An Encyclopaedia of Language_10

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An Encyclopaedia of Language_10502 LANGUAGE AS GEOGRAPHYFigure 52 Vowel isoglosses in English (after LAE and AES)maxən/ ‘do’ (cf. German machen) found as far north as the area round Berlin and /tsvaɪ/ ‘two’ (cf. German zwei), with thedental affricate, in a large area east of Hanover. Similar phonological variation is naturally also found in the dialects and accents of English. The Linguistic Atlas ofEngland (LAE) and the Atlas of English Sounds (AES), based on the Survey of English Dialects (SED), show the distributionof a number of familiar geographical variants in the English dialects (cf. Figure 52). Thus, in the traditional dialects and alsothe accents south of a line running approximately from the Severn to the Wash, the vowels of but and butcher are distinct, asin the RP pronunciations /bʌt/ and /bʊtʃə/, as the result of a phonemic split in the original Middle English short /ʊ/ whichtook place in the Early Modern English period. By this change, the vowel was unrounded and centralised in many words, butretained unchanged in others. It was, however, not adopted in most dialects and accents of central and northern England,where one typically finds the same phoneme, characteristically /ʊ/, in all these words, e.g. /bʊt/ and /bʊtʃə/. Similarly restricted to the dialects and accents of southern and eastern England is the lengthening of original short /æ/before fricatives and nasal clusters in some words, e.g. in grass, laugh and grant. South of the isogloss shown on Figure 52these and similar words are pronounced with a long vowel, which in RP, which has adopted these forms, is typically a low,back /ɑː/, e.g. grɑːs/, laːf/, /grɑːnt/, phonemically distinct from the short /æ/ of, e.g., /gæs/ gas or /kænt/ cant. This developmentdid not occur in the dialects and accents of the north and midlands, which have retained the original short vowel, usually witha more central quality than is usual in RP, and there /grɑs/, /lɑf/ and /grant/ have the same vowel as /gas/ and /kɑnt/. In fact,the situation to the south of this isogloss is not uniform over the whole area. Although in most south-western accents anddialects the vowel of grass, etc., is usually long, it is doubtful, as Wells (1982:345–57, especially 353–5) points out, whetherthere is a phonemic distinction between this and the vowel, of e.g., gas, since it is characteristic of this area that manyoriginally short vowels have been lengthened. However, the border between this region and the area of south-eastern Englandwhere there is a clear phonemic opposition between /æ/ and ɑː/ has still to be established since this matter has not yet beeninvestigated in sufficient detail. In traditional dialect geography, as exemplified by the maps of the DSA and the LAE, and of most other linguistic atlases,phonological variation is thus shown in terms of the differential development of certain historical phonemes as shown in thewords elicited through the respective questionnaires. What is mapped, in effect, is the variation of isolated sounds inindividual words. This emphasis on isolated phonetic differences seen from a historical perspective was challenged, from thepoint of view of modern structural linguistics, by Weinreich (1954), although similar ideas had already been voiced byTrubetzkoy (1931), cf. Petyt (1980:102–7 and 117–31). He suggested that such an atomistic approach was incapable of AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 503Figure 53 Front rounded vowels in German dialects (after Wiesinger 1970, 1983b and Kranzmayer 1954)identifying significant geographical distinctions in a systematic way. What was important were not necessarily differences inphonetic detail, but differences between the phonological structuring in different dialects. In terms of phonological structure, then, dialects may differ first in the number of phonemic contrasts they draw. Thus, thedialects and accents of northern England are distinguished from those of the south in that, as we saw earlier, they lack adistinction between /ʌ/ and /ʊ/ which is characteristic of the south and thus have one vowel fewer in their phonemic inventory.In Weinreich’s view, the important boundary is not that of any individual lexical items, but the one dividing those dialectswhich possess this phonemic contrast from those which do not. On the other hand, the distinction between long /ɑː/ and short /æ/ in words like grass may be considered relatively insignificant, since it does not affect the number of phonemes, but onlythe incidence of particular phonemes in particular words. Indeed, what now appears significant in terms of phonologicalstructure is the possible lack of such a distinction in the western dialects, about which, as we have seen, the LAE is unable togive us clear information (cf. Trudgill 1983:36–7). There may also ...