Standard Irish English?

JJM, at least here in Wisconsin, while "th" represents the phonemes /D/ and /T/, these phonemes, and in particular /D/, have a tendency to strongly assimilate to preceding consonants. Consequently, /D/ in particular can be actually realized as [D], [T], [d] or [d_d], [t] or [t_d] (note that this does not become aspirated), [z] or [z_d], [s] or [s_d], and even potentially [n] or [n_d] (which I have seen in transcriptions of speech from my area, even though I'm not aware of realizing it as such myself). If anything, /D/ seems to be realized as something other than [D] if there is any reasonable possibility of such being possible, here, as if, while [D] is the default realization of if, it were rather "hard" to enunciate as a whole, and as if speakers are, as a whole, quite willing to replace it with whatever happens to be "easier" to enunciate in any given environment. I even find myself pronouncing it as [d] or [z] in places at times where there's no adjacent consonants for it to assimilate to, including across word boundaries, and while some say that simply replacing /D/ with [d] or [z] in a wholesale fashion is "lazy", whatever that is supposed to mean, I myself don't have many qualms with such. Anyways, I wouldn't be surprised if such things with respect to the pronunciation of /D/ and /T/ were not at all limited to this area and Irish English, as I know that the pronunciation of /D/ as [d] is said to be prevalent in, say, the Chicago area, as just one example.

Calling Australian English a form of British English is like calling a chimpanzee a kind of gorilla. AusE is the English spoken in Australia. British English is the English spoken in Great Britian. They are quite similar (at least when compared to North American English) but one is not the subset of the other.

Irish English is a subset of British English (BE) for the simple reason that BE represents the grouping of all English dialects in the British Isles - of which the island of Ireland is a part.

Groupings such as AE and BE are entirely arbitrary anyway.

>>Calling Australian English a form of British English is like calling a chimpanzee a kind of gorilla.<<

Thanks, I got the message, it seems I have not been familiar enough with AuE . So from now I'm aware it is another standard form of English. But pronunciation-wise and spelling-wise it is still closer to Standard BrE than to Standard AmE. I also agree with JJM that this grouping is arbitrary, but as far as the spelling of written texts (and vocabulary and usage) is concerned, there do exist two separate standards, which can be called (somewhat arbitrarily) British and American. Australians and the Irish also follow the former one, as far as I know. And writing "behavior" together with "maximise" in the same text would most probably raise objections from most English speakers using any of the two variants, as would perhaps the simultaneous use of "bonnet" and "rest room". Canadian is another in-between version which is perhaps closer to AmE than to BrE.

What concerns pronunciation, I think Canadians are much closer to American English. Genarally speaking, I seemed to have arrived at the conclusion that in each of these countries (UK, US, Au, Ca, NZ) they have their own accepted "standard" in both pronunciation and spelling. It's just a matter of conventon. For Example, In Ireland the Irish way of pronunciation is considered "standard" and in Australia it is the Australian one. I think the best indicator would be to listen to the formal speeches or national radio programs in these countries.

We shouldn't call an English variety a "subset" of another variety.
There are many Englishes, and no variety is inferior or superior to other varieties.
You could say that Canadian English pronunciation is quite close to American English (spelling isn't that close by the way...) but calling Canadian English a "subset" of American English isn't appropriate.

What I like about the existence of various national standards (I mean pronunciation, principally) is the fact that you have more possibility to choose between different varieties of English, more so than for other languages, with the possible exception of Spanish (there, you can also choose between Castilian/European Spanish, Mexican Spanish and Argentinian Spanish, to name just the most common ones). But I have wondered if for native speakers, a non-native speaking with the characteristic Irish or Australian accent would sound more strange than one speaking RP or General American? In short, do you think that all varieties of English are equally "acceptable" or "natural" for non-natives from the point of view of native speakers?

A lot of younger Irish people from large cities today sound very much like Americans (or vice versa, depending on how you look at it). The "Irish lilt" one traditionally hears in movies and amongst other stereotypes seems to be pretty rare in practice--at least the Irish people I know personally have only a very slight accent that only becomes apparent after listening to them speak a few sentences. And they sound much more like Americans than they do the British.

All of this also seems to be increasingly true for most of Scotland.

Indeed, even Australian isn't that marked in many people from larger cities today.

I get the impression that many versions of English are merging. As long as it's away from non-rhotic accents, I think this is a good thing. (Why do I prefer rhotic accents? Because they more closely approximate spelling, in most cases.)

I don't believe that it is for native speakers of English to allow or disallow, approve or disapprove of any forms non-native speakers of English use. For one thing, native speakers of English have long been outnumbered by non-native speakers of English. In fact, most communication that takes place in English takes place between second language speakers of the language.

By the way, Easterner, I don't think that your above question is valid for one simple reason: if a non-native speaker of English speaks English well enough to be considered a speaker of American, British or Irish English, then they are a native-like expert user of the language and the language is theirs as it is anybody else's and they are a member of the linguistic community in question, i.e., they are simply a speaker of British, American or Irish English.

In all other cases (I'm talking about the 90% (or more) of learners who never reach stages of ultimate attainment), a person is a speaker of English (expert or not) with a Swedish, Dutch, Hungarian, Serbian or Chinese accent. What I am saying is that you cannot consider yourself to be a speaker of American English if you have a Dutch/Turkish/Arabic/whatever accent. That's simply because you don't speak like an American-born person.

Mind you, I do not see anything wrong with people having a non-native accent in a second language. Neither is there anything wrong with second-language speakers who speak without a non-native accent. All I'm saying is that it's not important, as long as we understand each other.

>>We shouldn't call an English variety a "subset" of another variety.
There are many Englishes, and no variety is inferior or superior to other varieties.
You could say that Canadian English pronunciation is quite close to American English (spelling isn't that close by the way...) but calling Canadian English a "subset" of American English isn't appropriate. <<

I agree. Calling Canadian English American is, in my mind, the equivalent of calling Nicaraguan Spanish Mexican, i.e. it is not accurate. If we wish to group Canadian and US English together (and it is common sense), then we can always resort to the term "North American English".

The reason that people outside the English-Speaking world perceive English as a language with only two standard varieties is because they are only familiar with those two standard varieties. This, in turn, is the case because the US and the UK are the two most populous and influential English-Speaking countries in the world. For all their vastness, Canada and Australia have fewer than 55 million people between them. We may be relatively small in numbers and clout, but, for crying out loud, it does not mean that we do not have our local standard varieties of English. It simply means that you aren't exposed to them as much as you are to US and UK English.

Mxsmanic, I myself would doubt that North American English dialects are merging, overall, even though many may seem to think so; various studies have shown that such is *not* so, within the context of NAE. Within NAE, while rhoticness has replaced nonrhoticness in many dialects, other changes within specific areas have shown up, such as new vowel shifts, for example the Northern Cities Shift and the California Vowel Shift, amongst other things. Within English English, things merging overall is more of a likelihood, simply because of the spread of Estuary English, and its replacing or influencing many preexisting speech forms, even in Scottish English; however, though, besides the spread of rhoticness, there really are no such things in NAE.

Ved, if anything marks a non-native English speaker as such, it is not simply a foreign accent, but rather the complete opposite, that is, speaking *too* "neutrally", due to having carefully learned a single "correct" (read: formal) register of a "standard" variety, rather than having learned English as a native language, and hence have natively learned not a "standard" variety as such, but rather one of many different dialects, with their various variations with respect to each other, and having natively learned not a formal register, but rather an informal register, with formal forms being only generally learnt later on in school and via contact with the literary written language.

Hence, such English as learnt by a non-native speaker is likely to be perceived as "flat" and overly formal or literary in many contexts, and with any informal forms being used being simply individual variations upon the formal register which was originally learnt, rather than the informal register actually having been learnt as a complete set of speech forms natively. Of course, though, this is hard to avoid, as one generally is not formally taught the informal register, and one is normally taught a "standard" form, which few actually speak natively as such, rather than one of the many dialects which people learn natively. The only real way to avoid this is to live in a natively English-speaking area, and simply pick up the dialect spoken natively around there, and I see little way by which this can be avoided if one is being taught formally.

" What I like about the existence of various national standards (I mean pronunciation, principally) is the fact that you have more possibility to choose between different varieties of English, more so than for other languages, with the possible exception of Spanish (there, you can also choose between Castilian/European Spanish, Mexican Spanish and Argentinian Spanish, to name just the most common ones). "

Actually, I believe the differences in Portuguese are greater than that of either English or Spanish, and German and Italian are even more so.

The only difference is that for example in English (I don't know the situation is Spanish, Italian etc.) it is ok to speak different form of the language, nobody would think less of you if you speak with Scottish accent or with Irish accent or with Ozzy accent rather than the with the standard BBC accent. While here in Lithuania the dialect speakers are tacitly ostracized, therefore all supposedly educated people try to speak the "standard" form of Lithuanian and to make it as colourless as possible. What a silly system!

Well, one important factor is that English is a pluricentric language, and hence there is no single "standard" form of English, but rather a number of different "standard" forms, which as a result weakens the influence of any single "standard" variety. Another factor is that the "standard" forms of English tend to be highly conservative, in practice, and what is called "standard" usually does not really reflect how most people actually speak informally, which accounts for most usage, but rather is purely formal/literary in nature. Consequently, it is unlikely to be actually used as such in most usage by native speakers. This is especially true with Received Pronunciation, which is basically highly formal by definition, and hence actually using such is going to be actually *marked*, from the point of most native speakers. However, this is not so with Estuary English, which may in the future become a new "standard" variety of English English, and which is in the process of displacing RP.