Speak Up is an Italian magazine written in English and aimed
at EFL students. For several years now it's had its own website where videos
are posted of interviews with all sorts of English native speakers. Even world-famous
linguist David Crystal has more than once contributed to the magazine: listen to
the free podcasts here.


"the type of speech which is basically GB except for the presence of a few regional characteristics which may well go unnoticed even by other speakers of GB".
Among these
characteristics are, for
Some of John
Peter Sloan's regional features in this interview include the following:
i) he
pronounces have and having a beer without h;
ii) he
seems to say with as wɪf rather than GB wɪð or wɪθ;
iii) he
says ˈlɪʔl̩ instead of GB ˈlɪtl̩ or ˈlɪtəl for little;
iv) he says
here iʔ is instead of GB here it is;
v) the
first time he pronounces the word sitting
he says it with glottal stop instead of t, and then he 'corrects himself';
vi) his KIT
vowel sometimes sounds as close as FLEECE, as in one of his renderings of the word English. (This is typical of some Midland
accents in England. John is in fact originally from Birmingham. Listen to how
he says fun, cut, nut and us by clicking the link here under "Block
1 - Pronunciation" named "13 Dita in gola; p. 25".)
(A little
digression… Recently, there has been talk on the web about the use of the
glottal plosive ʔ being perfectly
acceptable in today's GB before syllabic l.
See for example this article by Pronunciation Studio teacher Maria Kozikowska.
She claims that pronunciations like ˈbɒʔl̩
and ˈlɪʔl̩ for bottle and little are
"now more and more widely acceptable in an RP (= GB) accent". Again
this is blatantly false. Here's what Cruttenden writes on p. 184 of his new Gimson's:
For more on
the gaffes made by Pronunciation Studio, see this article by Jack Windsor Lewis, this post and comments on Kraut's English phonetic blog, and this other post on the same blog.)
One final note about
the magazine Speak Up: its Language Blog is riddled with incorrect statements and howlers concerning the
pronunciation of English. See, for instance, this post, where a reader asks how
the two t's in department are to be pronounced; and this brief description of
the characteristics of a New York accent.