This study considers regional variation of voice quality in two varieties of British English – Southern Standard British English and West Yorkshire English. A comparison of voice quality profiles for three closely related but not identical northern varieties within West Yorkshire is also considered. Our findings do not contradict the small subset of previous research which explored regional and/or social variation in voice quality in British English insofar as regionality may play a small role in a speaker’s voice quality profile. However, factors such as social standing and identity could perhaps be even more relevant. Even when considering homogeneous groups of speakers, it is not the case that there is a cohesive voice quality profile that can be attached to every speaker within the group. The reason for this, we argue, is the speaker-specificity inherent in voice quality.

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This study investigates the vowel spaces of eight native San Diego speakers (four males and four females) that are: born and raised in San Diego County, only lived outside San Diego for a maximum of four years, English dominant speakers, Caucasian, and aged between 23 and 32 (mean = 28.6 years old). All participants were recorded using handheld Zoom H2n audio recorders. Participants read a word list of 74 monosyllabic words, 80 sentences (mean = 6.5 words per sentence), and participated in a short 20-minute sociolinguistic interview about themselves and the San Diego area. For the purposes of this study, F1–F3 were measured in Praat for all vowels in the read speech of the eight participants using dynamic formant measurements at 10% intervals across each vowel. Results are normalised across all speakers, and then analyzed in Excel and R. Although this is a preliminary study, this investigation provides some of the first acoustic-phonetic results looking at the San Diego accent in young males and females.