English Phonetics Diary #3

     This week I watched the second part of the series about different English accents from the English with Lucy channel. This video focused on how different sounds are pronounced in three different English accents - British, American, and Canadian. Sets of 3 sentences showcasing a specific rule or type of pronunciation were presented to the representatives of the different accents and later contrasted. I had a lot of fun with this video, it was very eye-opening, and so I hope this reflection will interest some.

    The first set of sentences was related to the different 'o' sounds. In the example of 'I bought a bot', the American and Canadian speakers pronounced the 'o' in the two words the same (/baːt/), while the British speaker pronounced them differently (/bɔːt/ and /bɒt/). The first sound, present in words like 'taught' or 'bought' is much longer than the other one. It's interesting how British English distinguishes the two sounds and makes one of the 'o' sounds longer. I also loved the discussion about American and Canadian accents sometimes dropping the second 't' in a words. They used the example of the word 'Toronto' and with a British accent the second 't' was voiced, while in American and Canadian it was not voiced. It was interesting to see how similar the American and Canadian accents are, because I've always struggled with contrasting them, apart from a couple very specific words. Another set of sentences was connected to pronouncing 'o' before an 'r'. The word 'sorry' is pronounced differently in all three accents - /ˈsɒri/ in British, /ˈsaːri/ in American, and /ˈsɔːri/ in Canadian. This is where we start seeing the differences between Canadian and American accents. All three accents have a totally different pronunciation, which really helps starting to distinguish them. Finally, the last set I wanted to discuss was words that start with 'pro-'. This was a very interesting one and the first word discussed was 'process'. With the British accent it was pronounced as /ˈprəʊses/, in the American accent as /ˈpraːses/, and the Canadian accent actually uses both. At this stage I've started noticing certain patterns. The American accent has a tendency to simplify a lot of the 'o' sounds, where they all are pronounced as /aː/, on the example of 'sorry', 'bought', and 'process'. The other two accents have much more variety and intricacy, especially the British accent, which might be one of the reasons it's so distinct. 

    Watching this video was an entertaining and very educational experience for me. Accents are a fascinating aspect of spoken language and being able to look at them in a very scientific way was fascinating. I not only was able to understand the differences between different accents better, but I think my language awareness level, especially connected to transcription, has really elevated thanks to this video, which is why I recommend it to all my colleagues.