Listening to the Past Audio Records of Accents of English

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.

1. Analysing early audio recordings Raymond Hickey; 2. British Library sound recordings of vernacular speech Jonathan Robinson; 3. Twentieth-century received pronunciation: prevocalic /r/ Anne Fabricius; 4. Twentieth-century received pronunciation: stop articulation Raymond Hickey; 5. Early London English Paul Kerswill and Eivind Torgersen; 6. Merseyside Kevin Watson and Lynn Clark; 7. Scotland - Glasgow and the Central Belt Jane Stuart-Smith and Eleanor Lawson; 8. Early recordings of Irish English Raymond Hickey; 9. Evidence of American regional dialects in early recordings Matthew J. Gordon and Christopher Strelluf; 10. New England Daniel Ezra Johnson and David Durian; 11. Upper Midwestern English Thomas Purnell, Eric Raimy and Joseph Salmons; 12. Western United States Valerie Fridland and Tyler Kendall; 13. Analysis of the ex-slave recordings Erik R. Thomas; 14. Archival data on earlier Canadian English Charles Boberg; 15. Canadian raising in Newfoundland? Sandra Clarke, Paul De Decker and Gerard Van Herk; 16. The Caribbean Shelome Gooden and Kathy-Ann Drayton; 17. West Africa Magnus Huber; 18. Earlier South Africa English Ian Bekker; 19. Tristan da Cunha Daniel Schreier; 20. Australia Felicity Cox; 21. Early New Zealand English: the closing diphthongs Márton Sóskuthy, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Katie Drager and Paul Foulkes; 22. The development of recording technology Raymond Hickey.

Raymond Hickey is Professor of English Linguistics at Universität Duisburg–Essen. His main research interests are varieties of English (especially Irish English and Dublin English) and general questions of language contact, variation and change. Among his recent book publications are Irish English: History and Present-Day Forms (Cambridge, 2007), The Handbook of Language Contact (2010), Eighteenth-Century English (Cambridge, 2010) and The Sound Structure of Modern Irish (2014).