Chapter published in:
Language Variation – European Perspectives VIII: Selected papers from the Tenth International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10), Leeuwarden, June 2019
Edited by Hans Van de Velde, Nanna Haug Hilton and Remco Knooihuizen
[Studies in Language Variation 25] 2021
► pp. 53–78

Chapter 3
Revisiting the vowel mergers of East Anglia

Correlations of moan, mown and goose

| University of Cambridge
This study revisits the longstanding distinction between /u:/ (moan) and /ʌu/ (mown) in East Anglia, where the Long Mid Mergers that resulted in a single goat vowel did not take place. Words such as ‘road’ and ‘rowed’ are therefore not homophonous. Recently, however, this distinction has started to break down. Acoustic analysis of 24 speakers indicates change in apparent time, where a merger by approximation of moan and mown is taking place in Lowestoft (northern East Anglia) for working-class speakers. Findings further suggest that a previously reported ongoing merger between moan and goose, which occurred as a result of a chain shift, was not completed but may have had a hand in deferring the moan/mown merger in East Anglia over many years. goose fronting is also reported as a change in apparent time.
Keywords: language variation and change, vowel mergers, sociophonetics, British English, levelling, dialectology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The moan/mown merger
    • 2.2The goose/moan merger
  • 3.Methods
    • 3.1Speaker sample
    • 3.2Recording, data extraction and coding
    • 3.3Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1The moan/mown merger
    • 4.2The goose/moan merger
    • 4.3 goose fronting
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1The moan/mown merger
    • 5.2The goose/moan merger
    • 5.3 goose fronting
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 16 June 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.25.03but
References
Adank, Patti, Roel Smits, & Roeland van Hout
2004 A comparison of vowel normalization procedures for language variation research. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 116. 3099–3107. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Bates, Douglas, Martin Mächler, Ben Bolker & Steve Walker
2015 Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1). 1–48. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Baranowski, Maciej
2017 Class matters: The sociolinguistics of goose and goat in Manchester. English Language Variation and Change 29. 301–339. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Boersma, Paul & David Weenink
2020 Praat: Doing phonetics by computer. Version 6.1.16. http://​www​.praat​.org (6th June 2020.)
Britain, David
2002 Surviving Estuary English: Innovation diffusion, koineisation and local dialect differentiation in the English Fenland. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 41. 74–103.Google Scholar
2005 Innovation diffusion: “Estuary English” and local dialect differentiation: The survival of Fenland Englishes. Linguistics 43(5). 995–1022. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2009 One foot in the grave? Dialect death, dialect contact, and dialect birth in England. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 196–197. 121–155.Google Scholar
Butcher, Kerri-Ann
2013 An investigation into yod dropping in Ipswich. University of Essex: BA thesis.Google Scholar
Cheshire, Jenny, Sue Fox, Paul Kerswill & Eivind Torgersen
2008 Ethnicity, friendship network and social practices as the motor of dialect change: Linguistic innovation in London. Sociolinguistica 22. 1–23. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Ellis, Alexander John
1889 The existing phonology of English dialects compared with that of West Saxon speech (On Early English Pronunciation 5). Woodbridge: English Text Society.Google Scholar
Fielding, Anthony J.
1992 Migration and social mobility: South East England as an escalator region. Regional Studies 26(1). 1–15. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Fisiak, Jacek & Peter Trudgill
2001 Preface. In Jacek Fisiak & Peter Trudgill (eds.), East Anglian English, ix–xii. Woodbridge: D.S Brewer.Google Scholar
Fridland, Valerie
2008 Patterns of /uw/, /ʊ/, and /ow/ fronting in Reno, Nevada. American Speech 83(4). 432–54. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Garde, Paul
1961 Réflexions sur les différences phonétiques entre les langues slaves. Word 17. 34–62. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gordon, Ian, Tony Champion, Neil McDonald & Christine Whitehead
2017 Review of research on migration influences and implications for population dynamics in the wider south east: Providing state of the art evidence to local authorities in the East of England. http://​www​.lse​.ac​.uk​/business​-and​-consultancy​/consulting​/assets​/documents​/review​-of​-research​-on​-migration​-influences​-and​-implications​-for​-population​-dynamics​-in​-the​-wider​-south​-east​-technical​-report​.pdf (6 June 2020.)
Harrington, Jonathan & Steve Cassidy
1999 Techniques in speech acoustics (Text, Speech and Language Technology 8). The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic publishers. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Harrington, Jonathan, Felicitas Kleber & Ulrich Reubold
2008 Compensation for coarticulation, /u/-fronting, and sound change in standard southern British: An acoustic and perceptual study. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 123(5). 2825–2835. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Haddican, Bill, Paul Foulkes, Vincent Hughes & Hazel Richards
2013 Interaction of social and linguistic constraints on two vowel changes in northern England. Language Variation and Change 25. 371–403. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hall-Lew, Lauren
2005 One shift, two groups: When fronting alone is not enough. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 10(2). 105–116.Google Scholar
2009 Ethnicity and phonetic variation in a San Francisco neighborhood. Stanford University: Ph.D. thesis.Google Scholar
Hay, Jennifer, Paul Warren & Katie Drager
2006 Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics 34(4). 458–484. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Herzog, Marvin I.
1965 The Yiddish language in northern Poland: Its geography and history. Special issue of International Journal of American Linguistics 31(2).Google Scholar
Holmes-Elliott, Sophie
2015 London calling: Assessing the spread of metropolitan features in the southeast. University of Glasgow: Ph.D. thesis.Google Scholar
Jansen, Sandra
2017 Change and stability in goose, goat and foot: Back vowel dynamics in Carlisle English. English Language and Linguistics 23(1). 1–29. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Kendall, Tyler & Erik R. Thomas
2010 Vowels: Vowel manipulation, normalization, and plotting in R. R package, version 1.1. http://​ncslaap​.lib​.ncsu​.edu​/tools​/norm/ (18 June 2020.)
Kennedy, Marianna
2006 Variation in the Pronunciation of English by New Zealand school children. Victoria University of Wellington: MA thesis.Google Scholar
Kökeritz, Helge
1932 The phonology of the Suffolk dialect, descriptive and historical. Uppsala University: Appelbergs Boktryckeri Aktiebolag.Google Scholar
Labov, William
1966 The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington D.C.: Centre for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
1994 Principles of linguistic change. Volume 1: Internal factors. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Labov, William, Sharon Ash & Charles Boberg
2006 Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, phonology and sound change. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, Mark Karen & Corey Miller
1991 Near-mergers and the suspension of phonemic contrast. Language Variation and Change 3(1). 33–74. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Labov, William, Malcah Yaeger & Richard Steiner
1972 A quantitative study of sound change in progress. Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey.Google Scholar
Lindsey, Geoff
2019 English after RP: Standard British pronunciation today. London: Palgrave Macmillan. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Maguire, Warren, Lynn Clark & Kevin Watson
2013 Introduction: What are mergers and can they be reversed? English Language and Linguistics 17(2). 229–239. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Mesthrie, Rajend
2010 Sociophonetics and social change: Deracialisation of the goose vowel in South African English. Journal of Sociolinguistics 14(1). 3–33. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Nycz, Jennifer
2019 Linguistic and social factors favoring acquisition of contrast in a new dialect. In Sasha Calhoun, Paola Escudero, Marija Tabain & Paul Warren (eds.), Proceedings from the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, August 2019, 1480–1484. Canberra: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association Inc.Google Scholar
Ohala, John
1981 The listener as a source of sound change. In Carrie S. Masek, Robert A. Hendrick & Mary Frances Miller (eds.), Papers from the parasession on language and behaviour, 178–203. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.Google Scholar
Potter, Robert
2018 A variationist multilocality study of unstressed vowels and verbal -s marking in the peripheral dialect of east Suffolk. University of Essex: Ph.D. thesis.Google Scholar
RStudio Team
2020 RStudio: integrated development for R. RStudio. http://​www​.rstudio​.com/ (6th June 2020.)
Samuels, Bridget
2006 Nothing to lose but their chains: Rethinking vocalic chain shifting. Harvard University: BA thesis.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter
1974 The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
1988a Norwich revisited: Recent linguistic changes in an English urban dialect. English World-Wide 9(1). 33–49. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1988b The great East Anglian merger mystery. In Rémi Jolivet & Florence Epars Heussi (eds.), Mélanges offerts en hommage à Mortéeza Mahmoudian. Tome II. (Cahiers de l’ILSL11). 415–23. Lausanne: Université de Lausanne.Google Scholar
2001 Modern East Anglia as a dialect area. In Jack Fisiak & Peter Trudgill (eds.), East Anglian English, 1–12. Woodbridge: D.S Brewer.Google Scholar
2004 The dialect of East Anglia: Phonology. In Bernd Kortmann & Edgar Schneider (eds.), A handbook of varieties of English: A multimedia reference tool (Phonology 1), 163–177. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
2021 The English of East Anglia. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Google Scholar
Trudgill, Peter & Tina Foxcroft
1978 On the sociolinguistics of vocalic mergers: Transfer and approximation in East Anglia. In Peter Trudgill (ed.), Sociolinguistic patterns in British English, 69–79. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Warren, Paul & Jen Hay
2005 Using sound change to explore the mental lexicon. In Claire Fletcher-Flinn & Gus Haberman (eds.), Cognition, language, and development: Perspectives from New Zealand, 101–121. Bowen Hills, Queensland: Australian Academic Press.Google Scholar
Wells, John
1982a Accents of English I: An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
1982b Accents of English II: The British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
1984 English accents in England. In Peter Trudgill (ed.), Language in the British Isles, 55–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Williams, Ann & Paul Kerswill
1999 Dialect levelling: Change and continuity in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull. In Paul Foulkes & Gerard J. Docherty (eds.), Urban voices: Accent studies in the British Isles, 141–162. London: Arnold.Google Scholar