Chris Montgomery

• Classifying Accent Features

  • Linguists use an approach called lexical sets to talk about vowels
  • This uses words to stand in for the vowels in those words - e.g 'bath' contains the 'a' sound. This is the same vowel, but pronounced differently.
• Regional Dialects


  • Some accents are more distinctive than others - for instance, algorithms cannot tell accents from Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds apart, but are okay with Liverpool and Newcastle.
  • A study conducted asked 100 people to listen to audio clips of different accents, locate the speaker, and identify what features gave them this conclusion.
  • For example, Sheffield speakers were identified by glottal stops and flat vowel sounds, Scouse were identified by the 'ck' sound.