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Clive Upton (born 30 September 1946) is an English linguist specializing in dialectology and sociolinguistics. He is also an authority on the pronunciation of English. He has been Emeritus Professor of Modern English Language at the University of Leeds since 2012.
Upton was born in Solihull, England, and was educated at Solihull School (1956–65). He holds a BA and a MA from the University of Wales (Swansea) (now Swansea University) and a PhD from the University of Leeds, where he was Professor of Modern English Language from 2006 to 2012.
Upton's research in dialectology began at Swansea, where as an MA student he was one of the original fieldworkers on the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (SAWD). After a lectureship at the University of Malawi, he began his long association with the Survey of English Dialects (SED) at the University of Leeds, where he joined the Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies as a research assistant to Harold Orton on the Survey's Linguistic Atlas of England. After he received his PhD from Leeds in 1977, appointments at the Papua New Guinea University of Technology, the University of Birmingham and the University of Sheffield followed. He returned to Leeds in 1997, where he became Professor of Modern English language in 2006 and Professor Emeritus upon his retirement in 2012. Upton has contributed to a number of major publications on English dialectology which draw on SED materials. He co-authored Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and Grammar (London: Routledge, 1994) with David Parry and John Widdowson, and An Atlas of English Dialects (Oxford: OUP, 1996 and London: Routledge, 2006) with Widdowson.
Between 2002 and 2005 Upton, with Oliver Pickering, led the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC) project, which made the collections of the former Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies accessible to those with interests in the speech, customs, beliefs and practices of traditional British communities. [1]
In 2004–2005 he was academic adviser to the BBC's "Voices" project. Local radio journalists collected examples of speech from around the country, and Upton coordinated the group which analysed the data generated by the initiative. [2] The findings were published in Analysing Twenty-first Century British English (London: Routledge, 2013), co-edited with Bethan L. Davies. Upton worked with the British Library to make the "Voices" material widely available. Many of the recordings are now accessible, alongside other accent and dialect materials (including substantial material from the SED), on the library's Sounds site. [3]
In addition to his work in dialectology, Upton has been a pronunciation consultant for Oxford University Press since 1993. His revised version of the Received Pronunciation model is used in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary , the Concise Oxford English Dictionary , and the New Oxford Dictionary of English . [4]
He is also responsible for the British element of the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (2001) and its second edition, The Routledge Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (2017). With his son Eben Upton, he is co-author of the Oxford Rhyming Dictionary (2004). He was editor of the Cambridge University Press journal English Today from 2013 to 2017.
As of September 2022, he is the editor of the Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, an annual publication. [5]
Clive Upton is married to Lesley. They have two children, a son Eben (b. 1978) and a daughter Stevie (b. 1981). Eben is the lead developer of the Raspberry Pi computer.
British English is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadly, to the collective dialects of English throughout the British Isles taken as a single umbrella variety, for instance additionally incorporating Scottish English, Welsh English, and Northern Irish English. Tom McArthur in the Oxford Guide to World English acknowledges that British English shares "all the ambiguities and tensions [with] the word 'British' and as a result can be used and interpreted in two ways, more broadly or more narrowly, within a range of blurring and ambiguity".
Received Pronunciation (RP) is the accent regarded as the standard and most prestigious form of spoken British English, since as late as the early 20th century. Language scholars have long disagreed on questions such as: the exact definition of RP, how geographically neutral it is, how many speakers there are, the nature and classification of its sub-varieties, how appropriate a choice it is as a standard, how the accent has changed over time, and even its name. RP is an accent, so the study of RP is concerned only with matters of pronunciation, while other features of Standard British English, such as vocabulary, grammar, and style, are not considered. The accent has changed, or its traditional users have changed their accents, to such a degree over the last century that many of its early 20th-century traditions of transcription and analysis have become outdated and are therefore no longer considered evidence-based by linguists. Still, in language education these traditions continue to be commonly taught and used, and the use of RP as a convenient umbrella term remains popular.
General American English, known in linguistics simply as General American, is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans, encompassing a continuum rather than a single unified accent. It is often perceived by Americans themselves as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics, though Americans with high education, or from the (North) Midland, Western New England, and Western regions of the country are the most likely to be perceived as using General American speech. The precise definition and usefulness of the term continue to be debated, and the scholars who use it today admittedly do so as a convenient basis for comparison rather than for exactness. Other scholars prefer the term Standard American English.
Estuary English is an English accent, continuum of accents, or continuum of accent features associated with the area along the River Thames and its estuary, including London, since the late 20th century. Phonetician John C. Wells proposed a definition of Estuary English as "Standard English spoken with the accent of the southeast of England". He views Estuary English as an emerging standard accent of England, while also acknowledging that it is a social construct rather than a technically well-defined linguistic phenomenon. He describes it as "intermediate" between the 20th-century higher-class non-regional standard accent, Received Pronunciation (RP), and the 20th-century lower-class local London accent, Cockney. There is much debate among linguists as to where Cockney and RP end and where Estuary English begins, or whether Estuary English is even a single cohesive accent.
Scouse, more formally known as Liverpool English or Merseyside English, is an accent and dialect of English associated with the city of Liverpool and the surrounding Liverpool City Region. The Scouse accent is highly distinctive as it was influenced heavily by Irish and Welsh immigrants who arrived via the Liverpool docks, as well as Scandinavian sailors who also used the docks, and thus has very little in common with the accents found throughout the rest of England. People from Liverpool are known as Liverpudlians, but are usually called Scousers; the name comes from scouse, a stew originating from Scandinavian lobscouse eaten by sailors and locals.
In an English-speaking country, Standard English (SE) is the variety of English that has undergone codification to the point of being socially perceived as the standard language, associated with formal schooling, language assessment, and official print publications, such as public service announcements and newspapers of record, etc. All linguistic features are subject to the effects of standardisation, including morphology, phonology, syntax, lexicon, register, discourse markers, pragmatics, as well as written features such as spelling conventions, punctuation, capitalisation and abbreviation practices. SE is local to nowhere: its grammatical and lexical components are no longer regionally marked, although many of them originated in different, non-adjacent dialects, and it has very little of the variation found in spoken or earlier written varieties of English. According to Peter Trudgill, Standard English is a social dialect pre-eminently used in writing that is distinguishable from other English dialects largely by a small group of grammatical "idiosyncrasies", such as irregular reflexive pronouns and an "unusual" present-tense verb morphology.
The open front unrounded vowel, or low front unrounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. It is one of the eight primary cardinal vowels, not directly intended to correspond to a vowel sound of a specific language but rather to serve as a fundamental reference point in a phonetic measuring system.
The close central rounded vowel, or high central rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʉ⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is }. The sound is also commonly referred to by the name of its symbol, "barred u".
The open-mid back unrounded vowel or low-mid back unrounded vowel is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ʌ⟩, graphically a rotated lowercase "v". Both the symbol and the sound are commonly referred to as a "wedge", "caret" or "hat". In transcriptions for English, this symbol is commonly used for the near-open central unrounded vowel and in transcriptions for Danish, it is used for the open back rounded vowel.
The open-mid front rounded vowel, or low-mid front rounded vowel, is a type of vowel sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents the sound is ⟨œ⟩. The symbol œ is a lowercase ligature of the letters o and e. The letter ⟨ɶ⟩, a small capital version of the ⟨Œ⟩ ligature, is used for a different vowel sound: the open front rounded vowel.
The spoken English language in Northern England has been shaped by the region's history of settlement and migration, and today encompasses a group of related accents and dialects known as Northern England English or Northern English.
A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which do not have a phonemic orthography.
A lexical set is a group of words that share a particular phonological feature.
Harold Orton was a British dialectologist and professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds.
The Survey of English Dialects was undertaken between 1950 and 1961 under the direction of Professor Harold Orton of the English department of the University of Leeds. It aimed to collect the full range of speech in England and Wales before local differences were to disappear. Standardisation of the English language was expected with the post-war increase in social mobility and the spread of the mass media. The project originated in discussions between Professor Orton and Professor Eugen Dieth of the University of Zurich about the desirability of producing a linguistic atlas of England in 1946, and a questionnaire containing 1,300 questions was devised between 1947 and 1952.
The distinction between rhoticity and non-rhoticity is one of the most prominent ways in which varieties of the English language are classified. In rhotic accents, the sound of the historical English rhotic consonant,, is preserved in all pronunciation contexts. In non-rhotic accents, speakers no longer pronounce in postvocalic environments: when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, in isolation, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, but a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the sound and pronounces them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/. When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "better apples," most non-rhotic speakers will preserve the in that position since it is followed by a vowel in this case.
The Atlas Linguarum Europae is a linguistic atlas project launched in 1970 with the help of UNESCO, and published from 1975 to 2007. The ALE used its own phonetic transcription system, based on the International Phonetic Alphabet with some modifications. It covers six language families present on the European continent: Altaic, Basque, Indo-European, Caucasian, Semitic and Uralic; these families are divided into 22 linguistic groups comprising 90 languages and dialects. The data were collected in 2631 localities. The members of the ALE project are organized into 47 national committees and 4 committees for minority languages.
Stewart Forson Sanderson (1924–2016) was a Scottish folklorist and linguist.
J.D.A. (John) Widdowson is a British linguist and folklorist.
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