The accentual structure and intonation

CONTENTS

1.      Introduction

2.      General overview of the dialect

3.      The system of  consonants

4.      The system of vowels

5.      The accentual structure and intonation

6.      The system of consonants

7.      The system of vowels

8.      The accentual structure and intonation

9.      Conclusion

10. Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

To start with, the anglophone Australia and New Zealand are two of the youngest nations in the world. The first Europeans who took their residence in Australia came more than 200 years ago. They did not come because they wanted to. Australia was founded as a penal colony. Convicts from Britain, mostly from large English cities, were sent there. They were joined by free settlers, military personnel and administrators, often with their families. However, a large part of the convict body was Irish, with at least 25% directly from Ireland, and others indirectly via Britain. There were other populations of convicts from non-English speaking areas of Britain, such as the Welsh and Scots. English was not spoken, or was poorly spoken, by a large part of the convict population, and the dominant English input was that of Cockney South-East England

They were eventually followed by voluntary immigrants. Until now, the Australian with British ancestor is the predominant part of the population. Among them, the area where a nowadays Australian most probably can find their ancestors is the region around London. The second important group of immigrants were Irish, mainly responsible for the huge number of Catholics in Australia compared with Britain (30.4% in 1851).

Later Australian English was influenced by “Americanization”, a lot of new words, spelling, terms and usages were introduced. In XIX century the reason was the immigration during the Australian gold rushes, and in XX century American influence has mostly arrived via pop culture and through the mass media – books, magazines, television programs, and computer software – and the web.

Major differences between Australian English and Received Pronunciation

1.1  General overview of the dialect

As for modern Australian English, according to linguists there are three main varieties of it which are spoken: Broad, General and Cultivated. They reflect variations in accent and the social class or educational background of the speaker as well, but not very often.

Broad Australian English (BAusE) is recognisable and familiar to English speakers around the world because it is used to identify Australian characters in non-Australian films and television programs. On the other hand, the majority of Australians speak with the General Australian accent (GAusE). This predominates among modern Australian films and television programs. As for Cultivated Australian English (CAusE), it has some similarities to British Received Pronunciation, and is often mistaken for it. Cultivated Australian English is spoken by some within Australian society.

1.2    The system of  consonants

A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below.

        Australian accent is non-rhotic: star /stɑ:/.

        Many speakers have also coalesced /dj/, /sj/ and /tj/ into /dʒ/, /ʃ/ and /tʃ/, producing standard pronunciations such as /tʃu:n/ for tune.

        The flapping of intervocalic /t/ and /d/ to alveolar tap /ɾ/ before unstressed vowels (as in butter, party) and syllabic /l/ (bottle), as well as at the end of a word or morpheme before any vowel (what else, whatever). Thus, for most speakers, pairs such as ladder/latter, metal/medal, and coating/coding are pronounced identically.

        Both intervocalic /nt/ and /n/ may be realized as /n/ or /ɾ/, which can make winter and winner homophones. Interesting will sound like inner-resting. Most areas in which /nt/ is reduced to /n/, it is accompanied further by nasalization of simple post-vocalic /n/, so that V/nt/ and V/n/ remain phonemically distinct. In such cases, the preceding vowel becomes nasalized, and is followed in cases where the former /nt/ was present, by a distinct /n/. This stop-absorption by the preceding nasal /n/ does not occur when the second syllable is stressed, as in entails.

1.3 The system of  vowels

Australian English vowels are divided into two categories: long, which includes long monophthongs and diphthongs, and short, all of which are monophthongs. Australian English long vowels mostly correspond to the tense vowels used in analyses of Received Pronunciation (RP) as well as its centralising diphthongs whereas its short vowels correspond to the lax vowels. A number of vowels differ only by the length.

The phonetic basis for the three accent types emerges from a consideration of these qualities. The broad accent makes much use of tongue movements which are more open or further forward than the RP norms. The cultivated accent is, literally, further back.

The vowel system of BAusE is very similar to Cockney, the accent of working class in London while the counterpart of CAusE is close to that of British. CAusE differs from GAusE and BAusE in terms of Diphthong Shifting, which is similar to that found in the southeast of England. BAusE is close to GAusE but with extra duration in the first element of the diphthongs. The mainly rural broad type has noticeably slow diphthongs.

Observations of Australian English vowels have given us detailed insight into variations that occur within the dialect and how Australian English (AusE) differs from British and American. The major characteristics of Australian are summarized as following.

The front vowels in Australian, as in the words /I/, /e/, and /æ/ are all raised relative to the same vowels in British. This means that the vowel in the word /I/ is rather closer to the /i:/ vowel than in British. The vowel /e/ is closer to the /I/ vowel than in British and the vowel in the word /æ/ is closer to the /e/ vowel than in British. The vowels in the words /O:/ and /O/, which are back vowels in British, are more fronted in Australian and therefore closer to the /æ/ vowel. The high /u:/ and /u/ vowels are very similar to one another in British but these two are quite distinct in AusE.

The centering diphthongs /Iə/ and /e:/ occurring in Australian are often pronounced with negligible off glide such that the production is rather like prolonged monophthongal realization  /I/ and /e/ vowels e.g. weary /wIəri:/ /wI:əi/.

The glides in the /æq/ and /qu/ vowels have different orientations in British relative to Australian. The rising diphthongs such as /æI/, /ae/, /OI/, /æq/, and /əu/ occur. /əu/, /ae/, /OI/ vowels have undergone a process of shift such that in Australian /æI/ is similar to British /ae/. In some instances, these differences may lead to misunderstanding such as the unfortunate woman who believed she was being sent home from the hospital ‘to die’ after being informed that she was ‘going home today’

Australian English prefers the word-internal /ə/ and the word-final /i:/ to the unstressed /I/, e.g. that sounds for an Englishman as if it were thet.

The Australian tend to merge all the unstressed vowels in /ə/ where British use / I/ and the ending – y, e.g., July /Gqlai/, Geelong, /Gqlaŋ/. /R/ is produced as /a/ in most positions, in words like dance even /æ/.

1.4        The accentual structure and intonation

Speaking about the accentual structure there is no difference in the position of stress in words.

As for intonation, it is characterized by examples of uptalk, i.e. high rising terminals associated with syntactic declarative utterances. While a variety of tunes were found in turn-final contexts, speakers tended to use mid-level, high rises, and fall-rises, whereas more final falls coincided with turn-yielding position. There were minimal differences in the spread of intonational patterns across the city and country corpora, although country speakers used marginally more uptalk than city speakers.

At the same time, CA speakers tend to have a slightly smaller intonation range than RP speakers. This lead to several criticisms of CA speech as "monotonous" by many speech trainers earlier this century.  There are other traits of RP pronunciation that are not present in CA, such as frequent use of a definite vowel in the final position. 

Major differences between Australian English and RP

(practical application)

CONCLUSION

To sum up, Australian English is a non-rhotic variety of English spoken by most native-born Australians. Phonologically, it is one of the most regionally homogeneous language varieties in the world. As with most dialects of English, it is distinguished primarily by its vowel phonology.

References

1.      Cox Felicity & Sallyanne Palethorpe , "Australian English", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 37 (3): 341-350, 2007

2.      Harrington, J.; Felicity Cox & Z. Evans, "An acoustic phonetic study of broad, general, and cultivated Australian English vowels", Australian Journal of Linguistics 17: 155–84,1997

3.      Mitchell and Delbridge "Phonetics of English in Australia", 2004

4.      Roach, Peter , "British English: Received Pronunciation", Journal of the International Phonetic Association 34 (2): 239-245 , 2004

5.      Wells, J.C. Accents of English London: Cambridge University Press, 1982, rep. 1985

6.      www.englishlanguage.ru

THE RAINBOW PASSAGE.

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act as a prism and form a rainbow.  The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colours. These take the shape of a long round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon. There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end. People look, but no one ever finds it. When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

2