Accent + Dialects Flashcards
Accent
variation in pronunciation associated with a particular geographical region
Dialect
variation in words and structures associated with a particular geographical region
Why is RP regarded as having high prestige?
RP is referred to as the “stereotypically, quintessential British accent”. This attitude is created by the fact that many RP speakers have status and hold positions of power in our society.
Lexical variations
- bread roll - barm/barmcake (associated with Lancashire), bap
- plimsolls - pumps, daps
- trousers - kecks, pants
- dinner - Tea
- ice lolly - lolly ice (Liverpool)
- sofa - Couch, settee
- chewing gum - chewie, chuddy
- alleyway - ginnel
Cockney Rhyming slang
Mince pies - eyes
Load of bread - head
Plates of meat - feet
Boat race - face
Pork pies - lies
Ruby Murray - curry
Jack Jones - alone
Scooby Doo - clue
Stairs – apples and pears
Believe – Adam and Eve
Talk – rabbit and pork
Trouble – Barney Rubble
Wife – trouble and strife
Look – butcher’s hook
Mate – china plate
Years – donkey’s ears
Where did MLE come from?
The ‘Windrush Generation’ brought their language - Jamaican Creole or ‘Patois’ - and this sowed the seed that, 40 years later, would become MLE.
Grammatical patterns in MLE
- Unmarked by person
- Missing prepositions
- Non- standard verb tenses
- General extenders
- Tag questions
- Discourse markers
- Excessive intensifiers
- Non-standard clause markers
- Hedges
Lexical items in MLE
- Gassed (excited)
- Long (laborious, tedious)
- Moist (soft, uncool, boring)
- Nitty (someone who is desperate and will do anything to get high)
- Peak (serious, unfortunate)
- Peng (attractive)
- Safe (goodbye)
- Shook (scared)
Features of RP
- Non-rhoticity (/r/ at the end of words isn’t pronounced, e.g. mother would be muhthuh
- Trap-bath split, meaning that words like bath, can’t and dance are all pronounced with the broad /a/ sound (as in father)
Features of cockney
- Non-rhoticity
- Trap-bath split
- London vowel shift e.g. ‘day’ and ‘buy’ sound like the American ‘die’ and ‘boy’
- Glottal stopping
- L-vocalisation, so the ‘l’ at ends of words becomes a vowel sound e.g. ‘pal’ sounds like ‘pow’
- Th fronting e.g ‘thing’ becomes ‘fing’ and ‘mother’ becomes ‘muhvah’
Features of the Brummie accent
- The foot-strut merger, where the syllable in ‘foot’ and ‘could’ is pronounced with the same syllable as ‘strut’ or ‘fudge’
- Short /i/ in ‘kit’ verging towards IPA kit (keet)
Leslie Milroy - Geographical mobility
Argued that increased geographical mobility leads to the large scale disruption of close-knit linguistic networks
Paul Kerswill - Standardisation
Suggests that ‘standardisation’ is occurring with dialects as social mobility has increased leading to the breakdown of tightly-knit communities as well as increased interactions with other speech varieties leading to dialect levelling
Foulkes and Docherty
Suggested that standardisation is spreading from London out by tracing the use of ‘Th’ fronting in London and the surrounding areas.
Trudgill - Attitudes towards accents
- RP speakers are perceived to be haughty and unfriendly by non-RP speakers
- Children with working class accents may be evaluated by teachers as having less academic potential
- Trudgill believes that there is no linguistic reason for saying any language is superior to another
