /әʊ/ (as in goat) are often pronounced as monophthongs (such as [eː] and [oː]), or as older diphthongs (such as /ɪә/ and /ʊә/). However, the quality of these vowels varies considerably across the region, and this is considered a greater indicator of a speaker's social class than the less stigmatised aspects listed above.

Conclusion

In the case of English there exists a great diversity in the spoken realization of the language and particularly in terms of pronunciation. The varieties of the language are conditioned by language communities ranging from small groups to nations. Now speaking about the nations we refer to the national variants of the language. In then – treatment we follow the conception of A.D. Shweitzer. According to him national language is a historical category evolving from conditions of economic and political concentration which characterizes the formation of a nation. In other words national language is the language of a nation, the standard of its form, the language of a nation's literature. It is common knowledge that language exists in two forms: written and spoken. Any manifestation of language by means of speech is the result of a highly complicated series of events. The literary spoken form has its national pronunciation standard. A «standard» may be defined as «a socially accepted variety of a language established by a codified norm of correctness». Today all the English-speaking nations have their own national variants of pronunciation and each of them has peculiar features that distinguish it from other varieties of English. It is generally accepted that for the «English English» it is «Received Pronunciation» or RP; for «The American English» – «General American pronunciation»; for the – «Educated Australian». Standard national pronunciation is sometimes called an «orthoepic norm». Some phoneticians, however, prefer the term «literary pronunciation». Though every national variant of English has considerable differences in pronunciation, lexic and grammar, they all have much in common which gives us ground to speak of one and the same language – the English language. It would not be true to say that national standards are fixed and immutable. They undergo constant changes due to various internal and external factors. Pronunciation, above all, is subject to all kinds of innovations. Therefore the national variants of English differ primarily in sound, stress and intonation. It is well-known that there are countries with more than one national language, the most common case being the existence of two national languages on the same territory. For this Canada will be an example, where two different languages – English and French – form the repertoire of the community. In this case scholars speak about bilingualism in contrast to monolingualism typical of a country with one national language. Here arises the problem of interference, that is «linguistic disturbance which results from two languages (or dialects), coming into contact in a specific situation»4. It may be well to state that every national variety of the language falls into territorial or regional dialects. Dialects are distinguished from each other by differences in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. We must make clear that, when we refer to varieties in pronunciation only, we use the word «accent».1 So local accents may have many features of pronunciation in common and consequently are grouped into territorial or area accents. In Britain, for example, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire accents form the group of «Northern accent». We must admit, however, that in most textbooks on phonetics the word «dialect» is still used in reference to the regional pronunciation peculiarities, though in the latest editions both in this country and abroad the difference in terms «dialects and accents» is generally accepted. As we see, those terms should be treated differently when related to different aspects of the language. It is, however, true that there is a great deal of overlap between these terms. For certain geographical, economic, political and cultural reasons one of the dialects becomes the of the nation and its pronunciation or its accent – the received standard pronunciation. This was the case of London dialect, whose accent became the «RP» («Received Pronunciation») of Britain. It has been estimated that the standard pronunciation of a country is not homogeneous. It changes in relation to other languages, and also to geographical, psychological, social and political influences. In England, for example, we distinguish «conservative, general and advanced RP».

4 Learners of a foreign language often use the word "accent" to describe pronunciation features in a foreign language influenced by the mother tongue, in other words, a foreigner may be easily recognized by an accent Midland accents, Yorkshire, for example, West Midland and North-West accents have very much in common with Northern ones. Therefore they are combined in this book into one group; peculiar realization of vowels and consonants will be marked, of course, when each subgroup is described separately. The counties of northern England are not far from the Scottish border, so the influence of Scotch accent is noticeable, though there are of course many features of pronunciation characteristic only of northern English regions. The most typical representative of the speech of this area is Newcastle accent. It differs from RP in the following: In vowels 1. RP [] is realized as [u]: love [lv] – [lv]; 2. RP final [i] sounds like [i:]: city [siti] – [siti:]; 3. words like dance, chance which in RP have [a] are pronounced with: [dns], [tns]; 4. [ei], [] are either monophthongs, or much narrower diphthongs than the ones in the south of England, or they may even sound as opening diphthongs [le], [o]: bay [be:], [bie], plate [ple:t], [phet], boat [bo:t], [bo t]; 5. words that have «al» in spelling – talk, call, all, are pronounced with [a]: [ta:k], [ka:l], [a:l]; 6. RP words with [3:] are pronounced with in a broad Tyneside accent: first [fist], shirt [f:t]; so first, forced; shirt, short are homonyms; 7. [ai] is [i]: right [rit]; 8. words which in RP have [au] may have [it], e.g. about [abut]. In consonants 1. [1] is clear in all environments; 2. [h] is usually present in all positions; 3. – ing is [in]: shilling [ilin]; 4. [p, t, k] between vowels are accompanied by glottal stop [?]: pity [pit? i:];

5. in parts of Northumberland and Durham [r] may be uvular (in its production the tongue and the uvular, not the tongue and the alveolar ridge take part)

Bibliography

 Katie Wales (2006). Northern English: A Social and Cultural History. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-86107-1.