ENGLISH ACCENTS & DIALECTS Related titles : World Englishes, Second Edition Gunnel Melchers & Philip Shaw 978 1 444 13537 4 International English: A Guide to the Varieties of Standard English, Fifth Edition Peter Trudgill & Jean Hannah 978 0 340 97161 1 ENGLISH Fifth edition ACCENTS & DIALECTS Arthur Hughes Peter Trudgill Dominic Watt First published in Great Britain 1979 Second edition published in Great Britain 1987 Third edition published in Great Britain 1996 Fourth edition published in 2005 by Hodder Arnold This edition published in 2012 by Hodder Education Published 2013 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY, 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2012 Arthur Hughes, Peter Trudgill, Dominic Watt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of going to press, but neither the authors nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 13: 978 1 444 121 38 4 (pbk) Typeset by Phoenix Photosetting, Chatham, Kent Contents Preface ................................................................................................................................................ vii Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... ix Wordlist .............................................................................................................................................. xi List of online recordings ............................................................................................................ xii IPA chart ............................................................................................................................................ xiii 1 Variation in English ......................................................................................................... 1 2 Dialect Variation ............................................................................................................... 19 3 Received Pronunciation ............................................................................................... 37 4 Regional Accent Variation .......................................................................................... 59 5 British Isles Accents and Dialects .......................................................................... 73 5.1 London (‘Cockney’) ............................................................................................ 75 5.2 London West Indian ........................................................................................... 80 5.3 Norwich ...................................................................................................................... 83 5.4 Bristol ............................................................................................................................ 86 5.5 Southampton .......................................................................................................... 89 5.6 South Wales (Pontypridd) .............................................................................. 94 5.7 West Midlands ........................................................................................................ 97 5.8 Leicester ...................................................................................................................... 101 5.9 Bradford ...................................................................................................................... 104 5.10 Hull ................................................................................................................................. 107 5.11 Liverpool ..................................................................................................................... 112 5.12 Manchester ............................................................................................................... 116 5.13 Middlesbrough ...................................................................................................... 119 5.14 Carlisle ......................................................................................................................... 123 5.15 Edinburgh .................................................................................................................. 127 5.16 Aberdeen ................................................................................................................... 131 5.17 Belfast ........................................................................................................................... 136 5.18 Dublin .......................................................................................................................... 141 5.19 Galway ......................................................................................................................... 144 5.20 Devon ........................................................................................................................... 147 5.21 Lancashire .................................................................................................................. 149 5.22 Northumberland .................................................................................................. 153 5.23 Lowland Scots ........................................................................................................ 158 5.24 Shetland Islands .................................................................................................... 162 Contents Suggestions for using the book ............................................................................................ 169 Further reading .............................................................................................................................. 183 References ......................................................................................................................................... 187 Index .................................................................................................................................................... 197 vi Preface It is now over thirty years since the first edition of this book was published. In its original, much slimmer form, it covered just 11 accents and dialects of British Isles English. This set has more than doubled in size through the four subsequent editions, with the present edition now describing the characteristics of almost 30 varieties. This expansion of coverage, along with an overall increase in the level of descriptive detail, is a reflection of the huge surge in interest in documenting the diverse phonetic properties of English in the UK and Ireland. Prodigious quantities of dialectological and sociolinguistic research have been carried out in the decades between 1979 and the present day, in many cases using a combination of sophisticated auditory, acoustic, and statistical analysis techniques. Alongside these, large-scale dialect surveys, such as the BBC Voices project, have made a wealth of digital recordings of interviews and other forms of speech available to listen to by downloading sound files from the internet. Our observations about the varieties described in the book are therefore underpinned more strongly than ever before by a substantial and growing body of systematically collected information about the ways in which British and Irish English vary geographically and socially at the levels of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. Though a volume like English Accents and Dialects does not, and cannot, aim to describe more than a subset of the major urban and traditional rural varieties spoken in these islands, the fifth edition addresses some of the more significant omissions from previous editions (Manchester, Southampton, Hull, Middlesbrough). The entry on London West Indian English gives a flavour of the differences between traditional working-class London speech and the ‘multicultural’ London English that has emerged in the metropolis since the 1980s, while the entries on central Lancashire and the Shetland Islands add to the set illustrating some of the pronunciation features that persist in areas further removed – in the case of the Shetlands by hundreds of miles – from large and linguistically influential centres of population. The addition of these extra varieties, in combination with the fact that the accompanying sound recordings are now available for download from XXXSPVUMFEHFDPNDXIVHIFT, should significantly enhance the book’s usefulness to members of the target readership. These range from school and university students of English language and linguistics to forensic speech analysts, via speech and language therapists, actors, teachers of English, and general readers with an interest in how English varies. 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