“But can you even speak, like, proper Northern?”: The rise of a General Northern English accent
Issue 10: Voices Section | author: Jasmin Kaur (columnist)
Columnist Jasmin Kaur, third-year Linguistics undergraduate at the University of Cambridge, writes about accent levelling in the North of England and how this reflects the changing English population.
Great Britain is home to a vast number of accents. Indeed, different speaking patterns in traditional accents such as Geordie and Cockney can be traced to settlement patterns from as early as the 5th Century [1]. Newer accents like General Northern English (GNE) and Estuary English reveal much more about the individual speaker, shining a light on their socio-economic status, regional background, ethnicity and more [2]. In this article, I will shed light on whether accents in the North of England have become less distinct and the implications of this for a GNE accent.
Accent levelling, which Kerswill defines as the loss of localised features in both urban and rural dialects, can occur for a number of reasons [3]. A common cause is geographical diffusion. In this instance, features from a populated, culturally dominant urban area have a wave-like spread to other nearby urban areas. Thus, language change can be seen as something which occurs in language communities with a high level of contact, with speakers moving more between populous towns and cities. Thus, it is only natural that speakers in populous Northern cities may be moving towards adopting a pan-Northern manner of speaking. For those that speak GNE, they can be said to speak a dialect “in opposition to Southern British English” [4]. This may consist of syntactic linguistic features such as the “give it me” construction or phonological and phonetic features such as the words TRAP–BATH and FOOT–STRUT being pronounced the same.
We can then consider the consequences of accent levelling for former industrial cities like Newcastle with its infamous Geordie accent. Once the hub of a thriving coal mining and manufacturing industry with close-knit social networks, the collapse of heavy industry in the 1970s fragmented these networks. Local speakers were affected by mass unemployment and a breakdown of their close-knit linguistic groups. Many aspects of the Geordie accent have been preserved, like the FLEECE vowel being pronounced as [fleɪs]. However, levelling has also impacted FACE and GOAT vowels; more speakers adopt a GNE or Southern Standard British English (SSBE) pronunciation in lieu of the local one. This effect was captured by Watt [5] who recorded data from older and younger speakers in Tyneside. The study found a marked age and class difference in whether speakers opted for the supralocal GNE variant ([eː] and [oː]), the traditional local variant ([ɪə] [ʊə]), or the national SSBE variant ([oʊ] and [eɪ]). Crucially, younger speakers had a less regionally marked pronunciation compared to the older speakers, reflecting levelling over the years. However, the younger Tyneside speakers did not converge towards a Southern vowel system, but the more general Northern one. Due to the increased importance of “Northern identity”, we can start to see the Northern pronunciation becoming more standard.
Similar views were found again in an updated longitudinal study from 1971 to 2013, investigating how 6 Tyneside speakers of different genders and social classes realise the FACE vowel [6]. The study found increased levels of the SSBE closing diphthong [eɪ] and the GNE monophthong [e:]. Thus, it can be said that most speakers appeared to follow community-wide changes, reflecting the new shift towards adopting the supralocal pronunciation. Gender is also an important factor. Whilst men had more supralocal and local features, women in the study had much lower levels of the regionally marked variant. Following from this, the men with localised FACE variants also appeared to express a strong sense of loyalty to the Tyneside dialect. Unlike the group of women who followed a community-wide shift towards the GNE standard, the men can be said to have followed a retrograde change, opposing the shift away from their traditional dialect. Social class is another important characteristic correlated to levelling; middle class speakers avoided using the local Tyneside pronunciation of FACE and GOAT. For both the male and working-class speakers, adopting either a national or supralocal standard of pronunciation would be akin to rejecting their Tyneside roots.
Moreover, this shift can also be observed for the whole North of England. In particular, accent levelling can be best demonstrated in middle-class speech. For the group of educated middle-class Northerners, GNE reflects the desire to reflect their Northern identity whilst also avoiding low status regionally marked features. This is reflected by a 2020 study at the University of Manchester [4] which investigated the rise of GNE by analysing the speech of highly educated individuals from 5 large Northern cities: Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle upon Tyne. Experimenters investigated this by exposing an AI machine to recordings of 3500 self-identified British speakers reading a passage from "The Boy who Cried". The AI was then trained to identify the different cities based on the differing vowel formants in the data. The AI experiment yielded lower accuracy rates for identifying accents from Leeds (67%), Manchester (63%) and Sheffield (55%), which were, on occasion, confused for each other. In contrast, the AI had a high accuracy rate for correctly identifying Scouse speakers (82%) and Geordie speakers (71%). Whilst accent levelling has certainly affected Northern English cities, not all accents in the region have become homogenous.
With countries like the UK becoming a melting pot of other cultures, accents such as Asian Englishes regularly interact with GNE in the North of England. Looking at the UK 2019 population survey, Asian British ethnic groups have grown by 0.5% since the 2011 Census [8]. Overall, the survey showed the largest population increase of ethnic groups in the UK since 2011. Furthermore, aspects of GNE are also found in Punjabi English (PE) speakers in Bradford. Compared to Anglo-English speakers who produce closer realisations of FACE and GOAT vowels, PE speakers follow the typical pattern of Asian Englishes having lower vowel heights [9]. Thus, monophthongal realisations by Punjabi-English speakers may even represent the merging of their different identities. In this sense, accent levelling might even be considered an inevitable feature of diverse populations. For the North of England, GNE is the accent uniting an increasingly diverse population.
References:
[1] The British Library. (2019, April 24). Geordie: A regional dialect of English. Retrieved August 29, 2022, from https://www.bl.uk/british-accents-and-dialects/articles/geordie-a-regional-dialect-of-english
[2] Sharma, D., Levon, E., & Ye, Y. (2022). 50 years of British accent bias: Stability and lifespan change in attitudes to accents. English World-Wide, 43(2), 135-166.
[3] Kerswill, P., Britain, D., & Cheshire, J. (2003). Dialect levelling and geographical diffusion in British English. Social dialectology: in honour of Peter Trudgill, 223-243.
[4] Strycharczuk, P., López-Ibáñez, M., Brown, G., & Leemann, A. (2020). General Northern English. Exploring regional variation in the North of England with machine learning. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 48.
[5] Watt, D. (2002). ‘I don’t speak with a Geordie accent, I speak, like, the Northern accent’: Contact‐induced levelling in the Tyneside vowel system. Journal of sociolinguistics, 6(1), 44-63.
[6] Buchstaller, I., Krause, A., Auer, A., & Otte, S. (2017). Levelling across the life‐span?: Tracing the face vowel in panel data from the North East of England. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 21(1), 3-33.
[7] Gov.uk. (2021, December 16). Population estimates by ethnic group and religion, England and Wales: 2019. Office for National Statistics. Retrieved August 29, 2022, from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationestimates/articles/populationestimatesbyethnicgroupandreligionenglandandwales/2019#:~:text=2.-,Ethnicity%20in%20England%20and%20Wales,points%20since%20the%202011%20Census
[8] Wormald, J. (2014). Bradford Panjabi-English: the realisation of FACE and GOAT. York. Papers in Linguistics: PARLAY Proceedings, 1, 118-138.
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