REGIONAL ACCENTS OF ENGLISH

                      Regional accents of English

The regional accents of English speakers show great variation across the areas where English is spoken as a first language. many identifiable variations in pronunciation, usually deriving from the phoneme inventory of the local dialect, of the local variety of Standard English between various populations of native English speakers.Local accents are part of local dialects. Any dialect of English has unique features in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. The term "accent" describes only the first of these, namely, pronunciation. See also: List of dialects of the English language.

Non-native speakers of English tend to carry over the intonation and phonemic inventory from their mother tongue into their English speech. For more details see Non-native pronunciations of English.

Among native English speakers, many different accents exist. Some regional accents are easily identified by certain characteristics. Further variations are to be found within the regions identified below; for example, towns located less than 10 miles (16 km) from the city of Manchester such as Bolton, Oldham and Salford, each have distinct accents, all of which form the Lancashire accent, yet in extreme cases are different enough to be noticed even by a non-local listener. There is also much room for misunderstanding between people from different regions, as the way one word is pronounced in one accent (for example, petal in American English) will sound like a different word in another accent (for example, pearl in Scottish English).

England
The main accent groupings within England are between Northern England and Southern England; the English Midlands also has a number of distinctive accents.

For many years, the BBC and academic bodies employed Received Pronunciation as a 'standard', although this is no longer a requirement for broadcasting. Received Pronunciation has its roots in the speech patterns of the counties surrounding London, popularly known as the Home counties, where many of the monied classes in London originated during the 16th and 17th centuries, but is now more a marker of a particular social class than a region.

There is considerable variation within the accents of English across England. Two sets of accents are spoken in the West Country, Cornish (primarily in South Cornwall) and West Country (the counties of Devon, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Bristol, Dorset (Not so much in east Dorset), Wiltshire (again, less so in eastern Wiltshire), and also in East Cornwall). The accents of Northern England are also distinctive including a range of variations: Northumberland, County Durham, Newcastle upon Tyne, Sunderland, Cumbria, Lancashire with regional variants in Bolton, Burnley, Blackburn, Manchester, Preston, Blackpool, Merseyside and Wigan, Yorkshire is also distinctive, having variations between the North Riding of Yorkshire, West Riding of Yorkshire and East Riding of Yorkshire. Other accents include a range of accents spoken in the West Midlands (The Black Country, Dudley, Birmingham, Stoke-on-Trent and Wolverhampton); the accents of the counties comprising the East Midlands (Nottingham, Derby, Leicester, and Kettering) and East Anglia (Norfolk, Suffolk, north Essex and Cambridgeshire). Even within these broad categories there are considerable differences in inflection and pronunciation.[citation needed]


Wales
Main article: Welsh English

The accent of English in Wales is strongly influenced by the phonology of the Welsh language, which more than 20% of the population of Wales speak as their first or second language. The North Wales accent is distinct from South Wales and north east Wales is influenced by Scouse and Cheshire accents. South Wales border accents are influenced by West Country accents. The Wenglish of the South Wales Valleys shows a deep cross-fertilisation between the two.

The Cardiff dialect and accent is also quite distinctive from that of the South Wales Valleys, primarily:

    The substitution of < iə > by <øː>[1][2]
        here [hiə] pronounced as [(h)jøː] in the broader form
    A more open pronunciation of <ʌ> as in love and other[2]
    <æ> is widely realised as <a> giving a pronunciation of Cardiff ['kæːdɪf] as Kahdiff ['kaːdɪf]
    /l/ is clear L in most positions.


Ireland
Main article: Hiberno-English

Ireland has several main groups of accents, including (1) those of Dublin and surrounding areas on the east coast where English has been spoken since the earliest period of colonisation from Britain, (2) the accents of Ulster, with a strong influence from Scotland as well as the underlying Gaelic linguistic stratum which in that province approaches the Gaelic of Scotland, and (3) the various accents of west, midlands and south.




North America


North American English is a collective term for the dialects of the United States and Canada; it does not include the varieties of Caribbean English spoken in the West Indies.

    Rhoticity and mergers before /r/. Most North American English accents differ from Received Pronunciation and some other British dialects by being rhotic; the phoneme /r/ is pronounced before consonants and at the end of syllables, and the "r-colored vowel" [ɚ] is used as a syllable nucleus. For example, while the words hard and singer would be pronounced [hɑːd] and [sɪŋə] in Received Pronunciation, they would be pronounced [hɑɹd] and [sɪŋɚ] in General American. (Exceptions are certain traditional accents found in eastern New England, New York City, and the Southern United States.) R-coloring has ultimately led to some phonemic mergers before historic /r/ that are unknown in most other native dialects: in many North American accents, Mary, merry and marry sound the same, despite having different vowels in RP ([ɛə], [ɛ], [æ] respectively); likewise, hairy rhymes with ferry, and nearer rhymes with mirror.[dubious – discuss]

    Mergers of the low back vowels. Other North American mergers that are absent in Received Pronunciation are the merger of the vowels of caught and cot ([kɔːt] and [kɒt] in RP) in many accents, and the merger of father (RP [fɑːðə]) and bother (RP [bɒðə]) in almost all.

    Flat A. Most North American accents lack the so-called trap–bath split found in Southern England: Words like ask, answer, grass, bath, staff, dance are pronounced with the short-a /æ/ of trap, not with the broad A /ɑ/ of father heard in Southern England as well as in most of the Southern hemisphere. (In North America, the vowel of father has merged with that of lot and bother, see above.)

    Flapping of /t/ and /d/. Another feature distinguishing North American English dialects in general from British Received Pronunciation is the voicing or flapping of /t/ before an unstressed vowel, causing the word better to sound like "bedder" [bɛdɚ] or [bɛɾɚ].

The United States does not have a concrete 'standard' accent in the same way that Britain has Received Pronunciation. Nonetheless, a form of speech known to linguists as General American is perceived by most Americans to be "accent-less", meaning a person who speaks in such a manner does not appear to be from anywhere. The region of the United States that most resembles this is the central Midwest, specifically eastern Nebraska (including Omaha and Lincoln), southern and central Iowa (including Des Moines), and western Illinois (including Peoria and the Quad Cities, but not the Chicago area)



Canada
Main article: Canadian English

Three major dialect areas can be found in Canada: Western/Central Canada, the Maritimes, and Newfoundland.

The phonology of West/Central Canadian English, also called General Canadian, is broadly identical to that of the Western US, except for the following features:

    The diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ are raised to approximately [əɪ] and [ʌʊ][3] before voiceless consonants; thus, for example, the vowel sound of out [ʌʊt] is different from that of loud [laʊd]. This feature is known as Canadian raising.
    There is no contrast between the vowels of caught and cot (cot–caught merger, as above); in addition, the short a of bat is more open than almost everywhere else in North America [æ̞ ~ a]. The other front lax vowels /ɛ/ and /ɪ/, too, can be lowered and/or retracted. This phenomenon has been labelled the Canadian Shift.

With respect to phonemic incidence, the pronunciation of certain words has American and/or British influence. For instance, shone is /ʃɒn/; been is often /bin/; process can be /prosɛs/; etc.

Words like drama, pyjamas, pasta tend to have /æ/ rather than /ɑ/~/ɒ/. Words like sorrow, Florida, orange have /or/ rather than /ɑr/; therefore, sorry rhymes with story rather than with starry.

Australia
Main article: Australian English

Australian English is relatively homogenous when compared to British and American English. There is however some regional variation between the states, particularly in regards to South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia.

Three main varieties of Australian English are spoken according to linguists: Broad Australian, General Australian and Cultivated Australian.[4] They are part of a continuum, reflecting variations in accent. They can, but do not always reflect the Social class, education and urban or rural background of the speaker.[5]

    Australian Aboriginal English refers to the various varieties of the English language used by Indigenous Australians. These varieties, which developed differently in different parts of Australia, vary along a continuum, from forms close to General Australian to more nonstandard forms. There are distinctive features of accent, grammar, words and meanings, as well as language use.
    The furthest extent of the Aboriginal dialect is Australian Kriol language, which is not mutually intelligible with General Australian English.
    On the Torres Strait Islands, a distinctive dialect known as Torres Strait English is spoken.
    In Australian English, pronunciations vary regionally according to the type of vowel that occurs before the sounds nd, ns, nt, nce, nch, and mple, and the pronunciation of the suffix "-mand". In words like "chance", "plant", "branch", "sample" and "demand", the vast majority of Australians use the short /æ/ vowel from the word "cat". In South Australian English however there is a high proportion of people who use the broad /aː/ vowel from the word "cart" in these words.
    Centring diphthongs, which are the vowels that occur in words like ear, beard and air, sheer. In Western Australian English there is a tendency for centring diphthongs to be pronounced as full diphthongs. Those in the eastern states will tend to pronounce "fear" and "sheer" without any jaw movement, while the westerners would pronounce them like "fia" and "shia", respectively.[6]
    In Victoria, many speakers pronounce the "a" and "e" vowels in a way that is distinct from speakers in other states. The first vowel in "celery" and "salary" are the same, so that both words sound like "salary". These speakers will also tend to say "halicopter" instead of "helicopter". For many older Victorian speakers, the words "celery" and "salary" also sound the same but instead both sound like "celery". These speakers will also pronounce words such as "alps" as "elps".




New Zealand
Main article: New Zealand English

The New Zealand accent is distinguished from the Australian one by the presence of "clipped" vowels, slightly resembling South African English. Phonetically, these are raised or centralised versions of the short "i" and "e" vowels, which in New Zealand are close to [ɨ] and [ɪ] respectively rather than [ɪ] and [ɛ]. New Zealand pronunciations are often popularly represented outside New Zealand by writing "fish and chips" as "fush and chups", "yes" as "yiss", "sixty-six" as "suxty-sux." Scottish English influence is most evident in the southern regions of New Zealand, notably Dunedin.

Geographical variations appear slight, and mainly confined to individual special local words. One group of speakers, however, hold a recognised place as "talking differently": the South of the South Island (Murihiku) harbours a "Celtic fringe" of people speaking with a "Southland burr" in which a back-trilled 'r' appears prominently. The area formed a traditional repository of immigration from Scotland.

The trilled 'r' is also used by some Māori, who may also pronounce 't' and 'k' sounds without aspiration, striking other English speakers as similar to 'd' and 'g'. This is also encountered in South African English, especially among Afrikaans speakers.




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