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Learn all the differences between the UK and US English?
Some differences:
BrE AmE Horse Hoss Curse Cuss Creature Critter Pretty Perdy Saucy Sassy Yes Yes'n Whore 'ho' Sir Mister Idiot Ignert
Larissa - It depends where you live ! If you live in Europe, learn British English. If you live in south America, learn American English.
It's that simple! why make such a big philosophy. People in Europe don't like American accent too much, and Ame spellings are considered incorrect in Europe, just some people in Eastern Europe like it, because of the mentality of emigration to USA. On the other hand, if you learn British accent, even the American will be charmed by the British accent, so it’s a win-win situation.
JC Wells does a pretty damn good job of comparing RP and GenAm in volume I of his "Accents of English" book. ... so good in fact, that an extremely talented and motivated speaker of one accent can acquire the other (assuming he/she has the time and inclination and some accompanying audio materials). The audio materials are especially handy if going from GAE to RP since British television is not exactly replete with RP speakers while American television and cinema are replete with GAE speakers. Based on my visits to England and listening to the Cockney characters on "The Office" and the Northern accents on "The Full Monty" I have concluded this: Some of the more conservative forms of GAE are not any futher from RP than the broadest regional English accents (in fact, I think GAE might even be closer).
GAE, unlike RP (and most other English accents) is rhotic and flat bath and uses an "ah" sound for lot and cloth words and has a less rounded goat and goose vowel. However GAE and RP agree substantially (and in many cases completely) on the phonetic realisation of certain phonemes such as those of kit, dress, trap, foot, strut, fleece, face, price, choice and mouth. Cockney has dipthong shifts in face, price, mouth, and choice (face sounds like fice, etc...). It also has a strange fleece pronunciation (be sounds almost like bay and please like plays). Cockney also vocalises "l" in words lie people, milk, and belt (these words sound almost identical in RP and GAE). North of England English lacks a strut vowel. Even if all its other characteristics were identical to RP (which they aren't) it would still sound ridiculous due to the way words such as blood, money, and hundred are pronounced. I think that a GAE speaker would have a much easier time achieving the RP realisation of "The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain" than a Cockney speaker would. To be brutally honest, I think that Peter Jennings' accent is closer to RP than the accents of most of the characters of "The Office" or "The Full Monty". Wait... you mean that most British people don't sound like the characters on the original cast recording of "Phantom of the Opera" or the Alfred Hitchcock movie "Lady vanishes" or like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, or Huch Grant, Obi One Kanobi, or Gandolph. Correct. Many don't even come anywhere near to sounding like that. Despite all the piss-taking RP gets, it still remains the easiest accent for native English speakers outside of England (and even for some within England) to understand. I suspect the same applies with regard to foreign speakers of English. Cockney, with its endless dipthong shifts, t-glottalisation, l-vocalisation, h-dropping, final g dropping can sometimes be a strain for someone who is not from London. RP is better not because of its poshness but simply because it is the one English accent which is very easily understandable by the rest of the English-speaking world. The same might be said about GAE. It was not through whim or sheer idiosyncracy that RP and GAE were chosen as the two reference accents for the purpose of establishing the standard lexical sets in the JC Wells book. (The author could have used Cockney and Brooklynese as the two reference accents). As much as many people may hate to admit it, these two accents are more standard, more correct, more intelligible, and more charactericstic of educated or cultured speech than many of the rest. These are also the accents which are used in British and American ESL programmes respectively (as audio supplements). Remember... A standard accent is NOT necessarily that which is spoken by all but that which is UNDERSTOOD by all. Does that not make sense?
Could you explain me these terms please, because I'm not sure I understand them:what does "Standard English and Standard accent" mean?
RP: Received Prononciation, what does it mean exactly? GAE:? what's its meaning?
Yes, Wells' books are awesome. But it should be remembered that, unlike RP, GAE is more vaguely defined. While RP's characteristics are more or less non-negotiable there are some differing views as to what exactly constitutes "General American." Certain things like rhoticity, intervocalic /t/ and /d/ flapping, yod coalescence after alveolars and the father-bother merger are unanimously agreed upon as part of General American but other things like the "whine-wine," "cot-caught," and "Mary-marry-merry" mergers may or may not fall under the umbrella depending on who you talk to. You might call such things "possibly GAE" features.
Of course GAE can be a useful reference point at times but unlike RP which is nearly completely clearly defined, GAE isn't. With the inherent vagueness of GAE it really is hard to say who exactly speaks it and who doesn't. I would venture to say that no American speaks GAE 100% but everyone has varying degrees of features which do and don't fall under the GAE umbrella. Some have fewer or more GAE features, but for everyone the resulting difference is made up of a combination of "possibly GAE" features (such as the ones I mentioned above) and non-GAE regional/sociolectal features. Since of course I'm familiar with my speech, I'll give three examples each of features I have which are GAE, possibly GAE, and non-GAE. Some of my GAE features: --intervocalic (after a stressed syllable) /t/ and /d/ --> [4] --rhoticity --"father-bother" merger Some of my possible GAE features: --"cot-caught" merger --"Mary-marry-merry" merger --"whine-wine" merger Some of my non-GAE features: --California Vowel Shift influences --Front-vowel raising before /N/ (/EN/ and /{N/ --> /eN/, /IN/ --> [iN]). This does not apply across morpheme boundaries, however. --"-eg" raising (/Eg/ --> [e:g])
Could you explain me these terms please, because I'm not sure I understand them:what does "Standard English and Standard accent" mean?
RP: Received Prononciation, what does it mean exactly? GAE:? what's its meaning? Thanks
Received Pronunciation (RP) is the "standard" accent in Britain, but current statistics show that only 3% of the populations uses it (natively I assume).
General American English (GAE) is the "standard" accent in America. Unlike RP, this "accent" is spoken by many. I'm unsure how many Americans speaks "GAE". I tend to think the numbers are 40% to 60%. I know native English speakers that don't speak GAE, but the vast majority of people I interact with do. Can someone correct my stats on the rough number of GAE speakers for Larissa?
<<General American English (GAE) is the "standard" accent in America. Unlike RP, this "accent" is spoken by many. I'm unsure how many Americans speaks "GAE". I tend to think the numbers are 40% to 60%. I know native English speakers that don't speak GAE, but the vast majority of people I interact with do. Can someone correct my stats on the rough number of GAE speakers for Larissa?>>
Well, as I explained above, it's kind of hard to define exactly what does and doesn't constitute GAE and no American really speaks it 100%. However, Americans who are native speakers of English do have features of GAE in their speech to varying degrees. Unfortunately, I don't know about percentages in terms of features. I do know that about 40-50% of the US is "cot-caught" merged but that's the only feature I have sound figures for. The "father-bother" merger is found only in certain areas in the Northern East and maybe some isolated areas in the South (but that's apparently not the norm) so anyone outside the Northern East could be safely to said to merge the two---the vast majority of the American population.
I myself tend to favor a more specific definition of GAE, despite people who say that they speak such who would not fall within such, simply because it is more practically useful as a reference to which other things can be compared. Some examples of how I'd define it phonologically include:
Mandatory Features: Intervocalic /t/ and /d/ flapping Rhoticity "father"-"bother" merger "Mary"-"merry"-"marry" merger "nearer"-"mirror" merger "horse"-"hoarse" merger "hurry"-"furry" merger "forward"-"foreward" merger Yod coalescence after alveolars Velarized alveolar laterals in postvocalic positions Vowel length linked to following obstruent fortis/lenis-ness and possibly sonorant voiced-ness, not vowel tense/lax-ness Diphthongal /e/ and /o/ Optional Features: "cot"-"caught" merger "whine"-"wine" merger Velarized alveolar laterals in prevocalic positions Non-GAE Features: Canadian Raising Raising of front vowels before /N/ or /g/ Northern Cities Vowel Shift California Vowel Shift Full word-final devoicing Interdental hardening (non-assimilation stopping and or affrication) Raising of /A/ before /r/ followed by a fortis obstruent Intervocalic obstruent elision or lenition, besides flapping of /t/ and /d/ Note that some of the specifically non-GAE features mentioned above are mentioned as just very non-GAE features of my own dialect which stick out in my mind, and the reason why they are mentioned is just as examples of things which are definitely not features of GAE.
Slight correction to my above post:
"--Front-vowel raising before /N/ (/EN/ and /{N/ --> /eN/, /IN/ --> [iN])" should read: "--Front-vowel raising before /N/ (/EN/ and /{N/ --> [eN], /IN/ --> [iN]) Yes, Travis, I agree with your list, altho the only thing is I'm not sure if I'd put the "Mary-marry-merry" merger as a certain GAE feature. This may be influenced in my mind by the fact that "General American" was a term largely popularized by John Samuel Kenyon who considered both "Mary-marry-merry" merged and non-merged people to be speaking General American. Of course he was describing the linguistic situation of the early 20th century so it certainly would've been conservative GAE by today's standards. He was from Ohio and was not "marry-merry" merged (I'm not sure about "Mary") from the books I've read of his.
Hmm, well I seem to fit the bill as a GAE speaker, but I'm not sure what some things like this, Raising of /A/ before /r/ followed by a fortis obstruent" mean.
However, I live in California and think most people around me speak GAE. Does all of California have the California Vowel Shift? Even if I notice that a few vowels seem a bit off ("fer" for "for", a few people here have "hw" instead of my "w", for example "whine" and wine" but then that's not a vowel), it's nothing that's highly noticeable. The NCVS is more extreme than what I've heard out here.
Yes, it's true that the majority of Americans speak GAE in one form or another while RP (in its pure form) is only spoken by a small minority of Britons. One must remember, though, that not all non-RP speaking Britons speak broad Cockney or sound like "The Full Monty" characters. There are also many near-RP or quasi-RP speakers who are very much understandable and who sound "nice".
<<Based on my visits to England and listening to the Cockney characters on "The Office">>
The accents in the office aren't actually Cockney. Their accents are generally more west London with a west country lilt in some cases.
<<However, I live in California and think most people around me speak GAE. Does all of California have the California Vowel Shift? Even if I notice that a few vowels seem a bit off ("fer" for "for", a few people here have "hw" instead of my "w", for example "whine" and wine" but then that's not a vowel), it's nothing that's highly noticeable. The NCVS is more extreme than what I've heard out here.>>
The California Vowel Shift has been well-documented in the Bay Area as well as Southern California. One of the primary researchers on the shift, Penelope Eckert, who's a researcher at Stanford, has been documenting its spread especially amongst younger Bay-Area residents for over a decade. As a relatively new shift, its influences are rarely heard in the speech of those over 35, I'd say. The California Vowel Shift is in the earlier stages that the Northern Cities Vowel Shift was in probably about the 1950s when it first began to be noticed and was at the time mostly restricted to younger speakers in the urban Northern Cities (of course it's spread much more now and continues to spread). As with any vowel shift, some people are more progressive along it than others in general and many have it more progressively in certain situations while not in others. I hear influence of the CVS everyday in the people around me but then again I'm in college so you'd expect that age group to be most progressive along the shift.
<<Based on my visits to England and listening to the Cockney characters on "The Office">>
The accents in the office aren't actually Cockney. Their accents are generally more west London with a west country lilt in some cases. I'm actually an RP speaker (or so I've been told by numerous Brits in one form or another) who grew up in continental Europe. (My favourite occasion was when I was queueing up to gain admittance to a popular London nightclub and the lad standing behind me asked me: "Where are you from? You have a posh accent". I actually made very little of it and changed the subject. Although I was extremely flattered, I tend to take compliments somewhat modestly and with reserve). Anyway... I can usually tell if a speaker's accent is RP or near-RP. I can also usually tell when a person's accent is not RP (be it an English or an American accent). However, because I did not grow up in England I cannot tell where exactly most non-RP speaking Englishmen are from. Sometimes I can't even tell if they're even English since the very broadest Cockney sounds almost like Australian, the very broadest northern accent sounds almost Scottish, and the two elderly men I've met from the south-west of England sounded like they could have been Dutch or Scandinavian. In any case, I happen to enjoy listening to Cockney on British comedies (like Miss Brahms on "Are you being served?"). It sounds pleasantly comic and is often the accent adopted by stand-up comedians in London. On the other hand, I feel that RP (not the comically exaggerated kind - just the normal kind) is more appropriate for situations which require a certain amount of gravity. (This is all within England, of course). |