Fall 2006

LING 470J "Accents of English"

Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11-12:15

              This course will explore the speech patterns of many accents of English, both from the United States and from other major Anglophone areas around the world, with a focus on both regional and social varieties. Students will receive practical ear training to detect and transcribe differences in speech. They will study how accents are part of a set of systematic patterns, along with the major characteristics of a variety of accents. For example, in which areas do speakers park their car or "pahk theuh cah"? Which speakers distinguish each vowel in the words Mary, merry, marry, Murray? Which areas have merged the vowels in word pairs like caught and cot? Which areas have a "z-sound" in the word greasy? Can a speaker's race or ethnicity be identified soley from their speech?

              Students will study some of the historical origins of accents and attitudes towards accents, as seen in both scholarly studies and the media. Students will work with materials from various linguistic atlas projects, sociolinguistic studies of urban speech, and on-line speech archives, in addition to collecting their own data to transcribe, describe and analyze.

This course fulfills the seminar requirement for the English major. Prerequisite: LING 101, and any 300-level linguistics course, or permission of instructor. Students may also petition to take this course out of sequence (before the 300-level linguistics course) with permission of instructor.

LINKS

Multimedia Tools from Mouton (Handbook of Varities of English and the Atlas of North American English)

Arthur the Rat combined DARE form

Alt-Usage-English list audio forms
International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA)
Speech Accent Archive
Phonological Atlas of North America (earlier version of the Atlas of North American English)
British accents and dialects at BBC Voices
British Library's "Collect Britain" English Accents and Dialects
Varieties of English
List of Links for Phonetics/Phonology from University of Washington

Miscellaneous links