English and its Varieties. An Analysis of the British and the North American Sound System

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, Free University of Berlin (Institut für Englische Philologie), course: Levels of Linguistic Analysis II, language: English, abstract: Regarding the English language, there are wide variations in pronunciation, including dialects or accents due to differences within the age, the gender, or the geographical origin of the speaker. But there are also variations that are defined as standard pronunciation. Two of them, concerning the English language, are known as the Received Pronunciation (RP), which presents the Standard British accent, and the General American accent (GA), which presents the standard pronunciation in North America. Nowadays those variations face the people amongst others by the spoken media, like television or radio. Especially English learners who were, or still are predominantly confronted with the British English Pronunciation due to their academic education tend to have an issue with the unfamiliar General American pronunciation.

To illustrate the differences between the General American accent and the Received Pronunciation in British English, this paper dwells on the individual parts that finally form a specific pronunciation type: The differences within the vowel and consonant system, as well the differences within the articulation with focus on the stress of syllables.