Vowels and Diphthongs GOAT and FACE

These lexical sets have monophthongal pronunciations/o:/ and /e:/ respectively in traditional dialects in the lower North, central Lancashire and Humberside, but diphthongal pronunciations in the far North and Merseyside. In Tyneside and Northumberland, traditional dialect speakers have centring diphthongs /uə/ and /iə/ in these words, whilst in Merseyside the corresponding diphthongs are more like RP. In the North-east, there is evidence of levelling in younger and/ or middle-class speakers, not towards the closing diphthongs of RP, but to the monophthongal pronunciations found throughout most of the North. Watt and Milroy (1999) report that, in a study of speech recorded in 1994, only the older, working-class males used  in the majority of tokens of FACE vowels. Amongst all other groups, the most frequent variant was /e:/, with  emerging as a minority variant in the speech of young, middle-class males and females. Watt and Milroy suggest that the younger Tynesiders are signalling that they do not wish to identify with the old-fashioned cloth-cap-and-whippet image of their fathers, but still wish to be identified as northerners, so they are assimilating their speech to a pan-northern norm. At the opposite end of the northern dialect region, pronunciations of FACE words vary between older monophthongal /e:/ and the diphthongal  found in Merseyside and the Midlands as well as in RP. In these areas, the monophthongal pronunciations would be the old-fashioned variants, and the diphthongal variants are spreading from urban centres such as Liverpool. Some northern dialects retain traces of an earlier distinction between  in e.g. eight, weight and /e:/ in e.g. ate, wait. Both Hughes and Trudgill (1996: 89) and Petyt (1985: 119–124) note this distinction in speakers from West Yorkshire. However, the maintenance of a phonemic distinction appears to be recessive in these dialects. Petyt concludes that the influence of RP has led to confusion as to the incidence of these two phonemes, though some speakers retain a distinction between  in wait and  in weight.

To a certain extent, the variants of GOAT words are parallel to those of FACE: traditional North-eastern dialects have a centring diphthong /uə/ , most of the North has a monophthong /o:/, whilst Merseyside has /ou/. Some West Yorkshire speakers maintain a distinction between /o:/ in e.g. nose and  in e.g. knows, but, as with the parallel distribution of variants in the FACE set, this is recessive (Petyt 1985: 124–132). Whilst Watt and Milroy found an overall preference for the pannorthern monophthongal variant /o:/ in every group of their Tyneside informants except the older working-class males, another conservative variant  was used more by young, middle-class males than any other group. Watt and Milroy suggest that, for this group, the adoption of this variant is a “symbolic affirmation of local identity” (Watt and Milroy 1999: 37). A similar fronted variant is found in Humberside and South and West Yorkshire, and has become a stereotypical marker of the dialect of Hull, where humorous texts use semi-phonetic spellings such as fern curls for phone calls.