Cover not available

Article published In: English World-Wide
Vol. 43:1 (2022) ► pp.96–123

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

Regional variation in British English voice quality

 | University of Huddersfield
 | Soundscape Voice Evidence
 | University of Huddersfield | J P French Associates
 | University of Huddersfield | Lancaster University
Published online: 3 December 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.20007.gol
Abstract
This study considers regional variation of voice quality in two varieties of British English – Southern Standard British English and West Yorkshire English. A comparison of voice quality profiles for three closely related but not identical northern varieties within West Yorkshire is also considered. Our findings do not contradict the small subset of previous research which explored regional and/or social variation in voice quality in British English insofar as regionality may play a small role in a speaker’s voice quality profile. However, factors such as social standing and identity could perhaps be even more relevant. Even when considering homogeneous groups of speakers, it is not the case that there is a cohesive voice quality profile that can be attached to every speaker within the group. The reason for this, we argue, is the speaker-specificity inherent in voice quality.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Voice quality
  • 3.British English voice quality
  • 4.Materials and methods
    • 4.1Materials
    • 4.2Methods
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Southern Standard British English and West Yorkshire English
    • 5.2Bradford, kirklees, and wakefield
    • 5.3Voice quality settings and self-evaluation of regional identity in West Yorkshire
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
References (37)
References
Abercrombie, David. 1967. Elements of General Phonetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beck, Janet. 2005. “Perceptual Analysis of Voice Quality: The Place of Vocal Profile Analysis.” In William Hardcastle, and Janet Beck, eds. A Figure of Speech: A Festschrift for John Laver. London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 285–322.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beck, Janet Mackenzie. 2007. “Vocal Profile Analysis Scheme: A User’s Manual.” Edinburgh: Queen Margaret University College – QMUC, Speech Science Research Centre.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Beck, Janet, and Felix Schaeffler. 2015. “Voice Quality Variation in Scottish Adolescents: Gender Versus Geography.” In Maria Wolters, Judy Livingstone, Bernie Beattie, Rachel Smith, Mike MacMahon, Jane Stuart-Smith, and James M. Scobbie, eds. Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow, UK, 737–741.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Devlin, Thomas, Peter French, and Carmen Llamas. 2019. “Vowel Change across Time, Space and Conversational Topic: The Use of Localised Features in Former Mining Communities”. Language Variation and Change 311: 303–328. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dickie, Catherine, Felix Schaeffler, Christoph Draxler, and Klaus Jänsch. 2009. “Speech Recordings via the Internet: An Overview of the VOYS Project in Scotland”. Proceedings of Interspeech. Brighton, UK, 1807–1810. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Edmondson, Jerold A., Lama Ziwo, John H. Esling, Jimmy G. Harris, and Shaoni Li. 2001. “The Aryepiglottic Folds and Voice Quality in the Yi and Bai Languages: Laryngoscopic Case Studies”. Mon-Khmer Studies 311: 83–100.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Esling, John H. 1978. “Voice Quality in Edinburgh: A Sociolinguistic and Phonetic Study”. PhD Dissertation, University of Edinburgh.
Esling, John H., Scott R. Moisik, Allison Benner, and Lise Crevier-Buchman. 2019. Voice Quality: The Laryngeal Articulator Model. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Foulkes, Paul. 2002. “Current Trends in British Sociophonetics”, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 81: 75–85.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gold, Erica, and Peter French. 2011. “International Practices in Forensic Speaker Comparison”. International Journal of Speech, Language, and the Law 181: 293–307. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gold, Erica, Sula Ross, and Kate Earnshaw. 2018. “The ‘West Yorkshire Regional English Database’: Investigations into the Generalizability of Reference Populations for Forensic Speaker Comparison Casework”. Proceedings of Interspeech. Hyderabad, India, 2748–2752. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hall-Lew, Lauren, Ruth Friskney, and James M. Scobbie. 2017. “Accommodation or Political Identity: Scottish Members of the UK Parliament”. Language Variation and Change 291: 341–363. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hillenbrand, James, Ronald A. Cleveland, and Robert L. Erickson. 1994. “Acoustic Correlates of Breathy Vocal Quality”. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 371: 769–778. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hirano, Minoru. 1981. Clinical Examination of Voice. Vienna & New York: Springer.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Keating, Patricia, Marc Garellek, and Jody Kreiman. 2015. “Acoustic Properties of Different Kinds of Creaky Voice”. In Maria Wolters, Judy Livingstone, Bernie Beattie, Rachel Smith, Mike MacMahon, Jane Stuart-Smith, and James M. Scobbie, eds. Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Glasgow, UK, 821–825.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Keating, Patricia, Jianjing Kuang, Christina Esposito, Marc Garellek, and Sameer Khan. 2012. “Phonation in Nine Languages”. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 1311: 3347. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kirkham, Sam, Danielle Turton, and Adrian Leemann. 2020. “A Typology of Laterals in Twelve English Dialects.” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 1481: EL72–EL76. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Klug, Katharina, Christin Kirchhübel, Paul Foulkes, and Peter French. 2019. “Analysing Breathy Voice in Forensic Speaker Comparison: Using Acoustics to Confirm Perception”. In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain, and Paul Warren, eds. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Melbourne: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc., 795–799.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kluge, Katharina, Magdalena Müller, Cornelia Dubielzig, Christoph Meinerz, and Herbert Masthoff. 2019. “Distribution of Voice Quality Features in German – Preliminary Results”. Paper presented at the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics, University of Huddersfield, UK.
Knowles, Gerry O. 1978. “The Nature of Phonological Variables in Scouse”. In Peter Trudgill, ed. Sociolinguistic Patterns in British English. London: Arnold, 80–90.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kreiman, Jody, and Bruce Gerratt. 1998. “Validity of Rating Scale Measures of Voice Quality”. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 1041: 1598–1608. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter, and Ian Maddieson. 1996. The Sounds of the World’s Languages. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Laver, John. 1980. The Phonetic Description of Voice Quality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1994. Principles of Phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2000. “Phonetic Evaluation of Voice Quality”. In: Martin J. Ball and Raymond D. Kent, eds. Voice Quality Measurement. San Diego: Singular Publishing Group, 37–48.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Llamas, Carmen. 2007. “‘Place between Places’: Language and Identities in a Border Town”. Language in Society 361: 579–604. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Moisik, Scottt, Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins, and John Esling. 2019. “Phonological Potentials and the Lower Vocal Tract”. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 511: 1–35. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
McIntyre, Dan, Lesley Jeffries, Matt Evans, Hazel Price, and Erica Gold. 2022. The Babel Lexicon of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Nolan, Francis, Kirsty McDougall, Gea de Jong, and Toby Hudson. 2009. “The DyViS Database: Style-Controlled recordings of 100 Homogeneous Speakers for Forensic Phonetic Research”. International Journal of Speech, Language and the Law 161: 31–57.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
San Segundo, Eugenia, Paul Foulkes, Peter French, Philip Harrison, Vincent Hughes, and Colleen Kavanagh. 2019. “The Use of the Vocal Profile Analysis for Speaker Characterization: Methodological Proposals”. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 491: 353–380. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stevens, Louisa, and Peter French. 2012. “Voice Quality in Studio Quality and Telephone Transmitted Recordings”. Paper presented at the British Association of Academic Phonetics Conference, University of Leeds, UK.
Stuart-Smith, Jane. 1999. Glasgow: “Accent and Voice Quality”. In Paul Foulkes, and Gerard J. Docherty, eds. Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles. Leeds: Arnold, 201–222.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Thomas, Erik R. 2011. Sociophonetics: An Introduction. Basingstoke; Palgrave Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English (vol. 21) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wilhelm, Stephan. 2018. “Segmental and Suprasegmental Change in North West Yorkshire: A New Case of Supralocalisation?”. Corela: Cognition, Representation, Language, HS-24: 1–32. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wormald, Jessica. 2016. “Regional Variation in Panjabi-English”. PhD Dissertation, University of York.
Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Xu, Yaling & Wenyong Wang
2024. An Exploration of Users’ Intention to Continuously Use English Social Platforms in Colleges and Universities Based on the SOR Model. Applied Mathematics and Nonlinear Sciences 9:1 DOI logo
Li, Gang
2023. Internet of Things and Cloud Computing Integration of Opera Elements into Vocal Singing Teaching Practice Exploration. ICST Transactions on Scalable Information Systems DOI logo
Loakes, Debbie & Adele Gregory
2022. Voice quality in Australian English. JASA Express Letters 2:8 DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 7 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue