A choice of reference accents

As we have seen, the consonant system of English is relatively uniform throughout the English-speaking world; accents of English differ mainly in terms of their vowel systems as well as in the phonetic realisations of vowel phonemes. The aim of this chapter is the discussion of three of the vowel systems of English: one from (Southern) England, one from Scotland and one from the United States. All three of them are ‘standard’ systems in that they are used by speakers of Standard English rather than by speakers of nonstandard regional dialects. They therefore reflect accents of such speakers who have the syntax, morphology and vocabulary of the variety of Standard English spoken in England, Scotland and the United States respectively.

Needless to say, these three accents are not the only ones to go with whatever variety of Standard English may be spoken in various parts of the world: for example, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Northern and Southern Ireland and not least the West of Britain and certain parts of the United States have different accents, which may to a greater or lesser extent also be standardised. None of these accents will be systematically covered in this book (but see section 3.7 below, where the characteristics of some of them will be briefly summarised). Why, then, make this particular choice of three standard accents? Apart from the fact that all three accents are interesting in their own right – a fact that hardly distinguishes these from others – there are several reasons for choosing these three for detailed and systematic treatment.