This chapter addresses word stress patterns in Slavic languages. The discussion focuses on the placement of stress and the nature of the accent. Fixed stress systems are discussed (initial, antepenultimate, penultimate) as well as systems with free stress. The chapter also discusses the movement of the stress within inflectional patterns. The discussion furthermore includes the nature of the stress in various Slavic languages. There is also an outline of the laws regulating the patterns of stress in Slavic languages.

This chapter introduces the concept of accent, particularly in relation to dialects and varieties of English.The chapter first defines the word 'accent', and the relationship among accent, dialect, and variety. The chapter then focuses on how we understand and describe accents, and the social meaning that accents convey in different contexts. The chapter then discusses variation within different regional varieties of English, and the use of umbrella terms such as 'British English' or 'American English' to encompass a range of social, regional, and ethnic varieties. The chapter then describes the features of the book; the final section of the chapter has a series of exercises and tasks to guide you through a revision of the contents of the chapter.

In the final chapter of this book, we return to the concept of accent, by looking at how we develop and use our accent across time and space. The chapter then provides you with resources for more advanced study of English and phonology, by presenting a range of online websites and databases with speech samples, as well as movies and TV series to provide exposure to different varieties of English. The discussion then focuses on pragmatic considerations in data collection, including the use of free software programs such as Audacity and PRAAT to record and analyse speech. The chapter then reviews different types of data that can be collected for phonetic and phonological analysis, including word lists, reading passages, and conversational data, with a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of using each type of data. In the final section of the chapter, you are guided through exercises to check your understanding of the content of the chapter.

This chapter outlines how social media data, such as Facebook and Twitter, can be used to study language attitudes. This comparatively recent method in language attitudes research benefits from the immediate accessibility of large amounts of data from a wide range of people that can be collected quickly and with minimal effort – a point in common with attitude studies using print data. At the same time, this method collects people’s spontaneous thoughts, that is unprompted attitudinal data – a characteristic usually attributed to methods drawing on speech data. The study of language attitudes in social media data can, however, yield wholly different insights from writing and speech data. The chapter discusses the advantages and pitfalls of different types of content analysis as well as the general limitations of the method. The chapter presents an overview of software programmes to collect social media data, as well as geo-tagging, and addresses data analysis as well as the general usefulness of the method (e.g. its applicability around the world or the potential for diachronic attitudinal change). The case study in this chapter uses examples from Twitter, focusing on attitudes towards the Welsh accent in English.

A writer, film director, photographer, and artist, the author’s reflection comprises the opening pages of an essay and an autobiographical fragment presenting his mixed-origin multilingual family. The short final section, ‘Border Tax’, extracted from the same essay, reflects on power relations strategies and the high economic and political stakes of multilingual verbal interaction. The economic metaphor of a border tax to convey the idea that an accent is the price to be paid for speaking a foreign language is striking as a reminder of the hybrid character of language: linguistic transparency and purity, and sharply delimited bilingualism, are delusions. Accents are described as markers of belonging; they are shown to convey fine nuances of identity, to carry with them distant or lost worlds. In contrast with the usual perception of accent as something to be erased, the author prizes accent as a remnant of the past in the present, or of far-off places in the here and now. The price to be paid to speak a second language well can be a high one, and our sights should not be set too high for our students, as we cannot know how high the price will be for them.

In France, Cécile Goï questions the notion of cultural otherness while mocking the times when she played with the Gypsies in her small village as a child. This experience was the seed of her first "gesture of indignation" in response to ostracism related to cultural and linguistic diversity.  Making sense of such experiences produced to a profound reflection on social cohesion, equal opportunities, and educational success, in particular for newly arrived students.

Dialogue can be used to develop characters and progress plot but also needs to be dramatically necessary: characters need good reasons to impart information. Characters’ voices need to be differentiated. Dialogue injects energy; too much reported speech and action saps it. How to deliver information through dialogue without it feeling artificial. The value of what is not said and what stands behind the spoken words. The significance of silence. The constructed nature of ‘realistic’ dialogue. The debate over ‘said’. A guide to conventional and unconventional ways of punctuating dialogue. Managing accent and dialect. The problem of ‘other world’ speech. Managing a character’s thoughts.

‘If dialogue in fiction faithfully reflected speech in real life it would often be boring – full of repetitions, non sequiturs, digressions, irrelevancies, trivia and hesitations; it would also take up far too much space. The writer’s aim is to make dialogue appear authentic.’

This chapter covers two related prosodic phenomena: stress, i.e. the relative perceived prominence of individual syllables, and speech rhythm, the distributed prominence of syllables across stretches of speech and their perceived regularity in time. Both stress and rhythm can be viewed from the angles of perception and production, and speakers of different languages differ in how stress and rhythm are produced, perceived and interpreted for linguistic meaning. The chapter explains which articulatory and phonatory factors have been found to play a role in the production of stressed syllables, and distinguishes between stress and accent. The historically important concepts of rhythm classes and isochrony are presented in the context of current developments and debates. Three recent issues for research are presented in some detail: the analysis of stress in different languages, rhythm metrics, and rhythm and perception. The chapter further explores the role of rhythm for turn-taking in everyday talk, showing that conversationalists aim to rhythmically integrate their turns at talk with those of other speakers.

This chapter examines voice quality as the long-term, relatively constant or habitually recurring phonetic characteristics of an individual’s speech. The identification of voice quality settings relates the auditory/acoustic components of the voice quality strand of an individual’s accent (i.e. habitual manner of speaking) to the articulatory postures or movements that shape speech sound quality over the long term. An essential generator of long-term quality is the larynx, producing sustained vibrations and laryngeal articulatory resonances that interact with vowel quality and tonal quality. Various instrumental phonetic procedures have been developed to observe postural settings of the parts of the vocal tract. The images from these experimental observations have been incorporated into instructional tools for teaching and learning about voice quality settings and the movements of the laryngeal articulatory mechanism in particular.

This chapter provides an overview of research on heritage language (HL) sound systems, with a focus on areas of convergence and divergence among heritage speakers (HSs), native speakers (NSs) who continue to be dominant in the language, and second language learners (L2ers) who acquired the language later in life. Drawing on data from a wide range of HLs, the chapter addresses both phonetic (articulatory, acoustic, perceptual) and phonological (phonemic, distributional, phonotactic) aspects of the HL sound system, as well as that of the majority language, in light of theories of bilingual speech and variables previously studied as predictors of HSs’ linguistic behavior. Despite the diversity of results reviewed, several recurring themes emerge, including intermediate patterning between NSs and L2ers, a higher level of performance in perception than production, and individual variability. In particular, the depth and the accessibility of HSs’ knowledge of the HL sound system show considerable variation related to structural linguistic factors, demographic and sociolinguistic factors, input and usage-based factors, and methodological factors. In addition to summarizing the areas in which there is an emerging consensus, the chapter points out a number of remaining questions that pave the way for future research on HL sound systems.

Khaled Rifaat provides a detailed analysis of Arabic intonation including an extensive review of literature, noting from the outset the ‘paucity of research on intonational prosody’ in Arabic linguistics. He describes Arabic intonation as an ‘accidentally dense system’ characterized by ‘structural and functional simplicity’. In particular, he points out problems of eliciting adequate corpora of spontaneous speech, whether in colloquial Arabic or in more formal Standard Arabic. His discussion covers the theoretical framework of Arabic intonational phonology, phrasing and constituents, accent types and distribution, declination, and trendlines.

Accents in second language speech have multiple perceptual consequences, including breakdown in communication and undesirable judgements about accented speakers. Whereas perceived accents are likely influenced by various acoustic variables, it is not clear which acoustic variables influence the perceived accents the most and whether such important predictors of accents change as learners’ proficiency develops. Here we report a study that has examined acoustic sources of foreign accent in second language Japanese produced by American learners at different instructional levels, including beginning and intermediate late learners and early bilinguals. We collected speech samples from these learners as well as a control group of native speakers, and measured 27 segmental and prosodic variables. These acoustic variables were related to accent rating scores obtained from native listeners. Confirmatory analyses showed that 24 out of 27 variables tested were reliably associated with listeners’ accentedness judgements. Exploratory analyses showed that prosodic features were most predictive of beginning to intermediate late learners’ accents, whereas vowel features were most predictive of early bilinguals’ accents. These results shed light on issues related to the acoustic sources of foreign accent and the development of second language speech.

In this study, segmental and prosodic properties of word-length stimuli were assessed together. Six talkers from 5 L1 backgrounds (American English, Hindi, Korean, Mandarin, and Spanish) were recorded reading English stop-initial trochaic words. The productions were played for 20 monolingual American English-speaking listeners rated the accentedness of each talker. For each token, the deviation from native English productions was determined for segmental (VOT, vowel quality) and three prosodic properties (ratios of duration, intensity, f0 across the two syllables). For each non-native language background, a linear mixed-effects regression model was created to predict accentedness ratings from the phonetic deviations, and the significance of each fixed effect was examined. In each model, the significant predictors included both segmental and prosodic properties. For Hindi and Spanish talkers, the single best predictor was segmental; however, for Korean and Mandarin talkers, the single best predictor was prosodic. Thus, even for short stimuli, both segmental and prosodic information must be considered in accounting for accentedness judgments. We conclude that listeners are sensitive to the different ways that foreign accent may be manifested across different non-native backgrounds.

This chapter covers several issues in language classification: the distinction between a language, a dialect, and an accent; how and why languages are classified into families; how the ancestral language of a given family can be reconstructed; how languages diversify and how related languages come about. A separate section is dedicated to the documentation of languages “in the field.” The final section is concerned with the issue of language mapping; various resources offering language maps are discussed.

The term paralinguistics (from ‘alongside language’ in ancient Greek) describes sounds that carry meaning, but that are not part of the language system. Such sounds convey information to other speakers, but they are not always clear, leaving one with a sense of ‘it wasn’t what they said, but how they said it.’ To interpret the speaker’s tone, participants often rely on the context of the interaction. This chapter explores research on paralinguistic features in four categories: voice quality, prosody, conversational management, and accent. The discussion includes how affect is expressed in electronic communication. Afterwards, these concepts are connected to an intercultural communication-oriented pedagogy, with sample language teaching activities.

One of the most important contributors to understanding and speaking a second or foreign language is the lexicon, which is the focus of the first pedagogical chapter. After briefly reviewing relevant research regarding how vocabulary is learned in a second or foreign language, the discussion turns to issues in language variation and communication strategies that language learners and users might draw on, when they lack the necessary vocabulary to convey their intended meaning. Since research into L2/Lx lexical acquisition is vast, a full review is not possible, therefore this chapter focuses specifically on findings that are most relevant for promoting intercultural communicative competence: what it means to know words and how to teach vocabulary effectively. The chapter concludes with a proposal of connecting this research to concepts in intercultural communicative competence, sample language teaching tasks, and activities.