Dialects o English demos

Dialects o English demos.

Rogers chapter 6 describes some general properties that tend to separate out

English dialects.

He lists 11 key ones on p 110-111.

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1) Presence of non-prevocalic /ɹ/ rhotic [‘r-full’] vs non-rhotic [‘r-less] dialect.

Most Canadian dialects are rhotic, many southern British are non-rhotic

2) Distinction of vowels in ‘caught’ vs ‘cot’.

Preserved in southern British and some (mostly eastern) US dialects. Merged in most of Canada and Western US.

3) Distinction between vowels ‘put’ and ‘but’. Most s. British and North American preserve the distinction. Northern English (Beatles) and Scots English (Sean Connery) usually merge.

4) Finlal vowel in ‘baby’. Relaively high [i] –like or a bit lower [ɪ]-like. Some British and souhern US dialects have the lower vowel.

5) Distinction of ‘pat’ ‘path’ some dialects have no (inter)dental fricaives. May substitute alveolar stops (e.g. some Newfoundland “lord tunderin’” or labio dental fricatives (cokney, some African American English).

6) Presence of [h]. E.g, Cockney and some Newfoundland don’t have h.

7) Vowels in ‘hate’ and ‘boat’ diphthongized. (Some dialects e.g. Jamacain, some Minnesota have monophthongs).

8) Presence of [j] after alveolars. (e.g. n t d [nuz] versus [njuz].

9) Inter vocalic /t/ : tapped (Canada, US) , or glottalized (Cockney, Scots English)

10) Distinction of vowels in ‘merry, marry, Mary’

11) Distinction of ‘witch’ and ‘which’

There are also many many differences in details of individual vowel phonemes.

Rogers gives a sketch of several.

A nice source of some dialect info from Brittain (and some accented English) is the following web site.

The documentation is a little sparse. But it’s an easy to use site.

http://web.ku.edu/idea/ ‘International dialects of English’ Archive U. Kansas)

Here are a few of the more interesting ones: