Accents and Articulation

The Gussenhoven and Kenstowicz articles complement one another nicely in that the former discusses the physical manner in which words and their corresponding sounds are produced, while Kenstowicz discusses certain curious anomalies found in the phonetics of the English language.

Gussenhoven’s discussion is centred around an explanation of how various anatomical elements in and around our mouths function in tandem with one another. For example, fricatives are the result of a narrowing of the speech tract, producing sounds found in words like fee (voiceless labiodental fricative), while plosives come about through quite the opposite – a complete closure of the very same speech tract. Such words are found especially frequently in the French language and often necessitate that no air escape through the nasal cavity. These effects are also built upon the pre-existing circumstance that pressure differences in different parts of the human vocal tract exist. Gussenhoven completes the discussion by providing a concise overview of the phonetic alphabet.

Kenstowicz raises more interesting questions, building upon our newly-acquired knowledge of physical mechanisms in and around the mouth. As a reader without a traditional ‘American’ accent, this article was of great interest to me as it required me to think of word pronunciations in a manner very different from that in which I would ordinarily pronounce them.

What stood out to me most starkly was the discussion of ‘flapping’ – in this case, the distortion of ‘t’ sounds in multiple different ways. A number of cases were cited with reference to American English: ordinary flapping with the word ‘atom’, nasal flapping with the word ‘panty’, and glottal stops in words such as ‘bottle’ or ‘cotton’. As a leaner of French, German, and Russian, the notions of flapping and glottal stops were not entirely unfamiliar to me. As mentioned in Gussenhoven, German contains multiple instances of glottal stops, for example (eg. beachten, Beamter, geeignet).

However, the paper brought to my consciousness the immense variation that can be found in the English language alone. It is fascinating that such a similar alphabet set used across multiple languages can lead to such vast differences in pronunciation. In fact, examining just the English language and nuances between accents would provide a compelling enough study.

English being a non-phonetic language makes it all the more interesting: unlike phonetic languages such as German and Russian in which there is far greater regulation in the pronunciation of consonant and vowel clusters, it surprises me that native English speakers are so unaware of the almost random differences in pronunciation (myself included). I would like to explore in greater depth the perception of these differences to non-native English speakers, while taking a closer look at the phenomenon in British English in which the letter ‘r’ is almost non-existent and unpronounced when it appears at the end of words (as in ‘car’ or ‘later’). This mirrors the flapping phenomenon in American English in which the letter ‘t’ in the middle of words tends to be left less-well-articulated or pronounced as a ‘d’.