General British and related recordings
The recordings on this page represent examples of General British (GB) together with variations on it: Conspicuous General British (CGB) and two types of Regional General British (RGB)—London-Regional GB (often called ‘Estuary English’) and Northern Regional GB––together with brief systematic descriptions of other accents. The examples of General British include some older examples of the accent from 1932-1962. It is important to remember that in practice these descriptive labels often shade into one another, e.g. a person's speech may be generally GB but have one or two features of CGB.
There are also examples of two accents which enjoy comparable status in Britain—General Northern English and Scottish Standard English.
Most audio clips are accompanied by a selection of the following: (a) notes on the pronunciation, (b) the orthographic text, (c) a phonemic transcription, and (d) an intonational transcription.
GB is described in detail in Gimson’s pronunciation of English (GPE) by Alan Cruttenden (Eighth edition, Routledge, 2014), which has a companion website containing historical recordings, MRI videos and practice materials for EFL. In GPE there is regular reference to CGB and RGB together with brief systematic descriptions of other accents. Alan Cruttenden also compiled the audioclips on this webpage. Many of the ordinary-spelling transcripts and phonetic transcriptions were made by Jack Windsor Lewis.
More audio material is available on the companion website to Practical phonetics and phonology by B.S.Collins & I.Mees (Third edition, Routledge, 2013), where there are examples of English accents, both within and outside Britain.