[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hi, students.
Welcome to the lesson.
Today I'm going to talk to you about four
accent-related terms, which in some ways
overlap and cause confusion.
So this is a good lesson for you to watch
if you're interested more in the linguistic side of language.
We're going to start off with the word accent.
This comes from the original Latin word accentus
which means to sing along.
So if we think about that, we know
that accent has to do with the sound that we make,
the sound of our voices and the sound of our speech.
So an accent or a person's accent
is the way that person pronounces
sounds in a language.
At a very broad, high level, we have accents
from different countries.
We've got a British accent, an American accent,
or depending on your viewpoint, you've
got a native accent and a foreign accent.
And also we can go to a lower down level
and be quite narrow in how we define accents.
We can have accents from particular cities, a Birmingham
accent, we can have an accent from London,
we can say a London accent, traditionally cockney.
But yet we can get even more narrow inside
that because some people can tell
the difference between, say, a South London accent and a North
London accent.
So we can go down and down and down.
And in a lot of my videos here on my channel,
I teach you how to make your accent clear,
or more broadly, I teach you a British accent.
Moving on, we've got this word here,
dialect, which I'm sure you've come across,
but you might not really understand what this is
and how we use it.
So if we refer back to accent, which
is about the way we pronounce sounds,
dialect is something more than that.
It is the regional differences in a language
in the way that people speak, which includes
the way people pronounce sound.
It includes accent, but it also includes
the vocabulary choice and the grammar specific to that place.
Next, we have received pronunciation,
often just abbreviated to RP.
This is the accent that you will hear in the universities,
on the television, and also in the professions.
So we can call this the accent of educatedness.
Now some people will be very triggered by that,
but that's just the way it is.
Most people who are doing those jobs and working in those areas
have an accent that is broadly RP.
Personally, I don't like to use this term so much because I
consider it to be a bit dated due
to its association with the BBC because BBC presenters always
speak in received pronunciation because it was considered
the most clear and easy to understand and authoritative
accent.
However, nowadays they don't do that anymore.
They have a policy of accent diversity, which
means presenters from different places
and with different accents.
So for that reason, I'm not that keen on using this term.
But most people have heard it, know what it is.
So for those purposes when we're talking about which accent
is considered the most correct and the most prestigious
in the UK, it's this one.
Then we have our final term to explain here,
which is standard English.
In the same way there was a difference between accent,
which is about sound, and dialect,
which is about the whole of a person's speech,
standard English will include their grammar,
whether their grammar is correct, and also
their vocabulary choices.
So you will encounter standard English
when you're reading a broadsheet newspaper, for example.
This is English that follows all of the rules.
Now it is possible to speak with an accent of received
pronunciation, but not speak or write in standard English,
following all the grammar.
However, in practice, it rarely happens.
The two normally go together.
Having the correct accent and the correct grammar normally
goes together due to the relationship between the two
and the educatedness of the person.
So standard English, that's also what I teach on this channel
as well, pointing out the common mistakes
so you can remove those from your English.
Because if you get the two of these together,
this is how you're going to make the best possible presentation,
and the key thing, be taken more seriously by people.
That is the reason that here on this channel
we work towards those two things.
OK.
So thank you for watching this video.
I hope you've enjoyed learning about accents.
I'll see you again soon.
Bye.