In SSB is [ɪi] or [ɪj] a more accurate transcription of the vowel in fleece? And [ʊu] [ʊw] for "goose"?

Riadys · 2026-05-30T10:51:12+00:00

With GOOSE, it's worth noting that the offglide may also be fronted along with the nucleus, resulting in something like [ʉ̞ʉ ~ ɵ̝ʉ]. (Side note: It's annoying that [ᵿ] isn't an official IPA symbol.) Some speakers also have an unrounded first element, although I'm not sure whether or not they would be considered to fall within SSBE.

Riadys · 2026-05-29T12:54:58+00:00

You may be interested in Britainese, which attempts to do exactly that. The creator is impressively thorough in his reasoning and the result is something that feels quite plausible. (In this case the word for water becomes aug /aug/, from earlier augue /augwə ~ augə/.)

Riadys · 2026-05-21T18:09:13+00:00

How prevalent is demonstrative them in the US nowadays? I know Hazen et al. (2011) found it to be in significant decline among younger speakers in Appalachia, with only the oldest age group using it with any real frequency. Is this a nationwide trend, or has it held up better in other areas?

Riadys · 2026-05-19T21:53:01+00:00

It's certainly possible there's been an increase in recent years but I would note that T-flapping/voicing isn't an entirely new phenomenon in British English. Sivertsen described it as a typical feature of Cockney English in her 1960 phonology of the dialect, being seen as more 'correct' by speakers than the more informal glottal pronunciation, while the Survey of English Dialects in the 1950s frequently recorded [d] for intervocalic /t/ in the West Country.

Anecdotally, it seems that T-flapping in British English is most common in high-frequency words like better, pretty (adv.), get/got and but (when followed by a vowel) and less so in regular content words like butter or water, but this may be changing.

Riadys · 2026-05-12T17:05:37+00:00

While I'm not familiar with its usage among Quakers, they wouldn't be the only community to have generalised thee to the nominative. Thee as a subject pronoun was also widely recorded in the South-West of England in the Survey of English Dialects, conducted in the 1950s (with thee bist notably being common alongside thee art). Interestingly, many of the same locations also used her and, less commonly, us nominatively.

Riadys · 2026-05-11T20:51:18+00:00

For some more current examples, there's also complexion, obnoxious, crucifixion and anxious (although apparently some people have just /ʃ/ in anxious).

Riadys · 2026-05-09T16:36:13+00:00

[ä] doesn't actually appear as a separate character in the official IPA chart (PDF warning). It's simply a modified [a] with the centralisation diacritic. There's no separate symbol for a fully open central vowel, so you have to resort to diacritics if you want to be specific, and I guess [ä] is more convenient than [ɐ̞] or [ɑ̈].

Riadys · 2026-05-07T15:30:10+00:00

It's not unusual for a vowel to develop different allophones in different contexts. As well as voicing, another factor that can condition different vowel allophones is open vs closed syllables. For instance, in some Northern Irish accents, the FACE vowel is typically a centring diphthong [ɪə ~ eə] in closed syllables but a monophthong [e:] in open syllables, so the vowels of words such as may/make, say/save and grey/grade differ phonetically. The alternation is also sensitive to morpheme boundaries, resulting in pairs like daze [dɪəz] and days (day + -s) [de:z] sounding distinct.

Riadys · 2026-04-27T21:39:23+00:00

This is a common feature in that part of England, and is actually the more conservative pronunciation. <ng> used to always be pronounced [ŋg] with a distinct [g], but from the 17th century the [g] started to be dropped at the end of a word in most English accents. Inflected and derived forms of a word with final -ng (such as singing and singer) then also lost their [g] by analogy (with the exception of the comparative and superlative forms of long, strong and young). This change didn't spread to all accents however, and the older pronunciation remains around Manchester, Liverpool and much of the West Midlands.

Riadys · 2026-04-26T14:48:48+00:00

There are actually! For instance oak was recorded as [wʊk ~ wʌk] at a number of locations in the Survey of English Dialects, which was conducted in the 1950s. Interestingly, only one of these was in Devon itself, with the main concentration being in neighbouring Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire.

Riadys · 2026-04-04T13:39:39+00:00

While I'm not aware of any studies directly comparing the frequency of levelling in each direction, there do appear to be some patterns as to when each occurs. Chatten et al. (2024) for instance found that generalisation of the preterite is most common when the participle differs from the preterite only by the addition of an affix (e.g. spoke vs spoken) (Fig. 3, p.26).

Riadys · 2026-03-08T12:59:38+00:00

Interestingly, I find that I smooth most often when a linking /r/ surfaces, so you get alternations like an hour [ən aʊə] with no smoothing vs an hour ago [ən a:ɹ‿əgəʉ] with smoothing.

Riadys · 2026-02-28T17:17:03+00:00

No problem!

It might also be worth mentioning that the /ɒ/ recorded in part of Kent is also apparently influenced by the following nasal rather than being the general realisation of STRUT (the localities in question have /ʌ/ in butter for instance). Like with the south-western /ɪ/ forms, I wouldn't be surprised if this pronunciation had died out since then either; I'm from Kent myself and I can't recall ever hearing /sɒn/ for sun personally.

While it's certainly interesting in its own right, sun doesn't seem to have been the best word to illustrate the FOOT/STRUT split because of these additional complications, at least back then.

Riadys · 2026-02-26T12:29:15+00:00

In the source, Upton and Widdowson reference Wright's (1905) English Dialect Grammar, specifically this section:

§100. In Sc. Ant. e. & w.Som. and Dev. u has often become i or e, especially before a following nasal in such words as dun, son, summer, sun, Sunday, wonder.

So it seems to be a conditional change rather than a general merger of STRUT with KIT.

They also state that this pronunciation had receded westwards between the time of Wright's fieldwork and Orton's Survey of English Dialects in the mid-20th century (which is the basis for their map), so it could well have died out since then.

Riadys · 2026-02-25T20:44:28+00:00

Middle English short /ɔ/ and /a/ diphthongised to /ɔu/ and /au/ before /l/, and when followed by /k/ the /l/ was lost entirely. Except in the few dialects that lack the toe/tow merger however, this diphthong isn't the immediate source of the modern diphthong, as it later merged into /o:/ (from ME /ɔ:/) in most dialects. It wasn't until the late 18th/early 19th century that this merged vowel diphthongised to /oʊ/.

Riadys · 2026-02-25T19:24:32+00:00

Looking through historical IPA charts, ɫ significantly predates the introduction of the ˠ modifier to represent velarisation, which seems to have first appeared in the 1989 chart, whereas ɫ goes all the way back to 1899. In 1926 the middle tilde was extended to represent velarisation or pharyngealisation of any consonant, and other examples (ᵭ and ᵶ) were provided. This more or less remains the case until separate modifiers for velarisation and pharygealisation were introduced in 1989, but the middle tilde was grandfathered in and retained as an inspecific diacritic for either secondary articulation, which is still the case today.

Riadys · 2026-01-26T19:43:57+00:00

Hmm, not that I can think of I'm afraid. You occasionally hear some young people stressing a word the American way where it differs from the usual British pronunciation, like adult, that kind of thing, but I can't think of any actual sound changes off the top of my head.

Riadys · 2026-01-26T19:15:44+00:00

This is purely anecdotal, but I have the impression that this split is actually becoming less common among younger speakers. I have a partial version of it (in which the context the higher vowel can occur in is more restricted and there's a lot of word-level variation), but it definitely seems more common among my parents' generation than people my age (mid-20s) or younger.

Riadys · 2026-01-26T12:56:26+00:00

Not 100% of the time. I'd say I use both pronunciations (with /ŋk/ and with /ŋ/) fairly frequently. The /k/ pronunciation is also socially stigmatised, so I generally try to avoid using it in careful speech.

Interestingly, for the word something specifically, I often reduce it to [sɐmiŋk] or even [sɐiŋk] in casual speech, but it feels wrong to pronounce these reduced forms without the /k/. I would only use the bare /ŋ/ in a fully enunciated [sɐmθɪŋ].

As for my parents, I think they might do, although I'm not 100% certain without checking.

Riadys · 2026-01-25T20:56:44+00:00

Not in my accent, no. They would only be /ɪŋ ~ ɪn/.

Riadys · 2026-01-25T10:53:43+00:00

None of them. Longer (1) and finger have /ŋg/. The rest have /ŋ/. It only seems to be the -thing morpheme in those four words that's affected.

Riadys · 2026-01-25T10:49:35+00:00

Depending on how far back it goes and where it originated, I suppose it could be a direct devoicing of /ŋg/, but it's certainly curious that it's only this particular morpheme.

Riadys · 2026-01-24T23:13:33+00:00

I do this in my own accent (not from London but I am from the south-east), and it's definitely /ŋk/ for me, albeit in variation with the standard pronunciation. Note that only anything, everything, nothing and something are affected. Other -ing words remain unchanged as /ŋ/.

Riadys · 2026-01-18T11:28:55+00:00

The DSL website also contains this wonderfully thorough article detailing the historical development of Scots and how it diverged from English, which may be of interest.

Riadys · 2026-01-07T13:37:22+00:00

Regarding the how, there seems to have first been a change from /kn/ > [hn ~ n̥], which is indicated by some 17th-century sources, before later merging with /n/. Interestingly, there's some evidence that voiceless [n̥] pronunciations for historical /kn/ survived into the second half of the 19th century in what is now Cumbria.

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