Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that answer the question.
Query: Are accents different throughout England?
The accents of Northern England are also distinctive, including a range of variations: Northumberland (with Northern and Southern variants), Newcastle upon Tyne, Sunderland, Cumbria, and Lancashire, with regional variants in Barrow, Bolton, Burnley, Blackburn, Manchester, Preston, Fylde, Liverpool and Wigan. Yorkshire is also distinctive, having regional variants in Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, York, Hull, Middlesbrough (sometimes grouped with North east accents)
One difference between a pitch accent and a stress accent is that it is not uncommon for a pitch accent to be realised over two syllables. Thus in Serbo-Croatian, the difference between a "rising" and a "falling" accent is observed only in the pitch of the syllable following the accent: the accent is said to be "rising" if the following syllable is as high as or higher than the accented syllable, but "falling" if it is lower (see Serbo-Croatian phonology#Pitch accent).
Western New England English is relatively difficult for most American laypersons and even dialectologists to identify by any "distinct" accent when compared to its popularly recognized neighbors (Eastern New England English, New York City English, and Inland Northern U.S. English), meaning that its accents are widely perceived as unmarked "General American" varieties. Linguistic research, however, reveals that Western New England English is not simply one single or uniform dialect. Linguist Charles Boberg proposes that it be most generally divided into a Northwestern New England English (a standalone "Vermont" accent) and a Southwestern New England English (a less advanced subdialect of Inland Northern English); however, even Boberg lists the possibilities of several distinct accent divisions of Western New England.
South East England and the Home Counties (the counties bordering London) tend to reflect the interface between the London region and other regional accents. Affluent districts are associated with a modified Received Pronunciation (RP) accent, reflecting their traditional popularity with upper middle and upper-class residents which has spread throughout more social classes broadly in rural areas with commuting access to London. Less affluent areas have traditionally mainstream London accents (that is, variants of the Estuary English accent) that grade into southern rural outside urban areas.
Boston and surrounding northeastern New England form the only major region in North America where the distinction between the vowel phonemes "broad "a"" (as in "father") and "short "o"" (as in "bother") is often maintained (with some New York accents also following this pattern). Examples include words like "father" and "spa" which contain (, ) and "bother" and "dock" which contain (, ) being different. This means that even though "dark" has no in many Boston accents, it remains distinct from "dock" because its vowel quality is different: vs. . In this way, Bostonians align with most Britons, but unlike most other Americans, who use the same vowel in both of these classes: .
With urbanisation, distinctive urban accents have arisen which often differ greatly from the historical accents of the surrounding rural areas and sometimes share features with Southern English accents. Northern English dialects remain an important part of the culture of the region, and the desire of speakers to assert their local identity has led to accents such as Scouse and Geordie becoming more distinctive and spreading into surrounding areas.
On the other hand, the Boston accent merges the "short "o"" with the "aw" phoneme: the two classes exemplified by "caught" and "cot" thus both become an often long and rounded , so that "caught", "cot", "law", "wand", "rock", "talk", "doll", and "wall" all are pronounced with the same vowel. By contrast, New York accents and southern New England accents have for "caught" and for "cot" and the London accents have and , respectively. In Boston and some other parts of New England, a few words ending in , e.g., "hot" and "got", can be pronounced with an entirely different phoneme, however, sounding instead like "hut" and "gut", respectively.
The old Maine accent, the closest remnant today to an old Yankee regional accent, includes the phonology mentioned above, plus the breaking of (as in "there"), (as in "here"), and (as in "more") each into two syllables: "they-uh", "hee-yuh", and "moh-uh"; some distinct vocabulary is also used in this accent. Maine is one of the last American regions to resist the horse–hoarse merger. This continued resistance was verified by some speakers in a 2006 study of Bangor and Portland, Maine, yet contradicted by a 2013 study that reported the merger as embraced by Portland speakers "of all ages". The traditional horse–hoarse separation means that words like "war" and "wore" may sound different: "war" rhyming with "law", and "wore" rhyming with "boa." Unlike the Boston accent, this traditional Maine accent may be non-rhotic entirely: even in the pronunciation of .The traditional Southeastern New England English accent, popularly known as a Rhode Island accent, in addition to all the features mentioned under the phonology section above, also includes a sharp distinction in the vowels of "Mary", "marry", and "merry" and in the vowels in "cot" versus "caught" , plus the pronunciation of , as in "car", far back in the mouth as —these three features making this New England accent noticeably similar to a New York accent. These features are often unlike the modern Northeastern New England (NENE) dialect of Boston, as is Rhode Island's feature of a completed father–bother merger, shared with the rest of the country outside of NENE. A few terms are unique only to this area, such as the word "cabinet" to mean "milkshake" (particularly, coffee cabinets), "pizza strips" (Italian tomato pie strips served cold without cheese), and "coffee milk".An ethnic local accent has been documented among self-identifying French Americans in Manchester, New Hampshire. The accent's most prominent pronunciation features are "th"-stopping (pronouncing "thin" like "tin" and "there" like "dare") and, variably, word-initial "h"-dropping (so that "hair" may sound like "air").
It is important to note however that different mergers occur in different dialects. Among United States accents, the Boston, Eastern New England and New York accents have the lowest degree of pre-rhotic merging. Some have observed that rhotic North American accents are more likely to have such merging than non-rhotic accents, but this cannot be said of rhotic British accents like Scottish English, which is firmly rhotic and yet many varieties have all the same vowel contrasts before as before any other consonant.
In modern times, English is the most spoken language in the North West, with a large percentage of the population fluent in it, and close to 100% conversational in it. To the north-east of the region, within the historic boundaries of Cumberland, the Cumbrian dialect is dominant. The historical county of Lancashire covered a vast amount of land, and the Lancashire dialect and accent is still predominant throughout the county, and stretches as far north as Furness in South Cumbria to parts of north Greater Manchester and Merseyside in the south of the region. The region boasts some of the most distinctive accents in the form of the Scouse accent, which originates from Liverpool and its surrounding areas, and the Manc accent, deriving from the central Manchester district. The region's accents are among those referred to as 'Northern English'.
Accents typically differ in quality of the voice, pronunciation and distinction of vowels and consonants, stress, and prosody. Although grammar, semantics, vocabulary, and other language characteristics often vary concurrently with accent, the word "accent" may refer specifically to the differences in pronunciation, whereas the word "dialect" encompasses the broader set of linguistic differences. Often "accent" is a subset of "dialect".
The Yat dialect is the most pronounced version of the "New Orleans Accent". Natives often speak with varying degrees of the "Brooklyn-esque" accent, ranging from a slight intonation to what is considered full Yat. As with all dialects, there is variance by local speakers due to geographic and social factors. This results in many different levels of Yat throughout the area, marking distinct differences between higher-income people and lower-income people. Yat tends to differ in strength and intonation from neighborhood to neighborhood. The type, strength, and lexicon of the accent vary from section to section of the New Orleans Metropolitan Area. Longtime residents can often tell what area the other residents are from by their accent.
There are differences between and even within areas of East Anglia: the Norwich accent has distinguishing aspects from the Norfolk dialect that surrounds itchiefly in the vowel sounds. The accents of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire are different from the Norfolk accent.
Eastern New England English encompasses Boston and Maine accents, and, according to some sources, the distinct Rhode Island accent. All Eastern New England English is famous for non-rhoticity, meaning it drops the "r" sound everywhere except before a vowel: thus, in words like "car", "card", "fear", and "chowder" (). The phrase "Park the car in Harvard Yard"—dialectally transcribed —is commonly used as a shibboleth, or speech indicator, for the non-rhotic Eastern New England dialect running from Boston north to Maine, and as far west as Worcester, which contrasts with the generally rhotic dialects elsewhere in North America. In all of Eastern New England, except Rhode Island, words like "caught" and "cot" are pronounced identically (both are often rounded, thus: ), because those two vowel sounds have fully merged. A phenomenon called Canadian raising occurs throughout Eastern New England, causing "writer" to have a different stressed vowel sound than "rider", and for the verb "house" to have a different vowel sound than the noun "house". and have relatively back starting positions. The "horse"–"hoarse" distinction is still present to some extent in some areas, as well as the "Mary"–"marry"–"merry" distinction in many speakers.
Most accents of American English and Canadian English are unaffected by the split. The main exceptions are parts of New England ("see Boston accent"), where the broad sound can be used in some of the same words as in southern England, such as "aunt, ask, bath" etc. ("aunt" though is unique, as the broad-a pronunciation is found sporadically throughout the US, not only in New England)
1254 audio samples of people with various accents reading the same paragraph. Directory of 118 British accents. — Listen to examples of regional accents and dialects from across the UK on the British Library's 'Sounds Familiar' website , listen and compare side by side instantaneously. Searchable free-access archive of 681 speech samples, England only, wma format with linguistic commentary An article on the connection of class and accent in the UK, its decline, and the spread of Estuary English Homepage of the telephone survey of North American English accents A site for non-linguists, by Barbara Johnstone of Carnegie Mellon University by Claudio Salvucci A newspaper article on Philadelphia speech Includes class handouts describing Cockney, Scottish, Australian, and Scouse, among other things. A series of web pages by PBS that attempts to discuss the differences between dialects in the United States Short videos demonstrating differences in English accents around the world.
The New England English dialect and Boston accent are native to the region. Many of its most stereotypical features (such as r dropping and the so-called broad A) are believed to have originated in Boston from the influence of England's Received Pronunciation, which shares those features. While some Boston accents are most strongly associated with the so-called "Eastern Establishment" and Boston's upper class, the common accent is locally prevalent and predominantly associated with blue-collar natives exemplified by movies like "Good Will Hunting" and "The Departed". The Boston accent and accents closely related to it cover eastern Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.
Traditionally, the "East Coast" comprises three or four major linguistically distinct regions, each of which possesses English varieties both distinct from each other as well as quite internally diverse: New England, the New York metropolitan area, the Mid-Atlantic states (centering on Philadelphia and Baltimore), and the Southern United States. The only traditionally "r"-dropping (or non-rhotic) regional accents of American English are all spoken along the Atlantic Coast and parts of the Gulf Coast (particularly still in Louisiana), because these areas were in close historical contact with England and imitated prestigious varieties of "r"-dropping London (a feature now widespread throughout most of England) at a time when they were undergoing changes. Today, non-rhoticity is confined in the United States to the accents of eastern New England, New York City, older speakers of the former plantation South, and African-American Vernacular English (though the vowel-consonant cluster found in "bird", "work", "hurt", "learn", etc. usually retains its "r" pronunciation, even in these non-rhotic accents). Other than these few varieties, American accents are rhotic, pronouncing every instance of the sound.
Many linguists analyse Japanese pitch accent somewhat differently. In their view, a word either has a downstep or does not. If it does, the pitch drops between the accented mora and the subsequent one; if it does not have a downstep, the pitch remains more or less constant throughout the length of the word: That is, the pitch is "flat" as Japanese speakers describe it. The initial rise in the pitch of the word, and the gradual rise and fall of pitch across a word, arise not from lexical accent, but rather from prosody, which is added to the word by its context: If the first word in a phrase does not have an accent on the first mora, then it starts with a low pitch, which then rises to high over subsequent morae. This phrasal prosody is applied to individual words only when they are spoken in isolation. Within a phrase, each downstep triggers another drop in pitch, and this accounts for a gradual drop in pitch throughout the phrase. This drop is called terracing. The next phrase thus starts off near the low end of the speaker's pitch range and needs to reset to high before the next downstep can occur.
Great Lakes accents, Chicago being the largest city with these speakers, tend to front the vowel in the mouth and tense the short-"a" vowel wholesale, triggering a series of other vowel shifts in the more innovative accents of the region, which linguists call the "Inland North". Great Lakes accents share that first feature with Boston accents. Both dialects, including the larger Eastern New England dialect of which Boston is the main hub, also show a back tongue positioning of: the vowel (to ) and the vowel (to ). In the Northern U.S., from northern New England across the Great Lakes to Minnesota, the sound tends to move forward, for example appearing four times in the stereotypical Boston shibboleth "Park the car in Harvard Yard". Boston, Pittsburgh, Upper Midwestern, and Western accents all merge the vowels of "cot" versus "caught", a feature rapidly expanding throughout the whole country; however, a Northeastern coastal corridor passing through Rhode Island, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore typically preserves a cot–caught distinction, as depicted in popular humorous spellings of the "caught" vowel, as in "tawk" and "cawfee", which intend to represent it being tense and diphthongal. Eastern New England and New York City accents are the only American regional dialects with some strong degree of "r"-dropping (or non-rhoticity) in words like "store", "far", and "weird", though this was also once common in old Plantation Southern accents. New York City and Philadelphia/Baltimore accents are the only regions to split the short-"a" vowel into two distinct phonemes, using different "a" pronunciations for example in "gap" versus "gas".
The English of Western New England in fact shows many sharp differences throughout rather than one uniform accent. In 2001, Charles Boberg, discussing that Western New England English was a likely direct influence on the Inland Northern English of the Great Lakes region, still identified as many as four or five English sub-regional accents within Western New England itself, based on data from the late 1990s:
There are several American English accents spoken in the region (normally north of Connecticut), including New England English and its derivative known as the Boston accent, which is native to the northeastern coastal regions of New England. The most identifiable features of the Boston accent are believed to have originated from England's Received Pronunciation, which shares features such as dropping the final R and the broad A. Another source was 17th century speech in East Anglia and Lincolnshire where many of the Puritan immigrants originated. The East Anglian "whine" developed into the Yankee "twang". Boston accents were most strongly associated at one point with the so-called "Eastern Establishment" and Boston's upper class, although today the accent is predominantly associated with blue-collar natives, as exemplified by movies such as "Good Will Hunting" and "The Departed". The Boston accent and those accents closely related to it cover eastern Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.
English in southern England (also, rarely, Southern English English, or in the UK, simply, Southern English) is the collective set of different dialects and accents of the English spoken in Southern England.
There are many accents traditionally associated with London. The most well known of the London accents long ago acquired the Cockney label from London's East End, which is heard both in London itself, and across the wider South East England region more generally. The accent of a 21st-century Londoner varies widely; what is becoming more and more common amongst the under-30s however is some fusion of Cockney with a whole array of ethnic accents, in particular Caribbean, which form an accent labelled Multicultural London English (MLE). The other widely heard and spoken accent is RP (Received Pronunciation) in various forms, which can often be heard in the media and many of other traditional professions and beyond, although this accent is not limited to London and South East England, and can also be heard selectively throughout the whole UK amongst certain social groupings. Since the turn of the century the Cockney dialect is less common in the East End and has 'migrated' east to Havering and the county of Essex.
Words that would have a stressed before intervocalic in the UK's Received Pronunciation (RP) are treated differently in different varieties of North American English. As shown in the table below, in Canadian English, all of these are pronounced with , as in "cord" (and thus merge with historic prevocalic in words like "glory" because of the horse–hoarse merger). In the accents of Philadelphia, southern New Jersey, and the Carolinas (and traditionally throughout the South), these words are pronounced among some with , as in "card" (and thus merge with historic prevocalic in words like "starry"). In the accents of New York City, Long Island, and nearby parts of New Jersey, these words are pronounced with like in RP. However, this is met with hypercorrection of , (thus still merging with historic prevocalic in "starry"). On the other hand, the traditional Eastern New England accents (famously, the Rhode Island and Boston accents) these words are pronounced with without hypercorrection, just like in RP. Most of the rest of the United States (marked "General American" in the table), however, has a distinctive mixed system: while the majority of words are pronounced as in Canada, the four (sometimes five) words in the left-hand column are typically pronounced with ; and the East Coast regions seem to be slowly moving toward this system over time.