Amanda Cole writes for The Conversation about new study of English accents:
Cockney and received pronunciation (Queen’s English) were once spoken by people of all ages, but they are no longer commonly spoken among young people in the south-east of England. In new research, colleagues and I recorded the voices of 193 people between the ages of 18 and 33 from across south-east England and London. We then built a computer algorithm which “listened” to how they spoke and grouped them by how similarly they pronounced vowels in different words. We identified three main accents:standard southern British English, multicultural London English and estuary English.
Around 26% of our participants spoke estuary English, which has similarities with Cockney but is more muted and closer to received pronunciation. The people in our sample who spoke estuary English would pronounce words like “house” a bit like “hahs”, but not as extreme as you would find in Cockney. Estuary English is spoken across the south-east, particularly in parts of Essex, and is similar to how Stacey Dooley, Olly Murs, Adele or Jay Blades speak.
Standard southern British English—which many perceive as a prestigious, “standard” or “neutral” sounding accent—is a modern, updated version of received pronunciation. SSBE speakers, who made up 49% of our sample, tended to say words like “goose” with the tongue further forward in the mouth (sounding a bit more like “geese”) than what we would expect in received pronunciation. […]
We found that speakers of standard southern British English and estuary English generally tended to be white British, and women were more likely than men to speak the former. It’s not surprising to find that women speak in a more socially prestigious way, as much previous research suggests—women are often more chastised for speaking with regional accents than men.
Notably, standard southern British English and estuary English are not as different from each other as Cockney and received pronunciation. This could be evidence of what’s known as dialect leveling—where young people from different parts of the region now speak more similarly to each other than their parents or grandparents did. […]
This is not to say that there are no new or innovative ways of speaking today. One example is an accent which linguists call multicultural London English, first noted in recent decades in the speech of young east Londoners. This accent has similarities with Cockney and other south-eastern accents, but also has influences from other languages and dialects of English.
The young people with a multicultural London English accent (around 25% in our sample) said the vowels in words like bate and boat with the tongue starting at a point higher up in the mouth compared to standard southern British English so that they might sound a little bit more like “beht” and “boht”.
They tended to be Asian British or Black British and many were from London, but there were also people from across the south-east who spoke with elements of a multicultural London English accent. Bukayo Saka, Little Simz and Stormzy could be examples of people who speak with these features.
Click through for more, including links and videos. They end by singing my song: “Attempting to prevent accents from changing is like sweeping back an incoming tide with a broom—fruitless and defying nature.” Thanks, Dmitry!
I have some GOOSE-fronting in my own idiolect. The fronted GOOSE vowel sounds nothing much like the FLEECE vowel in GEESE, largely because it remains rounded while the FLEECE vowel is unrounded.
Separately, that male speakers are more likely to exhibit low-status dialect features than female speakers is an old empirical claim in English/UK dialectology – I remember reading I think Trudgill on this back in the Eighties and it may have been stuff he published in the Seventies. But I’m not sure that the “chastisement” mechanism suggested here is the consensus view or the only view, and it seems weirdly discordant with the “all accents are equally valid” claim to say that “but women have no agency and only manifest the accents they do because of social pressure.” Perhaps another just-so story that would get the same result would be to claim that non-elite males are on average more likely than their female peers to receive positive social reinforcement from their male peers by collectively refusing to emulate elite ways of speaking and thereby symbolically telling the toffs they can fuck right off. Or even that male speakers are on average less adept at picking up on the social cues communicating the potential social advantages of elite pronunciation that female speakers are reacting to.
said the vowels in words like bate and boat with the tongue starting at a point higher up in the mouth compared to standard southern British English so that they might sound a little bit more like “beht” and “boht
Anyone understand what that means? If so, can you translate it to IPA?
We identified three main accents:standard southern British English, multicultural London English and estuary English.
Speaking as somebody who grew up just outside ‘Hounslow’ — as featured in Pygmalion: it’s where Eliza’s father came from — this doesn’t ring true for me. (Or perhaps I mean I’m talking about the 1960’s/70’s and accents have homogenised since.)
In my day, West London (Hounslow) was different to Southern British English (Isleworth: the posh end of Hounslow); was different to North London (Tottenham — which might count as ‘multicultural’); was different to South London (Croydon — where my brother’s wife’s large family are centred); was different to Cockney was different to Estuary English.
I recorded the voices of 193 people … from across south-east England and London.
a) Not nearly enough of a sample.
b) I’m very interested in the geographical spread of where they grew up, as well as where the research team found them.
@AntC: From the paper (§2.1, p. 10):
@AntC: one thing that’s a bit odd is that the percentages represented to their three “main accents” sum up to 100%. It would seem more credible if they summed up to 95% or whatever with the remainder made up of “miscellaneous” accents not discussed in any further detail. Or maybe the underlying paper explains something like they eliminated for simplicity’s sake anyone studied who didn’t exhibit one of these Big Three?
If they did their research this year (which may not be a good assumption) the oldest people studied would have been born around 1990, so significant shifts since the way then-living people had talked in the same area some decades before 1990 do not seem implausible.
“Came here to say that, left satisfied.”
Thank you to Y for clicking through when I couldn’t be arsed to and cutting-and-pasting useful information about their sample. Let me note that the racial mix of the speakers studied does not match up with that the broader population (even as age-adjusted) of “Southeast England” – or of London-considered-in-isolation or of Essex-considered-in-isolation or for that matter England-as-a-whole. As to the class mix, the notion that 0% of the sample are posher than “middle class” seems positively American. They shoulda sent their researchers over to Royal Ascot or wherever to capture a few speakers who would fess up to being upper-class.
At the end of the academia-to-popular pipeline we sink into this The novelty of the paper is not “Cockney and RP are dead, long live MLE, SSBE and EE”. The novelty is using functional principal component analysis (fPCA) as a tool for finding “linguistically coherent accents”. The paper is a proof of concept in which fPCA succeeds in dividing the 193 subjects into three clusters whose linguistic and social features turn out to correspond to MLE, SSBE and EE as described by previous researchers.
“The speakers were aged 18–33 years (mean age = 21.8) (born 1986–2001)” so study was 2019.
“We draw out subpopulations of south-eastern speakers based on their diphthong systems which we then relate to speakers’ social information.”
The core of the study was number-crunching: fPCA of formant trajectories for the subjects’ diphthongs.
“According to the clustering analysis, the optimal number of clusters in the data is three, which suggests there are three hidden subpopulations of speakers.”
The fPCA uses only linguistic data. Not until the clusters have been spat out are the social factors considered.
“Clusters broadly corresponding to MLE, SSBE and EE have emerged which have collections of co-occurring linguistic features and social predictors in line with previous work.”
So, concept proved.
The researchers like fPCA for reducing a priori assumptions and circular reasoning from linguistic to social variables. e.g.:
I’m just wondering what kind of phonetic information the authors are expecting
to convey.
Yes thank you @Y for digging into the paper. (Like @JWB, I couldn’t be arsed to, because like @DM I have grave doubts about the methodology.)
But those extracts don’t answer my question: specifically which parts of **(Greater) London** do the speakers come from? There’s a parallel thread going on about ‘Neighbourhoods’. It’s been well said London is not so much a City as a collection of villages. You can walk from Isleworth to Hounslow in less than an hour — as I often did — and hear the change in accent. (Nowadays Hounslow has a much higher than in my day ‘multicultural’ population of Indian-subcontinent affiliation — overspill from Southall. That’s a quite different multicultural accent than in Tottenham/West-Indian.)
@JWB Essex-considered-in-isolation
(Ex-alumni of Essex Uni speaking here: all I know formally about Linguistics is doing a joint topic with the Philosophy Dept ‘Philosophy of Language’. You can now condemn my ignorance self-righteously.)
In Brit Universities, it is quite rare for students to be drawn ‘locally’; I even wouldn’t particularly expect Essex students to be from S.E. England. The Uni has strong Computing and Engineering Departments, which draw students nationally. In my digs in the first year, over half my flatmates were from north of the Wash and/or West of Stonehenge. Indeed most students deliberately choose Uni’s to be as far from their parents as possible. (I understand this to be opposite in U.S.A.) I’m talking about ‘proper’ Universities; as opposed to what used to be called ‘Technical Colleges’ or ‘Community Colleges’ which did draw their students more locally, but have now rebranded themselves as ‘(Technical) University’ or some such.
So I suspect the explanation for “the percentages represented to their three “main accents” sum up to 100%. ” Is that they only sampled speakers who self-identified as S.E. England.
Thanks @mollymolly. Bollix, frankly: the “likely reason” is inadequate methodology and inadequate sampling. I know Psychology experiments tended to sample only students, because they were near to hand. Doing that for dialect analysis strikes me as entirely invalidating the exercise.
entirely invalidating the exercise
Me, I wouldn’t quite say so. Using university students (and staff) is suspect, and probably everyone knows it by now. But science is a series of approximations. This one is a decent first approximation, and achieved what it aimed to achieve, as described by mollymooly. It does not quite demonstrate what the popular articles claim it does.
Put another way, if the same study was done 60 years ago, I imagine enough RP and Cockney speakers would be identified to form recognizable clusters, even within such a biased sample as this.
Using university students (and staff) is suspect,
Hmm, hmm. Is that only academic staff? Uni Essex is outside Colchester/extreme North-East Essex. Indeed when it was being planned, one of the possible sites was over the border into Suffolk. (We’re in Constable/the Hay Wain country.)
So although the Essex accent nearer London is definitely ‘Estuary’, Colchester showed features of an East Anglia accent. That would show up sometimes amongst the non-academic staff: cleaners, cooks, security guards.
(I recognised it because my family used to holiday on the Norfolk Coast.) Again did their sampling select out such people?
“I remember reading I think Trudgill on this back in the Eighties and it may have been stuff he published in the Seventies.” – 1972 in open acess here.
So maybe the “clustering” analysis just means that they didn’t have to admit that any of the speakers in the sample didn’t have any of the three specified accents because in some mathematical sense all of the apparent outliers could be classified as closer to the central tendency (or some other statistics-jargon term) of one of the clusters than of the other two – even if by ear you would say they didn’t really match up with any of the three but spoke with some fourth accent?
@drasvi: Yeah, that’s probably it, or possibly some follow-up re-write of a similar analysis. Thanks! I appear upthread to have regurgitated from deep memory a reasonable approximation of Trudgill’s hypothesized mechanism. “Covert Prestige” would be a good name for a band …
Or perhaps I mean I’m talking about the 1960’s/70’s
Yes, I’m not sure why you suppose your memories of a half-century and more ago are relevant to a current dialect study. I too remember when things were different! (*shakes cane*)
Indeed most students deliberately choose Uni’s to be as far from their parents as possible. (I understand this to be opposite in U.S.A.)
Certainly not opposite in the US (I did it in 1968, my grandson did it last year, and I know of plenty of examples in between), and I’d want a scientific study to show what “most students” in the UK have done.
England is hardly big enough to allow students to get very far away from their parents. Let’s say you were from St. Ives in Cornwall and went to university in Newcastle-on-Tyne (I don’t think there’s anything more northeastward than that). Google maps says driving distance is 480 miles. You can come up with a hometown/university pair with more mileage than that where the student doesn’t even have to leave the state of New York. My older daughter went to university approx. a 900 mile drive from our house, and she didn’t even cross the Mississippi.* If she’d gone to her mother’s alma mater (UCLA) it would have been more like a 2,800 mile drive. Any English students who really want to get out from under their parents’ shadow will probably want to investigate the NZ options – the University of Otago might be a good fit.
Although to be fair in England you historically would (and may still to a lessened degree) typically get more dialect difference per hundred miles traveled than in the U.S.
*Okay, my next child is currently at university only 200 miles away – like someone from Shrewsbury going to Essex University.
Yes, my grandson has chosen a college a tad over 3,000 miles away from his loving parents and grandparents. But we no longer have to communicate via occasional letters, as was the style when I were a lad!
Getting away from your parents certainly isn’t uncommon as a factor in choice of university in the UK, though less now than it used to be – expanding access to higher education and the introduction of tuition fees (over 20 years ago now) mean that there are plenty of students who can’t afford to move away from home to study. I suspect AntC’s perspective on this may be a bit out of date.
While the distances involved in travel in the UK might be much less than in the US, comparing driving distances is misleading – students with cars are a very small minority in Britain. Getting from St. Ives to Newcastle via public transport is going to take you 12-16 hours and is probably not going to be very much fun with any amount of luggage. (And why limit it to England? St. Ives to Inverness will give you even more changes!)
@Ben T. Can’t English students get their parents to drive them, at least at the beginning of term when they’ve got a lot of stuff to transport? That’s how we did it when my daughters matriculated. We have a generally much lousier rail network in the U.S., I understand, but my currently-enrolled daughter can get to/from campus by rail from our house in not much more time than it takes to drive (maybe equivalent if traffic on the highway is less than ideal). The same was true when I was a student long ago, for a different hometown/university combination. But I expect the same is true in England if home and campus are both located within a relatively short number of miles of two different stations on the same railway line and there are no dodgy transfers to navigate.
@J.W. Brewer
For some reason, I didn’t think of that while I was typing that, but I think that is what most students do. Which causes its own problems, since there’s usually nowhere in and around UK university campuses for all those cars to go!
@JWB: Distanced is relative. I know people in the former Soviet Union for whom a 300 km drive is something you do every weekend to visit friends or relatives. In Germany, that kind of distance means “they live so far away that we see them only once or twice a year”. I guess in Luxembourg, getting away from the parents means moving farther away than an afternoon stroll 😉
Ah, but this is the UK meaning of “middle class”, where “upper class” means actual nobility, and the people who go to Eton, go on to rule the country and speak RP in daily life are “upper middle class”.
I don’t! All I did was echo doubt about one of the conclusions that doesn’t directly follow from the method. There’s nothing wrong with principal components!
@Ben T.: having thus far only been in the parent role for move-in at two U.S. universities out of a total of several thousand, I may not have a valid sample, but I must say that both of those institutions had put a lot of effort (presumably incrementally improved over many years) in working out the optimal logistics of having an unusually large number of vehicles arrive and need to be unloaded simultaneously, having older students paid for the day guide you to the right spot to park to unload (often a spot where parking was not usually permitted) for wherever your child’s room is going to be and then having other paid older students help unload the contents of the car quickly so that you could then free up that in-demand spot, go park the empty car at a greater distance where more parking is available because it’s too far from the dorms to want to lug stuff from, and then walk back to help your child actually unpack the stuff inside the room.
Many other aspects of university administration may still be dysfunctional or sclerotic, but that part they’ve figured out.
Hat: Yes, my grandson has chosen a college a tad over 3,000 miles away from his loving parents and grandparents. But we no longer have to communicate via occasional letters, as was the style when I were a lad!
My daughter has chosen a college more than twice that distence — or almost two continents — away. Still she called me just before I left work today. I’m amazed by that.
(No, not to hear the dear voice of her father. Some bureaucratic issue with her student loan. The system is apparently not built to handle southern hemisphere academic years.)
i wouldn’t say AntC’s wrong about the geography of u.s. college-going, though it’s not a matter of students’ desire.
aside from those at ‘elite’/’selective’/etc. (read: “expensive”) private colleges and universities, however – which is to say, for the vast majority of u.s. undergraduate students – going to a school in-state is the norm, because anything else is generally economically unfeasible (out-of-state tuition being substantially higher than already barely-in-reach in-state rates at public schools, and living at home or with blood relatives often being what makes paying any tuition plausible). as JWB said, “in-state” can mean quite long geographical distances (i know folks from long island who were very happy to go to SUNY Geneseo and be 360 miles / 6 hrs drive from their parents), but even there the felt distance can be much shorter.
@rozele, I was figuring Montauk kid going to SUNY-Fredonia as the N.Y. equiv of St.-Ives-to-Newcastle, but it wouldn’t surprise me if Suffolk Co. kids are pretty thin on the ground at Fredonia – it’s not like Geneseo or some of the other campuses that have a distinctive hook to attract kids from the other end of the state.
But even without going out west to unusually large states like California and Texas one can come up with non-strained examples of lengthy in-state journeys — e.g. plenty of students from the Memphis area would presumably take advantage of the chance to go to the primary University of Tennessee campus 400 miles away in Knoxville if they were admitted.
I have some GOOSE-fronting in my own idiolect.
Essentially everyone in anglophone North America does, as well as many other varieties.
Ah, but this is the UK meaning of “middle class”, where “upper class” means actual nobility
We’ve got that too, basically reflecting the 25,000 Americans in the Social Register, a directory of old money. To get in you need to be green (money), blue (blood), and lily-white (reputation, not necessarily skin color).
Anyhow, those people aren’t easy to interview: Anthony Kroch did a study of posh Philadelphians in 1994. He was only able to find ten in the age range (pre-WWII) that he was interested in, and only through personal introductions, though all of them were completely cooperative. His main result is that the Philadelphia upper class has more features in common with other Philadelphians (rhoticity and BATH=TRAP) and are mostly distinctive by their prosody.
public schools
That is, ‘state universities’.
non-strained examples of lengthy in-state journeys…Memphis…Knoxville
absolutely! my sister went to UMass Amherst, which (barring some technicalities) is the farthest-removed campus from where we grew up.
but that’s still assuming the memphis kid – or my sister – can afford to live independently* while paying tuition, or is willing to take on more debt to do so. and that, i think, is what keeps most u.s. students close to where they grew up, more than anything else.
.
* including living in a dorm, which doesn’t end up very different in cost. a quick glance at the UMass Amherst rates shows the cheapest shared room to cost $3000 per semester, with an extra fee required to stay in your room during breaks – plus a required meal plan, which will set you back at least another $3300 per semester. so you need to have access to another $12,000 or more a year, which i don’t think is any less than the cost of living off-campus nearby enough to not add car and gas expenses to the equation (biking works until it snows; i believe the bus system(s) is a mixed bag). and to fill out the rest of the picture: in-state tuition (at a full-time courseload) is ~$17,000/year, while out-of-state students pay ~$39,000, with new englanders from outside massachusetts getting a discounted ~$32,000 rate. it adds up to a lot of incentive to live at home while in school, especially if you can’t easily afford to enroll full-time.
Cornwall and Tyneside may not seem very far apart to an American, but there is a very big difference in dialect between them!
A 2016 blog post on where Irish students go to third-level
https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2016/01/01/sankey-diagrams-of-irish-educational-transitions/
@Kate B. – I tried to allow for that in my point above re the rate of dialect change per hundred miles traveled being generally higher in the U.K. than U.S. …
@J.W.B. – I tried to allow for that in my point above re the rate of dialect change per hundred miles traveled being generally higher in the U.K. than U.S. …
Does the rate in the U. S. not depend on the direction and which part of the country you are talking about?
For example, from Maine to Georgia the rate is much higher than, say, from Ohio to California or from New Mexico to Montana.
Many students of American English have noted that the spoken English in what was once the Thirteen Colonies is considerably more different (north to south) than in areas of later Anglophone settlement in the U. S.
@M: sure. I could restate the point more carefully as “a randomly-chosen 100 mile journey in the U.S. is less likely to manifest significant dialect change than a randomly-chosen 100 mile journey in the U.K.” Within the Northeast, New York City and Philadelphia are a bit less than 100 miles apart city center to city center,* but the traditional non-prestige local dialects were different enough that Bill Labov allegedly left the faculty of a university in the former city for one in the latter because he thought he already understood the former dialect but the latter had enough unsolved mysteries to keep him busy until he retired.
*They’re both pretty geographically extensive, so the drive from the southwesternmost tip of NYC to the northeasternmost tip of Philly is barely 60 miles.