accent

Definition:

(1) In speaking, an identifiable style of pronunciation. See also:

• Accent Prejudice
• Brogue
• Drawl
• Elocution
• Phonetics
• Phonology
• Received Pronunciation
• Rhythm
• Stress

(2) In English metrics, the emphasis given a syllable by stress, pitch, and duration.
(3) A diacritical mark, such as the acute accent over the e in cliché.

Etymology:

From the Latin, "to" + "song"

Observations (Definition #1):

• "Your accent is the way you pronounce English when you speak it--and of course everybody therefore has an accent. Your dialect, on the other hand, has to do also with the grammatical forms that you use, as well, perhaps, as any regional vocabulary that you employ.
  
  "It is important to make this distinction between dialect and accent, in order to be able to show that it is possible to speak Standard English with a regional accent. Standard English has nothing to do with pronunciation. In fact, most people who speak Standard English do so with some sort of regional pronunciation, so that you can tell where they come from much more by their accent than by their grammar or vocabulary."
  (Peter Trudgill, Dialects. Routledge, 2004)



• "I sometimes wonder if Americans aren't fooled by our accent into detecting brilliance that may not really be there."
  (Stephen Fry)



• "[Yankees] are pretty much like Southerners--except with worse manners, of course, and terrible accents."
  (Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind, 1936)



• "Within each national variety [of English] the standard dialect is relatively homogeneous in grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and punctuation. Pronunciation is a different matter, since there is no equivalent standard accent (type of pronunciation). For each national variety, there are regional accents, related to geographical area, and social accents, related to the educational, socio-economic, and ethnic backgrounds of the speakers."
  (Tom McArthur, The English Languages. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998)



• "Differences between accents are of two main sorts: phonetic and phonological. When two accents differ from each other only phonetically, we find the same set of phonemes in both accents, but some or all of the phonemes are realised differently. There may also be differences in stress and intonation, but not such as would cause a change in meaning. As an example of phonetic differences at the segmental level, it is said that Australian English has the same set of phonemes and phonemic contrasts as BBC pronunciation, yet Australian pronunciation is so different from that accent that it is easily recognized.
  
  "Many accents of English also differ noticeably in intonations without the difference being such as would cause a difference in meaning; some Welsh accents, for example, have a tendency for unstressed syllables to be higher in pitch than stressed syllables. Such a difference is, again, a phonetic one. . . .
  
  "Phonological differences are of various types . . .. Within the area of segmental phonology the most obvious type of difference is where one accent has a different number of phonemes (and hence of phonemic contrasts) from another."
  (Peter Roach, English Phonetics and Phonology: A Practical Course, 4th ed. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009)



• The Speech Accent Archive (George Mason University)
  "The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded. The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool. It is meant to be used by linguists as well as other people who simply wish to listen to and compare the accents of different English speakers.
  
  "This website allows users to compare the demographic and linguistic backgrounds of the speakers in order to determine which variables are key predictors of each accent. The speech accent archive demonstrates that accents are systematic rather than merely mistaken speech."
  (Steven H. Weinberger, "About the Speech Accent Archive." George Mason University, 2011)

Pronunciation: AK-sent