Rhoticity

  • Jacques DURAND (Toulouse)
    Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties and structures
    2012, Vol. XVII-1, pp. 25-37

    The PAC project (The Phonology of Contemporary English: usage, varieties, structure) aims at giving a better picture of spoken English in its unity and its geographical, social and stylistic diversity. Based on Labovian methods, the project seeks to describe both rhotic and non rhotic accents of English, from traditional standards to more recent postcolonial varieties. This large corpus enables researchers to analyse and compare intervarietal features such as rhoticity as well as more specific phenomena such as vocalic length in Australian English or variable rhoticity in New Zealand English. Today LVTI, a collaborative project aiming at an interdisciplinary sociolinguistic survey of great urban centres such as Manchester and Toulouse is being set up following the PAC/PFC classical protocol.