Málfríður - 15.03.2007, Blaðsíða 16

1 MÁLFRÍÐUR
People want to make an impression with their accent
and the way they speak often depends on which
social group they wish to identify with. In Britain,
and in most other cultures around the world, the
way people speak is often an indicator of their sta­
tus in society, their origin, and can even give hints
as to their age, occupation, and so on. However,
Estuary English has been spreading through all lev­
els of the social hierarchy, which might confuse the
interlocutor that has never met the speaker before.
Estuary English is a term coined by David Rose­
warne in 1984. He described this accent as “[a]
variety of modified regional speech [...] a mixture
of non­regional and local south­eastern English
pronunciation and intonation” (Rosewarne 1984).
This pronunciation has its origin around the river
Thames and its estuary, which means that most
of the speakers live in the South­East of England.
Various other people have been developing the
description by discussing the geographical spread
of Estuary English.
Estuary English used to be understood as a devia­
tion from a standard, or rather, a deviation from
Received Pronunciation, but things have turned out
differently.
The Speaker
Generally, a speaker of Estuary English is described
as being “young, middle (or upper) class, upwardly
mobile, and – contrary to the belief of many news­
paper columnists – in possession of a certain level of
education” (Haenni, 1999: 51).
While one group of speakers speak with the
Estuary English accent so they will sound more
high­class, another group adopts it to sound less
high­class. As Altendorf noted “[t]his social com­
promise is also reflected in the linguistic makeup
of [Estuary English]. It comprises features of RP as
well as non­standard London English thus borrow­
ing the positive prestige from both accents without
committing itself to either. This vagueness makes it
extremely difficult to pin [Estuary English] down
linguistically” (Altendorf 1999: 1).
One can hear this accent spoken, for instance, in
London, in the media, in schools, in the House of
Commons, and amongst influential people such as
David Beckham and Sir Michael Caine.
The Pronunciation
I analyzed David Beckham’s accent from listen­
ing to two BBC interviews from 2004 as a way of
describing the pronunciation characteristics, for he
is doubtless one of the best known current speak­
ers of Estuary English. I will try to explain these
characteristics briefly. Also, when pointing out the
characteristics of Beckham´s pronounciation, it is
important to note that he is being compared to
Received Pronunciation, which has been the stan­
dard in England. There were several common characteristics in
Beckham‘s pronunciation, such as lowered vowels,
G­Dropping, Glottalling, and more. Lowered vow­
els basically means that the position of the tongue is
lower than that of RP pronunciation. For instance, it
is lower when pronouncing shining [a
T
I]. The symbol
next to [a] signifies the fact that it is lowered. Once
lowered, this vowel sounds almost like the [ cI] vowel
in boy ['b cI] and royal ['r cI el]. G­Dropping means,
as the name indicates, that Beckham drops the
„­g“ in pronunciations such as ['hævIn] (having) and
['krɑpIn] (cropping). Beckham also had Glottalling,
which means that the sounds of /p/, /t/, and /k/
were often replaced with a glottal stop. For exam­
ple, David Beckham said [a Ω?] instead of [a Ωt],
[wI:?] instead of [wI:k], and so on. HappY Tensing
was another characteristic of Beckham‘s accent. This
means that in the final position of words such as
actually and happy the sound has more of an “í”
quality to it than in Received Pronunciation. Conse­
quently, these words were pronounced ['æ?uli]
and ['hæpi] instead of ['æ?ulI] and ['hæpI]. L­
Vocalisation means that [l] in words like foot-
ball and always was replaced by the vowel [o].
Guðlaug Hilmarsdóttir
er í MA ná­mi í ensku við
Há­skóla Íslands.
Guðlaug Hilmarsdóttir
Guðlaug Hilmarsdóttir
Estuary English