Features of the development of the English literary pronunciation and their conditionality features stories

It`s common knowledge that over 300 mln. people now speak English as first language. It`s the national language of Great Britain, the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. English was originally spoken in England and south-eastern Scotland. Then it was introduced into the greater part of Scotland and southern Ireland. In the 17 and 18 centuries it was brought to North America. English became wide-spread in Wales at about the same time. Welsh English is very similar to southern English, although the influence of Welsh has played a role I its formation. Then in the 20 century American English to spread in Canada. Thus nowadays two main types of English are spoken in the English-speaking world: English English and American English.

I. British English. British English Pronunciation Standards and Accents (BEPS) comprise English English, Welsh English, Scottish English and Northern Ireland English. Received Pronunciation and at the regional non-RP accents of English may be grouped: 1) Southern accents (southern accents, east Anglia accents, south-west accents), 2) Northern and midland accents (northern accents, Yorkshire accents, north-west accents, west midland). It has long been believed that RP is a social marker, a prestige accent of an Englishman. Then it lost its local characteristics and was finally fixed as a ruling-class accent. Now it is a genuinely region less accent within Britain. British phoneticians estimate that nowadays RP is not homogeneous. Three main types: the conservative RP forms, the general RP forms and the advanced RP forms. The last type reflects the tendencies typical of changes in pronunciation.

Changes in the standards These changes may affect all the features of articulation of vowel and consonant phonemes and also the prosodic system of the language. Considerable changes are observed in the sound system of the present-day English, which are most remarkable since the well-known Great Vowel Shift in the middle English period of the language development.

1) Changes of Vowel Quality: 1. According to the stability of articulation; 2. According to the horizontal and vertical movement of the tongue (centering of both front and back vowels); 3. Combinative changes (when sounds are in company they influenced each other); 4. Changes in length (there is a strong tendency for the so-called short vowels to be lengthened, and it is interesting to note that this lengthening can be heard sporadically in many words in any position.

2) Changes in Consonant Quality: 1. Voicing and devoicing (tendency for devoicing now seems to be on the increase); 2. Loss of (h); 3. Initial ‘hw’ (tendency to pronounce (w); 4. Loss of final (n); 5. Spread of “dark” (l/) instead of (l); 6. Glottal stop (the use of GS by advanced RP speakers a “clipped” effect on a foreigner); 7. Palatalized final (k’); 8. Linking and intrusive (r); 9. Combinative changes.

Some free phonemes have appeared under the influence of the written image of words, their spelling. Some of these changes are quite stable, some tend to disappear. The language is a living body and its oral aspect is most vitally changeable.

As was stated above, we grouped regional accents of England into southern and northern ones. This division is very approximate of course, because there are western and eastern accents but their main accent variations correspond either with southern or northern accentual characteristics. One of the main differences between these groups of accents is in the phoneme inventory – the presence or absence of particular phonemes. Some English accents are ‘rhotic’ or ‘r-full’ and other are non-rhotic or ‘r-less’ In most regional accents the glottal stop is more widely used than in RP.

Southern English Accents. As was stated above, educated Southern speech is very much near-RP accent whereas non-standard accents are very much near Cockney. Cockney accent is a social accent- the speech of working-class areas of the Greater London.

Northern and Midland Accents. 1) Northern accents: the countries of northern England are not far from the Scottish border, so the influence of Scottish accent is noticeable, though there are of course many features of pronunciation characteristic only of northern English regions. 2) Yorkshire accents: Yorkshire and Bladford accents are identical with northern vowel features.

II. Welsh English. As everyone probably knows Wales is a bilingual area. This speech situation in linguistics is known as exoglossic. In Wales English dominates over Welsh in urban areas, in the west and north-west of the country the balance being in favour of Welsh. Welsh English at the level of educated speech and writing is not much different from that of English English.

III. Scottish English. The status of Scottish English is still debated. Some linguists saythat it is a national variant. Other say that it`s a dialect. In the Highlands and Islands of northern and western Scotland, Gaelic is still the native language of thousands of speakers from these regions. A standardized form of this language, known as Scots, was used at the court and in literature until the Reformation. Then it was gradually replaced by English. Nowadays educated Scottish people speak a form of Scottish Standard English which grammatically and lexically is not different from English with an obvious Scottish accent.

IV. Northern Ireland English. English pronunciation standards in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Eire are different. The explanation lies in history. In the Middle Ages almost the whole of Ireland was Irish speaking. Nowadays, native speakers of Irish are few in number and are confined to rural areas even though Irish is the official language in Southern Ireland was originally introduced from the West and West Midlands of England and still shows signs of this today. The English of northern parts of the island with its centre in Belfast has its roots in Scotland, as large numbers of settlers came to this part from the south-west of Scotland from the seventeenth century onwards.

V. American English. The sociolinguistic situation in the United States is very complicated. It`s moulded by certain linguistic, cultural, historic, demographic, geographic, political and other factors. The situation in the USA may be characterized as exoglossic, having several languages, but its starting point was the English language of the early 17<sup>th</sup> century. Now American English has drifted considerably from English English though as yet not enough to give us ground to speak of two different languages. American English shows a lesser degree of dialect than British English due to some historical factors: the existence of Standard English when first English settlers came to America, the high mobility of population, internal migrations of different communities and so on. As regards pronunciation, it`s not at all homogeneous. There are certain varieties of educated American speech. In the USA three main types of cultivated speech are recognized: the Eastern type (is spoken in New England and in New York city. It bears a remarkable resemblance to Southern English); the Southern type (Used in Southern and South-East of the USA); General American (It’s the pronunciation standard of the USA).

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