British English Pronunciation preferences: a changing scene.

J.C. Wells
Dept. of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London (1999)
A poll of BrE pronunciation preferences was carried out in late 1998, based on a self
selected sample of nearly 2000 speech-conscious respondents, who answered a
hundred questions about words of uncertain or controversial pronunciation.
This survey was carried out as a part of the research for the new edition of a
pronunciation dictionary (Well 1999 and forthcoming)

As the key points of this article, these quotations sum up what the objective of the
same self was. This is, to exhibit the reasons why the poll was carried out, the making
processes and the results it gave to his author.
Wells explains that There is a problem for lexicographers in deciding which variant to
priorize for learners dictionaries, to recommend because of uncertainties when it
comes the time to pronounce a controversial word they have to rely on their informal
impressions.
Before this survey was carried out, another one was firstly performed by Wells in a
small-scale way, with a bunch of ninety words, and its results were introduced in the
first edition of the LPD by Wells. Those showed a clear preference by BrE speakers of
the vowel e over i, as instance.
Wells based this second survey basing it on the first, but organizing it on a wider scale,
as I mentioned before. Joined, these compendiums of an analysis provided a basis for a
more reliable assay of both variant preferences and language changes in progress.

The use of a written questionnaire is apparently taken as an innovation owing to the

previous presence of a specially trained worker who transcribed live or recorded
utterances. This time, the respondents reported their performances. Despite the
inaccuracy in their linguistic usage, the author explains that it is a perfectly trustworthy
system to use in these kinds of surveys, because he relies on respondents awareness on
whether they prefer a given pronunciation or another.

Moving on to the methodologys procedure, the poll took place in September and
October 1998, and the design of it was sketched in three ways; a 12-page printed
document distributed by post, a plain-text electronic document shred by e-mail or as an
interactive form on the web. The printed document was chosen by the huge majority to

hand in their written responses. Press and radio publicity made possible to recruit two
thousand of self-selected British speech-conscious respondents, motivated to spend up
to an hour answering the questionnaire. But press and radio publicity from the British
Association Festival of Science was not the only way of recruiting the respondents.
Wells organized a direct contact to another phoneticians, friends, and students of
phonetics or even from casual visitors to the official web site of the Dept. of Phonetics
and Linguistics. A precondition imposed to them was that of having spent their
childhood living in Britain.

Concerning the social characteristics of the respondents Wells admits the bias within
the resultant sample, as it appeared not to be representative for the population of Great
Britain. It does not accurately reflect the balance of sexes, age groups, or regional
origin of the population as a whole in the authors opinion, priorize a motivation to
complete the questionnaires with self-selected participants was better than low response
rates based on random samples. Moreover, despite being statistically insignificant,
related to sex condition, more women volunteered for this analysis. (1141 women, 786
men). Finally, related to age, Wells had to correct the biased sample on adults, which in
the end gave an approximately equal representation with an age range 10-75. The results
were represented in this kind of tables and they showed a statistically significant
relationship between pronunciation preference and age. For example, younger people
fancy the pronunciation /bu/.

As regards regional origin, it was reported that of the 1932 respondents, the 49% had a
southern England origin; the 30.1% were from the north of England, 3.5% from
Scotland and 2.9% from Wales. The remaining 14.5% had moved around within Great
Britain and, as it has been explained before, any who spent a long time outside Britain
were excluded. Some of the responses showed an association with this pattern and
pronunciation preferences, as this example displays in terms of percentages with the
vowel in halt.

Correcting come bias for age because of associations with the regions of origin, the raw
50-50 reported a 52% preference for // and a 48% for//.

A hundred multiple-choice questions made up the content of the questionnaire for the
respondents to choose which if two or more pronunciations of a selected word. An
example would be the following.

Again, age made a difference among other parameters. The questionnaire was divided
into three sections which dealt with consonant, vowels and stress patterns. Besides it
included some non-linguistic related questions about sex, origin and so on.

The results of these surveys led to some important findings: Are standards of
pronunciation declining? Are older people out of touch? What is it with spelling
pronunciation? Are sound changes in progress? Are there any talking points of
discussion? One by one, Wells exhibit these themes together with tables extracted from
results.
Firstly, the author exposes that the general public reached the conclusion of a declining
in standards of pronunciation, mainly as a reflection of the aversion languages have to
changes. This is due to loss of stigmatization (as in the word nuclear /'njkli/) and the
bad press Received Pronunciation had gained lately (increasingly perceived as
exclusive and formal).Younger groups therefore prefer non-RP pronunciation, who in a
way have less deference to it. These happenings led some variants to vanish, like the
French borrowing questionnaire, which had been anglicized by younger speakers to
/kest'ne/. Preferences are therefore gradually moving into line with actual usage.
Secondly, the author reveals that concerning senior groups there is a pattern in which
they would adapt relatively new words to their own pronunciation owing to they are less
familiar with the actual pronunciation. Several examples are mall word of which they
preferred a closer pronunciation to a Londoner street instead of the option for the
American pronunciation /ml/, as it is a borrowing.
Spelling pronunciation tends to rely on orthography in a way that pronunciation
corresponds with spelling. For example, the long vowel // is mostly associated with
the letter a however, when combined with an l and another consonant alternatives arise,
like for the item scallop /'sklp/ or falcon, although traditionally pronounced /fkn/,
the option /'flkn/ reached the 50% preference amongst the under 26s may be

supported by the similarity to the title of the American drama Falconcrest. Further
results showed an inflectional regularization in plural form fricatives //- // in which
the younger groups tended to use the voiceless one instead of the traditional voiced
sound; a velar softening in Latin-derived words, such as /'lgtjud/which becomes a
rival pronunciation for /'lndtjud/; A regularization in stress placement in derivative
words ending in able (and disagreement in its pronunciation), which led to a pattern of
change in the stress position towards the antepenultimate syllable, like in the word
/n'kmp()rb()l/; When found in compundings, there existed, also, a regularization
preference towards younger generations, while senior groups tended to irregularities
like /'njuspep/or /'frd/.
Speeding things up, the results also showed sound changes in progress, such as the loss
of //, which is disappearing and being replaced by / /; A yod coalescence, this is,
that /tj/ and /dj / are gradually becoming /t/ and /d/ respectively; The so called
Cheshire cat plosives are experimenting both epenthesis and elision; There are
changes too both in weak vowels (as in careless) and in the selection of weak as against
unstressed strong vowel in certain items (as garage).

As there is not such a section of a conclusion, I will simply explain that the main
purpose of this survey is to research new and old discussions about some misleading or
controversial pronunciations.