Accent Levelling in the North of England: A Study in Young Adults

Dialect levelling, defined as the “reduction or attrition of marked variants” resulting from dialect contact (Trudgill 1986, 98), has been the subject of various studies on Northern British English (see Kerswill 2003; Strycharczuk et al. 2020). There is evidence of levelling occurring at the phonetic level, accompanied by a shift in speakers’ accent self-identification. Rather than identifying with their regional accent, speakers increasingly describe their accent as “Northern”. This study aims to explore the extent of accent levelling among young adults. Recent research has highlighted the role of accent bias on young adults, suggesting that this demographic may be particularly susceptible to sound change (The Sutton Trust 2022). To examine the spread of accent levelling, this paper focuses on assessing the phonetic changes in vowel realisation in the lexical sets PRICE (/aɪ/), FACE (/eɪ/), and GOAT (/əʊ/), which are traditionally monophthongal in most of Northern England (e.g., PRICE as aː, FACE as eː, GOAT as oː), but are becoming increasingly diphthongised. Data from eight speakers was analysed using quantitative acoustic measurements and qualitative evaluation. Results show that young adults in Northern England overwhelmingly produce these vowels as diphthongs, which reinforces the evidence for ongoing accent levelling in their speech.