The Accents of Northern England

 2
being confined to only a small proportion of speakers (about three per 
cent of the whole population, according to A. Hughes and P. Trudgill 
(1996) and no more than about ten per cent according to J.C. Wells 
(1982). 
1.1.2   Accent and dialect 
Once the importance of local accents in a language such as British 
English has been established, it is worth mentioning the difference exist-
ing between what is here defined as ‘accent’ and what is indicated as 
‘dialect’. Accent refers to the sounds produced by speakers who come 
from a particular region or belong to a specific social class, thus relating 
exclusively to the phonetic/phonological level of language. Dialect, con-
versely, refers to the particular features of grammar and vocabulary em-
ployed by language users, and is therefore concerned with syntax, mor-
phology, lexicon, as well as pronunciation. The analysis carried out in the 
present work focuses on English accents, since only the phonologi-
cal/phonetic aspect of a range of British English varieties is investigated. 
Striking differences of pronunciation habits are indeed a widespread fea-
ture among British native speakers, while the use of dialect is definitely 
rare and in certain areas has already died out. 
 3
Whereas it is most common to hear standard English spoken in a 
number of accents, it is less usual nowadays in Britain to find dialect 
speakers. The use of dialect is indeed restricted to small rural areas 
which are far-away from London and the south-east region (e.g. eastern, 
central and southern Scotland and a part of Northern Ireland, where 
Scots is still spoken; the far North of England and the rural West). On the 
one hand British dialects are often said to be gradually disappearing, on 
the other, British regional accents do not run any risk of extinction and are 
currently enjoying a comparatively better status then they did in the last 
decades. Regional accents are now associated with a less negative so-
cial evaluation and may even be present in the media, though RP re-
mains the accent required from newsreaders and professionals, for in-
stance.  
1.1.3   Studying English accents 
Studying English accents means investigating an extremely lively 
topic first of all because pronunciation is subject to a continuous process 
of slight changes. Describing accents, even in a synchronic approach 
such as the one which is adopted in the present work, must take into ac-
count the main pronunciation features as related to the age, sex and so-
cial position of the language users. This implies that the task is always a 
 4
complex one, not only because linguistic phenomena are never clear-cut, 
but also because it involves different fields of linguistics, mainly phonetics 
and phonology. The former concerns the concrete characteristics (articu-
latory, acoustic, auditory) of the sounds used in languages; the latter 
deals with how sounds function in a systemic way in a particular lan-
guage. Both phonetics and phonology also describe the prosody of a lan-
guage, i.e. how features of pitch, loudness and length combine to pro-
duce stress, rhythm and intonation. Further areas of study which are re-
lated with those mentioned are primarily dialectology, which is interested 
in the ways a language differs in various geographical areas, and socio-
linguistics, concerning the interaction between language and society. 
1.1.4   Does accent matter? 
To what extent does accent matter nowadays in Britain? This is one 
of the possible issues that sociolinguistics, applied to the study of British 
local accents, can successfully investigate. The question posed at the 
beginning of this paragraph is not a trivial one, if one thinks that even the 
layman has usually some knowledge of the differences existing in sys-
tems of pronunciations throughout the country and is often highly compe-
tent on his/her own variant. When asked to comment on accent differ-
ences in his/her country, region or local area, any native speaker of any 
 5
language can generally give some satisfactory – though impressionistic – 
description. This implies that accents really matter at least in that they 
enable a listener to locate, more or less precisely, the geographical origin 
of his/her interlocutor. In England, accents can do more than that: they 
can also spot the social background and education of any speaker of the 
language. 
Since in England accents are related not only to geographical ori-
gin, but also to social evaluation (RP being generally accepted as the 
non-localizable, upper class and upper-middle class pronunciation sys-
tem), they seem to play a relevant role in the overall system of social rela-
tions, their defining characteristics being often exploited for puns and of-
ten leading to misunderstandings. In describing British accents, some 
words, which focus their salient features, are commonly used. They in-
clude terms such as ‘burr’, indicating a type of regional speech in which r 
sounds are pronounced more noticeably than in the neutral accent (e.g. in 
Irish accents); ‘lilt’, referring to a way of speaking in which the voice rises 
and falls in a musical way (once again particularly used to describe Irish, 
as well as Welsh accents); and ‘twang’, meaning a nasal voice quality. 
Moreover, aesthetic criteria are often associated with specific accents; 
urban accents are notably considered to be ugly and harsh as opposed to 
 6
what are perceived as charming countryside accents. It could be possible 
to explain such widespread aesthetic judgements in terms of phonaes-
thetics, i.e. the study of the expressive properties of sound. In this re-
spect, northern English speech generally sounds like consonantal and 
harsh to most native speakers, while southern or Irish accents, which are 
slower in tempo, are perceived as being harmonious.  
However, the social perspective once again plays an important role 
in accent evaluation since northern accents are generally subject to social 
prejudice, being often associated with the urban industrial working-class. 
1.2   Outline of the research topic 
The present work is concerned with the phonetic description of the 
accents of Northern England. The aim is a descriptive one, and it involves 
the analysis and illustration of the phonetic features which are typical of 
each main linguistic area in the North of England. The reference accent is 
here considered RP (Received Pronunciation), which is also indicated as 
‘neutral British English’ throughout the work; all the regional speech char-
acteristics which are outlined are compared to the RP pronunciation sys-
tem. Since the main purpose of the project is to make an account of the 
current northern regional accents, no previous theoretical standpoint has 
been chosen as a basis for discussion. This implies that the analysis has 
 7
been carried out, as it were, from the bottom up, namely starting from the 
rough data (the recordings of regional speech samples) and then extract-
ing from them the main pronunciation characteristics. The resulting re-
ports, each describing a particular accent, are meant to constitute a gen-
eral survey of Northern English. Finer and finer analyses might be offered 
on this topic, since it is possible to investigate the subtle differences exist-
ing between accents belonging to neighbouring localities. This kind of de-
tailed research, however, is beyond the scope of the present work, which 
is exclusively concerned with the description of the main accents in 
Northern England.  
Once again, it is worth noting that the regional variant that I define 
as ‘Northern English’ is not a homogeneous one. As a result, when I de-
scribe the accent of the North East area, for instance, I partly overlook the 
subtle variations existing within it and make a consistent attempt to find a 
general framework for the analysis.  
1.3   The background literature 
There is a great deal of descriptive work still to be done on this sub-
ject, particularly on the study of accent differences on a much finer scale. 
Studies on the prosodic characteristics of English accents are still rarer 
 8
and there is no book or article including a systematic comparison of the 
intonation used in different areas of the country. 
Though not based on any previous theory, the present work relies 
on the specific literature available on the subject, which consists in a few 
books and a number of sketchy articles. The works of J.C. Wells (1982), 
A.C. Gimson (1994) and A. Hughes and P. Trudgill (1996) deserve par-
ticular mention as they include a detailed point-by-point comparison of 
British accents.  
On the whole, though, all the works on the subject are generally 
lacking in clarity and precision, sometimes even contradictory. In those 
cases where a more detailed geographical subdivision of English accents 
is attempted, the boundaries of the various phonetic areas are often un-
certain and may undergo inconsistent changes in subsequent works. An-
other frequent misunderstanding concerns the distinction between accent 
and dialect. It is sometimes possible, indeed, to find descriptions of re-
gional varieties of English in which the main features of the broad local 
traditional dialect are presented as accent features. The matter is further 
complicated by the existence of various notation systems which are to be 
decoded and compared in different works. All of the systems used, how-
 9
ever, are poor in phonetic detail and are actually unable to attempt any ef-
fective description of phonetic variations in regional accents. 
The complex task of defining intonation and its typical forms in re-
gional speech is quite often dismissed in the main works on the subject, 
on the grounds that there are no adequate previous studies which give 
any detailed account of the prosodic features of English accents. There 
are indeed some brief works specifically dealing with intonation, but varia-
tion in intonation is in most cases only superficially hinted at.   
Nevertheless, the recordings of regional speech samples which ac-
company some of the main books on the subject are of foremost impor-
tance in showing the most typical forms of regional accents.  
In the present work, the lack of an exhaustive background literature 
is thus replaced by the use of official and non-official recordings as  pri-
mary sources. 
1.4   The development of the research 
The phonetic analysis of English northern accents has been carried 
out in different phases. The first one involved the collecting of the material 
and a tape-recorder was used for that purpose. The informants are all na-
tive northerners with a variably broad accent; for each linguistic area I re-
corded the speech of people differing in sex, age and social position. The 
 10
official cassettes (i.e. those accompanying the main books on the subject) 
have then been used as a frame of reference for the analysis, and I 
matched my own results against the speech samples which they contain. 
From the rough material the chief phonetic data have been extracted. 
Once an outline of the idiosyncratic features of the main northern accents 
was available, it was necessary to establish the geographical boundaries 
between the various phonetic systems. Consequently, it was decided ei-
ther to group certain accents together or to keep them separate from the 
others as covering a single phonetic area on their own. As a result, a lin-
guistic map showing the approximate limits of each accent has been 
drawn, dividing Northern England up into several sub-areas. 
During the first stage of the project, a questionnaire was used to 
provide most of the information on the speakers' phonetic system and in-
tonation at once. The questionnaire included a number of key words as 
well as sentences, so that the pronunciation and intonation characteristics 
of each informant could be checked minutely. Besides, the informants 
were asked to speak spontaneously for a few minutes; in this way, some 
processes of connected speech such as assimilation and elision, as well 
as the speakers' typical phonetic habits came to the surface.  
 11
When the data gathered by these recordings turned out to be par-
ticularly relevant – e.g. when they are evidence of what is assumed or 
vice versa indicate a dissimilar pattern – they are sometimes reported in 
the analysis, pointing out the geographical origin of the speakers who 
produced the most interesting forms. In all other cases, where no com-
ments on the interviewees' pronunciation is added, it is nevertheless simi-
larly implied that a complete survey of the recordings (both official and 
non-official) has been carried out, and the results are consistent with 
those shown in the text.  
The second stage involved the analysis of the gross material con-
sisting in a number of recordings and the preparation of a detailed (or 
‘narrow’) phonetic transcription of the most notable characteristics.  
The difficulties one is likely to encounter in such a project  are 
largely related to the availability of the data and to the variability of local 
accents. The latter aspect concerns not only the geographical extension 
of a particular accent, but also the extent to which accents change de-
pending on the age and social position of the speakers.  
A further significant issue involves the fluctuation present in the 
speech of a single speaker. Most speakers are indeed unaware of their 
own changing speech patterns and variation in their realizations. Actually, 
 12
studies in instrumental phonetics have demonstrated that a person can-
not produce even a single sound in exactly the same way twice in suc-
cession. In addition, the range of formality used in speech is responsible 
for stylistic variation. All speakers vary their way of talking according to 
the situation in which words are uttered, so that in formal style all the 
sounds are given their full value and are generally uttered slowly and 
carefully, whereas in informal and casual styles some of them may be 
omitted and all the sequences are generally articulated much more 
quickly. From a wider point of view, difficulties can be found in the exami-
nation of the phonetic level of languages because of the intrinsic elusive 
nature of spoken language itself: 
 
(…) It is by no means easy to analyse the data obtained for any speech event into discrete, 
successive units within either the articulatory or the acoustic patterns. Speech must, therefore, 
be considered from the phonetic point of view as an ever-changing continuum of qualities, 
quantities, pitch, and intensities. If, for practical purposes, e.g. in a phonetic/phonemic transcrip-
tion of the spoken language, we treat speech as a succession of articulatorily or auditorily sepa-
rable units, it is largely because we impose, upon the gross material of speech, entities which 
we have derived (consciously or unconsciously) from a knowledge of the linguistically significant 
oppositions operating for any particular language system, e.g. the words, the morphemes and 
(…) the phonemes. 
(Gimson, 1994: 199) 
 
 13
1.5   Coding English sounds 
The phonetic alphabet which is used in the present work is the In-
ternational Phonetic Association's alphabet (IPA) in its expanded version 
can
IPA (1997). The standard IPA alphabet is the most widely used set of 
phonetic symbols and the version
 can
IPA (1997) is an implementation of it, 
containing much more information and being much more accurate in pho-
netic detail. Writers on English phonetics have variously used different 
symbols to represent the same phonemes, causing sometimes confusion 
to the readers. 
can
IPA, too, in supplementing the original IPA version, 
sometimes modifies the notation of already existing symbols and espe-
cially adds new ones so as to code all sounds with great precision on the 
basis of their articulation.  
As far as English phonetics is concerned, it is worth listing some of 
the conventions which have been changed by the version
 can
IPA (1997). 
The phoneme which is usually notated as /i:/ becomes /Ii/ in the system of 
phonetic notation used in the present work; the same modification affects 
the vowel /u:/, which becomes a diphthongal /Uu/. Further innovations in-
clude the choice of the symbol /E/ for what is often written as /e/. The no-
tation of English diphthongs has also been subject to change; the sound 
that is mainly transcribed as /eI/ is changed into /EI/; /aI/ into /ae/; /aU/ 
 14
into /ao/; /OI/ into /Oe/ and what is variously indicated as /ÈU/, /oU/ here 
becomes / U/. 
 New symbols have been introduced particularly among conso-
nants; their meaning becomes clear if one looks at the contexts in which 
they appear as well as at the general reference table of consonants (see 
Table 2). Some diaphonemic symbols are also used in the notation sys-
tem in question. They indicate, through a single symbol, the possible 
variants – used either in the same accent or in different reference accents 
– of the phoneme they represent. In other words, the diaphoneme /¢/ 
represents the British English phoneme /I/ and the American English /È/, 
which are both used in the same context (e.g. in the suffixes -ed, -es, -
est, -less). The same principle applies to the diaphonemes /a;/, /Ø;/, /j/, 
/H/, /</ (the latter indicating non-prevocalic r, which has no contoidal re-
alization in non-rhotic accents and a contoidal realization in rhotic ones). 
It is clear, then, that a narrow phonetic transcription is used in order 
to achieve the maximum precision in the description of English sounds. 
That is particularly important in relation to the subject of this work, which 
makes an attempt to represent accurately the slight variants of the same 
English phonemes in several local accents. Therefore, a number of sym-
 15
bols are employed, representing the allophones of the English phonemes 
which are most typically found in the accents of Northern England.  
Tables 1 and 2 are meant to be general reference systems, indicat-
ing the complete set of phones appearing in this work.  
Table 1 shows the complete range of vowel sounds that the human 
vocal apparatus can produce. These are located in the vowel quadrilater-
als, in which vowels are classified according to their tongue height and 
their frontness or backness. Another parameter of vowel quality which 
has a bearing on vowel classification is lip-rounding
1
; on the basis of the 
presence or absence of this factor, vowels have been located in two 
separate quadrilaterals. The vowels which appear in the English vowel 
system stand out against the others (which are in brackets) as being in 
bold type. 
                                                          
1
 Rounded vowels are produced  with a particular articulatory setting: the corners of the lips are 
brought towards each other and the lips pushed slightly forward.