This article investigates the status of thefoot–strutsplit in the counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the East Midlands of England. The East Midlands area is a linguistic transition zone between northern English varieties with a phoneme inventory of five short vowels, wherefootandstrutare represented by the same phoneme, and southern English varieties which have thefoot–strutsplit and therefore six short vowels. However, a lack of research on the distribution of thefootandstrutvowels in the East Midlands exists and to fill that gap, this article examines the possible diffusion of the split northwards as predicted by Trudgill (1986). Reading-passage data, stratified by age group, sex and location is used to provide an apparent time, multilocal view on the distribution of the two vowel categories. Surprisingly, the changes that we notice do not concern the increasing distance betweenfootandstrutbut mainlyfoot-fronting in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire andstrut-retraction in Derbyshire which leads to an increase in overlap betweenfootandstrutin all three counties.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.