Not quite the same: The social stratification and phonetic conditioning of thefoot–strutvowels in Manchester

Abstract

The foot–strut vowel split, which has its origins in 17th century English, is notable for its absence from the speech of Northerners in England, where stood–stud remain homophones – both are pronounced with the same vowel /ʊ/. The present study analyses the speech of 122 speakers from Manchester in the North West of England. Although the vast majority of speakers exhibit no distinction between the foot and strut lexical sets in minimal-pair production and judgement tests, vowel height is correlated with socio-economic status: the higher the social class, the lower the strut vowel. Surprisingly, statistical models indicate that vowel class is a significant predictor of foot–strut in Manchester. This means that, for a speech community without the split, there remains an effect in the expected direction: strut vowels are lower than foot vowels in the vowel space. We suggest that co-articulatory effects of surrounding consonants explain this instrumental difference, as they have significant lowering/heightening effects on the acoustics but are not fully captured by our statistical model. We argue that the perplexing nature of the historical split can be partially accounted for in this data, as the frequency of co-occurring phonetic environments is notably different in foot than in strut, resulting in cumulative effects of co-articulation. We also present evidence of age grading which suggests that middle class speakers may develop a phonetic distinction as they age.

General Northern English. Exploring Regional Variation in the North of England With Machine Learning

“…Thus, the most accurate characterization of the strut vowel in the North of England, according to our data, is that the vowel is considerably raised compared to Southern British English [ʌ], but the quality is not necessarily identical to foot . A similar observation is made by Turton and Baranowski ( 2020 ), based on socially stratified sample of speakers from Manchester. Turton and Baranowski show that the degree of strut systematically correlates with social class, with more lowering present in middle-class speakers, compared to working class.…”

“…Data from a single speaker of Manchester English are available through Dynamic Dialects. Interestingly, this speaker has a lowered vowel in strut , which is distinct from foot , as observed for some Manchester speakers by Turton and Baranowski ( 2020 ). This speaker also has diphthongal face and goat (the onglide of goat is also fronted).…”

Escaping theTrap: Losing the Northern Cities Shift in Real Time

“…Potentially of more importance, formant measurements in the 2008 data were selected by choosing a measurement point by hand, while in the 2016 data they were automatically extracted. Severance, Evanini, and Dinkin (2015) contended that the differences between these two measurement methods are in general small, and recent studies such as Turton and Baranowski (2020) have productively combined hand-measured data with FAVE measurements; but to be sure, in the next section we will verify that, in our data, the two methods yield sufficiently comparable results to be includable in the same analysis.…”

foot-fronting andfoot–strutsplitting: vowel variation in the East Midlands

“…Middle English showed no such distinction (Wells 1982a: 196) and this split is a relatively recent change which started in the seventeenth century in London in which 'ME ŭ, phonetically [ʊ], developed an unrounded variant, [ʌ], in certain words' (Chambers & Trudgill 1998: 106;Beal 2008: 131). Wells (1982a), Harris (1996) and Turton & Baranowski (2020) provide an overview of the different stages of the FOOT-STRUT split. Beal comments that the development of the FOOT-STRUT split could be described as change from below and that the lack of the split may not have been recognised as a 'shibboleth of northern speech' until the middle of the eighteenth century (Wales 2006: 103;Beal 2012b: 8, 131).…”

“…) report the split for Birmingham in the West Midlands. Turton & Baranowski (2020) conduct a variationist study in Manchester and focus on the distribution of FOOT and STRUT according to social class. They conclude that only very few people, mainly belonging to the highest social class, have the phonemic distinction between FOOT and STRUT.…”