The importance of accent

Every speaker of English has a particular system of his or her own, known by linguists as that individual’s idiolect. However, considering language only at the idiolectal level might produce extremely thorough and detailed descriptions, but would give rather little insight into why individuals speak in the way they do. To understand this, we must identify higher-level groupings, and investigate geographical and social accents. That is to say, individuals adopt a particular mode of speech (or more accurately, move along a continuum of modes of speech) depending on who they want to identify with, who they are talking to, and what impression they want to make. Not all these ‘decisions’ are conscious, of course. Small children learn to speak as their immediate family members do; but quite soon, the peer group at school (even nursery) becomes at least equally important; and later, older children, then television presenters, actors or sporting heroes may become role models, leading to modifications in accent. Consequently, age-related differences appear in all varieties; some will be transient, as a particular TV show falls out of fashion and the words or pronunciations borrowed from it disappear; others will become entrenched in young people’s language, and may persist into adulthood, becoming entirely standard forms for the next generation.

This flexibility, and the associated facts of variation and gradual change, mean that phonologists face a Catch-22 situation. On the one hand, describing idiolects will give seriously limited information, since it will not reveal the groups an individual belongs to, or the dynamics of those groups. On the other hand, we must take care that the groups are not described at too abstract a level. Any description of ‘an accent’ is necessarily an idealization, since no two speakers will use precisely the same system in precisely the same way: our physical idiosyncrasies, different backgrounds, and different preferences and aspirations will see to that. Nonetheless, two speakers of, say, Scottish Standard English, or New Zealand English, will have a common core of features, which allows them to be grouped together by speakers of the same accent, by speakers of other accents, and by phonologists. Not everyone is equally adept at making these identifications, of course. Speakers of other varieties may succeed in placing accents only within a very wide geographical boundary: thus, a speaker of GA may have difficulty in distinguishing a Scottish from an Irish speaker, while conversely, a Scot may confuse Americans and Canadians. Within groups, however, much more subtle distinctions are perceived and have geographical or social meaning: hence, one speaker of SSE may identify another as coming from Glasgow rather than Edinburgh, and perhaps even from a particular area of the city; and may well base assumptions to do with social class and level of education on those linguistic factors.

Accent is clearly extremely important, as one of the major tools we use in drawing inferences about our fellow humans, and in projecting particular images of ourselves. Phonologists should, then, be able to do as speakers do, in identifying and classifying accents, but with a more technical rather than emotional classification of the differences and similarities between them. An accent, in phonological terms, is an idealized system which speakers of that variety share. Although slight differences in its use may be apparent, both across and within individuals, its speakers will still share more in common with one another, and with that idealized accent system, than with speakers of any other idealized accent system. Standard accents should also be described in just the same way as non-standard ones, as they provide just the same sort of social and geographical information about their users: that is, although it is quite common for speakers of a standard accent, such as SSBE in the south of England, to claim that they have no accent, other speakers (and phonologists) know different.

A more detailed appreciation of the cues speakers attend to in different accents, and the social judgements they make on that basis, is a matter for sociolinguistics and dialectology rather than phonology. The main contribution a phonologist can make is to produce a classification of types of differences between accents, which can then be used in distinguishing any set of systems; and that is the goal of this chapter. In the next three sections, then, we shall introduce a three-way classification of accent differences, and illustrate these using examples involving both consonants and vowels. First, the systems of two accents may contain different numbers of phonemes, so different phonemic oppositions can be established for them: these are systemic differences. Second, the same phonemes may have different allophones: these are realizational differences. Finally, there are distributional differences, whereby the same lexical item may have different phonemes in two different varieties; or alternatively, the same phoneme may have a phonological restriction on its distribution in one variety but not another.