60 B1+ | 6. Klasse | READING | The English-speaking world/Intercultural issues Read the text about dialects and accents in Britain. Choose the correct section (A–D) for each statement (1–8). You can use a section more than once. Write your answers in the boxes provided. The first one (0) has been done for you. 4 Skim the first text and underline the keywords and ideas. Then read the first question and decide if the answer is in the first text. If it isn’t, move on to the next question. Repeat this pattern for each text until you have answered all the questions. Check your answers when you have finished. You should have more than one answer coming from each section of the text. Top tips Regional differences in spoken English across the UK If you travel around the UK, you experience changing landscapes, architecture and customs, but also variation in the voices you hear … Section A Have you ever tried to put on a British accent? The chances are the accent you’re trying to copy when you say certain words is ‘Received Pronunciation’ (RP) or ‘Standard English’ – also known as the ‘Queen’s English’. RP is what most non-Brits are used to hearing as a British accent, often when you switch on the BBC on TV or tune into the BBC World Service. But it’s called the Queen’s English for a reason; hardly anyone in the UK, apart from the Queen, speaks this way. The truth is, although it may be called Standard English, it is anything but standard. The British Isles is made up of an awful lot of different dialects and accents, more than 37 dialects at the last count. Section B A dialect is a specific variety of English that differs from other varieties in three ways: vocabulary, grammar and phonology (pronunciation or accent). For instance, a speaker from Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the North-East of England might pepper their speech with localised vocabulary, such as gan for ‘to go’ or clarts for ‘mud’, or use regional grammatical constructions, such as the past tense constructions I’ve went or I’ve drank. They could thus be described as a Geordie dialect speaker. However, despite these special linguistic characteristics, a Londoner will get them. London is where you can find one of the UK’s most famous dialects, Cockney. Cockney came about as the dialect of the lower classes in London, especially in the poorer East End of the city. This dialect also gave us Rhyming Slang, with e.g. apples and pears meaning ‘stairs’, and you can, to this very day, hear plenty of market traders round the East End shouting out in Cockney from their stalls. Yorkshire is a large county in England, and, as a result, lots of people speak with a variation of the Yorkshire dialect. One of the biggest differences between this dialect and RP is that words ending in an ‘ee’ sound, like ‘nasty’, are pronounced with an ‘eh’ sound, so ‘nasty’ sounds like ‘nasteh’. Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv
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