Do you call it April Fools' Day, April Noddy Day or April Gowkin' Day? Is the season before winter the Autumn, the Fall or the Backend? When you're out of breath, do you pant, puff, pank, tift or thock?
The words we use (and the sounds we make when we use them) are more often than not a product of where we live, and An Atlas of English Dialects shows the reader where certain words, sounds and phrases originate from and why usage varies from region to region. The Atlas includes:
ninety maps showing the regions in which particular words, phrases and pronunciations are used
detailed commentaries explaining points of linguistic, historical and cultural interest
explanations of linguistic terms, a bibliography for further reading and a full index.
Based on the Survey of English Dialects â the most extensive record of English regional speech â the Atlas is a fascinating and informative guide to the diversity of the English Language in England.
OLD ENGLISH, the English of the period from approximately 450 to 1100 A.D., had as its form of TO BURY byrgan, in which the letter g had a [j] pronunciation and, more importantly for this map, the letter y had a special [u] sound close to a âFrench uâ. According to Joseph and Elizabeth Wright (Middle English Grammar, para. 49), the change of this sound to [Δ] is one which first took place in Kent and the surrounding areas late in the Old English period. For a small number of words which had been spelt with y in Old English this Kentish pronunciation eventually found its way into STANDARD ENGLISH, the generally accepted varieties of English which are comparatively free from obviously localized speech-forms. It was usually signalled too by an e appearing in the spelling, giving for example KNELL from Old English cnyll and MERRY from Old English myrige.
This change of a variety of short [u] to [Δ] was not the normal one for those words which were in Old English spelt with y: The most common development for the sound has been to [i]. Most words which had a y spelling underwent this change during the MIDDLE ENGLISH period, that is between approximately 1100 and 1500 A.D., resulting in such modern i-spelt words as BRIDGE, KISS, LISTEN and SISTER.
However, as a further complicating factor, especially in the West Midlands the Old English [u]-type pronunciation lived on beyond the Middle English period, later changing only slightly. This pronunciation too has had an influence on Standard English, resulting in Old English y words such as BLUSH, MUCH, CHURCH, now spelt with u and with[
] or [
] pronunciations.
BURIED thus shows the influence of two strands in the development of the Old English y short [u]-sound. Its standard pronunciation, [Δ], shows the Kentish development, and this pronunciation is seen to exist in the non-standard dialects of the far North, Midland, Southern and far South-western England. However [
], still signalled by its spelling, is seen to persist in areas which, including southern Lancashire and South and West Yorkshire, contain part of the historical West Midland speech area. It is remarkable that it also remains firmly established in south-eastern areas where standard [Δ] began.
The northern [a] area is attested by Wright in his Dialect Grammar.
HAND
Although [a] is the original Old English vowel sound in HAND, the existence of an [
] pronunciation is itself very ancient. To quote Trudgill, Dialects of England, p. 23: âIn Anglo-Saxon times there developed a strong tendency in certain areas of England to change a short âaâ to a short âoâ in words where the vowel occurred in front of an n. Thus âlandâ became âlondâ just as âlangââ became âlongâ. However, this change was much less successful than the âlangâ to âlongâ change, and took root only in western areas of the country.â This both summarizes and simplifies a complicated situation which in many dialects involved the introduction of long vowel-sounds for a time in the late Old English and early Middle English periods before a short sound again became the norm. The [
] area for HAND is contracting, but the sound remains characteristic of the pronunciation of many West Midlanders more than a thousand years after it was first heard in such words as HAND and LAND. Joseph and Elizabeth Wright point out in their New English Grammar (para. 63) that in at least one case the old [a/
] variation has usefully survived into standard Modern English, giving us the separate though related words BAND and BOND.
The [Δ] pronunciation found in the South-east appears to be an exaggerated form of the type of [a] which is associated with South-eastern speech and with a conservative form of the standard RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION (or RP) accent. This variety of [a] is best described as âa with a flavour of eâ. In the INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET (IPA) it is transcribed as [ĂŠ], using the combined a + e symbol called âaescâ (or âashâ). To many Northerners southern [ĂŠ] sounds like [Δ], and it is not hard to see how this pronunciation at times slips over into the full [Δ] to which it is so close.
[a] was the normal short a sound in English until the late sixteenth century, at which time a general trend towards southern [ĂŠ] occurred. [ĂŠ] then remained as the RP short a sound until very recent times. It continues to be used by most North Americans. During the second half of the twentieth century, however, there has been a noticeable move back towards an [a] in Britain. The move from southern [ĂŠ] towards [a] is one which marks out younger from older speakers of Received Pronunciation and one which, in the words of Wells (Accents of English, p. 292) âpromises to carry RP further away from both American and southern-hemisphere accents of Englishâ.
LAST
Along with the distinction between northern [u] and southern [
] in such a word as SUN, the distinction between the use of a short vowel in the north and a long vowel in the south in such words as LAST is one which speakers of British English habitually use to locate an English personâs origins by her or his accent. This map can therefore usefully be compared with that for SUN (Map 7), as it can with the map for AUNT(IE) (Map 4), where âshortâ and âlongâ a also occur, albeit with a different history from that applying to LAST.
The varieties of pronunciation with which we are concerned here apply to situations where an a-sound is followed not only by [s] as in LAST but also where it is followed by [f] (for example in CHAFF) or by [Ξ] (in PATH). With only minor changes the sound remained short, as [a], for more than a thousand years after the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England. During the seventeenth century, however, it became fashionable to lengthen this sound while still pronouncing it much as the short sound had been pronounced: Ekwall, in English Sounds and Morphology (para. 46), traces the first written record of the change to 1685. It is this new sound which is seen to survive as [a
] in the speech of non-standard speakers over most of the southern half of England. By the eighteenth century a further change had taken place, in which the lengthened sound came to be articulated further back in the mouth, giving [
]: this development took root in the South-east, from where it influenced RP around the country, but its non-standard geographical spread has remained quite restricted. This sound-change can be contrasted with that of the parallel lengthening of [
