The Wikipedia article on Estuary English has just been changed so that the first sentence starts "Estuary English or London Regional General British is an accent of English ..."  and refers to Alan Cruttenden's latest revision of Gimson's Pronunciation of English.  I have put a note on the talk page saying I don't think this term (LRGB) should be given equal status as a name for the accent in question. After all, the name Estuary English has been in use for a long time and is widely discussed, while LRGB is a recent creation by just one writer. I think it would be better if the name was removed from the lead paragraph and was introduced in the section called "Name" (which currently only shows abbreviations). The article on Received Pronunciation has a separate section about other names for RP. Perhaps this will have been implemented by the time you read this. 




NOTE: The editor involved has now changed the EE article in line with my suggestion, which I am glad about. Incidentally, the editing software for this blog managed to lose a couple of paragraphs I added to the above on the Estuary English article in general, so I will come back to the subject at a later date.

Wikipedia has hundreds of articles on phonetics, and a number of these are relevant to the business of teaching pronunciation. However, if you look for an article on pronunciation teaching, you will be disappointed. The first article you are likely to find is the one called Pronunciation. This pathetic little piece is really little more than a poor dictionary definition of the word. It contains gems such as “Pronunciation is the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect.” This implies that two different meanings are being presented, but I certainly can’t see the difference. Further words of wisdom come later, with “Syllables are counted as units of sound (phones) that they use in their language”.

If you are looking for information specifically about teaching English, then the article entitled English as a second or foreign language might look promising. But when you turn to the section on pronunciation, what you get is almost the same stuff as you find in the article called Non-native pronunciations of English (which I have criticized before). In both cases what you get is an unorganized laundry list of things that speakers of particular languages are likely to “get wrong”. Some of the material is very badly written – for example, you read that in Brazilian Portuguese “Speakers may pronounce word-initial r as a guttural ar pronunciations or a trill. These often sound to English speakers as /h/, leading to confusion between ray and hay etc.” In the ‘English as a second or foreign language’ article I was surprised to be told to “Note that [bɪt] is a pronunciation often used in England and Wales for bet, and also in some dialects of American English.”

Oddly, there is also an article called Teaching English as a foreign language, which doesn’t say much about the language but is more about the TEFL industry.

Finally in my search for articles relevant to pronunciation teaching I came across Accent reduction. This short article is actually quite well written. I suppose, though, that in a blog it’s OK to air one’s personal prejudices so I’ll note in passing that I hate this term. You can change your accent, and you can make it more similar or less similar to some specific  target accent, but you can’t just have less of an accent than someone else. It depresses me that one of the best selling books on the pronunciation of English is called Get Rid of your Accent.

So it would be great if one or more experts on pronunciation teaching would put an article on the subject on WIkipedia. I shall watch hopefully.