Accents of English

This video just has a plain transcript, not time-aligned to the videoThis video will introduce you to ways in which accents of English can differ so that you can figure out how to establish a set of symbols to use to transcribe both standard and non-standard and non-native varieties.
First, let’s start with the terms “accent” and “dialect”. While they are used interchangeably in casual speech, British linguistics use these terms with precise technical differences. Accents are language varieties that differ from one another only in pronunciation, while dialects, differ from one another in their grammars. Of course, this distinction as an idealization, as people who pronounce things differently from one another also tend to have grammatical and other structural differences in their languages as well.
As an aside, note that in linguistics accent may also refer to aspects of intonation and syllable prominence – that meaning is a completely unrelated use o f the term.
As phoneticians, we are mainly concerned here with differences in pronunciation.
Among accents of English, differences in pronunciation are systematic, meaning that we can describe how and where they will occur. These differences include both phonetic (or realizational) and phonological differences.
In realizational or phonetic differences, the same vowel phoneme is realized differently in different language varieties. That is, it has a different quality, but is otherwise the same as other varieties in terms of its distribution and function. The chart presented here shows examples of vowel phonemes that have realizational differences in US and UK varieties of English.
To hear an example of these vowels in both varieties, visit the Cambridge English Dictionary website, and click on the US and UK reference pronunciations for some or all of the words in this table.
There are three types of phonological differences between accents: lexical, distributional, and systemic
Lexical differences are those that apply to specific lexical items. An example of this is the difference between the words “tomato” and “potato” in American and British varieties of English.
Notice that the difference here is not just phonetic (though they do result in differences in pronunciation of the words). Lexical differences occur at the level of the phoneme, meaning that they are not predictable by phonological environment.
Sometimes different varieties will have the same phoneme, but different patterns of distribution determining how and where that phoneme is realized.
Take the phoneme /ɹ/, for instance. Many varieties of British English are non-rhotic, while most varieties of American English are rhotic. In non-rhotic varieties of English, the phoneme /ɹ/ is not pronounced at the ends of syllables but it does appear at the beginning of syllables and words. In contrast, syllable structure does not affect whether or not the /ɹ/ is pronounced.
A further distributional difference between rhotic and non-rhotic varieties is that non-rhotic varieties often insert a phonetic [ɹ] when a syllable final vowel is followed by a syllable initial vowel in the next word. This is called linking-r or intrusive-r, and does not apply to rhotic varieties of English.
Here is another example of distributional differences. In some varieties of American English, the phonemes /ɪ/ and /ɛ/ are both realized as [i] before /n/ (essentially a loss of contrast between these two vowel categories). On the other hand, the distinction is maintained in other phonological environments.
The third and final type of difference between accents can be described in terms of the number of phonological contrasts (phonemes) that exist in different varieties. This table shows some examples of vowel categories from three different English varieties.
By examining this table, we can see, for example, that Standard Southern British English and General American English both maintain 3 different vowel phonemes for the lexical set poll, pull, book, buck, while Standard Scottish English only uses 2 categories.
Note that some accent differences don’t fit neatly into the lexical/distributional/systemic categorization scheme just described. Here is an example of just such an exception. In Scottish English, vowel length is determined in part my lexical differences, and in part by morpho-phonological conditioning.
So the stressed vowel in bible is short, while the stressed vowel in libel is long. This is a lexical specification that appears in monomorphemic bi-syllabic words.
However, not all appearances of short and long allophones are lexically conditioned. Short allophones also predictably occur before voiceless stops and fricatives as well as before voiced stops, nasals, and /l/.
Long allophones occur before voiced fricatives and /ɹ/, as well as in open syllables, and also in morphologically complex words such as “agreed” where the past tense morpheme /-d/ results in the production of a long vowel.