England is the mother country of the English language, and it remains to be regarded as the cultural centre. All national varieties of English are to be described againgst the background of the prescriptive grammar of London English. This prescriptive standard is called Standard English (StE). This is the shape of English as it is taught in most nonanglophone countries in the world. The pronunciation counterpart to StE is RP = Received Pronunciation.
This standard, however, is not the only way of speech used in England.
This chapter is about some interesting features of variation within England that are socially based.
For getting ahead in society, StE is the must. But in ordinary speech, there are other sociolects still very vigorous. There are two factors to predict pronunciation: the already mentioned social and the regional one.The regional one belongs to the field of dialectology and is not to be dealt within this paper. For a short view consider e.g. Bähr (1974).
Though StE is the standard, unexepctedly it is not the way of speech that stands for the
top of the social latter. New-comers are often recognized, because their RP tends to be too close
to the written language (Wells, 1982a: 283ƒƒ.),
the very Upper class uses U-RP, which is
different from the normative pronunciation; due to its function, it sounds snobbish and
emphasizedly careless to other
people; U-RP-speakers will pronounce that man as [
] or soft as
[
].
Consider as well
the famous expression
[
]
(Wells, 1982a: 280ff.). The r is usually a flap
([
] rather than an approximant.
There
may be differences in vocabulary, too, but there is no agreement among investigators on this
point. U-RP and RP are barely regionally variable.
On the lower social scale regional variation is considerable (cf. Hughes/Trudgill, 1979: 6). From the middle class "downwards" we observe regional shades of pronunciation, geographically restricted expressions. The lower class generally keeps using dialects. As I excluded dialectology from this paper, I shall only lose a few lines on two important ones: One left its traces as far as Australia, and as the dialect of the capital, it plays a significant role: the dialect of London is called Cockney. There is a second great vowel shift, which makes out the main difference between it and RP (Bähr, 1974: 109):
The Northern dialects, on the other hand, are marked by the opposite: They lack in part the
Great Vowel Shift features that once made up New English: [a]
instead of RP [æ],
[
]
instead
of RP [
]
etc.), as is pronounced e.g. in
the Nidderdale dialect. They are the speeches of the
[
]-region.
They are the bridge to the next topic of this
little article, to Scotland, as they are very akin to the language spoken "north of the Border".
On the following isoglosses the reader may see the continuum from English to Scottish dialects
(Bähr, 1974: 321):
.