An acoustic analysis of ‘happy-tensing’ in the Queen's Christmas broadcasts

Abstract

This paper presents a longitudinal analysis of some vowels from the annual Christmas broadcasts produced by Queen Elizabeth II over a 50-year period in order to investigate whether adults adapt to sound changes taking place in the community. The sound change that was analyzed in this paper, which is sometimes known as happY-tensing, concerns the tensing of the final vowel in words like 'happy' in British English Received Pronunciation over the course of the last 50 years. In the first part of the study, schwa …