Prosody

Wells (1982: 392) notes: “Popular English views about Welsh accents include the claim that they have a ‘sing-song’ or lilting intonation”, a characteristic associated particularly with the industrial valleys of south Wales. Comparatively little has been published on Welsh English intonation, but studies have been carried out since Wells’s Accents of English. Tench (1989: 140), on the English of Abercrave in the Swansea Valley, notes “the high degree of pitch movement on an unaccented post-tonic syllable” and “the high degree of pitch independence of unaccented syllables in pre-tonic position”, features which, says Tench, lie behind the sing-song claim. The detailed analysis in Walters (2003: 81–84), which draws on his substantial 1999 study, describes striking pitch movement in the pronunciation of Rhondda Valleys English (for example, the tendency for pitch to rise from the stressed syllable), which Walters connects with influence from Welsh-language intonation patterns.