regional varition

The study of regional variation is probably the best-known and longest-established form of the study of variety, and most of us have a stereotyped picture of the earnest dialect researcher roaming through the countryside to seek out ancient rustic characters and elicit information about vocabulary and pronunciation. It is usual to make a distinction between the study of dialect (which looks not only at pronunciation but also vocabulary and grammar) and accent (which is purely a matter of pronunciation). We have already met the word ‘accent’ in a completely different use (to refer to distinctive pitch patterns), and this sometimes gives rise to confusions.

Regional variation can arise from many causes. One cause is  invasion or colonisation: parts of Britain, for example, were colonised by Norse and Saxon invaders while other parts remained unconquered, and there are still recognisable differences in English language and pronunciation due to this fact. Historically speaking, we can see that separate varieties were most likely to emerge when there were barriers and frontiers between the areas in which a language was spoken. Countries in which isolated communities have been separated from each other by mountains or sea often have greater differences in pronunciation than countries where there has been free and easy movement among people. We can see something of the sort on a very large scale in the way in which American English moved away from the pronunciation of English in England where it originated, thanks to the barrier of the Atlantic. When the first American “talking” films were shown in Britain in the 1930’s, the distributors had to consider putting subtitles on the films because most members of a British audience had virtually no experience of listening to an American accent. In the present day many people are able to communicate by phone with others who have very different varieties of the language, and can hear many different language accents on radio and TV. Now spoken communication between British and American speakers seems relatively straightforward and misunderstandings are likely to be due to cultural differences rather than linguistic or phonetic ones.

There has been a recent growth of interest in a related area of the study of English pronunciation, sometimes referred to as English as an International Language. Since English is now used by so many people around the world for international communication, it is possible to see pronunciation varieties emerging which are not based primarily on the native-speaker accent of some part of the English-speaking world. Instead, they show English as a global “common property” in which key phonetic and phonological distinctions are retained, but choosing to sound, for example, English or American seems irrelevant.

Social variation

To consider the complex ways in which social factors affect variation would take us into the domain of sociolinguistics and beyond the scope of the present book. But for our purposes we can broadly distinguish between three different kinds of variation. One is related to social class: in some societies (but certainly not in all) people have a pronunciation which identifies them as a member of some social class, or as being at some point on a scale from low to high social class. A good example is “h-dropping”: a well-known study in Bradford showed that speakers were more likely to pronounce the  sound in words like ‘house’, ‘hat’ etc. if they were of higher social class, and more likely to omit it if they were of lower class.

A second type of social factor is speakers’ tendency to use different pronunciations in different social situations. Not everyone does this, and many people who do it are reluctant to admit that they do. Many people can and do speak something like the standard accent in their professional life, but switch to a different accent (either a local regional variety or a lower-class pronunciation) when they are with family and friends.

Finally, there are social divisions in society other than class ones. Many languages show differences between the speech of men and women; different professional groups (for example, teachers or members of the armed forces) often have some distinctive accent or speaking style, and many societies, though with a common language, have strong differences of religion which are reflected in the variety of the language spoken.

Style variation

We are all capable of changing the way we speak when this is necessary for successful communication. Everyone can vary between speaking rapidly or slowly, or between quietly and loudly in a way that is appropriate to the communication situation, (though some people make such adjustments more successfully than others). Phonetic descriptions of languages have tended to be made on the basis of a slow, careful speaking style, and this creates major problems when one comes to study more natural speech and discovers that it does not fit many of the “facts” stated in textbook descriptions.

Teachers, priests and politicians are good examples of people who need to be able to speak in a range of styles: public speaking is something which does not come easily to everyone, and in some cases people even take lessons in how to address a large group of people.

Age and variation

Everyone knows that young people speak differently from older people. It is not likely that this is due to physical causes. We do not know how much of age-based variation is due to individuals changing as they grow older and how much is due to the pronunciation changing from year to year. It is likely that a major factor is the wish of young people to speak in a different way from their parents, and in the present day this is strengthened by broadcasting aimed specially at young people. Some changes happen rapidly, while others emerge only over a very long period. Two changes in English have been specially noticeable since I began to work in phonetics in the mid-1960’s. One is the growth in the use of the glottal stop (for which the phonetic symbol is [] ), either as a replacement for the  phoneme in words like ‘getting’, ‘better’ (so that ‘getting better’ is pronounced [ ]), or in conjunction with  //, //, // or // where the glottal closure precedes the oral closure in words like ‘captive’ [t] , ‘cats’ [], ‘accent’ [], ‘butcher’ []. The other change is the fronting of the // vowel, most noticeably after //. In the early twentieth century, the “Received Pronunciation” version of this vowel was back and rounded in all contexts, but in the speech of younger English people from the South-East this vowel in words like ‘union’ //, ‘human’ //, ‘usual’ //  has become more of a front vowel (nearer to the // vowel), and it now has very little lip-rounding. The word ‘used’ in ‘I used to’ thus sounds almost like the word ‘yeast’.

The pronunciation of a language, then, is liable to constant change, and at any time there are many varieties which are found in different places and situations.