English World-Wide - Volume 24, Issue 1, 2003

The formants of the conversational vowels of five male and five female Singapore English (SgE) speakers are measured and compared with comparable measurements of British English (BrE) in order to gain a comprehensive view of the vowel space of Singaporean speakers and to determine which of the vowel distinctions of BrE are not maintained in SgE. It is found that the distinctions between /iː/ and /ɪ/ and also /e/ and /æ/ are not maintained in SgE, and any distinction between /ɔː/ and /ɒ/ is small. It is also found that SgE /uː/ is more back than BrE /uː/. It is further suggested that the fewer number of vowel contrasts in SgE does not contribute to much loss of intelligibility.

Serious studies on English pronunciation in Africa, which are only beginning, have so far highlighted the regional and sociolinguistic distribution of some features on the continent. The present paper revisits some aspects of these studies and presents a sort of pronunciation atlas on the basis of some selected features. But more importantly, the paper examines how these features are formed. It considers, but goes beyond, the over-used theory of mother-tongue interference, and analyses a wide range of other factors: colonial input, shared historical experience, movement of populations, colonial and post-colonial opening to other continents, the psychological factor, speakers’ attitudes towards the various models of pronunciation in their community, etc. For example, the Krio connection accounts for some striking similarities between Nigerian, Sierra Leonean and Gambian Englishes despite the wide geographical distance between them. The positive perception of their accent, which they judge superior to the other West African accents, has, in the past three decades, shaped the English pronunciation of Ghanaians in a particular way. The northward movements of populations have disseminated to East Africa some typically Southern African features. Links between Southern and East Africa, and Asia, are reflected in the presence of some Asian features in East and Southern African Englishes. The paper shows how African accents of English result from the interaction between the influence of indigenous languages and Africans’ exposure to several colonial and post-colonial Englishes.

The article discusses the specific features of the English used in The Gambia by looking at the phonetic and lexical markers that distinguish Gambian English from the other national varieties of West African English. The study shows that Gambian English has a number of established and exclusive features owing to the formation of a national norm and the influence of certain indigenous languages, yielding a national quasi-standard easy to identify.

The article examines the phonology of Rhondda Valleys English, an accent of the Welsh “Valleys”, to try to discover to what degree it is influenced by the Welsh language. It finds some features of segmental phonology which appear to be direct transfers. However, most of these appear to be recessive, since they are found mostly in the speech of older generations born at a time when there was considerably more Welsh spoken in the Rhondda than at present. The article lists other non-standard features of segmental phonology where parallel sounds exist in the Welsh language, but it cannot be stated with certainty that Welsh is the primary source. In such cases, the Welsh substratum may be acting at least to reinforce the presence of the features concerned. Finally, the article looks at the suprasegmentals (prosody) of Rhondda Valleys English. Here, because the similarities with the Welsh language are so striking and there are no obvious parallels with neighbouring dialects of England, it would seem very likely that most of the features concerned constitute direct transfers. Since such Welsh-language derived suprasegmental features seem more pervasive than the segmental ones, they may well form the strongest and most enduring “Celtic imprint” on the dialect studied.

The spread of the glottal stop as a variant of /t/ in British English has been well documented in the recent literature (Macafee 1994; Macaulay and Trevelyan 1973; Stuart-Smith 1999; Kerswill and Williams 2000; Fabricius 2002). The origins of this feature are not easy to pinpoint, and some theories (Macafee 1997, for example) even point to Glasgow, though not without controversy. It is, nevertheless, spreading rapidly throughout Scotland in predictable patterns along the lines of social class, age and sex (Macaulay 1991; Stuart-Smith 1999; Romaine 1982). This paper presents some of the findings from a recent study of pronunciation changes in rural Aberdeenshire (north-east Scotland). The data confirm the spread of the glottal stop in this area in apparent time. In addition to this, there is an interesting pattern visible. While all of the other phonetic variables in this study show remarkable similarity of patterning across age, the glottal stop shows a different distribution. I argue that the reason for this has to do with its status as an incoming variant which is not a Scottish Standard English form, and that the groups which resist it and those which adopt it are predictable from the results of sociolinguistic research elsewhere in Britain.