Акценты в английском: экскурс

Акценты английского на примере юмористических передач и стендапа

Урок по фонетике и контекстам английского
Илья Зыченко

One of the distinct features of English is the variety of regional accents, dialects, and registers. The aim of this page is to collect some examples and explanations to facilitate studying the nuances of contemporary spoken English using YouTube videos of sketches, skits, stand-up performances, excerpts from TV-shows as well as some lectures on phonetics and contexts

General American & Received Pronunciation

Two major phonetic systems in English

If we want to find models of "ideal" English where there will be no regional, educational, or another kind of differences we can either use GA (for the USA) or RP (British English, "BBC English", etc.). These systems represent universal and theoretical spoken English, and usually all transcriptions in dictionaries are in GA or RP. You may see it in this example of the word 'schedule' which is pronounced differently.

Upper RP (U-RP) or posh English

When we think of stereotypical British English spoken by the nobility and/or royalty and other sorts of aristocracy we mean U-RP. It is considered old-fashioned and obsolete and realistically used either by old people in some isolated communities or for humorous purposes. Somewhere using U-RP may even be seen as arrogant and rude.
There are many nuances in pronouncing vowels in U-RP and you may read more about it here. But in terms of consonants it has some features illustrated in the videos below.

The first sketch is about a headmaster (a head of a school in the UK) which tries to sound posh and highbrow not only in the way he organises his speech but the sounds themselves. Most notably he says 'Whatsoever' pronouncing the [H] and this is typical of U-posh and some accents of the American South, but next time he overdoes it and adds the sound where it is not supposed to be (Wednesday).
Historically words spelled with WH- were pronounced like that, but in the process called 'whine-wine merge' they became homophones. The second video is a compilation of the WH- moments from Family Guy highlighting the humorous effect of using outdated pronunciation.

Also worth mentioning the tapped R in the U-RP which is associated with BBC announcers (example) used in the first sketch.

Fake posh by Rowan Atkinson

Transcript (scroll to the second sketch)

Family Guy parody on whine-wine merge

Estuary English

If we want to move from the RP and 'downshift' to more colloquial and commonly used systems of spoken British English it will be 'Northern' and 'Southern' and from the latter the Estuary English is the most common. 'Estuary' means the estuary (where a river meets a bigger water body like sea, ocean, etc.) of the Thames and various local dialects of the region.
The most prominent features of the accent is L-glottalisation (when the L sound is replaced with a glottal stop) H-dropping (like in French) and some other related to vowels. You can find a lot of videos on the matter (for example this one)
The videos below illustrate commonly spoken English in the South. Pay attention of James Acaster's rhotacism as well as the long [i:] in the word 'heap' as opposed to the [i] in 'hip'

Ricky Gervais

Transcript (need to find the excerpt)

James Acaster on some aspects of Britishness

James Acaster on British history

pay attention to the word 'nicked' — specifically British meaning to steal something. The same word will be used in the SNL parody of Queen below

Northern English

Philomena Cunk on Architecture

Posh vs North

Sherlock corrects the most common mistakes made by native speakers

Parody heavy southern accent by Ali G

Ali G and Rees-Mogg (Southern English vs Posh)

Transcript