HENK03611U Engelsk - Frit emne: The dialects of North American English

This course will focus on variation in North American English pronunciation exploring the evidence presented in Labov et al.’s ‘The Atlas of North American English, Phonetics, phonology and sound change’ (Mouton de Gruyter 2005), which outlines the phonological variation in the speech of North Americans in the 1990’s. The main focus of the course will be on ongoing sound changes inNorth Americawhich, according to the Atlas, define the boundaries of dialects. Thus the course will focus on not only the mechanism, the cause and the consequences of linguistic change but also on the diagnostic phonological features of individual dialects found on the continent. The course will also will deal with the description of English accent phonology and outline in particular how the phonology of vowels plays a crucial role in the categorization of English phonological accents as well as discuss phoneme, allophone, reference accent and acoustic phonetics.