 This in-class meeting focuses on the sound system of North American English and requires that students understand the principles of phonetic transcription in general and the transcription of RP in particular. If students do not feel confident in any of these areas, we recommend to visit the respective e-learning units on the Virtual Linguistics Campus and to work through the e-lectures in this YouTube channel, especially the e-lectures about phonetic transcription and about English and England. This background knowledge is necessary for the goals of this in-class meeting. The particular prerequisite for this in-class meeting is that students have worked through the unit, the transcription of North American English, including the e-lecture English in North America. And that has to be done in accordance with our inverted classroom model. That is, they have to do it prior to this in-class meeting, which we are going to simulate now. As a starting point for this in-class meeting, I suggest to examine the students' capability of reading from transcription. In doing this, I will be supported by another first-term student of our class, Dunia Rochan. So Dunia, how are you? I'm fine, hello. Okay, let's see whether she's fine after this video. Okay, Dunia will simulate the student audience in class. So the first thing we could do is we could train transcription. To train the students' capability of reading from transcription, which is important in order to get a feeling for the subject, there are several possibilities. For example, we can use the language index on the virtual linguist's campus, load a language, make our students read some samples and check the result. So Dunia is not a speaker of this language here, which is Bulgarian. But nevertheless, she will try and read from transcription the greeting message. So Dunia, shall we try? Of course. Okay, I think I think they would have understood her in Bulgaria, perhaps as a foreign speaker of Bulgarian. But this is what you can do, read from transcription. Another option is you can take texts where students are unlikely to be very familiar with. For example, you can take something from early modern English here in the transcription. This is a famous sonnet by William Shakespeare. And have the students read this from transcription. So again, Dunia, it's your task. Now, can you read the first line? Shall I compare the two summaries D? Okay, shall I compare D to a summaries D? That was not too bad and we could continue like that. So this is a nice approach to what's becoming familiar with phonetic transcription. As a second practical element, I suggest to discuss a transcription task where the students had to transcribe a text, in this case, in RP. And they had to do that during the week. And now you can discuss the solutions with the students. But again, I would first of all let the students read the whole text from transcription. You have to be careful though, they have the original text in their hands or under the table. So here we don't have it. So, Dunia, can you read the first two lines and the headline for us? Descent of the Horts. I'm afraid that I shan't be able to help you this Saturday. Not to worry, one of the others will give me a hand. Okay, she did it very well. Of course, not as fast as orthography, but that is some sort of proof that she has no paper here. She really read that from transcription. Okay, you could continue that and you could also discuss the phenomenon of weakening already. But this will be the topic of the next in class meeting. For now, you can just compare your solution with the model solution. And here is the orthographical version that could support the students as well. Before we now start with the discussion of North American English, we have to sort out a very essential question, namely the question for the standard. So what are the reference varieties for English, first of all, in the British context? There is British as the head term for the orthographical and grammatical standard of English Britain and received pronunciation for the references accent of the English used in Britain. Okay, so we have British English for the reference variety and we have received pronunciation as the label for the accent that is used as a standard in England. Can we see a parallel with North America? As far as the grammar and the orthography are concerned, we should distinguish between Canada and the US and the pronunciation. Oh yeah, that's an interesting question. So we have this sort of situation. We have American English and Canadian English because they're different in terms of syntax, morphology, even orthography to some extent. And then we have a label for the reference accent which is North American English and the interesting thing is there are so many parallels between Canadian English and English used in the United States and so many principled differences that also apply to both accents that it doesn't make sense to draw a distinction really. So what we get is then the following picture. We have the labels here on the right for the standards, that is standard in grammar, syntax, orthography and the like. And we have labels for the standard accent and here we subsume Canadian English and the English in the United States under the same label, namely North American English. Okay, let's now practice. You already dealt with our E-lining unit, the sound system of North American English. You watched the video, you did several of our worksheets and interactive E-tests and you had to transcribe RP already. So you should now be able to apply your knowledge and do a short listening and transcription exercise first. Okay, shall we do it? So here is the exercise. We have to change position so that you can use the board. And I will now pronounce some nonsense words. As usual, nonsense words don't distract you from the orthography and Dunja will write down the words. While she is doing it, by the way, you can do the same and compare your solution with our model solutions later on. Okay, here's the first word. In RP, puj, alright. The next word is phaz, phaz. Okay, the ash, okay. Alright, number three is thirm, thirm, thirm. I hope these are nonsense words, they might exist but I don't know that they exist. Khan is number four, khan, khan, okay. And the last one is yawth, yawth, yawth. Not a single mistake. No, I'm not really sure. Okay, she can't remember this symbol. Almost, here it is. The ev, that's the symbol for the voice dental fricative. Okay, I would accept this as a nice solution. So let's get rid of that. Okay, here are the solutions. Now these are the solutions in RP and as you can see, Junior didn't make any mistake. The ev symbol was a little bit problematic but okay. Now I'm going to produce the same words in North American English as well as I can. I'm not a speaker of American English. Junior, can you mark the differences then or can you just mention the differences? The first would be puj. No, there's no difference. No difference. Number two, phaz. The vowel. The vowel is different. It's longer in American English in some context. We will see that. Then we have firm. There's the R after the vowel. An R. Karn. Again, R is following the vowel. If we produce it like that and finally yawth. RP would be yawth. The vowel is again different. Again, the vowel would be different. Okay, so this is what it looks like in American English and here we have the results in terms of two transcriptions. We are a little bit in a dilemma in transcribing American English because we have the LPD notation which is used in German schools. For example, in the school books and we have the Atlas of North American English notation which is used if you do linguistics in a professional way. So many phonology books use the Atlas of North American English transcription. Okay, let us now discuss the phonemes in detail. Okay, let's switch position and then we can do it. So what we are doing now is we are trying to locate the RP monophones on the chart and we will then compare them with American English. So let's start with the long monophones of RP. Dunja, can you give me some key words? C. Okay, C, so that would be a vowel which is over here. Draw. Mm-hmm, the low vowel. Relatively far back in RP. Saw. Saw, okay. Saw, yes. Two. The high vowel, ooh, is a round vowel and there is one missing. Her. Okay, now you have to... Dunja has a slight American accent so you should say her. Instead of saying her, we will see that difference later. Okay, you could now do the same with the short monophones and then you would get this sort of complete system of RP. You could now at this point, of course, load a real speaker of RP, a speaker from the language index and listen to the exact pronunciation of each of these phonemes in the context of a keyword. Let's now compare the RP system with that of North American English. So here it is and I deliberately left out the symbols. Okay, Dunja, where would you say are the main differences? In terms of this is the RP system, we now want to change it into the North American system. The short E is a bit lower. Okay, so you mean the E in the E as in, okay, orthography. So instead of saying bed, it's a little bit lower, bed. Okay, anything else? The long A, slightly more centralized. Okay, this one here as in bra would be a little bit more central. And the ash is often longer, isn't it? You're absolutely right. So nasals and fricatives, it's a little bit longer. So instead of saying Dan, you would say Dan in North American English. Okay, but beyond these three phenomena, we have a problem in North American English. Let's listen to two speakers. So here we have two speakers, one comes from Michigan and one from Arizona. And they both have to pronounce the words caught and caught. So let's listen to this one from Michigan first. Caught. Are they different? Yes, they are. They're clearly different again? Caught. Caught. Okay, and let's now do the same with the speaker from Arizona. Caught. Caught. What do you think? There's no difference. There's no difference anymore again? Caught. Caught. No difference. This phenomenon that occurs in the west and in the western part of the north and in Canada is a merger of two vowels and it is known as the low back merger. Because these two vowels, they merge. They become identical if you're a speaker coming from Canada or from the west and they're different if you're a speaker who lives in the north and in the southern parts of the United States. So the west, Canada, they have merged these two vowels. The standard that is used for the teaching of North American English should be a more traditional one that avoids this homophone effect. For the speaker from Arizona, the two words caught and caught are homophones. There's no difference. So we should use a variety that is resistant to this low back merger, the merger of the two low back vowels. Using this more traditional accent, we have the following situation. Here is now the vowel chart of North American English with the 17 vowels. Now, as I already said, we are in a slight degree of trouble. If you're a teacher who teaches at a German school, this LPD notation would be your transcription of American English because it is exhibited in the vocabulary lists of German schoolbooks. If you're a linguist, you're likely to use the Atlas of North American English notation. Alright, let's now turn to the system of diphthongs. And we're playing the same game. First of all, we will define the diphthongs for RP and then we will compare that with North American English. So Dunja, what about the diphthongal systems? Can you give me some keywords for the three ingliding diphthongs of RP? Yeah, here. So we have something like here, okay? There. You tried to do it very British, there. Possibly a little bit lower, there. Sure. Sure, okay. So these are the three ingliding diphthongs. We could add of course the up gliding diphthongs. You can do that in class, so we have to proceed a little bit faster here in this video. Okay, and here is the whole system now. The whole system of RP diphthongs. Let us now see which ones exist in North American English and which ones don't. So which ones do you think are not existent in North American English? I would say the ingliding one, because there is no following R. Okay, in British, in British English we don't have an R, so they are disappearing. In British English we would say here, there, and sure, and in American English? Here, there, sure. Okay, we have a monothongue plus R. So this is then a whole set of diphthongs which doesn't exist anymore in American English. Anything else that is different in American English? British English O as in go, home. I have trouble with this, by the way. It doesn't exist in American English. Well, we shouldn't really say it doesn't exist. We should perhaps replace it by something like this, where we have a new symbol O. O, not O, but O. And the same applies over here, where we have the A, which is less diphthongue in American English as it is in British English. So here is the system. This is the system once more in the LPD notation. And here, the linguistic version, the Atlas of North American English version, where LaBeouf, who is the mastermind behind the system, hasn't treated or doesn't distinguish between true diphthongs and monothongs anymore, but draws only a distinction between simple vowels and vowels plus an offset. Alright, so that's it. As a summary, we can now list the number of phonemes. Dunia, your task. Let's switch positions again. So how many phonemes do we have, the entire inventory of North American English? 41. Okay, 41. And how many vowels did we define? 17. Okay, 17. The number of monothongs and diphthongs? They are 5 and 12. Yeah, 12 monothongs, 12 and 5. Well, and now it's an arithmetic game. How many consonants do we have? 24. 24 consonants. Okay. So this is it. This is basically it. Now, if you have time in class, you can do the following. You can now confront your students with an exercise size, where they have to transcribe a text. This is one of our transcription texts, which we use on the virtual linguistics campus. And if you don't have any time, students can do that voluntarily. The model solution will then be given next time. By the way, quite interesting the word lettered, British English, will come out as? Lettered. Lettered in American English. So there we have one of the rare consonantal differences between RP and North American English in terms of consonants, where the? phoneme has a D as one of its alophones. Okay, let's summarize. After this in class meeting and the e-learning unit, the sound system of North American English prior to it, everyone should not only be able to list and classify RP and North American English phonemes, but also to transcribe words, simple phrases, and even sentences in North American English. The transcription of connected speech, that is, texts might still be a little bit problematic, but that doesn't matter at this point. We will tackle that in the unit present-day English connected speech and in the respective e-lecture. So let us stop here. But not without reminding the students to finish the final task. You know, the transcription which we've just shown. So thank you all for your patience. And thank you, Dunja, for your support. Thank you. So that's it. Bye-bye then.