Concept
Rhoticity in English
Related concepts (20)
English language in England
The English language spoken and written in England encompasses a diverse range of accents and dialects. The language forms part of the broader British English, along with other varieties in the United Kingdom. Terms used to refer to the English language spoken and written in England include: English English and Anglo-English.
English-language vowel changes before historic /r/
In English, many vowel shifts affect only vowels followed by /r/ in rhotic dialects, or vowels that were historically followed by /r/ that has been elided in non-rhotic dialects. Most of them involve the merging of vowel distinctions and so fewer vowel phonemes occur before /r/ than in other positions of a word. Rhoticity in English In rhotic dialects, /r/ is pronounced in most cases. In General American English (GA), /r/ is pronounced as an approximant ɹ or ɻ in most positions, but after some vowels, it is pronounced as r-coloring.
Philadelphia English
Philadelphia English is a variety or dialect of American English native to Philadelphia and extending into Philadelphia's metropolitan area throughout the Delaware Valley, including southeastern Pennsylvania, counties of northern Delaware (especially New Castle and Kent), the northern Eastern Shore of Maryland, and all of South Jersey, with the dialect being spoken in cities such as Wilmington, Atlantic City, Camden, Vineland, and Dover.
Compensatory lengthening
Compensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda, or of a vowel in an adjacent syllable. Lengthening triggered by consonant loss may be considered an extreme form of fusion (Crowley 1997:46). Both types may arise from speakers' attempts to preserve a word's moraic count. An example from the history of English is the lengthening of vowels that happened when the voiceless velar fricative /x/ and its palatal allophone [ç] were lost from the language.
Manchester dialect
Mancunian (or Manc) is the accent and dialect spoken in the majority of Manchester, North West England, and some of its environs. It is also given to the name of the people who live in the city of Manchester. It has been described as 'twangy' whilst also being labelled 'euphonic' and has been voted as the sexiest accent in England. Additionally it has been claimed Mancunian is one of the most desirable and friendliest accents in the UK.
Lexical set
A lexical set is a group of words that share a particular phonological feature. A phoneme is a basic unit of sound in a language that can distinguish one word from another. Most commonly, following the work of phonetician John C. Wells, a lexical set is a class of words in a language that share a certain vowel phoneme. As Wells himself says, lexical sets "enable one to refer concisely to large groups of words which tend to share the same vowel, and to the vowel which they share".
Diaphoneme
A diaphoneme is an abstract phonological unit that identifies a correspondence between related sounds of two or more varieties of a language or language cluster. For example, some English varieties contrast the vowel of late (/eː/) with that of wait or eight (/ɛɪ/). Other English varieties contrast the vowel of late or wait (/eː/) with that of eight (/ɛɪ/). This non-overlapping pair of phonemes from two different varieties can be reconciled by positing three different diaphonemes: A first diaphoneme for words like late (⫽e⫽), a second diaphoneme for words like wait (⫽ei⫽), and a third diaphoneme for words like eight (⫽ex⫽).
Pronunciation of English ⟨ng⟩
In English, the digraph often represents the velar nasal, as in long lɒŋ and nothing ˈnʌθɪŋ. In other cases, it represents a sequence of the velar nasal followed by the voiced velar stop, as in longer ˈlɒŋɡər, which had been the original pronunciation of the digraph up until Early Modern English when the g sound was lost in most words, giving ŋ a phonemic status in English. Another pronunciation is ndʒ, as in angel ˈeɪndʒəl and one pronunciation of longevity lɒnˈdʒɛvɪti (alternatively pronounced with ŋdʒ, lɒŋˈdʒɛvɪti, by analogy with long).
Syllabification
Syllabification (sɪˌlæbɪfɪˈkeɪʃən) or syllabication (sɪˌlæbɪˈkeɪʃən), also known as hyphenation, is the separation of a word into syllables, whether spoken, written or signed. The written separation into syllables is usually marked by a hyphen when using English orthography (e.g., syl-la-ble) and with a period when transcribing the actually spoken syllables in the International Phonetic Alphabet (e.g., [ˈsɪl.ə.bəɫ]). For presentation purposes, typographers may use an interpunct (Unicode character U+00B7, e.
H-dropping
H-dropping or aitch-dropping is the deletion of the voiceless glottal fricative or "H-sound", [h]. The phenomenon is common in many dialects of English, and is also found in certain other languages, either as a purely historical development or as a contemporary difference between dialects. Although common in most regions of England and in some other English-speaking countries, and linguistically speaking a neutral evolution in languages, H-dropping is often stigmatized as a sign of careless or uneducated speech.