VARIETIES OF ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION

The pronunciation of almost every locality in Great Britain has features that distinguish it from the pronunciation of other localities. Pronunciation is also socially influenced.

Dialects are the varieties that are spoken by socially limited number of people and used in certain localities. Therefore, there are local dialects and social dialects. Dialects have some peculiarities in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar but all dialects have more features in common, so they are varieties of the same language.

Due to mass media, the increased mobility of the population, concentration of the population in the Cities, dialectal differences are becoming less marked.

Among the most well-known dialects one should mention Cockney (spoken by the less educated part of Londoners), Geordie (heard in Newcastle), Scouse (the Liverpool dialect), Cornish (dialect in Cornwall) and others.

Dialect speakers are, as a rule, the less educated part of the population.

Besides, in present day English the number of local dialects is being reduced to a fewer, more or less general, regional types. In British English three main regional types of pronunciation are distinguished: Southern, Northern and Scottish.

It is common knowledge that the literary spoken form has its national pronunciation standard. A standard pronunciation is defined as “a socially accepted variety of a language established by a codified norm of correctness”. Standard national pronunciation is sometimes called an “orthoepic norm”.

Today all the English-speaking nations have there own national variants of pronunciation and each has peculiar features that distinguish it from other varieties of English.

The orthoepic norm of a language is the standard pronunciation adopted by native speakers as the right and proper way of speaking. It comprises the variants of pronunciation that exist in the language. It is used by the most educated part of the population. It should be emphasized, that the orthoepic norm is not constant and fixed for all centuries and generations.

The main factors that condition Variations of the orthoepic norm are: 1) social factors, 2) territorial factors, 3) stylistic factors.

It should also be mentioned that British English pronunciation is exposed to external influence. On the British television and screen there is a lot of American speech, which works against the standard of pronunciation, especially with the younger generation. On the other hand, the spread of education and mass media encourage to some extent a standard pronunciation.

It is generally considered that the orthoepic norm of British English is Received Pronunciation (RP). It was accepted about a century and a half ago. RP is mainly based on the Southern English regional type of pronunciation, but it has developed its own features. RP is spoken by a comparatively small number of English people, who have had the most privileged education (public schools being the best and most expensive fee paying schools in the country). RP is not taught at these schools, it is absorbed automatically by the pupils for they are sent to live at schools at the age of eleven, when their pronunciation is most flexible and soon they acquire the so called “public school accent”, the prestige accent. Though RP is carefully preserved by the public schools and the privileged class in England, the RP of today differs in some respects from the former refined RP used half a century ago.

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