What is an Accent?
Accents are the specific way in which each person pronounces a language, they are varieties of English based on pronunciation. Accents have specific regional ways of saying things and people who share a geographical space usually have a similar accent. Accents give clues about a person, where they come from and can also signal towards someone’s class, age, gender, ethnicity and social standing amongst other things. Accents can come from neighbouring places or from historical languages. Accents can give an impression of intelligence, employability, friendliness and personal and social characteristics. Accents are amazing!
Linguistics
*Warning*, This section may include jargon that some viewers find offensive! I may get a little bit technical and I may get carried away!***
As a linguist I aim to record the Manx accent and interpret it so I can describe it to audiences all over the world. Above is the international pronunciation chart. It is an alphabet of sounds. The chart is far from perfect but it attempts to display all the sounds of an accent.
Below is an example of the pronunciation chart and the phonetic symbols ʌ and ʊ are shown. The first sound may be found in the word 'butter' in the south of England, while the second may be the vowel in 'butter' in the North. Click to hear the difference in the vowel choice between a southern and northern English.
ʌ
ʊ
Not only can we analyse which vowel sound an accent prefers, we can also pinpoint how the certain vowel sound has been pronounced. The chart below is a rough display of a mouth. I recorded 3 people saying the word school to determine how they say the /u:/ vowel. The y-axis (F1) shows how high or low the tongue position is in the mouth, while the x-axis (F2) shows how far to the front or back the tongue position is. Using linguistic software we can pinpoint the differences between different accents in terms of how we each say our vowel sounds.
