Overview

This chapter offers a description of the main phonological and phonetic features of the variety of English spoken in Manchester, England, on the basis of recent oral data from the PAC-LVTI project. Its starting point is a brief account of levelling in the north of England, a phenomenon that has attracted the attention of many sociolinguists recently. It has been argued that a supralocal northern variety is in expansion in the north of England, and Manchester, as a major urban centre of the north of England, is a prime candidate to test the diffusion of some of the supralocal variants. We then provide a synthetic description of Mancunian English according to previous studies, before presenting our own work, based on a corpus of thirty-one informants. Our results suggest that Mancunian English is not levelling towards a supralocal northern variety as far as FACE and GOAT are concerned, though other vowels appear to be subject to a more global case of levelling.

Levelling in the North of England

Over the course of the twentieth century, linguists interested in the issues of variation and change have observed a progressive loss of localised features in England, leading to a greater homogeneity of different varieties at a regional, and sometimes national, level. One classic example of such homogeneity is the disappearance of Traditional Dialects, usually associated with rural areas. They have been progressively replaced by a smaller number of ‘Modern Dialects’, which are associated with much bigger areas (see Trudgill 2001: 11 inter alia). This phenomenon has been called ‘regional dialect levelling’ (Kerswill 2003: 223) and is defined as follows: ‘a process whereby differences between regional varieties are reduced, features which make varieties distinctive disappear, and new features emerge and are adopted by speakers over a wide geographical area’ (Williams and Kerswill 1999: 149).

It is linked to two mechanisms of linguistic change. The first is the ‘geographical diffusion’ of variants, often from a dominant centre to other areas. The second mechanism is called, somewhat awkwardly as Kerswill points out, ‘levelling’. It is defined as ‘the reduction or attrition of marked variants’ (Trudgill 1986: 98) and is related to the phenomenon of accommodation: speakers who wish to communicate have been shown to tone down some of their own linguistic features and adopt some of their interlocutors’.