Pronounced accents

I have just made a minor change to the problematic article International Phonetic Alphabet for English Dialects. I happened to notice its claim that [eə̯] is a New Zealand pronunciation of /ɪər/, with the explanatory note that “this is especially common amongst young speakers with very pronounced accents”. I removed the last four words because no accent is more “pronounced” than any other, unless you are explicitly comparing with some standard. This chimes with something I have just read – Peter Trudgill writes an excellent column every week for our local paper, the Eastern Daily Press,  with observations about language variation and standards, as well as a wealth of information about Norfolk dialect, on which he is the No.1 expert.  This week’s topic was the widely-held belief that some speakers speak without an accent – specifically, here, that Stephen Fry was born in Norfolk, but “now speaks without an accent”. It’s a shame that this column isn’t more widely available, but I believe there is a chance that a selection of these pieces might be published in book form in the future. I’ve been reminded that John Esling wrote a nice chapter entitled “Everyone has an accent except me” in Language Myths, (Penguin, 1998), eds. L. Bauer and P. Trudgill, pp 169-175.

Incidentally, Peter Trudgill and I were colleagues in the Linguistics Department at Reading University in the 1970’s, and now live within a mile of each other in Norwich.