TY - JOUR
T1 - Part of town as an independent factor: the NORTH-FORCE merger in Manchester
AU - Baranowski, Maciej
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, grant ES/I009426/1). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Phonology of Contemporary English 2015 (PAC2015) in Toulouse, April 9-13, 2015, and at International Conference on Language Variation in Europe 8 in Leipzig, May 27-29, 2015. I am heavily indebted to Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero and Danielle Turton for their support and inspiration throughout this project. I would like to thank Bill Labov, Gillian Sankoff, and Peter Trudgill for their kind encouragement and comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Many thanks to Louise Middleton and Jess Fox for assistance with data collection and coding. I would also like to thank Jacques Durand, Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Suzanne Evans-Wagner, Lauren Hall-Lew, Robert Lew, Anne Przewozny-Desriaux, Patrycja Strycharczuk, Jarek Weckwerth, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Funding Information:
This research was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC, grant ES/I009426/1). Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Phonology of Contemporary English 2015 (PAC2015) in Toulouse, April 9-13, 2015, and at International Conference on Language Variation in Europe 8 in Leipzig, May 27–29, 2015. I am heavily indebted to Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero and Danielle Turton for their support and inspiration throughout this project. I would like to thank Bill Labov, Gillian Sankoff, and Peter Trudgill for their kind encouragement and comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Many thanks to Louise Middleton and Jess Fox for assistance with data collection and coding. I would also like to thank Jacques Durand, Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Suzanne Evans-Wagner, Lauren Hall-Lew, Robert Lew, Anne Przewozny-Desriaux, Patrycja Strycharczuk, Jarek Weckwerth, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press.
PY - 2023/2/2
Y1 - 2023/2/2
N2 - This paper investigates the question of whether, as is often popularly believed, there may be systematic linguistic differences between different neighborhoods within a city by testing the independence of ‘part of town’ as a factor separate from social class in the NORTH-FORCE merger in Manchester, UK, in a sample of 122 speakers. The phonemic contrast is explored in minimal-pair tests, Cartesian distance, and Pillai scores. In opposition to most dialects of English, the NORTH-FORCE contrast is still present in Manchester, displaying a pattern of fine social stratification, with lower socio-economic levels having a stronger distinction. The merger is in progress in the city, but it is slower in north Manchester, showing a significantly greater distinction than the rest of the city, independent of social class. The results indicate a degree of social evaluation of the vowels, with implications for the question of the social meaning of a merger in progress.
AB - This paper investigates the question of whether, as is often popularly believed, there may be systematic linguistic differences between different neighborhoods within a city by testing the independence of ‘part of town’ as a factor separate from social class in the NORTH-FORCE merger in Manchester, UK, in a sample of 122 speakers. The phonemic contrast is explored in minimal-pair tests, Cartesian distance, and Pillai scores. In opposition to most dialects of English, the NORTH-FORCE contrast is still present in Manchester, displaying a pattern of fine social stratification, with lower socio-economic levels having a stronger distinction. The merger is in progress in the city, but it is slower in north Manchester, showing a significantly greater distinction than the rest of the city, independent of social class. The results indicate a degree of social evaluation of the vowels, with implications for the question of the social meaning of a merger in progress.
KW - Sound change
KW - sociolinguistics
KW - mergers, social factors, social class, sound change
KW - Manchester English
KW - neighbourhood deprivation
U2 - 10.1017/S095439452200014X
DO - 10.1017/S095439452200014X
M3 - Article
SN - 0954-3945
VL - 34
SP - 239
EP - 269
JO - Language Variation and Change
JF - Language Variation and Change
IS - 3
ER -
SDG 10 Reduced Inequalities