Regional accents of English

English dialects differ greatly in their pronunciation of open vowels. In Received Pronunciation, there are four open back vowels, , but in General American there are only three, , and in most dialects of Canadian English only two, . Which words have which vowel varies between dialects. Words like bath and cloth have the vowels in Received Pronunciation, but in General American. The table above shows some of these dialectal differences. ==Britain and Ireland==

Accents and dialects vary widely across Great Britain, Ireland and nearby smaller islands. The UK has the most local accents of any English-speaking country. As such, a single "British accent" does not exist. Someone could be said to have an English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish accent, although these all have many different subtypes. England Southern England There are considerable variations within the accents of English across England, one of the most obvious being the trap–bath split of the southern half of the country. Two main sets of accents are spoken in the West Country, namely Cornish and West Country, spoken primarily in the counties of Devon, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Bristol, Dorset (not as common in Dorset), and Wiltshire (again, less common in eastern Wiltshire). A range of variations can be heard within different parts of the West Country: The Bristolian dialect is distinctive from the accent heard in Gloucestershire (especially south of Cheltenham), for example. The Cornish accent has an east–west variation, with the east of the county having influences from West Country English and the west of the county having direct influences from the Cornish language. There is great variation within Greater London, with various accents such as Cockney, Estuary English, Multicultural London English, and Received Pronunciation being found all throughout the region and the Home Counties. Other accents are those of • the East Midlands (Derby, Leicester and Rutland, Lincoln, Northampton, and Nottingham) • East Anglia (Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire) • the Home Counties (typically Buckinghamshire, Essex, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, Surrey, Sussex, Kent, and Hampshire). The Essex accent has an east–west variation, with the county's west having Estuary English speech features and the county's east having the traditional Essaxon/East Anglian features. • A range of accents are spoken in the West Midlands (in the major towns and conurbations (The Black Country, Birmingham, Coventry, Stoke-on-Trent (considered by many to have tones of scouse), and Wolverhampton) and in rural areas (such as in Herefordshire and south Worcestershire). In February 2019, the New York Times published a quiz that maps the geographical differences between British and Irish dialects. Northern England The accents of Northern England have a range of regional variations. Cumbria has regional variants in Western Cumbria (Workington), Southern Cumbria (Barrow-in-Furness), and Carlisle. Modern Northumbrian has local variants in Northern Northumberland (Berwick-upon-Tweed), Eastern Northumberland (Ashington) and Newcastle, Sunderland, and mid- and southern County Durham. A specialist dialect called Pitmatic is within this group, found across the region. It includes terms specific to coal mining. Yorkshire is distinctive, having regional variants around Leeds, Bradford, Hull, Middlesbrough, Sheffield, and York. Although many Yorkshire accents sound similar, accents in areas around Hull and Middlesbrough are markedly different. Due to this, the Middlesbrough accent is sometimes grouped, with modern Northumbrian accents being a midway between the two regions. The Hull accent's rhythm is more like that of northern Lincolnshire than that of the rural East Riding, perhaps due to migration from Lincolnshire to the city during its industrial growth. One feature that it shares with the surrounding rural area is that an /aɪ/ sound in the middle of a word often becomes an /ɑː/, for example, "five" may sound like "fahve", and "time" like "tahme"; this way of pronouncing the "i" sound (only when followed by a voiced consonant) is shared with the Middlesbrough accent, as is the distinctive pronunciation of words like 'work' ("wairk") or 'shirt' ("shairt"). Historic Lancashire, with regional variants in Bolton, Burnley, Blackburn, Manchester, Preston, Blackpool, Liverpool, and Wigan. Many of the Lancashire accents may sound similar to outsiders, with the exception of Manchester and Wigan, where an older dialect has been maintained. The Liverpool accent, known as Scouse, is an exception to the Lancashire regional variant of English. It has spread to some of the surrounding towns. Before the 1840s, Liverpool's accent was similar to others in Lancashire, though with some distinct features due to the city's proximity to Wales. The city's population of around 60,000 was swelled in the 1840s by the arrival of around 300,000 Irish refugees escaping the Great Famine, as Liverpool was England's main Atlantic port and a popular departure point for people leaving for a new life in the United States. While many of the Irish refugees moved away, a vast number remained in Liverpool and permanently influenced the local accent. Scotland The regional accents of Scottish English generally draw on the phoneme inventory of the dialects of Modern Scots, a language spoken by around 30% of the Scottish population with characteristic vowel realisations due to the Scottish vowel length rule. Highland English accents are more strongly influenced by Scottish Gaelic than other forms of Scottish English. Wales The Welsh language heavily influences the use of English in Wales, which is characterised by unique grammatical conventions and a distinctive lexicon not found in other dialects of English. As in Welsh, the placement of the subject and the verb after the predicate allow the speaker to add greater emphasis at the start of a declaration, such as or . In south Wales the use of the tag question is common irrespective of the Subject–verb–object word order, while the word where in a question is often followed by the auxiliary "to", as in "" Aside from lexical borrowings from Welsh such as and (which are used consistently throughout Wales), colloquial English terms such as () and are largely limited to the South Wales Valleys. Despite the varieties of English spoken in Wales, the features of English in the South Wales valleys are commonly recognisable as "Welsh English" to people from the rest of the UK. The Cardiff dialect and accent is quite distinctive from that of the South Wales Valleys, primarily: • Rounding of the second element of to Isle of Man Manx English has its own distinctive accent, influenced to some extent by the Lancashire dialect and to a lesser extent by some variant of Irish English. Ireland Ireland has several main groups of accents, including (1) the accents of Ulster, with a strong influence from Scotland as well as the underlying Gaelic linguistic stratum, which in that province approaches the Gaelic of Scotland, (2) those of Dublin and surrounding areas on the east coast where English has been spoken since the earliest period of colonisation from Britain, and (3) the various accents of west, midlands, and south. Ulster The Ulster accent has two main sub accents, namely Mid Ulster English and Ulster Scots. The language is spoken throughout the nine counties of Ulster and in some northern areas of bordering counties such as Louth and Leitrim. It bears many similarities to Scottish English through influence from the Ulster varieties of Scots. Some characteristics of the Ulster accent include: • As in Scotland, the vowels and are merged, so that look and Luke are homophonous. The vowel is a high central rounded vowel, . • The diphthong is pronounced approximately , but wide variation exists, especially between social classes in Belfast. • In Belfast, is a monophthong in open syllables (e.g. day ) but an ingliding diphthong in closed syllables (e.g. daze ). But the monophthong remains when inflectional endings are added, thus daze contrasts with days . • The alveolar stops become dental before , e.g. tree and spider. • often undergoes flapping to before an unstressed syllable, e.g. eighty Connacht, Leinster, and Munster The accent of these three provinces fluctuates greatly from the flat tone of the midlands counties of Laois, Kildare, and Offaly to the perceived sing-song of Cork and Kerry to the soft accents of Mayo and Galway. Historically, the Dublin City and county area, parts of Wicklow and Louth, came under heavy exclusive influence from the first English settlements, known as The Pale. It remained until Independence from Britain as the biggest concentration of English influence on the whole island. Some Cork accents have a unique lyrical intonation. Every sentence typically ends in the trademark elongated tail-off on the last word. In Cork, heavier emphasis yet is put on the "brrr" sound to the letter "R." This is usually the dialect in northern parts of Cork City. Similar to the Cork accent but without the same intonation, Kerry puts even heavier emphasis on the "brrr" sound to the letter "R.", for example, the word "forty". Throughout the south, this word is pronounced whereby the "r" exhibits the typified Irish "brrr". In Kerry, especially in rural areas, the roll on the "r" is enforced with vibrations from the tongue, not unlike Scottish here. "Are you?" becomes a cojoined "A-rrou?" single tongue flutter, especially in rural areas. This extra emphasis on "R" is also seen in varying measures through parts of West Limerick and West Cork in closer proximity to Kerry. Another feature in the Kerry accent is the "S" before the consonant. True to its Gaelic origins in a manner similar to parts of Connacht, "s" maintains the "shh" sound as in "shop" or "sheep". The word "start" becomes "shtart", and "stop" becomes "shtop". Irish Travellers Irish Travellers have a very distinct accent closely related to a rural Hiberno-English, particularly the English of south-eastern Ireland. Many Irish Travellers who were born in parts of Dublin or Britain have the accent in spite of it being strikingly different from the local accents in those regions. They have their own language, Shelta, which strongly links in with their dialect/accent of English. ==North America==

North American English is a collective term for the dialects of the United States and Canada. It does not include the varieties of Caribbean English spoken in the West Indies. • Rhoticity: Most North American English accents differ from Received Pronunciation and some other British dialects by being rhotic. The rhotic consonant is pronounced before consonants and at the end of syllables, and the r-colored vowel is used as a syllable nucleus. For example, while the words "hard" and "singer" would be pronounced and in Received Pronunciation, they would be pronounced and in General American. Exceptions are certain traditional accents found in eastern New England, New York City, and the Southern United States, plus African-American English. • Mergers before : R-coloring has led to some vowel mergers before historic that do not happen in most other native dialects. In many North American accents, "Mary", "merry", and "marry" sound the same (Mary–marry–merry merger), but they have the vowels , , , respectively, in RP. Similarly, "nearer" rhymes with "mirror" (mirror–nearer merger), though the two have different vowels in RP: and . Other mergers before occur in various North American dialects. • Mergers of the low back vowels: Other North American mergers that are absent in Received Pronunciation are the merger of the vowels of "caught" and "cot" ( and in RP) in many accents, and the merger of "father" (RP ) and "bother" (RP ) in almost all. • Flat a: Most North American accents lack the so-called trap–bath split found in Southern England: Words like "ask", "answer", "grass", "bath", "staff", and "dance" are pronounced with the short-a of "trap", not with the broad "A" of "father" heard in Southern England as well as in most of the Southern Hemisphere. In North America, the vowel of "father" has merged with that of "lot" and "bother" (see above). Related to the trap–bath split, North American dialects have a feature known as /æ/ tensing. This results in /æ/ in some environments, particularly nasals to be raised and even diphthongized, typically transcribed as . Thus, "answer" is typically pronounced as rather than . • Flapping of and: In North American English, and both become the alveolar flap after a stressed syllable and between vowels or syllabic consonants, making the words "latter" and "ladder" homophones, either as or . The United States does not have a concrete "standard" accent in the same way that Britain has Received Pronunciation. A form of speech known to linguists as General American is perceived by many Americans to be "accent-less", meaning a person who speaks in such a manner does not appear to be from anywhere in particular. The region of the United States that most resembles this is the central Midwest, specifically eastern Nebraska, including Omaha and Lincoln; southern and central Iowa, including Des Moines; and parts of Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and western Illinois, including Peoria and the Quad Cities but not the Chicago area. Canada Three major dialect areas can be found in Canada: Western/Central Canada, the Maritimes, and Newfoundland. The phonology of West/Central Canadian English, also called General Canadian, is broadly similar to that of the Western US, except for the following features: • The diphthongs and are raised to approximately and before voiceless consonants. For example, the vowel sound of "out" is different from that of "loud" . This feature is known as Canadian raising. The is even more raised in Atlantic Canada, closer to . • The short "a" of "bat" is more open than almost everywhere else in North America . The other front lax vowels and , too, can be lowered and/or retracted. This phenomenon has been labelled the Canadian Shift. The pronunciation of certain words shows a British influence. For instance, "shone" is , "been" is often , "lieutenant" is , "process" can be , etc. Words like "drama", "pajamas"/"pyjamas", and "pasta" tend to have rather than ~. Words like "sorrow", "Florida", and "orange" have rather than ; therefore, "sorry" rhymes with "story" rather than with "starry". United States West Indies and Bermuda For discussion, see: • Bahamian English • Barbadian English • Bequia English • Bermudian English • Caribbean English • Jamaican English • Saban English • Trinidadian English ==Oceania==

Australia Australian English is relatively homogeneous when compared to British and American English. There is some regional variation between the states, particularly South Australia, Victoria, Queensland, Northern Territory, and Western Australia. Three main varieties of Australian English are spoken according to linguists: Broad Australian, General Australian and Cultivated Australian. The area formed a traditional repository of immigration from Scotland. Some sections of the main urban areas of Auckland and Wellington show a stronger influence of Māori and Pacific island (e.g., Samoan) pronunciations and speech patterns than most of the country. The trilled "r" is used by some Māori, who may pronounce "t" and "k" sounds without aspiration, striking other English speakers as similar to "d" and "g". This is also encountered in South African English, especially among Afrikaans speakers. Norfolk Island and Pitcairn The English spoken on the isolated Pacific islands of Norfolk and Pitcairn shows evidence of their long isolation from the world. Pitcairn's local creole, Pitkern, shows strong evidence of its rural English 19th-century origins, with an accent that has traces of both the English southwest and Geordie. The Norfolk Island equivalent, Norfuk, was greatly influenced in its development by Pitkern. The accents heard on the islands when English is used are similarly influenced but in a much milder way. In the case of Norfolk Island, Australian English is the primary influence, producing something like a softened version of an Australian accent. The Pitcairn accent is for the most part largely indistinguishable from the New Zealand accent. ==Africa and the Atlantic==

South Atlantic Falkland Islands The Falkland Islands have a large non-native-born population, mainly from Britain but also from Saint Helena. In rural areas, the Falkland accent tends to be stronger. The accent has resemblances to both Australia-NZ English and that of Norfolk in England and contains a number of Spanish loanwords. Saint Helena "Saints", as Saint Helenan islanders are called, have a variety of different influences on their accent. To outsiders, the accent has resemblances to the accents of South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. "Saint" is not just a different pronunciation of English; it also has its own distinct words. So "bite" means "spicy, as in full of chillies"; "us" is used instead of "we" ("us has been shopping"); and "done" is used to generate a past tense, hence "I done gorn fishing" ("I have been fishing"). Television is a reasonably recent arrival there and is only just beginning to have an effect. American terms are becoming more common, e.g. "chips" for crisps. The Coloured community is generally bilingual. English accents are strongly influenced by one's primary mother tongue, Afrikaans, or English. A range of accents can be seen, with the majority of Coloureds showing a strong Afrikaans inflection. Similarly, Afrikaners and Cape Coloureds, both descendants of mainly Dutch settlers, tend to pronounce English phonemes with a strong Afrikaans inflection. The English accents of both related groups are significantly different and easily distinguishable, primarily because of prevalent code-switching among the majority of Coloured English speakers, particularly in the Western Cape of South Africa. The range of accents found among English-speaking Coloureds, from the distinctive "Cape Flats or Coloured English" to the standard "colloquial" South African English accent, are of special interest. Geography and education levels play major roles therein. Black Africans generally speak English as a second language. One's accent is strongly influenced by one's mother tongue, particularly Bantu languages. Urban middle-class Black Africans have developed an English accent, with similar inflection as first-language English speakers. Within this ethnic group, variations exist: Most Nguni (Xhosa, Zulu, Swazi, and Ndebele) speakers have a distinct accent, with the pronunciation of words like "the" and "that" as would "devil" and "dust", respectively, and words like "rice" as "lice". This may be a result of the inadequacy of "r" in the languages. Sotho (Tswana, Northern Sotho, and Southern Sotho) speakers have a similar accent, with slight variations. Tsonga and Venda speakers have very similar accents with far less intonation than Ngunis and Sothos. Some Black speakers have no distinction between the "i" in "determine" and the one in "decline", pronouncing it similarly to the one in "mine". Black, Indian, and Coloured students educated in former Model C schools or at formerly White tertiary institutions will generally adopt a similar accent to their White English-home-language speaking classmates. Code-switching and the "Cape Flats" accent are becoming popular among White learners in public schools within Cape Town. South African accents vary between major cities, particularly Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg, and provinces (regions). Accent variation is observed within respective citiesfor instance, Johannesburg, where the northern suburbs (Parkview, Parkwood, Parktown North, Saxonwold, etc.) tend to be less strongly influenced by Afrikaans. These suburbs are more affluent and populated by individuals with tertiary education and higher incomes. The accents of native English speakers from the southern suburbs (Rosettenville, Turffontein, etc.) tend to be more strongly influenced by Afrikaans. These suburbs are populated by tradesmen and factory workers, with lower incomes. The extent of Afrikaans influence is explained by the fact that Afrikaans urbanisation would historically have been from failed marginal farms or failing economies in rural towns, into the southern and western suburbs of Johannesburg. The western suburbs of Johannesburg (Newlands, Triomf, which has now reverted to its old name Sophiatown, Westdene, etc.) are predominantly Afrikaans-speaking. In a similar fashion, people from predominantly or traditionally Jewish areas in the Johannesburg area (such as Sandton, Linksfield, and Victory Park) may have accents influenced by Yiddish or Hebrew ancestry. South African English accents, across the spectrum, are non-rhotic. Examples of South African accents (obtained from http://accent.gmu.edu) • Native English: Male (Cape Town) • Native English: Female (Cape Town) • Native English: Male (Port Elizabeth) • Native English: Male (Nigel) • Afrikaans (Primary): Female (Pretoria) • Afrikaans (Primary): Male (Pretoria) • Afrikaans (Primary): Male (Pretoria) • Northern Sotho (Primary): Female (Polokwane) Additional samples of South African accents and dialects can be found at http://web.ku.edu/~idea/africa/southafrica/southafrica.htm . Regardless of regional and ethnic differences (in accents), South African English accents are sometimes confused with Australian (or New Zealand) English by British and American English speakers. Zimbabwe In Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, native English speakers, mainly the White and Coloured minority, have a similar speech pattern to that of South Africa. Those with high degrees of Germanic inflection pronounce "Zimbabwe" as zim-bah-bwi, as opposed to the African pronunciation zeem-bah-bweh. Zimbabwean accents vastly vary, with some Black Africans sounding British while others will have a much stronger accent influenced by their mother tongues. Usually, this distinction is brought about by where speakers grew up and the school attended. For example, most people who grew up in and around Harare have a British-sounding accent, while those in the rural areas have a more "pidgin-english" sort of accent. Example of a Zimbabwean English accent (obtained from http://accent.gmu.edu) • Shona (Primary): Female (Bulawayo) Namibia Namibian English tends to be strongly influenced by South African English. Most Namibians who grew up in and around the capital city, Windhoek, have developed an English accent. Those in rural areas have an accent strongly influenced by their mother tongue, particularly Bantu languages. Nigeria Nigerian English varies by constituent units. The accents are influenced by the various mother tongues of the Nigerian constituent units. ==Asia==

India and South Asia A number of distinct dialects of English are spoken in South Asia. There are many languages spoken in South Asia like Nepali, Hindi, Punjabi, Rajasthani, Sindhi, Balochi, Pashto, Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Kannada, Kashmiri, Marathi, Odia, Maithili, Malayalam, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu, Tulu, Urdu and many more, creating a variety of accents of English. Accents originating in this part of the world tend to display several distinctive features, including: • syllable-timing, in which a roughly equal time is allocated to each syllable, akin to the English of Singapore and Malaysia. Elsewhere, English speech timing is based predominantly on stress. • "sing-song" pitch, somewhat reminiscent of those of Welsh English • retroflexion of "t" and "d" Philippines Philippine English employs a rhotic accent that originated from the time it was first introduced by Americans during the colonization period in an attempt to replace Spanish as the dominant political language. As there are no /f/ or /v/ sounds in most native languages in the Philippines, [p] is used as an alternative to /f/ as [b] is to /v/. The words "fifty" and "five" are often pronounced as and by many Filipinos. Similarly, /θ/ is often changed to [t] and /ð/ to [d]. "Three" becomes /tri/ while "that" becomes /dat/. This feature is consistent with many other Malayo-Polynesian languages. /z/ is often devoiced to [s], whereas [ʒ] is often devoiced to [ʃ] or affricated to [dʒ], so words like "zoo", "measure", and "beige" may be pronounced [su], [ˈmɛʃoɾ], and [beɪdʒ]. Apart from the frequent inability to pronounce certain fricatives (e.g., [f], [v], [θ], [ð], [z], [ʒ]), in reality, there is no single Philippine English accent. This is because native languages influence spoken English in different ways throughout the archipelago. For instance, those from Visayas usually interchange the sounds /e/ and /i/ as well as /o/ and /u/ because the distinction between those phonemes is not very pronounced in Visayan languages. People from the northern Philippines may pronounce /r/ as a strong trill instead of a tap, which is more commonly used in the rest of the Philippines, as the trill is a feature of the Ilocano language. Ilocano people generally pronounce the schwa sound /ə/ better than other Filipinos because they use a similar sound in their native language that is missing from many other Philippine languages. Hong Kong The accent of English spoken in Hong Kong follows mainly British, with rather strong influence from Cantonese on the pronunciations of a few consonants and vowels, sentence grammar, and structure. Malaysia Malay is the lingua franca of Malaysia, a federation of former British colonies and similar dependencies. English is a foreign language with no official status, but it is commonly learnt as a second or third language. The Malaysian accent appears to be a melding of British, Chinese, Tamil, and Malay influences. Many Malaysians adopt different accents and usages depending on the situation. For example, an office worker may speak with less colloquialism and with a more British accent on the job than with friends or while out shopping. • Syllable-timing, where speech is timed according to syllable, akin to the English of the Indian Subcontinent. Elsewhere, speech is usually timed to stress. • A quick, staccato style, with "puncturing" syllables and well-defined, drawn-out tones • Non-rhoticity, like most varieties of English language in England. Hence, "caught" and "court" are homophonous as (in actuality, or ), "can't" rhymes with "aren't", etc. • The "ay" and "ow" sounds in "raid" and "road" ( and , respectively) are pronounced as monophthongs, i.e. with no "glide": and . • is pronounced as [t] and as [d]; hence, "thin" is and "then" is . • Depending on how colloquial the situation is: many discourse particles, or words inserted at the end of sentences that indicate the role of the sentence in discourse and the mood it conveys, like "lah", "leh", "mah", "hor", etc. Singapore Singapore is effectively a multilingual nation. The Singapore government recognises four official languages: English, Malay, Mandarin Chinese, and Tamil. Students in primary and secondary schools learning English as the language of instruction also learn a second language called their "Mother Tongue" by the Ministry of Education, where they are taught Mandarin Chinese, Malay, or Tamil. A main point to note is while "Mother Tongue" generally refers to the first language (L1) overseas, in Singapore, it is used by the Ministry of Education to denote the traditional language of one's ethnic group, which sometimes can be their second language (L2). There are two main types of English spoken in Singapore: Standard Singapore English and Singlish. Singlish is more widely spoken than Standard English. It has a very distinctive tone and sentence structure, which are both strongly influenced by Malay and the many varieties of Chinese spoken in the city. A 2005 census showed that around 30% of Singaporeans speak English as their main language at home. There are many foreigners working in Singapore. 36% of the population in Singapore are foreigners, and foreigners make up 50% of the service sector. Therefore, it is very common to encounter service staff who are not fluent in English. Most of these staff speak Mandarin Chinese. Those who do not speak Mandarin Chinese tend to speak either broken English or Singlish, which they have learnt from the locals. ==Antarctica==

Phonetic change in the English spoken at a base in Antarctica has been registered. This has been referred to as the start of a new accent called Antarctic English. ==See also==