One/a/or Two?: Observing a Phonemic Split in Progress in the Southwest of England (original) (raw)

2011, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in …

While the distinct status of /a/ (TRAP) and /ɑː/ (BATH) is not in doubt in the standard accents of England or in those of the heavily populated southeast, and while the North of England does not make such a distinction at all, the status of these vowels in the southwest is very much disputed. In their introductory volume on English accents and dialects, Hughes, Trudgill, and Watt (2005:62) describe the "/a/~/ɑː/ contrast [as] absent or in doubt" for the whole southwest region. Wells (1982: 345), too, writes that in the West Country counties "the phonemic contrast relating to RP /ae/~/ɑː/ is absent or variable," adding that "this is a matter that has by no means been properly investigated." This view is confirmed by Peter Trudgill (pers. comm.), who studied a speaker from Bath, a city in the southwest, and found allophonic variation but no phonemic contrast in /ae/~/ɑː/, making lager and lagger homophones. This is also the view of Kurath and Lowman (1970:19), who write that "in areas where post-vocalic /r/ is preserved," i.e., the south-western counties, variants of ME /a/ are "positional allophones" and therefore do not have a separate phonemic status. However, compare Wakelin (1986:26), who writes, "I understand this [long-a] as a separate phoneme differentiated by length (and sometimes also by quality) from short /a/." These quotes serve to illustrate that the status of these phonemes in the southwest is unclear and that an investigation of the relevant vowels in a representative southwest variety will help to elucidate the situation. Applying both auditory and acoustic analysis, it is the ambiguous status of this distinction in the southwest that I explore in this paper: Is there one /a/ or two?