Levelling in a northern English variety: the case of FACE and GOAT in Greater Manchester
Résumé
This chapter offers a description of the main phonological and phonetic features of the variety of English spoken in Manchester, England, on the basis of recent oral data from the PAC-LVTI project. Its starting point is a brief account of levelling in the north of England, a phenomenon that has attracted the attention of many sociolinguists recently. It has been argued that a supralocal northern variety is in expansion in the north of England, and Manchester, as a major urban centre of the north of England, is a prime candidate to test the diffusion of some of the supralocal variants. We then provide a synthetic description of Mancunian English according to previous studies, before presenting our own work, based on a corpus of 31 informants. Our results suggest that Mancunian English is not levelling towards a supralocal northern variety as far as FACE and GOAT are concerned, though other vowels appear to be subject to a more global case of levelling.
Domaines
Linguistique
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Levelling in a northern English variety_preprint.pdf (3.33 Mo)
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