Comparing accents

When a person is described as ‘having an accent’ the phrase usually has prescriptive connotations: the implication is that their speech deviates from standardized pronunciation. In fact, everyone ‘has an accent’, but what does this mean in phonological terms? Essentially, differences between accents amount to differences in phonological systems, which can be of three principal kinds:

. inventory differences, involving the presence of a phonemic opposition in one accent, but not the other.

. distributional differences, in which the accents have the same phonemes but use them differently.

. realizational (or phonetic) differences, in which the phonemic contrasts available in both accents are identical, but the phonemes are realized differently.