The secrets of the posh accent – video Want to talk like the toffs in new film The Riot Club but unsure of your vowels? Let our expert guide you to the perfect upper received pronunciation and you'll never find yourself tongue-tied at a garden party or in an Oxbridge quad again •How to talk posh: a rarely marvlous glossary •Posh Britain: will they always lord it over us? •Quiz: how posh are you? •Laura Wade on Posh and The Riot Club Phonetic Chart Interactive Phonemic ChartCreated by Adrian UnderhillThis excellent teaching tool gives audio examples of the English phoneme set. Click on the phonemes to hear the sound and a sample word. Find out more about how the chart works and how it can help you in the classroom in a series of exclusive videos with Adrian dedicated to teaching pronunciation skills.Adrian Underhill is the series editor for the Macmillan Books for Teachers and author of Sounds Foundations, the inspiration behind the award-winning Sounds: Pronunciation App. More about Adrian Underhill Pronunciation Skills Videos
East End Cockney accent 'fading' A new form of accent is replacing the traditional Cockney in some parts of the East End, research has found. White youths are among those speaking in a dialect combining Bangladeshi and Cockney influences - reflecting population changes in the area. Research for the BBC Voices project found white youngsters had adopted words from Bangladeshi friends such as "nang" (good) and "creps" (trainers). Similar accent changes were also found in areas of Cardiff and Liverpool. Local identity A nine-month study of youngsters took place at a youth club in the borough of Tower Hamlets, East London as part of the BBC project into accents and dialects across the UK. "The majority of young people of school age are of Bangladeshi origin and this has had tremendous impact on the dialect spoken in the area," said Sue Fox, a research fellow at Queen Mary College, University of London. "In Cardiff I've heard a number of accent mixes that weren't previously heard before such as Cardiff-Arabic and Cardiff-Hindi."
Add phonetic transcription to any English text with Phonetizer What Britain's county dialects can tell us about the national character When I examined the wonderful collection of glossaries of county dialects I realised just how monastic was the zeal with which the Victorian lexicographers went about their compiling. Just as they collected the rocks, butterflies and ancient antiquities that now fill our museums, so (predominantly between 1850 and 1880) they went around collecting examples of local dialect from every county in England and several in Scotland – and even some specific industrial communities such as the mining villages of Yorkshire and Durham. I learned much about the British character through the English language. One of the more interesting aspects of English is the love of identifying action and sound through semi-onomatopoeic phrases. These jolly, affectionate and inventive expressions are known in the linguistics community as "reduplicative rhyming compounds". On matters of climate, Scotland has the final say.
Non-native pronunciations of English Non-native pronunciations of English result from the common linguistic phenomenon in which non-native users of any language tend to carry the intonation, phonological processes and pronunciation rules from their mother tongue into their English speech. They may also create innovative pronunciations for English sounds not found in the speaker's first language. Overview The speech of non-native English speakers may exhibit pronunciation characteristics that result from such speakers imperfectly learning the pronunciation of English, either by transferring the phonological rules from their mother tongue into their English speech ("interference") or through implementing strategies similar to those used in primary language acquisition.[1] They may also create innovative pronunciations for English sounds not found in the speaker's first language.[1] English is unusual in that speakers rarely produce an audible release between consonant clusters and often overlap constriction times. Examples
Norfolk schools seek to reclaim derided dialect | UK news Thass a rum 'un, bor, as Norfolk folk might say. Thousands of children are to be taught the county's dialect at school as part of a project to promote the much-maligned rural accent. Derided by city slickers and mocked in adverts for "bootiful" Bernard Matthews turkeys, Norfolk's mother tongue will be recorded and practised by pupils in 11 schools after Friends of Norfolk Dialect, or Fond, was awarded a £24,600 grant to introduce understanding and appreciation of the rich vernacular. "It's critically important that youngsters are aware that there's a wonderful, rich dialect that they need to use or lose. It's not something to be ashamed of," said Norfolk writer and broadcaster Keith Skipper, who founded Fond seven years ago. The Lost in Translation project, which is being funded by the Local Heritage Initiative, was born of a fear that the spread of Norfolk speech was, in the words of Mr Skipper, "wassanwotterwuz", or worse that what it was.
A reason to mither Are you chunnering? Ever seen a tarnack? Love the sound of nurdling? Maybe only if you come from Derbyshire. According to the Yorkshire Dialect Society, because of the influence of the internet, social mobility and globalisation, terms which were once commonly used are now a mystery to younger people. In Derbyshire, however, an effort has been made to document the dialect of a small village, Earl Sterndale, in a new book. He is using his book Words of the White Peak as "a passionate plea to save part of our history". But what about the rest of the country? Earl Sterndale Am mithered deeth - I'm worried to death. Anyroadup surrey, ar mun mek tracks fer wom, al sithee! Ay wur raight gloppendt, thi o' threaped 'im airt as it wurn't raight, 'e wur fair sneeped - He was really lost for words, they all bamboozled him that what he was saying wasn't correct, he was very crestfallen. Chunnering - Mumbling disagreeably but not really wanting to be heard. Na then, surrey, 'owat? North Yorkshire Devon
Routes of English - Pitmatic Lost language of Pitmatic gets its lexicon | UK news A dialect so dense that it held up social reforms has been rescued from obscurity by the publication of its first dictionary. Thousands of terms used in Pitmatic, the oddly-named argot of north-east miners for more than 150 years, have been compiled through detailed research in archives and interviews with the last generation to talk of kips, corf-batters and arse-loops. First recorded in Victorian newspapers, the language was part of the intense camaraderie of underground working which excluded even friendly outsiders such as the parliamentary commissioners pressing for better conditions in the pits in 1842. "The barriers to our intercourse were formidable," they wrote in their report on encountering the Pitmatic dialect. The first Pitmatic dictionary, including pit recollections and analysis of the origins of the dialect's words, has been compiled by Bill Griffiths, the country's foremost Geordie scholar, whose previous work includes the standard Dictionary of North East Dialect.
English dialect study - an overview By Clive Upton What is a dialect? Dialect is one of those words that almost everybody thinks they understand, but which is in fact a bit more problematic than at first seems to be the case. A simple, straightforward definition is that a dialect is any variety of English that is marked off from others by distinctive linguistic features. Such a variety could be associated with a particular place or region or, rather more surprisingly, it might also be associated with a certain social group—male or female, young or old, and so on. But whether the focus is regional or social, there are two important matters that need to be considered when defining ‘dialect’. Back to top Dialect or accent? A common mistake is to confuse a ‘dialect’ with an accent, muddling up the difference between words people use and the sounds they make, their pronunciation. It will be obvious from this that accent, or pronunciation, is a special element of a dialect that needs separate attention to be properly understood.