Social variations in english pronunciation. Social factors and phonetic markers

In all English-speaking countries there exists a close and obvious connection between language and social class: speech stratification correlates with social stratification. But only in England phonetic factors assume a predominating role which they do not generally have in other parts of the English-speaking world.

There was a survey in 1972 carried out by National Opinion Polls and according to the results of it speech was regarded as more indicative of social class than occupation, education, and income; and the likelihood is that by “the way they speak” respondents meant, above all, accent.

Thus accents are associated with the people who use them, with their way of life, and may have symbolic values. The accents of big urban centres like Liverpool, Birmingham and Glasgow in UK may have negative associations with the polluted environment of industrial area.

In the USA, New York is viewed as the centre of crime and drug taking (but also the financial and intellectual centre). Although there is no necessary connection at all between personality types and accents, most people react as if there were.

There is a stereotype of an RP speaker to possess authority, competence, intelligence and ambition while local accent is associated with friendliness, personal integrity, kindness. RP speaker may be disliked because he sounds “posh”, “affected”, while a person with a working class accent may be positively assessed for “friendship”, “fight”, “solidarity”, “personal integrity”.

There is a new classification of RP in the 6^th edition of A.C. Gimpon’s “Introduction to the Pronunciation of English”:

• General RP

• Refined RP

• Regional RP

Refined RP is defined as an upper-class accent, mainly associated with upper-class families, e.g. officers in the navy and some regiments. The number of speakers using Refined RP is increasingly declining. Reason: for many other speakers a speaker of Refined RP has become a figure of fun, and the type of speech itself is often regarded as affected.

The term Regional RP (U-RP) is used to describe the type of speech which is basically RP except for the presence of a few regional characteristics which may go unnoticed even by other speakers of RP. For example:

• vocalization of dark [l] to [υ] in words like held [heυd], ball [boυ];

• the use of a/æ instead of /a:/ before voiceless fricatives in words like after, bath, past.

There is one regional type, RP modified towards Cockney, which is called Estuary English. It is often characterized by younger speakers as having “street credibility” or “streetcred’ i.e. as being fashionable. The phonetic features of Estuary English include:

• the replacement of dark [l] by [υ] as in field [fiυd];

• the glottalization of /t/ preconsonantly and before a pause, as in not that no? æt;

• the use of Cockney-type realization of the diphthongs /ei, ai/, as in late [lait], light [loit]

• Cockney-type vowel allophones before /l/, e.g. cold [koυυd]

• Elision of /j/ after /n/, as in new [nu:]

In the 60-s A.C.Gimson distinguished three kinds of RP based on age and professional background:

1. conservative RP (lawyers and clergy);

2. general RP (BBc newsreaders);

3. advanced RP (young people, University graduates, exclusive social groups).

Nowadays the general RP is also called mainstream RP.

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