Theatre Speech (was: Flapping to another Topic)

[Aaron E. Drews]

On Mon, 24 Jan 2000, A. Vine wrote:

}I can vouch for heavy rhoticity in the English West Country speech.


That's where most of England's rhoticity is found.  Looking at a map of
England, the rhoticity boundary starts from about the center of the south
coast of England, and extends eastward in the south, and makes a fuzzy arc
to about central Wales.  Probably the best place to find true
Shakespearian English.

I think Trudguill's maps are from the mid 70s, and the data they're based
on is older.

There's a bit of rhoticity in the far north of England, but that's dying
out.  Rhoticity is even starting to die out in Scotland.  But the north of
England and the West Country, as far as I can reckon, don't make up half
of England geographically.  In terms of population, non-rhoticity is
spoken by far more than 50% of the English.

The /w/-/hw/ distinction is lost in almost all of England (I'm not sure
about the far north).  It's also losing ground in Scotland, rather
rapidly.


}
}Beverly Flanigan wrote:
}>
}> This is interesting--reminds me of "the voice from nowhere" in _American
}> Tongues_ (where the Directory Assistance operator says she was chosen for
}> her "generic" speech).  The combination of features doesn't seem quite
}> right:  Hasn't the voiced-voiceless /w/ distinction been (largely) lost on
}> both sides of the Atlantic?  And non- or weak-rhoticity fits only half of
}> England (according to Trudgill's maps) and much less than half of the
}> U.S.  By "released" intervocalic /t/ do you mean [t]?  Again, this wouldn't
}> fit either side of the pond today, would it?
}>
}

________________________________________________________________________
Aaron E. Drews                               The University of Edinburgh
aaron at ling.ed.ac.uk                  Departments of English Language and
http://www.ling.ed.ac.uk/~aaron       Theoretical & Applied  Linguistics

"MERE ACCUMULATION OF OBSERVATIONAL EVIDENCE IS NOT PROOF"
        --Death