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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.
Received Pronunciation (RP) is the accent traditionally regarded as the standard and most prestigious form of spoken British English. For over a century, there has been argument over such questions as the definition of RP, whether it is geographically neutral, how many speakers there are, whether sub-varieties exist, how appropriate a choice it is as a standard and how the accent has changed over time. The name itself is controversial. RP is an accent, so the study of RP is concerned only with matters of pronunciation; other areas relevant to the study of language standards such as vocabulary, grammar, and style are not considered.
General American English or General American is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans. In the United States it is often perceived as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics, but it encompasses a continuum of accents rather than a single unified accent. 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 having General American accents. The precise definition and usefulness of the term General American 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 associated with the area along the River Thames and its estuary, including London. 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: an "intermediate" between the 20th-century higher-class non-regional standard accent, Received Pronunciation, and the 20th-century lower-class local London accent, Cockney. There is some debate among linguists as to where Cockney speech ends and Estuary English begins.
The Yorkshire dialect is a dialect of English, or continuum of dialects, spoken in the Yorkshire region of Northern England. The dialect has roots in Old English and is influenced by Old Norse. The Yorkshire dialect has faded and faces extinction, but organisations such as The Yorkshire Dialect Society and the East Riding Dialect Society exist to promote its use.
The voiceless labiodental fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in a number of spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨f⟩.
In an English-speaking country, Standard English (SE) is the variety of English that has undergone substantial regularisation and is 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 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 sound ⟨ɶ⟩, a small capital version of the ⟨Œ⟩ ligature, is used for a distinct vowel sound: the open front rounded vowel.
Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. Dialectology treats such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation.
A pronunciation respelling for English is a notation used to convey the pronunciation of words in the English language, which does not have a phonemic orthography.
A lexical set is a group of words that all share a particular phonological feature.
West Midlands English is a group of dialects of the English language native to the English West Midlands.
New England English is, collectively, the various distinct dialects and varieties of American English originating in the New England area. Most of eastern and central New England once spoke the "Yankee dialect", some of whose accent features still remain in eastern New England today, such as "R-dropping". Accordingly, one linguistic division of New England is into Eastern versus Western New England English, as defined in the 1939 Linguistic Atlas of New England and the 2006 Atlas of North American English (ANAE). The ANAE further argues for a division between Northern versus Southern New England English, especially on the basis of the cot–caught merger and fronting. The ANAE also categorizes the strongest differentiated New England accents into four combinations of the above dichotomies, simply defined as follows:
Dialect levelling is the means by which dialect differences decrease. For example, in rural areas of Britain, although English is widely spoken, the pronunciation and the grammar have historically varied. During the twentieth century, more people moved into towns and cities, standardising English. Dialect levelling can develop by the influence of various types of media.
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.
Rhoticity in English is the pronunciation of the historical rhotic consonant by English speakers. The presence or absence of rhoticity is one of the most prominent distinctions by which varieties of English can be classified. In rhotic varieties, the historical English sound is preserved in all pronunciation contexts. In non-rhotic varieties, speakers no longer pronounce in postvocalic environments—that is, 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/, whereas a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the sound, pronouncing 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 pronounce the in that position, since it is followed by a vowel in this case.
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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