Introduction to Accents & Dialects

English Language: AQA A Level, topic 3.4.2

Accents and Dialect - Introduction

One of the most obvious ways we can tell differences in language is by listening to how people pronounce things.

How you speak (generally) indicates where you were raised.
For example, you can tell if someone’s from Newcastle because they will (generally) speak with a Geordie accent and use terms like ‘pet’.

In linguistics, we use the terms accent and dialect.
We say that dialect is the words that are fairly unique to that area.
The term accent describes how we say words. Everybody speaks with an accent, even if they think they don’t. You will often hear people say that they ‘don’t have an accent’, but this is not true – people have difficulties understanding that they have an accent because they believe that they speak ‘normally’.

Before we can look at accent, we need to look at how you write about accents for your exam.
When writing about a sound, we always write the phoneme (unit of sound) in two forward slashes like this: /a/.
When describing longer sounds, we use ‘:’ after the symbol.
To transcribe sounds, we use the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). These are freely available online. But you will not be given this in your Paper 2 exam, so you will have to memorise phonological features from the studies.

What is a Scouser (someone from Liverpool) using the word 'jarg' (fake) an example of?
Where was someone with a Brummie accent likely raised?
What do you need to remember when writing about sounds?
What kind of accent is someone from Newcastle likely to have?
What does IPA stand for?