THE PHONOLOGY OF RHONDDA VALLEYS ENGLISH |
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The Rhondda Accent
The pages and recordings that follow are a study of working-class male pronunciation in a South Wales 'Valleys' accent of English. Symbols and technical terms used are explained for the non-specialist reader in the Glossary. The accent studied is that of Rhondda Valleys English (RVE). It is similar to accents across the whole of the 'Valleys' area of south-east Wales. Readers can hear the consonants, vowels, intonational cadences etc in sound-clips throughout the text, and can access the full recordings in the Archive.
Rod Walters
Rod Walters was born in Neath, South Wales in 1939. He has spent most of his working life overseas, including 12 years in British Government funded EFL programmes in the Middle East. Returning to Wales in 1990, he worked until retirement in 2004 as a senior lecturer in the University of Glamorgan. His research interests have been in the phonology of South Wales 'Valleys English'. He has found that the features which contribute most strongly to 'Valleys' accents have been influenced by the Welsh Language. Given his background in music [LRAM], he is particularly interested in identifying and describing the prosodic features that form the distinctive 'melody' of Valleys accents of English, features which, though differing in phonetic detail, are (to his ear) found in many other Welsh accents of English.
Publications
- Walters, J.R. A study of the segmental and supra-segmental phonology of Rhondda Valleys English, PhD Thesis (1999), University of Glamorgan;
- Walters, J.R. English in Wales and a 'Valleys accent', in World Englishes (2001) Vol. 20.3, Blackwell;
- Walters, J.R. "Celtic English": influences on a South Wales Valleys accent, in English World-Wide (2003) Vol. 24.1, John Benjamins;
- Walters, J.R. On the intonation of a South Wales 'Valleys accent' of English, in Journal of the IPA (2003) Vol. 33. 2, CUP;
- Walters, J.R. A study of the Prosody of a South East Wales 'Valleys Accent', in The Celtic Englishes III (2003) ed. Hildegard L. C. Tristram, Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter;
- Walters, J.R. Applications of Discourse Intonation: Rhondda Discourse Intonation, in Speechinaction.com ed. Richard Cauldwell, 2003.
Contact
Contact: E-mail (Home) roddy.walters@gmail.com
Acknowledgements
My thanks are due to the University of Glamorgan Research Committee for funding this research, and to my two supervisors, Alan James and Paul Tench, for their unfailing wise counsel over the years. I also thank
- Martin Ball, Philip Brake, Cennard Davies, Robert Owen Jones and Alan Thomas for their advice on matters of Welsh Language phonology;
- Nik Coupland, John Edwards, David Parry and Robert Penhallurick for their insights into Welsh English;
- David Brazil, Gill Brown, Bob Ladd, Peter Roach and John Wells for their advice on matters of linguistics and dialect phonology;
- The Welsh Folk Museum at St Ffagan's for access to archive recordings of Rhondda speech;
- Sally Bates and Ineke Mennen for their instrumental analyses;
- Dave King, Roger Carruthers and other technical staff of the University of Glamorgan for their considerable contribution to the project.
Finally, I express my deep gratitude to the officials and members, many of them unemployed miners, of the Tynewydd Workmen's Club & the Conservative Workmen's Club (the "Con") at Treherbert, the Maerdy Workmen's Club, and the Cymmer Pioneer Workmen's Club & Cymmer Workmen's Hall at Porth. Their warmth and welcome made the job of interviewing easy and an experience I will never forget.