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THE LINGUISTICS STUDENT’S HANDBOOK 8
It appears that the term accent was once used specifically for intonation or
voice-quality (probably reflecting the origin of the word). The Oxford English
Dictionary quotes the eighteenth-century essayist Addison as saying ‘By the
Tone or Accent I do not mean the Pronunciation of each particular Word, but
the Sound of the whole Sentence.’ In modern usage, the vowel in a word like
home or the quality of the /r/ sound in a word like merry are potential distinctive
characteristics of one’s accent.
The second point above is the more important of the two. In common parlance,
especially in England, if you say that somebody ‘has an accent’ you mean
that they have a regional accent and not a standard one (see again, The Oxford
English Dictionary). Ellis phrases this, in a note in The Oxford English
Dictionary’s entry, by saying that an accent ‘may include mispronunciation of
vowels or consonants, misplacing of stress’, which clearly indicates by the use
of the prefix mis- that an accent is undesirable. The converse of this is that
people are sometimes said ‘to speak without an accent’ or ‘not to have an
accent’. This can mean one of three things.
1. A person X may say that another person Y does not have an accent if
they judge that Y’s accent is, in relevant respects, the same as their own.
2. A person may be said not to have an accent if they speak with a standard
accent.
3. A person who is known not to use English as their first language but
who nevertheless sounds like a native English speaker may be said not
to have an accent.
None of these notions would be accepted by linguists. Linguists would say
that nobody can speak without an accent. Everybody who speaks has particular
features of pronunciation, and these form the accent. Even people who
speak Received Pronunciation (RP, the standard accent of England) give themselves
away as being British the moment they go to the United States or
Canada. So everyone has an accent, and the fact that your accent sounds like
mine does not make it less true that we both have an accent.
Furthermore, while linguists acknowledge that different accents convey
different social messages, and that some may be valued more highly than others
in particular social situations, they would claim that no accent is linguistically
superior to any other. All accents allow the economical transfer of information
between people who use them.
Dialect
The problem with dialect is similar to that with accent. First of all we need to
recognise that for linguists the word dialect is more encompassing than accent,