Thursday 3 December 2009

ENGLISH ACCENTS AROUND THE WORLD

As we saw in the class, there are many English accents around the world and we saw examples from the classmates who were presenting this topic. I can make a comparison with the spanish accents because as well as the English ones there are a lot of variations and it depends also on the zone where it is spoken.
A good example on the variety of what I am talking about is the scotish accent because there are few differences from the other accents, I mean some of the sounds are preserved like the difference between /hw/ and /w/.
other special feature of this accent is that is a little bit stressed in some words like: cot and caught because they use this phonetic symbol [ɔ]. I found something very interesting here on the words foot, pull, food and pool, because according to my source thiere is not distinction between them, this means that the vowel that they use is a short one, there is a mixture between the vowels, what it is interesting because our teacher told us the difference and one vowel for foot is short and the other one for food is long. This are some of the different characteristics that we can find in scotish accent and depending on the place the accent may change.
Another example is the australian accent, this kind of accent is likely the most rare English accent that I know because they speak like they were saying a tongue twister, because I believe they don`t open the mouth widely and it seems that they use joined speech in all the words they are saying, a good example of this is that when they speak they say words with /t/ and they sound like /d/, this accent is like the one from South Africa. australian accent tend to use the sound /æ/ instead of the sound /a:/ like "celery" and "salary" they both sound the same in Australian accent.
here you have some links in order to know more about English accents:
Here you have some recording of the different accents:
This is a very interesting video about a girl trying to do several English accents, it is very good:

1 comment:

  1. You have made some interesting observations on the Scottish and Australian accents, Genaro.

    I found your comments on the use of the short vowel in both foot and food in the Scottish accent of particular interest - perhaps that explains why I sometimes find it difficult to know whether it is a long / u: / or a short / ʊ / in some words.

    I also agree with your observations about the Australian accent. The mouth does generally stay more closed, meaning that there is less difference between the vowel sounds, and there are certainly some similarities with a South African accent.

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