Introducing English Linguistics

Vowels in English
While the number of consonants across dialects of English is relatively
constant, with vowels there is considerably more dialectal variation. For
this reason, the discussion in this section will be restricted to the vowels
found in the standard varieties of American and British English. These
varieties are sometimes referred to, respectively, as General American (GA)
and Received Pronunciation (RP) or BBC English. It must be emphasized,
however, that while these varieties have a certain amount of prestige in
the United States and Great Britain, they are not spoken by everyone in
these countries, and variations from these standards do not necessarily
result in non-standard pronunciation. In the United States, people resid-
ing in Nashville, Tennessee, for instance, do not desire to speak like peo-
ple in Chicago, Illinois. Each part of the United States has its own region-
al standard of pronunciation, which may or may not resemble GA. The
same situation holds true in Great Britain, where only a small fraction of
individuals (10 percent of population) actually speaks RP.
Table 7.2 lists the vowels found in General American and RP. As this
table illustrates, vowels are classified according to the relative position of
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INTRODUCING ENGLISH LINGUISTICS