accents – Language Blues

Articoli taggati "accents"

Who says intonation doesn’t matter?

Sometimes language learners are so worried about grammar accuracy to think that intonation doesn’t matter that much after all. Personally, I have always felt a bit down when my sentence stress was so influenced by my mother tongue to force my interlocutor to repeat what I had just said, even …

British accents and dialects – Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland

NORTHERN IRELAND Many of the accents spoken in the province of Ulster share common features with Scottish English. Here are some distinguishing features: 1) Diphthongs in words like goat and face tend to be monopthongs, so they sound like “goot” and “fees”. 2) The “oo” in cook or book is …

British accents and dialects – the Midlands and the North of England

THE MIDLANDS As the word suggests, this is the “centre” of England. Here we can distinguish between East Midlands and West Midlands. The most famous dialect is the one spoken in Birmingham, which is called BRUMMIE. Linguistic variation has diminished a lot in these areas and it now tends to …

British accents and dialects – Southern Britain

Southern English has some common features that can be grouped as follows: 1) “r-dropping”: the “r” at the end of a word is not pronounced. Actually, it sounds similar to the “i” in girl or the “u” in purse; e.g. water or better are pronounced “uotǝ” and “betǝ”. That symbol …

British accents and dialects – an introduction

The Cornish and Manx dialects are facing the threat of extinction, sharing the same fate as some other 33 languages across Europe. This is what I’ve found out in an article recently published in the Western Morning News. The information is gathered from the UNESCO Languages in Danger Project, which …

One-minute World News

Listening: solo film in lingua originale? I miei studenti mi confessano spesso che il listening è l’abilità che più fanno difficoltà a sviluppare. Riuscire a comprendere ciò che ci viene comunicato in forma orale in una lingua che non è la nostra è sicuramente un’impresa ardua, soprattutto per coloro che hanno …

Archivi tag: accents