Vowels and diphthongs FACE, GOAT

These word-classes, among the most various and stigmatized in JamC, lend themselves to a host of realizations in BrC. They occur as down-gliding or, more commonly, in-gliding diphthongs, e.g. [guət] , mid monophthongs, e.g. [go:t], or even London-like up-gliding diphthongs, e.g. [gəöt] (rarely as the high monophthongs occasionally found in Jamaica). They do not seem to participate in the London Diphthong Shift, which lowers the starting point for both right down to [a], since they rarely dip below [ε]. While Sally’s FACE is London-like, her GOAT [gəöt] is a classic BrC hybrid: it has a central starting-point like many London speakers, but the [o] target is typical of JamC, with none of the fronting to [I], [Y] found in recent years (Altendorf and Watt, this volume). Despite some l-vocalization, the vowel quality in GOAT ~ GOAL is similar.

Beckford Wassink (1999: 161) notes that [ie] is more prevalent and less stigmatized for FACE in urban Jamaican than [uo] is for GOAT; it is expected that frequency would be reversed in BrC, since what is not prestigious in Kingston may be a source of covert prestige or basilectal focussing in Britain. Lexical exceptions mek [mεk] ‘make, let’ and tek [tεk] ‘take’ are common markers of BrC, but do not vary as often with [miek] and [tiek] as in JamC.