English accents and dialects has been the standard introductory textbook on varieties of English in the British Isles since it first appeared in 1979. It is well known and widely used as the only compact and affordable textbook providing detailed descriptions of a range of accents and dialects, as well as introductory chapters dealing with issues of social and regional variation and change. Although successive editions have expanded the range of varieties included and updated references, this fourth edition has undergone a more thorough overhaul, with a new co-author on board in the sociophonetician Dominic Watt. The new edition is accompanied by a digitally remastered CD with recordings of the transcribed interviews and word lists, and it includes new sections on the varieties spoken in Aberdeen, Galway, and “Leicester,” along with exercises on these.

In the ten years since the third edition of English accents and dialects appeared in 1996, there has been an upsurge of interest in variation and change in the accents and dialects of the British Isles. Sociophonetics as a distinct discipline has, according to Paul Foulkes, “expanded rapidly since the mid 1990s” (2005:4041), and much important work in this field has involved research on British varieties (see, especially, contributions in Foulkes & Docherty 1999). Research into variation and change in British varieties has, over the same period, expanded and developed to the point where it can sustain a biennial UK Language Variation and Change conference, the sixth of which took place in Lancaster in 2007. The time is clearly ripe for an update of this classic textbook that takes account of all the advances in research over the past decade.

The first chapter, “Variation in English,” provides an updated overview of the types of variation in English within the British Isles. The section on language change here has been extended from less than one page to more than three, to include information on a number of areas that have become hot topics in recent years. The phenomenon of “smoothing” in RP, whereby diphthongs and triphthongs become monophthongs – so that, for instance, tar, tyre, and tower become homophones [ta:] – is described, along with advice to foreign learners that such “advanced” RP pronunciations sound “affected” to most Britons. There is also discussion of what has been termed “Estuary English,” its salient features, and its status as “a ‘neutral’ variety that simultaneously provides the opportunity for lower-class speakers to appear higher-status than they are, and for middle- and upper-class speakers to appear lower status than they are” (5). Two features of Estuary English that have been cited as diffusing widely across urban varieties of British English (Kerswill 2003) are the use of the glottal stop for /t/ and the labio-dental approximant

pronunciation of /r/. The authors point out here that the latter is “spreading fairly fast in British English,” and both features appear in the comments on individual varieties in chap. 5.

Another feature discussed is the intonation pattern variously termed “high rising tone,” “high rise terminal” (both referred to by the acronym HRT), or “Australian Question Intonation” (AQI). There is some discussion of the idea, largely propagated by the media, that this feature has arrived in British English from Australia and/or New Zealand, either through television (the Australian soap operas Neighbours and Home and Away were cult viewing for British students in the 1980s) or because of face-to-face contact between young speakers of British and Southern Hemisphere varieties. This could happen either in the UK, where the ubiquity of Australian, New Zealand, and South African bar staff has become a standard motif in jokes, or on the “backpackers' trail” followed by many young, educated, middle-class Britons. As the authors admit, the origin of this feature is probably “more complex” (6): they provide references to recent treatments of the phenomenon by Foulkes & Docherty 2007 and Fletcher, Grabe & Warren 2005.

There is also, in this chapter, updated information on the changing status of RP. The third edition tentatively suggests that “it is sometimes said nowadays that there is not the same pressure as there once was to modify one's speech in the direction of RP” (1996:9), but goes on to report the result of the “matched guise” experiment carried out by Giles et al. 1975, in which a lecturer was rated as “more intelligent” when speaking RP than when speaking with a Birmingham accent. The new edition states more boldly that “there is … not the same pressure as there once was to modify one's speech in the direction of RP” (11), and discusses the results of a more recent experiment, reported in Stockwell 2002, in which young female students judged RP as not indicating higher social status and as “less pleasing” than Norwich and London accents, concluding that “an RP accent no longer has the ‘statusfulness’ or the ‘attractiveness’ that it did a generation ago” (11). This is important information both for learners of English and for others who might still equate “British” English with RP. This rather undermines the arguments earlier in this chapter that “RP is usually considered the best, the clearest and even the most ‘beautiful’ accent.”

Chap. 2, on dialect variation, contains rather less new information than chap. 1. This reflects a general tendency in this edition to pay more attention to recent research in sociophonetics than to the equally important work on variation and change in morphology and syntax. For instance, discussion of patterns of negation still includes the claim that “the further north one goes, the more likely one is to hear” constructions such as I've not got it (18), despite the fact that this has been contradicted by both Tagliamonte & Smith 2002 and Anderwald 2002. There is, however, a new section on the various functions of like, including the “quotative (be) like … thought to have been imported fairly recently into British English from North America” (23).

Chap. 3 is largely devoted to description and discussion of Received Pronunciation. Given that, in the authors' own words, “it has been estimated that only about 3 to 5 per cent of the population of England speaks RP” (3), the proportion of the book taken up by this minority variety is surprising (23 pages as opposed to an average of 3 to 4 for any other variety). In fact, the RP chapter is used to introduce much of the linguistic terminology here, but this could have the effect, surely not intended by the authors, of giving RP primacy as a “norm” from which other varieties “deviate.” Since one of the target markets for this volume is teachers and learners of English, this is perhaps understandable. Some of the phonetic symbols have been updated in this edition, with

and

where earlier editions had

and

, and there are expanded definitions of some technical terms. The argument for treating affricates as single units is both strengthened and clarified by the point that “affricates move as a unit when participating in the phenomenon known as spoonerism” (44).

Chap. 4 provides a succinct overview of regional accent variation. This includes a map of major dialect areas and a checklist of “key phonological characteristics of accents of English in the British Isles” (71), a very useful teaching aid. This chapter has been updated rather less than preceding ones, but the earlier statement that “speakers in the north-east of England, including Newcastle … retain /h/” (1996: 62) has been modified in the light of more recent research to state that “/h/ is retained in accents of the north-east of England such as that of Newcastle, although it disappears quickly as one travels southwards: /h/-dropping is reported for Sunderland, and it is virtually categorical in Middlesbrough” (66).

Chap. 5, which takes up approximately one-third of the book, is divided into 16 sections, each devoted to a specific regional variety. Apart from the three “new” varieties, changes introduced in this new edition tend to reflect recent research in sociophonetics. The chapters on London (76), Norwich (79), and Bristol (83) all contain comments on the use of the labio-dental approximant

by the speakers in the recordings. Since these are the same recordings used in the first edition (1979), instances of this feature were clearly present, but were either not noticed or not thought important by the original authors. Watt here provides a fresh pair of ears, attuned to this variant because of its prominence in the recent discussions of “leveling” and Estuary English referred to above. What this demonstrates is that we should be very cautious of putting forward diachronic arguments based on negative evidence: variants thought to be of recent origin could likewise have been missed or dismissed by earlier dialectologists and sociolinguists.

The new sections provide a welcome expansion of the varieties covered, to include a more northerly Scottish variety (Aberdeen), another Irish one (Galway), and one from the hitherto neglected East Midlands area of England. The last of these should really have been labeled “Leicestershire,” since the sample is taken not from the multicultural city of Leicester, but from the smaller town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, some 20 miles away. Interestingly, the one feature named in chap. 4 as characteristic of the East Midlands – /j/-dropping, whereby /j/ is lost before /u:/ in words such as beauty or music – is not found in this recent recording of a young speaker, suggesting that it might be recessive in this region. Comments on this recording note instances of most of the features found in “youth speak” throughout most of the UK:

for /t/ in all contexts, labiodental

and “frequent use of like as a pause filler, focus marker, and quotative” (94). This recording is the most recent of all in terms of both “real” and “apparent” time, since the speaker is in his twenties, while those recorded in Galway and Aberdeen were in their sixties and forties at the time of the recording. Given that some of the recordings on the accompanying CD were made in or before 1979, it would have been useful if the CD track listing (xiii) had included dates of recording and ages of the speakers at the time of recording, as any comparisons made between these are now as much diachronic as diatopic.

Minor criticisms aside, this new edition of English accents and dialects represents a timely and invaluable update to what is still the best single-volume textbook and introduction to varieties of English in the British Isles.