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expressing the material through speech.
Embedded speech is used during Brand’s
performance by vocally recreating the
voice of another celebrity, in this instance
Jordin Sparks. Brand attempts to mimic the
accent along with specific voice qualities
that Sparks portrays in the MTV awards.
Brand alters his own accent to impersonate
Sparks’s young female American accent; he
changes his Essex accent to what can be
described as similar to a typical Californian
accent spoken by a female. He alters his
pitch and tone to a higher level to mimic the
female voice and then uses more than three
fillers to imitate her speech - ‘er’, ‘like’ and
‘um’. Brand uses all of the features to try
and replicate the female American accent
in order to recreate a speech event that he
was present at, creating a humorous appeal
to the audience.
have argued that the glottal stop is not only
restricted to the south east of England but is
a feature that is becoming more widespread
within the UK. The glottal stop occurs when
there is complete obstruction of air flow in
the vocal tract, more specifically the glottis.
The voiceless alveolar /t/ is substituted for a
glottal stop /ʔ/. An example of this is where
the /t/ in both words ‘cotton’ and ‘butter’
are replaced by a glottal stop. Using the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) this
can be transcribed into [kɒʔən] and [bʌɁə].
In this example Brand also emphasises
the phoneme /ʌ/. T-glottaling is a very
popular feature of this accent and can be
stereotyped as a feature that is largely used
in and stems from London (Altendorf 2003).
Brand regularly drops the /h/ at the
beginning of his words, a process known
as H-dropping in the Estuary accent.
H-dropping offers another prevalent
example in Brand’s accent where the
removal of the voiceless glottal fricative is
evident in his speech. An illustration of this
with the word ‘have’. RP English speakers
would pronounce this as [hæv], compared
to Brand’s Estuary accent showing from the
clip that he drops the phoneme /h/ off the
word: [æv]. A notable colloquial feature that
demonstrates the difference between RP
and Estuary English is the word ‘ain’t’. This
morphosyntactic variable is commonly used
in Brand’s speech, along with it being widely
used in the south east of England. The
nonstandard term is mainly a contraction
for is not, am not and has not.
Accent
Russell Brand is well known for his strong
Estuary English accent, an accent that is very
distinctive in all of his performances. This
performance displays several noticeable
aspects of his accent which can be
compared against Received Pronunciation
(RP), also known as Standard English or
‘BBC English’, with the most noticeable and
prominent being TH fronting, T-glottaling
and H-dropping.
TH fronting is commonly used in Estuary
English; Brand commonly replaces the
phoneme /θ/ with the voiced labiodental
fricative phoneme /f/, also occasionally
replacing it with /v/. The labiodental fricative
uses the upper teeth and lower lips, which
in turn blocks partial airflow in the mouth.
We see an example in line 3 (‘I said some
things’) where Brand says [fɪŋz] instead of
the correct Standard English pronunciation
[θɪŋz]. The phoneme /v/ can also be evident
in TH fronting. In the performance, the word
‘Brother’ is enunciated [brəvəz], replacing
the linguistic variable /θ/ with /v/. This
shows that in Brand’s speech TH fronting
can occur in different positions of a word.
Timing and rhythm
Timing and rhythm are particularly crucial to
stand-up comedy; Brand emphasises and
puts stress on certain words for comical
effect, and also to ensure that his jokes are
well understood by the audience. The timing
is reasonably well paced throughout Brand’s
act, with it only slightly changing when he
is delivering a punchline or impersonating
others in his performance. Both short and
long pauses are taken through the act,
usually after a joke has just been delivered
or just beforehand - pauses of up to four
seconds are evident in the transcript. Brand
has purposefully created pauses in his
The glottal stop, also known as T-glottaling,
is used very frequently in Russell Brand’s
speech. Hughes, Trudgill and Watt (2012)
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