Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-29T08:54:14.801Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The trap–bath split in Bristol English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 April 2019

TAM BLAXTER  and
RICHARD COATES
TAM BLAXTER
Affiliation:
Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge, Trinity Street, CambridgeCB2 1TA, [email protected]
RICHARD COATES
Affiliation:
Bristol Centre for Linguistics, University of the West of England, Frenchay Campus, Coldharbour Lane, BristolBS16 1QY, [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The pronunciation of the bath vowel is a salient feature of English varieties of the southwest of England, yet neither the status of the trap–bath split in traditional dialects nor ongoing change today is well understood. After reviewing the existing literature, we investigate the quality and length of low unrounded vowels in Bristol English on the basis of sociolinguistic interviews with twenty-five speakers. The picture suggested by these data is complex: there is evidence for a traditional length-only trap–bath split, for a length and backness split diffusing from the east and for a merger diffusing from the north. Some of these changes involve lexical diffusion, especially with loanwords and other distinctive lexical groups. Overall, the rich and contradictory data speak to the contested sociolinguistic status of these variables and to the need to examine individual patterns of variation closely to gain a full understanding of them.

Keywords

Bristol EnglishEnglish dialectstrap–bath splitlexical diffusionsociolinguistics
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 269 - 306
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Acknowledgements are made to the Bristol Centre for Linguistics (BCL), which funded the ‘Sounds Bristolian’ project, and to Kate Beeching and James Murphy, both of BCL, for their work coordinating this research.

References

Anderson, Peter M. 1987. A structural atlas of the English dialects. London and New York: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Beal, Joan C. 2002. English pronunciation in the eighteenth century: Thomas Spence's ‘Grand repository of the English language’ (Oxford Linguistics). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bigham, Douglas S. 2008. Dialect contact and accommodation among emerging adults in a university setting. PhD thesis, University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Blake, B. J. 1985. ‘Short a’ in Melbourne English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 15(1), 6–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blaxter, Tam T. 2017. Speech in space and time: Contact, change and diffusion in medieval Norway. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.15576CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blaxter, Tam T., Beeching, Kate, Coates, Richard, Murphy, James & Robinson, Emily. Forthcoming. The trajectory of changing rhoticity in Bristol English.Google Scholar
Blaxter, Tam T., Leemann, Adrian & Britain, David. 2017. Evidence of sound change in British English crowdsourced using the ‘English Dialects App’. Presented at the 4th International Workshop on Sound Change, University of Edinburgh. www.academia.edu/34241956/Evidence_of_sound_change_in_the_British_English_crowdsourced_using_the_English_Dialects_App_Google Scholar
Boberg, Charles. 2009. The emergence of a new phoneme: Foreign (a) in Canadian English. Language Variation and Change 21(3), 355–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Britain, David, Leemann, Adrian, Blaxter, Tam T., Wanitsch, Daniel, Kolly, Marie-José & Grossenbacher, Sarah. 2016. Up, app and away? Social dialectology and the use of smartphone technology as a data collection strategy. Presented at the Sociolinguistics Symposium 21, Universidad de Murcia.Google Scholar
Chen, Matthew & Wang, William S. Y.. 1975. Sound change: Actuation and implementation. Language 51, 255–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coates, Richard. 2018. Steps towards characterizing Bristolian. In Wright, Laura (ed.), Southern English varieties then and now, 188–226. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flynn, Nicholas. 2011. Comparing vowel formant normalisation procedures. York Papers in Linguistics 2(11), 1–28.Google Scholar
Fudge, Erik. 1977. Long and short [æ] in one Southern British speaker's English. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 7(2), 55–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
GRASS Development Team. 2017. Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) Software, version 7.2. Open Source Geospatial Foundation. https://grass.osgeo.org/grass72/manuals/index.htmlGoogle Scholar
Hotzenköcherle, Rudolf. 1962. Einführung in den Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz. A: Zur Methodologie der Kleinraumatlanten. B: Fragebuch, Transkriptionsschlüssel, Aufnahmeprotokolle. Bern: Francke.Google Scholar
Hughes, Arthur, Trudgill, Peter & Watt, Dominic. 2012. English accents and dialects: An introduction to social and regional varieties of English in the British Isles, 5th edn. London: Hodder Arnold.Google Scholar
Kauhanen, Henri. 2017. Neutral change. Journal of Linguistics 53(2), 327–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kester, M. W. H. 1979. The Bristol dialect: A comparison between age-groups. Dissertation, University of Bristol.Google Scholar
Kettig, Thomas T. 2015. The bad–lad split: A phonetic investigation. MPhil thesis, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1981. Resolving the Neogrammarian Controversy. Language 57(2), 267–308.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 2002. Principles of linguistic change, vol. 1: Internal factors (Language in Society 20). Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 2007. Transmission and diffusion. Language 83(2), 344–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William. 2010. Principles of linguistic change, vol. 3: Cognitive and cultural factors. Oxford: Blackwell.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maguire, Warren. 2012. Pre-R Dentalisation in northern England. English Language and Linguistics 16(3), 361–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mathussek, Andrea. 2016. On the problem of field worker isoglosses. In Knooihuizen, Marie-Hélène Côté, Remco & Nerbonne, John (eds.), The future of dialects, 99–116. Berlin: Language Science Press.Google Scholar
Orton, Harold & Dieth, Eugen. 1962. Survey of English dialects, 5 vols. Leeds: Published for the University of Leeds by E. J. Arnold.Google Scholar
Orton, Harold, Sanderson, Stewart & Widdowson, J. D. A. (eds.). 1978. The linguistic atlas of England. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Paul, Hermann. 1880. Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, 4th edn, 1909; 5th edn, 1920. Halle: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
Payne, K. J. 2017. The Survey of English Dialects notebooks. Tradition Today: The Journal of the Centre for English Traditional Heritage 6, 45–68.Google Scholar
Piercy, Caroline. 2011. One /a/ or two? Observing a phonemic split in progress in the southwest of England. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 17(2), 155–64.Google Scholar
Quantum GIS Development Team. 2016. Quantum GIS Geographic Information System. Open Source Geospatial Foundation Project.Google Scholar
R Core Team. 2018. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. En. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. www.R-project.orgGoogle Scholar
Rumpf, Jonas, Pickl, Simon, Elspass, Stephan & König, Werner. 2009. Structural analysis of dialect maps using methods from spatial statistics. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 76(3), 280–308.Google Scholar
Steiniger, Stefan & Meier, Siegfried. 2004. Snakes: A technique for line smoothing and displacement in map generalisation. Presented at the ICA workshop on generalisation and multiple representation. www.geo.uzh.ch/~sstein/manuscripts/snakes_leicester.pdfGoogle Scholar
Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in contact (Language in Society 10). Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Wakelin, Martyn F. 1986. The southwest of England (Varieties of English around the World Texts series 5). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weinreich, Uriel, Labov, William & Herzog, Marvin. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In Lehmann, Winfred P. & Malkiel, Yakov (eds.), Directions for historical linguistics, 97–195. Austin, TX, and London: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Weissmann., 1970. Phonematische Analyse des Stadtdialektes von Bristol. Phonetica 21, 151–81, 211–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wells, J. C. 1982. Accents of English. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar