VOWELSINLONDONENGLISHMihoKamata.PDF

A SOCIO-PHONETIC STUDY OF THE DRESS, TRAP AND STRUT VOWELS IN LONDON ENGLISH Miho Kamata Abstract This study presents a preliminary empirical socio-phonetic investigation of the realisations of the three short vowels DRESS, TRAP and STRUT (Wells 1982a), produced by eight male Londoners, attempting to discover a possible vowel shift involving 1 these vowels in London speech . Two social characteristics of the subjects, age (young vs. old) and social class (working class (WC) vs. upper middle class (UMC)), are considered in three different speech styles; Interview Style, Reading Passage Style and Word List Style. Making use of a vowel formant normalisation technique called S-procedure (Watt Fabricius 2002), a direct comparison of vowel realisations for several individuals are shown on the same plot. As a result, different directional vowel shifts are found between WC and UMC. This paper will also briefly consider, firstly, a conceptual issue regarding accent varieties in London, secondly, a sociolinguistic issue for social class classification based on occupations, and finally a methodological issue in terms of vowel normalisation. 1. Introduction London has often been claimed to have different accents on a continuum with Received Pronunciation (RP) and Cockney being its extremes as an acrolect and a basilect. There are several mesolectal varieties referred to by a number of possibly overlapping terms such as ‘London (or, more generally, south-eastern) Regional Standard’ and ‘Popular London’ speech (Wells 1982b: 302-303), ‘Estuary English’ (Rosewarne 1984), ‘Post-Modern English’ (Maidment 1994), ‘New London Voice’