Thetrap–bathsplit in Bristol English

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.

Each p[ɚ]son does it th[εː] way: Rhoticity variation and the community grammar

“…By this classification, north/force words are at one end of the spectrum (the thought vowel and for some speakers the cloth vowel are large, well-established lexical sets into which north/force words are transferred), whereas nurse words are at the other (there is no other source of /ɜː/). Other lexical sets fall between these extremes, with the loss of rhoticity involving transfer into marginal existing sets ( idea for near , yeah for square ) or sets that only exist in certain varieties ( bath for start only in varieties with the trap/bath split, a phenomenon discussed more extensively in Blaxter and Coates [forthcoming]). The one other preceding vowel for which loss of rhoticity involves merger into a large, well-established lexical set is lett er , which merges with comm a , and this vowel, like north/force , consistently disfavors rhoticity across speakers and past studies.…”

“…Ongoing change, with traditional rhoticity declining under the influence of the nonrhotic standard, is visible in these data as change in apparent time (Blaxter et al, forthcoming). 1 Table 1 and Figure 1 show the number of observations and proportion of rhoticity per speaker against speaker age (the line is the linear trend line; points for female speakers are squares and male speakers diamonds) 2 .…”

Spatial evidence that language change is not neutral

“…This is a phonological change since it results in a phonemic split in the /a/ vowel (unambiguously so in varieties which also undergo later backing, but, we would argue, also in varieties which do not; cf. [178]; contra [179,180]).…”