Vowels FOOT

The FOOT vowel  was rather more frequent in the older East Anglian dialect than in General English (Wells 1982). Middle English  and /ou/ remain distinct in the northern dialects e.g. road /ru:d/, rowed /rΛud/ . However, there has been a strong tendency in East Anglia for the /u:/ descended from Middle English  to be shortened to  in closed syllables. Thus road can rhyme with good, and we find pronunciations such as in toad, home, stone, coat  . This shortening does not normally occur before /l/, so coal is /ku:l/. The shortening process has clearly been a productive one. Norwich, for example, until the 1960s had a theatre known as The Hippodrome , and trade names such as Kodachrome can be heard with pronunciations such as . The feature thus survives quite well in modern speech, but a number of words appear to have been changed permanently to the /u:/ set as a result of lexical transfer. Trudgill (1974) showed that 29 different lexemes from this set occurred with .

The vowel  also occurs in roof, proof, hoof and their plurals, e.g.  . It also occurs in middle-class sociolects in room, broom; working-class sociolects tend to have the GOOSE vowel in these items.

In the older dialect, a number of FOOT words derived from Middle English /o:/ plus shortening followed the same route as blood and flood and had /Λ/ : soot, roof /sΛt , rΛf/ .