Listening to the Past

Audio Records of Accents of English

Raymond Hickey

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781107051577
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316868096
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Audio recordings of English are available from the first half of the twentieth century and thus complement the written data sources for the recent history of the language. This book is the first to bring together a team of globally recognised scholars to document and analyse these early recordings in a single volume. Looking at examples of regional varieties of English from England, Scotland, Ireland, the USA, Canada and other anglophone countries, the volume explores both standard and vernacular varieties, and demonstrates how accents of English have changed between the late nineteenth century and the present day. The socio-phonetic examinations of the recordings will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics, the history of the English language, language variation and change, phonetics, and phonology.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Analysing Early Audio Recordings
• 2 British Library Sound Recordings of Vernacular Speech: They Were Lost and Now They Are Found
• 3 Twentieth-Century Received Pronunciation: Prevocalic /r/
• 4 Twentieth-Century Received Pronunciation: Stop Articulation
• 5 London’s Cockney in the Twentieth Century: Stability or Cycles of Contact-Driven Change?
• 6 The Origins of Liverpool English
• 7 Tyneside English
• 8 Scotland: Glasgow and the Central Belt
• 9 Early Recordings of Irish English
• 10 Evidence of American Regional Dialects in Early Recordings
• 11 New England
• 12 Upper Midwestern English
• 13 Western United States
• 14 Analysis of the Ex-Slave Recordings
• 15 Archival Data on Earlier Canadian English
• 16 Canadian Raising in Newfoundland? Insights from Early Vernacular Recordings
• 17 The Caribbean: Trinidad and Jamaica
• 18 Early Recordings from Ghana: A Variationist Approach to the Phonological History of an Outer Circle Variety
• 19 Earlier South African English
• 20 Early Twentieth-Century Tristan da Cunha h’English
• 21 Open Vowels in Historical Australian English
• 22 Early New Zealand English: The Closing Diphthongs
• 23 The Development of Recording Technology
• Index