Interaction of social and linguistic constraints on two vowel changes in northern England

Abstract

Abstract This paper focuses on the way that local social indexicality interacts with principles of vowel change. A combination of real and apparent time data from the northern English dialect of York indicate fronting of tense back vowels in thegoatandgooselexical sets, and diphthongization of traditionally monophthongal mid-vowels in thefaceandgoatlexical sets. The latter process of change, a northward diffusion of more prestigious southern forms, has been noted for some other northern English dialects, but has not been described acoustically in published work. We show that these two vowel changes have different social meanings in the community. As is the case in previous studies,goatandgoosefronting is not strongly associated with different speaker groups in the community. Monophthongal realizations offaceandgoat, on the other hand, are strongly associated with the speech of the local community, especially working-class speech. The results align with predictions of Labov's (1994) principle III of vowel change in that they show thatgoosefronting precedesgoatfronting. However, we argue that a full understanding of the trajectories of change requires attention to social indexical properties of these variants as well. In particular, the scarcity of fronted variants of monophthongalgoatis explained as a consequence of local indexing of such forms.

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