Listening to the Past
Audio Records of Accents of English
Ed. Raymond Hickey Cambridge University Press, 2017, 574 pages.
The current volume contains a number of chapters which analyse the earliest audio recordings for a number of varieties of English from the early twentieth century. These recordings often show accents prior to key developments of the mid-to-late twentieth century in the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, Ireland - to mention just a few anglophone countries where this would apply. The sociophonetic examinations of the recordings will be of interest to linguists working in language variation and change and also to researchers in such diverse fields as anthropology and oral history.
Contents
1. Analysing early audio recordings
Raymond Hickey
2. British Library sound recordings of vernacular speech. They were lost and now they are found
Jonathan Robinson
3. Twentieth-century Received Pronuncation: Prevocalic /r/
Anne Fabricius
4. Twentieth-century Received Pronuncation: Stop articulation
Raymond Hickey
5. London's Cockney in the twentieth century. Stability or cycles of contact-driven change?
Paul Kerswill and Eivind Torgersen
6. The origins of Liverpool English
Kevin Watson and Lynn Clark
7. Tyneside English
Dominic Watt and Paul Foulkes
8. Scotland - Glasgow and the Central Belt
Jane Stuart-Smith and Eleanor Lawson
9. Early recordings of Irish English
Raymond Hickey
10. Evidence of American Regional Dialects in Early Recordings
Matthew J. Gordon and Christopher Strelluf
11. New England
Daniel Ezra Johnson and David Durian
12. Upper Midwestern English
Thomas Purnell, Eric Raimy, Joseph Salmons
13. Western United States
Valerie Fridland and Tyler Kendall
14. Analysis of the Ex-Slave Recordings
Erik R. Thomas
15. Archival Data on Earlier Canadian English
Charles Boberg
16. Canadian Raising in Newfoundland? Insights from early vernacular recordings Sandra Clarke, Paul De Decker and Gerard Van Herk
17. The Caribbean - Trinidad and Jamaica
Shelome Gooden and Kathy-Ann Drayton
18. Early recordings from Ghana. A variationist approach to the phonological history of an Outer Circle variety
Magnus Huber
19. Earlier South African English
Ian Bekker
20. Early twentieth century Tristan da Cunha h’English
Daniel Schreier
21. Open vowels in historical Australian English
Felicity Cox
22. Early New Zealand English: the closing diphthongs
Márton Sóskuthy, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Katie Drager and Paul Foulkes
23. The development of recording technology
Raymond Hickey