XVI Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2024

Initially, I want to present a definition and figure out what a Brummie accent is, as it is very important to understand the meaning of the work as a whole.

The Brummie dialect, or more formally the Birmingham dialect, is spoken by many people in Birmingham, England, and some of its surrounding area. "Brummie" is also a demonym for people from Birmingham. It is often erroneously used in referring to all accents of the West Midlands, as it is markedly distinct from the traditional accent of the adjacent Black Country, but modern-day population mobility has tended to blur the distinction. Population mobility has meant that to a degree, the Brummie accent extends into some parts of the Metropolitan Borough of Solihull, but much of the accent within the borough might be considered to be closer to contemporary Received Pronunciation.

The term Brummie derives from Brummagem or Bromwichham, which are historical variants of the name Birmingham.

The strength of a person's accent can vary greatly all across Birmingham. As with most cities, the local accent changes relative to the area of the city in question. A common misconception is that everyone in Birmingham speaks the same accent. It could be argued that Brummie is an accent rather than a dialect as opposed to Black Country speech, which is a dialect with unique words and phrases, such as "owamya?" for how are you, which, many comment, is not used in Brummie speech. Similarly, Brummies generally use the word I while pronouncing it as 'oy', whereas Black Country natives instead use the dialectal term 'Ah', as in 'Ah bin', meaning I have been.

Thorne (2003) has said that the accent is "a dialectal hybrid of northern, southern, Midlands, Warwickshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire speech", also with elements from the languages and dialects of its Asian and Afro-Caribbean communities.

There are also differences between Brummie and Black Country accents, which are not readily apparent to people from outside the West Midlands. A Black Country accent and a Birmingham accent can be hard to distinguish if neither accent is that broad. Phonetician John Wells has admitted that he cannot tell any difference between the accents.

Rhymes and vocabulary in the works of William Shakespeare suggest that he used a local dialect, with many historians and scholars arguing that Shakespeare used a Stratford-upon-Avon, Brummie, Cotswold, Warwickshire or other Midlands dialect in his work. However, the veracity of this assertion is not accepted by all historians, and his accent would certainly have been entirely distinct from any modern English accent, including any modern Midlands accent.

In Brummie, some SQUARE words have shifted to the NEAR lexical set, such as there and where, which are thus pronounced as /ðɪə/ and /wɪə/ instead of /ðɛə/ and /wɛə/, respectively.

Urszula Clark has proposed the FACE vowel as a difference between Birmingham and Black Country pronunciation, with Birmingham speakers using /ʌɪ/ and Black Country speakers using /æɪ/. She also mentions that Black Country speakers are more likely to use /ɪʊ/ where most other accents use /juː/ (in words such as new, Hugh, stew, etc.). This /ɪʊ/ is also present in some North American dialects for words like ew, grew, new, due, etc., contrasting with /u/ (words like boo, zoo, to, too, moon, doom, etc.). Other North American dialects may use /ju/ for this purpose, or even make no distinction at all.

Below are some common features of a recognisable Brummie accent (a given speaker may not necessarily use all, or use a feature consistently). The letters enclosed in square brackets – [] – use the International Phonetic Alphabet. The corresponding example words in italics are spelt so that a reader using Received Pronunciation (RP) can approximate the sounds.

• The vowel of mouth (RP [aʊ]) can be [æʊ] or [æə]

• The vowel of goat (RP [əʊ]) can be close to [ɑʊ] (so to an RP speaker, goat may sound like "gout")

• Final unstressed /i/, as in happy, may be realised as [əi], though this varies considerably between speakers

• In Birmingham, STRUT and FOOT may either be distinguished or merge. If the two vowels merge, they are pronounced either as [ɤ] or [ʊ], as in northern England—see foot–strut split.

• The majority of Brummies use the Northern [a] in words like bath, cast and chance, although the South-Eastern [ɑː] is more common amongst older speakers.

• The vowels in price and choice may be almost merged as [ɒɪ] so that the two words would almost rhyme. However, the two are still distinct, unlike in the Black Country dialect.

• In more old-fashioned Brummie accents, the FORCE set of words takes [ʌʊə] and the PURE set takes [uːə~ʊə], so both sets were in two syllables in broad transcription. In such an old-fashioned accent, the words paw, pour and poor would all be said differently: [pɔː], [pʌʊə], [puːə]. In more modern accents, all three are said as [pɔː].

• Final unstressed /ə/ may be realised as [a]

• The letters ng often represent /ŋɡ/ where RP has just /ŋ/ (e.g. singer as [ˈsiŋɡɐ], Birmingham as [ˈbɘ̝͗ːmiŋɡəm])—see NG-coalescence.

• /r/ is not pronounced except when prevocalic (followed by a vowel); the Brummie accent, as an urban accent of the West Midlands region, is characteristically non-rhotic. The use of linking R and intrusive R in Birmingham and the rest of the urban West Midlands region is practically universal.

• Some tapping of prevocalic /r/ (some speakers; e.g. in crime or there is)

• In a few cases, voicing of final /s/ (e.g. bus as [bʊz])

According to Thorne (2003), among UK listeners "Birmingham English in previous academic studies and opinion polls consistently fares as the most disfavoured variety of British English, yet with no satisfying account of the dislike". He alleges that overseas visitors, in contrast, find it "lilting and melodious", and from this claims that such dislike is driven by various linguistic myths and social factors peculiar to the UK ("social snobbery, negative media stereotyping, the poor public image of the City of Birmingham, and the north/south geographical and linguistic divide").

For instance, despite the city's cultural and innovative history, its industrial background (as depicted by the arm-and-hammer in Birmingham's coat of arms) has led to a muscular and unintelligent stereotype: a "Brummagem screwdriver" is UK slang for a hammer.

Thorne also cites the mass media and entertainment industry where actors, usually non-Birmingham, have used inaccurate accents and/or portrayed negative roles.

Advertisements are another medium where many perceive stereotypes. Journalist Lydia S., writing in the Birmingham Post, commented on advertisers' association of Birmingham accents with pigs: the pig in the ad for Colman's Potato Bakes, Nick Park's Hells Angel Pigs for British Gas, the puppet simply known as Pig from Pipkins and ITV's "Dave the window-cleaner pig" all had Brummie accents. In 2003, a Halifax bank advertisement featuring Howard Brown, a Birmingham-born and -based employee, was replaced by an animated version with an exaggerated comical accent overdubbed by a Cockney actor.

Список литературы

1. [Электронный ресурс]. URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornish_dialect (дата обращения 21.01.24)

2. [Электронный ресурс]. URL: https://owlcation.com/humanities/A-Guide-to-the-Brummie-Accent-and-Slang (дата обращения 21.01.24)

3. [Электронный ресурс]. URL: https://pronunciationstudio.com/brummie-accent/ (дата обращения 21.01.24)

4. [Электронный ресурс]. URL: https://www.atlasofbirmingham.co.uk/all-blog/brummie-people-and-brummie-slang-yhpzj (дата обращения 21.01.24)

5. Wells J. C. Accents of English (Cambridge University Press, 1982). – 546 p. [Электронныйресурс]. URL: https://archive.org/details/accentsofenglish0000well/page/342/mode/2up