Титульный лист на русском языке

МОСКОВСКИЙ ГОСУДАРСТВЕННЫЙ ОТКРЫТЫЙ УНИВЕРСИТЕТ

Факультет лингвистики и межкультурной коммуникации

Кафедра лингвистики

РЕФЕРАТ

по теоретической фонетике английского языка

на тему:

«Нормативное произношение в современной Великобритании »

Выполнил(а):

Студентк(а) _-го курса

__________ отделения

группы _ _ _ _

__________ __________

Руководитель:

ст. преп. Усачёва Я.В.

Москва

20 _ _

Титульный лист на английском языке

MOSCOW STATE OPEN UNIVERSITY

The Faculty of Linguistics and

Crosscultural Communication

The Chair of Linguistics

The Theoretical Course in English Phonetics

PROJECT

“RP as the pronunciation standard in Great Britain”

Student

__________ __________

_ year, __________ department

Group “__________”

Supervisor

Ya.V. Usacheva

Moscow

20 _ _

Contents

Introduction 4

british English 5

History 5

Accent 6

Standardisation 7

The form of English taught across Europe is mainly that used in England and the subject is simply called "English". 7

Received Pronunciation 7

Usage 8

Status 8

Phonology 9

Consonants 9

Vowels 10

Historical variation 12

Comparison to other varieties 12

Received Pronunciation and BBC English 13

What is Received Pronunciation? 13

"Although the BBC does not, and never did, impose pronunciations of its own on English words, the myth of BBC English dies hard. It owed its birth no doubt to the era before the Second World War, when all announcers ... spoke ... Received Pronunciation." 13

What is BBC English? 13

Is there such a thing as BBC English? 14

Social prestige and the role of language 15

Estuary English 15

Features 16

Use of Estuary English 17

Blurring of accents 18

Royal stereotypes 18

General features 19

Some of the features of English English: 19

Change over time 20

References 20

Introduction

English developed from Anglo-Saxon and is a Germanic language. However, all the invading peoples, particularly the Norman French, influenced the English language and you can find many world in English which are French in origin. Nowadays all Welsh, Scottish and Irish people speak English (even if they speak their own language as well), but all the countries have their own special accents and dialects, and their people are easily recognisable as soon as they speak. Occasionally, people from the four countries in the UK have difficulty in understanding one another because of these different accents. A southern English accent is generally accepted to be the most easily understood, and is the accent usually taught to foreighners. A southern english accent is the Queen accent. People who speak this Qween’s English are considered to be snobs.¹

British English

British English (BrE, BE, en-GB) is the broad term used to distinguish the forms of the English language used in the United Kingdom from forms used elsewhere in the Anglophone world.^[1] British English encompasses the varieties of English used within the UK, including those in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and to some extent, those spoken in the former British Empire. Some may also use the term more widely, to include other forms such as Hiberno-English (spoken in Ireland).

Most Britons – the majority of whom speak English as either a first or a second language – consider that they just speak "English", rather than "British English". The term "British English" is used only by non-British people when necessary to distinguish it from other forms of English. British people, especially the English, would normally distinguish by naming the country (e.g. "Canadian") or region (e.g. "American") of the version of English.

History

The widespread use of English worldwide is largely attributable to the power of the former British Empire, and this is reflected in the continued use of the language in both its successor (the Commonwealth of Nations) and many other countries. In the days before radio and television, most communication across the English-speaking world was by the written word. This helped to preserve a degree of global uniformity of the written language. However, due to the vast separation distances involved, variations in the spoken language began to arise. This was also aided by émigrés to the empire encountering other, non-British cultures. In some cases, resulting variations in the spoken language have led to these being reflected in minor variations in written language usage, grammar and spellings in other countries.

Accent

The most common form of English used by the British ruling class is that originating from southeast England (the area around the capital, London, and the ancient English university towns of Oxford and Cambridge). This form of the language is known as the "Received Standard", and its accent is called Received Pronunciation (RP), which is improperly regarded by many people outside the UK as "the British accent". Earlier it was held as better than other accents and referred to as the King's (or Queen's) English, or even "BBC English". Originally, this was the form of English used by radio and television. However, there is now much more tolerance of variation than there was in the past; for several decades other accents have been accepted and are frequently heard, although stereotypes about the BBC persist. English spoken with a mild Scottish accent has a reputation for being especially easy to understand. Moreover, only approximately two percent of Britons speak RP, and it has evolved quite markedly over the last 40 years.

Even in the south east there are significantly different accents; the local inner east London accent called Cockney is strikingly different from RP and can be difficult for outsiders to understand^.

There is a new form of accent called Estuary English that has been gaining prominence in recent decades: it has some features of Received Pronunciation and some of Cockney. In London itself, the broad local accent is still changing, partly influenced by Caribbean speech. Londoners speak with a mixture of these accents, depending on class, age, upbringing, and so on.

Outside the southeast there are, in England alone, other families of accents easily distinguished by natives, including: West Country (South West England), East Anglian, West Midlands, East Midlands, Liverpool (Scouse), Manchester and other east Lancashire accents, Yorkshire, Newcastle (Geordie) and other northeast England accents.

Although some of the stronger regional accents may sometimes be difficult for some English-speakers from outside Britain to understand, almost all 'British English' accents are mutually intelligible amongst the British themselves, with only occasional difficulty between very diverse accents. However, modern communications and mass media have reduced these differences significantly. In addition, most British people can to some degree temporarily 'swing' their accent (and particularly vocabulary) towards a more neutral form of 'standard' English at will, to reduce difficulty where very different accents are involved, or when speaking to foreigners. This phenomenon is known in linguistics as code shifting.