accent (n.)

The cumulative auditory effect of those features of pronunciation which identify where a person is from, regionally or socially. The LINGUISTICS literature emphasizes that the term refers to pronunciation only, and is thus distinct from DIALECT, which refers to GRAMMAR and VOCABULARY as well. The investigation of the ways in which accents differ from each other is sometimes called accent studies. Regional accents can relate to any locale, including both rural and urban communities within a country (e.g. ‘West Country’, ‘Liverpool’) as well as national groups speaking the same language (e.g. ‘American’, ‘Australian’), and our impression of other languages (‘foreign accent’, ‘Slavic accent’). Social accents relate to the cultural and educational background of the speaker. Countries with a well-defined traditional social-class system, such as India and Japan, reflect these divisions in language, and accent is often a marker of class. In Britain, the best example of a social accent is the regionally neutral accent associated with a public-school education, and with the related professional domains, such as the Civil Service, the law courts, the Court and the BBC – hence the labels ‘Queen’s English’, ‘BBC English’, and the like. RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION (RP) is the name given to this accent, and because of its regional neutrality RP speakers are sometimes thought of as having ‘no accent’. This is a misleading way of putting it, however: linguistics stresses that everyone must have an accent, though it may not indicate regional origin. The popular label ‘broad accent’ refers to those accents that are markedly different from RP.

The emphasis which makes a particular WORD or SYLLABLE stand out in a stream of speech – one talks especially of an accented sound/word/syllable, or the accent(ual) pattern of a PHRASE/SENTENCE. The term is usually found in a discussion of metre (METRICS), where it refers to the ‘beats’ in a line of poetry – the accented syllables, as opposed to the unaccented ones. But any style of spoken language could be described with reference to the relative weight (accentuation) of its syllables: one might talk of the ‘strongly accented’ speech of a politician, for instance. Technically, accent is not solely a matter of LOUDNESS but also of PITCH and DURATION, especially pitch: comparing the VERB record (as in I’m going to record the tune) and the NOUN (I’ve got a record), the contrast in word accent between record and record is made by the syllables differing in loudness, length and pitch movement. The notion of pitch accent has also been used in the PHONOLOGICAL analysis of these languages, referring to cases where there is a restricted distribution of tone within words (as in Japanese). A similar use of these variables is found in the notion of sentence accent (also called ‘contrastive accent’). This is an important aspect of linguistic analysis, especially of INTONATION, because it can affect the ACCEPTABILITY, the MEANING, or the PRESUPPOSITIONS of a sentence, e.g. He was wearing a red hat could be heard as a response to Was he wearing a red coat?, whereas He was wearing a red hat would respond to Was he wearing a green hat? The term STRESS, however, is often used for contrasts of this kind (as in the phrases ‘word stress’ and ‘contrastive stress’). An analysis in terms of pitch accent is also possible. The total SYSTEM of accents in a language is sometimes called the accentual system, and would be part of the study of PHONOLOGY. The coinage accentology for the study of accents is sometimes found in European linguistics.

In GRAPHOLOGY, an accent is a mark placed above a letter, showing how that letter is to be pronounced. French accents, for example, include a distinction between é, è and ê. Accents are a type of DIACRITIC.