PHONETICS AND PHONOLOGY
Segmental Aspects

Languages are manifested all over the world, but there are also various dialects, accents and varieties within different languages. Crystal says that there are about 6,000 languages in the world and the number of dialects is even higher, as over 10,000 of them are used by people all over the world (Crystal, 2011).

As for the English language, Modern English, now an analytic language, comes from the Indo-European language family and belongs to the West Germanic group of Germanic languages.

The terms British and American English are at present recognised as the English language varieties, and they are used as a result of many pronunciation, vocabulary, grammatical, spelling and punctuation changes across history. The English language has been developing for many centuries throughout which many social and cultural events occurred and shaped the language into the one we know today.

In 1917, when his first edition of An English Pronouncing Dictionary was published, Jones referred to the English pronunciation pattern as Public School Pronunciation – PSP –  because, as he wrote, it was the type of pronunciation “most usually heard in everyday speech in the families of Southern English persons whose menfolk have been educated at the great public boarding-schools” (Jones, 2003, p. v). Jones considered this way of pronunciation a norm. In 1926, he replaced the term with Received Pronunciation (RP) because there was a tendency for the educated young men to lose “markedly local peculiarities” (ibid.). This expression is still used for a generally intelligible and acceptable accent all over the UK and a standardized and institutionalized “most correct” pronunciation norm of the educated people living in and around London although it used to be considered upper-class. Terms like BBC English or Queen´s/ King´s English are also used alternatively.

Educated people on the territory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland use the institutionalised, most “proper” norm of the English language. This variety of English is known as Standard English. As Crystal mentions, “the linguistic features of SE are chiefly matters of grammar, vocabulary, and orthography (spelling and punctuation). It is important to note that SE is not a matter of pronunciation: SE is spoken in a wide variety of accents (including, of course, any prestige accent a country may have, such as British RP)” (Crystal, 2011, p. 110), where “prestige“ means a social concept. This is the variety which is used as the norm of communication by the community´s leading institutions, such as its government, law courts and media. Standard English is also recommended as a desirable educational target (Crystal, 2011).

The British Standard of English is used in the mass–media, at schools, and at other educational institutions. It is “most familiar as the accent used by most announcers and newsreaders on serious national and international BBC broadcasting channels” (Roach, 1996, p. 4). Hewings says that “BBC English is taken as the model because it is a widely broadcast and respected variety, and for most people is easily understood” (Hewings, 2014, p. 10).

RP is not the accent defined from the phonological point of view, it is considered “standard”, and it is recognised as the most prestigeous pronunciation pattern. The editors of Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary have been following the trends reflected in pronunciation changes. In the edition published in 2003, they state that “the time has come to abandon the archaic name Received Pronunciation. The model used for British English is what is referred to as BBC English, this is the pronunciation of professional speakers employed by the BBC as newsreaders and announcers”  (2003, edited by Roach, Hartman and Setter).

Estuary English is the contemporary trend in using English in Britain. It mixes up some features of RP with those of Cockney dialect. Cockney used to be a pejorative term for working class sociolect, but now, this dialect is considered the accent of the Londoners.

As Crystal writes about Estuary English, “the term was coined in the 1980s to identify the way features of London regional speech seemed to be rapidly spreading throughout the counties adjoining the river Thames and beyond… It is something of a misnomer, for the influence of London speech has for some time been evident well beyond the Thames estuary, notably in the Oxford – Cambridge – London triangle and in the area to the south and east of London as far as the coast” (Crystal, 2011, p. 327). The most significant and noticeable feature of Estuary English is a high number of glottal stops in pronunciation (usually replacing t before consonants – Gatwick /gæʔwɪk/ instead of /gætwɪk, while in Cockney, the glottal stop is heard even after vowels, e.g. water /wͻ:ʔ/ instead of /wͻ:tə/. Other characteristic pronunciation features are replacement of the final l for w, e.g. bill pronounced as /bɪw/, not /bɪl/, or substituting f, v for dental θ and δ, e.g. teeth pronounced as /ti:f/ instead of /ti:θ/, or this instead of /δɪs/ pronounced incorrectly as /vɪs/ (ibid.).

For about thirty years, one of the British pronunciation models, the so called MLE (Multicultural London English), has also been used especially by young people in big cities who come from regions like West Africa or Jamaica, although every region or bigger city within the UK has its own accent with its pronunciation peculiarities. Social accents, besides the mentioned regional ones, are recognized too.

American English for which the term General American (GA) is often used, is defined as “a geographically (largely non-coastal) and socially based set of pronunciation features. It is important to note that no single dialect – regional or social – has been singled out as an American standard… Even national media (radio, television, movies, CD-ROM, etc.), with professionally trained voices have speakers with regionally mixed features. Network English can be described as a relatively homogenous dialect that reflects the ongoing development of progressive American dialects. The dialect itself contains some variant forms” (Jones, 2003, p. vi). American English, unlike British English, is a fully rhotic variety of English, which means that the phoneme r “is pronounced before consonants and before a pause, e.g. cart /ka:rt/ or car /ka:r/” (Jones, 2003, p. 458), while in British English, r is not pronounced in these positions, e.g. /ka:t/ or /ka:/