Southern Rural English
 |
| Southern Rural | |
|---|---|
| Native to | England |
| Region | Southern |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
| Glottolog | None |
Southern Rural English refers to the varieties of English used by much of the indigenous population of Southern rural England.The Survey of English Dialects captured manners of speech across the South West region that were just as different from Standard English more like Sounth West.
History and origins
Once widely spoken in counties of Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight until perhaps the 1960s but with the increased mobility and urbanisation of the population have meant that local Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Hampshire and Isle of Wight dialects (as opposed to accents) are today essentially extinct.
The dialects have their origins in the expansion of Anglo-Saxon into the west of modern-day England, where the kingdom of Wessex (West-Saxons) and kindgom of Mercia had been founded in the 6th century.
Characteristics
Vowel
- The diphthong /aɪ/ (as in price) realised as [əɪ] or [ɔɪ], sounding more like the diphthong in Received Pronunciation choice.
- The diphthong /aʊ/ (as in mouth) realised as [ɛʊ], with a starting point close to the vowel in Received Pronunciation dress.
- The vowel /ɒ/ (as in lot) realised as an unrounded vowel [ɑ] or an rounded vowel [ɒ].
- The distinction between /ʊ/ and /ʌ/, often known as the foot–strut split[4] is maintained; the quality of /ʌ/ ('strut') is more centralised /ä/.
- Where RP/BBC has the rounded LOT vowel /ɒ/ in words containing the spellings 'f', 'ff', 'gh' or 'th' (such as 'often', 'off', 'cough', 'trough' and 'cloth'), Southern Rural may have /ɔː/ as in the vowel of THOUGHT. This is a manifestation of the lot-cloth split.
- Trap-bath split is maintained by pronouncing trap with /a/or/æ/ and bath with /äː/
Consonant
- In traditional Southern Rural accents, the voiceless fricatives /s/, /f/, /θ/, /ʃ/ always remain voiceless which is the main difference from West Country accents.
- H-dropping is frequent.
- Glottal stops [ʔ] are found widely as an allophone of /t/, generally when in any syllable-final position.
- Double t is traditionally pronounced as /ɾ/ or /d/, so that little and butter sound like liddle and budder; see Intervocalic alveolar flapping.
- These dialects are rhotic like most North American and Irish accents, meaning all "r"s in a word are pronounced (as an approximant), in contrast to non-rhotic accents like Received Pronunciation where "r" is only pronounced before vowels. Often, this /r/ is specifically realised as the retroflex approximant.
See also
References