Urban Voices: Accent Studies In The British Isles

Description: Accents and dialects are constantly undergoing small variations over time, but evidence shows that change may have become increasingly rapid in the past few decades. 'Urban Voices' presents one of the few recent surveys of this phonological variation and change in urban accents across Great Britain and Ireland.



Each of the specially commissioned chapters is divided into two parts. The first provides a detailed description of accent features within one or more urban centres, including information on social and stylistic variation and ongoing change. The second discusses a range of current theoretical and methodological issues. Some chapters present wholly new data based on fieldwork carried out specifically for inclusion in 'Urban Voices', while others summarise data from well-known research, up-dated and reanalysed in accordance with new findings.



Containing copious illustrative and pedagogic material, this textbook presents a clear pathway to state-of-the-art research for students of sociolinguistics, dialectology, phonetics, and phonology at advanced undergraduate and graduate level. In addition, the detailed descriptive data and the accompanying cassette constitute a valuable resource for students and teachers of English, clinicians and speech therapists, forensic phoneticians, researchers in speech recognition and speech synthesis, and actors.



Contributors: Deborah Chirrey, Edge Hill University College / Beverley Collins, Rijks Universiteit Leiden, Netherlands / Gerard J Docherty, University of Newcastle, UK / Paul Foulkes, University of Leeds, UK / Nigel Hewlett, Queen Margaret College / Raymond Hickey, University of Essen, Germany / Paul Kerswill, University of Reading, UK / Anne Grethe Mathisen, University of Oslo, Norway / Kevin McCafferty, Universitetet i Tromso, Norway / Inger Mees, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark / Lesley Milroy , University of Michigan, USA / Mark Newbrook, Monash University, Australia / James M Scobbie, Queen Margaret College, UK / Jana Stoddart, Olomouc, Czech Republic / Jane Stuart-Smith, University of Glasgow, UK / Laura Tollfree, Monash University, Australia / Peter Trudgill, University of Fribourg, Switzerland / Alice Turk, University of Edinburgh, UK / Clive Upton, University of Leeds, UK / Dominic Watt, University of Leeds, UK / J D A Widdowson, University of Sheffield, UK / Ann Williams, University of Reading, UK.



Contents:
The international phonetic alphabet
Urban voices - overview
Patterns of variation and change in three Newcastle vowels: is this dialect levelling?
Derby and Newcastle: instrumental phonetics and variationist studies
Sheffield dialect in the 1990s: revisiting the concept of NORMs
West Wirral: norms, self-reports and usage
Sandwell, West Midlands: ambiguous perspectives on gender patterns and models of change
Norwich endogenous and exogenous linguistic change
Dialect levelling: change and continuity in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull
South East London English: discrete versus continuous modelling of consonantal reduction
Cardiff a real-time study of glottalization
Glasgow accent and voice quality
Edinburgh: descriptive material
Standard English in Edinburgh and Glasgow: the Scottish Vowel Length Rule revealed
(London)Derry: between Ulster and local speech - class, ethnicity and language change
Dublin English: current changes and their motivation.