Accents and Dialects (paper 2)

Question 1

Received Pronunciation (RP)

Answer 1

• the Oxford English Dictionary defines RP as being the “standard accent” of Southern England
• phonological features include:
  use of the trap/bath split (long a in words like “bath”)
  H-retention (he is always pronounced is initial positioning in words like “house”)

Question 2

Giles Matched Guise Experiment

Answer 2

• participants listen to a speaker using a guise (an accent put on by the speaker) and rate that accent on various features
• Giles’ research details that RP was seen as the most intelligent and prestigious, whereas regional accents were seen as friendlier or more honest
• ranked bottom for intelligence was the Brummie accent

Question 3

case study - George Osborne

Answer 3

• whilst in his role as Chancellor, Osborne was seen to drop his RP accent and use and accent closer to Estuary English (hybrid of RP and South Eastern accents) when speaking to workers
  eg. he used words like “kinda” and “Birddish” verses “kind of” and “British”
• however, was seen to use his RP accent in Parliament

Question 4

traditional and mainstream dialects - Peter Trudgill

Answer 4

• Traditional dialects - use “old” and often rural lexemes and grammatical constructions
• Mainstream dialects - more common lexical and grammatical constructions used by a majority within a geographical area
• through a process called LEXICAL ATTRITION, the traditional dialectal words are dying out

Question 5

Cockney rhyming slang (CRS)

Answer 5

• originated from the criminal underworld in the 1800s as a way of communicating without the police knowing of their doings
  eg. “brown bread” for dead and “trouble and strife” for wife
• while the dialectal terms of CRS are very rarely used now, a weakened version of the Cockney accent is still in use, propelled by the popular TV soap “Eastenders”

Question 6

Multicultural London English (MLE)

Answer 6

• emerging in the late 20th century, MLE is a sociolect (dialect of a particular social class) of English
• spoken predominantly by young, working class people in multicultural parts of London
  eg. TH-stopping (MLE is a mad ting)
  Jamaican slang like “blood” for friend