Some of you may have heard of this famous accent before. Especially because
of the well-known film My Fair Lady,
starring Audrey Hepburn. When we talk about a Cockney accent we talk about an
accent which is associated to the South East of England, concretely to a
particular part of London, to East London.
As it originated there, it shares many characteristics with other
dialects in the region such as Estuary English and RP. Its more important
features are:
Non –rhoticity
Glottal stopping, better becomes /be?ə/
L-vocalisation:
The phoneme l in final-word position usually becomes a vowel sound. Milk
becomes /miok/
Th-Fronting, that is, the pronunciation of <th>
as /f/ or /v/. Thing becomes “fing”.
H- dropping, that is, the non-pronunciation of the
sound /h/. Horrible becomes /ɒrɪbəw/.
Vowel raising. 3. /æ/ replaced with /e/
Any word producing the front open /æ/ vowel would be
pronounced with mid-open /e/ instead: ran becomes /ren/
Scottish
Standard English (SSE) is the variety of English spoken in Scotland. Note
that in Scotland other languages are also spoken: Gaelic and Scots. Traditionally, these two languages were the
main languages there, however, after the Act
of Union in 1707 (which led to the creation of the United Kingdom), English
became the language of the Scottish Church, administration and upper classes. SSE
resulted from the language contact between Standard English and Scots. That’s
why we are going to find many features from Scots in SSE. Nowadays, boundaries
between Scots and SSE are really blurred.
Some of its features are:
—Rhoticity: /r/ is pronounced in the syllable coda. /r/
may be an alveolar approximant as in RP [ɹ] or an alveolar tap [ɾ]
—There is a distinction between /w/ and /ʍ/so that witch and which
are pronounced differently.
—Use of the phoneme /x/ for <–ch>
in a small number of Scottish words. Eg: loch.
—Use of Scots /u/ instead of
/ʊ/. This vowel may be pronounced [ʉ] or even [ʏ].
Thus pull and pool are homophones.
—Non-initial /t/ is often realised as a glottal stop /ʔ/.
—Vowel length: The Scottish Vowel Length Rule(
”Aitken’s Law”)
—Use of double
modals. Eg: They might could be working in the shop.
—Negation:
use of the suffix -nae
. Eg. She isnae leaving for She
is not leaving.
—Vocabulary:
wee = small; bonnie=pretty,
bairn=child, haggis, kilt, kirk=church, etc.
—Scotticisms:
She learnt him some manners = She taught him some manners; Pure dead brilliant= exceptional,
fantastic.
ACTIVITIES
Do some research on Aitken's law and summarise its more important aspects.
Write down at least five Scottish words not mentioned above.
Watch the following video and try to identify at least three features described above.
Some of you may have heard of this famous accent before. Especially because
of the well-known film My Fair Lady,
starring Audrey Hepburn. When we talk about a Cockney accent we talk about an
accent which is associated to the South East of England, concretely to a
particular part of London, to East London.
As it originated there, it shares many characteristics with other
dialects in the region such as Estuary English and RP. Its more important
features are:
