When linguists talk about “accent” they’re talking about *how* people say things rather than *what* things people say.

There are a lot of ways we can talk about an accent—we can talk about pronunciation, rhythm of speech, voice pitch, and timbre, to name a few. However, when we talk about “accents” at the level of a whole dialect, we’re usually only talking about two things: pronunciation and the rhythm of speech (called prosody).

Here at the San Diego Project, we’re focusing on pronunciation. The two main things we look at when studying pronunciation differences are vowels and consonants. Now, since English spelling doesn’t match perfectly to English pronunciation, the first thing you need to do is forget about the way English words are spelled. Although spelling can give you clues about pronunciation, there are so many exceptions to the so-called “spelling rules”, that a regular alphabet won’t work when describing the sounds of a language (for example, English has about 44 different sounds, but only 26 regular alphabet characters). To get around this problem, linguists have created their own specialized alphabet called the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). Although many of the characters of the IPA are the same as they are in the English Alphabet (or Latin Alphabet), many are not. All of the characters written between [brackets] are IPA characters, and we’ll introduce them as we need them. Now let’s take a look at consonants and vowels.

Consonants & Vowels

Consonants are what most people call the “harder” sounds of a language, while vowels are the more “melodic” sounds (though linguists never use those terms). A good rule of thumb is that if you can hold a note while singing on a sound, it’s more than likely a vowel (try singing “Three Blind Mice” to see for yourself!). English has about 25 different consonants and about 19 vowels, depending on the dialect. While there’s a lot that can be said about consonant sounds in dialectology, most of the research involves vowels, so it helps to know a little more about how linguists talk about vowels.

The Importance of Vowels in Dialect Research

For many of the people we’ve recorded, the way they pronounce their vowels is one of the defining features of their own “SoCal Speech”. Because vowels can be so important to dialects, in nearly every speaker’s fact file, you’ll find a comparison of that speaker’s vowel space to the Common American English vowel space described above, along with descriptions of what that speaker is doing with his or her vowels.