Linguists are able to describe, transcribe, and classify the differences and similarities between accents formally and precisely, but there has until very recently been no reliable and objective way of measuring degrees of difference. It is one thing to say how varieties are similar, but quite another to assess how similar they are. On the other hand, there has recently been a strong focus in historical linguistics on the development of quantitative methods for comparing and classifying languages; but these have tended to be applied to problems of language family membership, at rather high levels in the family tree, not down at the level of individual accents. In this article, we outline our attempts to address the question of relative similarity of accents using quantitative methods. We illustrate our method for measuring phonetic similarity in a sample of cognate words for a number of (mainly British) varieties of English, and show how these results can be displayed using newer and more innovative network diagrams, rather than trees. We consider some applications of these methods in tracking ongoing changes in English and beyond, and discuss future prospects.1 How are accents different; and how different are accents?In November 2004, the BBC commissioned an online poll on attitudes to accents, as part of the 'Voices' project (which more generally explored 'how we speak in the UK now'). The fact that over 5,000 responses were received shows how interested speakers of English are in each others' accents; and the results and comments make fascinating reading (http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/yourvoice/poll_results.shtml, accessed 13 September 2006). Part of the fascination, however, lies in the opacity of many of the comments, which are difficult to interpret in phonetic terms, as shown in (1).(1) (a) I don't really like the Birmingham accent that much (even though I've got one), but I do like the Black Country Accent . . . It sounds singy and old-fashioned. (S. Murphy, Birmingham) (b) Yorksher accent and more specifically 'ull accent rules!. (red badger, 'ull) (c) I never notice my accent until someone points it out and the way we shorten words and the rs we sound here in Bristol. (Debbie Smith, Bristol) Many of these comments are straightforwardly attitudinal, and are expressed in terms of liking one accent and not liking another; and typically respondents are positive about their own varieties (though with distressing frequency this is not the case for the denizens of Birmingham). More interesting are the cases where respondents attempt to ground their comments with reference to particular phonetic or phonological characteristics of varieties, as shown in (1) by 'red badger', who encodes [h]-dropping in his/her response, and in Debbie Smith's comment on Bristol 'r'. These mentions, however, are hardly very specific, and are consequently hard to interpret. What is the issue with 'r' in Bristol here? For instance, is it the phonetic quality that counts, or its distribution? And does it matter whether someone is co...

In his foundational book on accents of English, Wells (1982: 374–5) describes the apparent merger of the vowels in the nurse and north lexical sets in Tyneside English (‘Geordie’) as follows: ‘In the broadest Geordie the lexical set nurse is merged with north, /ɔː/: work [wɔːk], first [fɔːst], shirt [ʃɔːt] (= short).’

Linguists have traditionally represented patterns of divergence within a language family in terms of either a 'splits' model, corresponding to a branching family tree structure, or the wave model, resulting in a (dialect) continuum. Recent phylogenetic analyses, however, have tended to assume the former as a viable idealization also for the latter. But the contrast matters, for it typically reflects different processes in the real world: speaker populations either separated by migrations, or expanding over continuous territory. Since history often leaves a complex of both patterns within the same language family, ideally we need a single model to capture both, and tease apart the respective contributions of each. The 'network' type of phylogenetic method offers this, so we review recent applications to language data. Most have used lexical data, encoded as binary or multi-state characters. We look instead at continuous distance measures of divergence in phonetics. Our output networks combine branch-and continuum-like signals in ways that correspond well to known histories (illustrated for Germanic, and particularly English). We thus challenge the traditional insistence on shared innovations, setting out a new, principled explanation for why complex language histories can emerge correctly from distance measures, despite shared retentions and parallel innovations.

Accents and dialects of English and Scots in Britain have been under active investigation for many decades, as reported through the Survey of English Dialects (Orton et al. 1962–71) and the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland (Mather et al. 1975–86), Wells’ three-volume compendium (1982), and a host of detailed studies of individual varieties. There are also welcome recent signs of the reintegration of variation data into theoretical discussion (see Henry 2002, Cornips & Corrigan 2005a and Trousdale & Adger 2007 for morphosyntax, as well as Anttila 2002 and Coetzee & Pater 2011 for phonology). Nonetheless, the precise structural, geolinguistic and sociolinguistic patterning of many features of vernacular Englishes in the UK is still largely unknown.

Dental pronunciation of alveolar consonants before /r/ and /ər/ is a well-known feature of traditional varieties of Irish English. This PRE-R DENTALISATION (PreRD) has a number of intriguing linguistic properties, in particular an associated /r/-REALISATION EFFECT and a MORPHEME BOUNDARY CONSTRAINT. It is less well known that PreRD is (or perhaps was) also a feature of a number of English varieties outside Ireland, particularly in traditional northern English dialects. This article analyses dialect data from northern England in order to determine the nature of PreRD there and its historical relations with the phenomenon in Irish English. In addition, it explores the phonological complexities of PreRD in light of the loss of rhoticity in traditional northern English dialects. Pre-R DentalisationDental pronunciation of (general English, ?underlying, ?historical) alveolar nonsibilant consonants before /r/ and /ər/ is a well-known (and indeed stereotyped) feature of traditional varieties of Irish English. Thus we find pronunciations such as try [t1 |aÚe], dry [d1 |aÚe], street [st1 |it], entry ["En1 t1 |e], better ["bEt1 "], wonder ["wç· 6 n1 d1 "] and dinner ["dən1 "] used by conservative speakers of Tyrone English (TyrE) in Northern Ireland. 2 This PRE-R DENTALISATION (henceforth PreRD) is a pan-Irish English feature, having been reported from locations as linguistically and geographically diverse as Wexford see also Harris 1985: 211-18 for a critical analysis), which has 1 I would like to thank Patrick Honeybone and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on this article. Any remaining deficiencies are, of course, of my own making. 2 Tyrone English data are from ongoing research on the variety by the present author. Harris (1985Harris ( , 2006) also records PreRD for /l/ in Mid-Ulster English, as in pillar ["pIl1 "], but this is not present in TyrE. 3 In Southern Irish English (but not Northern Irish English), PreRD of original /t/ and /d/ has resulted in phonemic split and merger with original /θ/ and /ð/, since the English dental fricatives, /θ/ and /ð/, have also become dental stops in all environments (Wells 1982: 429-31). Since this article deals with varieties where this is not the case, I do not discuss this aspect of Southern Irish English PreRD further. 362WA R R E N M AG U I R E (phonemic) contrasts between 'broad' dental /t d n l/ and 'slender' (palato-)alveolar /t´d´n´l´/. Furthermore, PreRD has a number of intriguing linguistic properties, in particular an associated /r/-REALISATION EFFECT (henceforth RRE), and a MORPHEME BOUNDARY CONSTRAINT (henceforth MBC). PreRD in Irish English is often associated with tapped (and possibly trilled) pronunciations of /r/, as in TyrE try [t1 |aÚe] vs cry [k®aÚe]. The RRE has been recorded in varieties of Ulster Scots (Gregg 1985), in Mid-Ulster English generally (Harris 1985), in Donegal Gaeltacht English (Ní Ghallchóir 1981, and in Wexford (Ó Muirithe 1996). Since the RRE is also present after /θ/ and /ð/ in those northern Irish English varieties w...