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1. A SOUTHERN FEATURE IN A NORTHERN ACCENT:
A SOCIOLINGUISTIC INVESTIGATION INTO THE BIRMINGHAM DIPHTHONG SHIFT
6th Northern
Englishes
Workshop
16th April 2014
Kamil Malarski
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

2. INTRODUCTION
• Birmingham as the second largest city in England
• The Birmingham dialect, or Brummie
• Rather underresearched (Clark 2008, Malarski 2013)
• Arguably, a Northern accent (Wells 1982, Cruttenden
2009)
6th Northern Englishes Workshop, 16th April 2014

3. PERCEPTION
• Very stigmatized
• “incorrect“, “ugly“ and “uneducated” (Thorne 2005)
• least “sociable”, “successful”, “elegant”, “wealthy”,
“intelligent” (Hiraga 2005)
• placed 34th in accent prestige and attractiveness
(Coupland and Bishop 2007)

4. PERCEPTION
Reactions towards Brummie and other accents on a 5-point Likert
scale (Malarski 2010: 22)

5. PERCEPTION
• The effect of that on diphhthongs?

6. CLASSIFICATION
• Geography
6th Northern Englishes Workshop, 16th April 2014

7. CLASSIFICATION
• Suprasegmental features (Cruttenden 1994, Ladd 1996, Malarski 2013)
6th Northern Englishes Workshop, 16th April 2014

8. CLASSIFICATION
• Segmental features (Wells 1982: 364; Clark 2008)
6th Northern Englishes Workshop, 16th April 2014

9. THE DIPHTHONG SHIFT – INTRODUCTION
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(Wells 1982: 256)

10. THE DIPHTHONG SHIFT – INTRODUCTION
• The London – Birmingham Diphthong Shift
(Wells 1982)
• A process where the fronting-closing diphthongs
move in the anti-clockwise direction and the back-
closing diphthongs in the clockwise direction
(Wells 1982: 308-310).

11. THE DIPHTHONG SHIFT DIACHRONICALLY
• The Diphthong Shift originated in London
• Later spread on to many other southern accents of English
(Britain and Sudbury 2008: 1)
• The turn of the 18th and the 19th century
(Wells 1982: 252, 257).
• North America vs. Australia and New Zealand

12. THE DIPHTHONG SHIFT DIACHRONICALLY
• Which one was the first to move?
• The FLEECE vowel in Wells (1982) and Trudgill (2004)
• Shifted qualities of MOUTH found in the Midlands in
the nineteenth century (Kerswill 2008: 454)

13. THE DIPHTHONG SHIFT DIACHRONICALLY
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The Diphthong Shift confronted with the Great Vowel Shift

14. THE DIPHTHONG SHIFT DIACHRONICALLY
• The Diphthong Shift is an after-effect of the Great
Vowel Shift (Britain 2008; Britain and Sudbury 2008)
• A process almost as fundamental as the Great Vowel
Shift (Wells 1982: 256)

15. THE DIPHTHONG SHIFT SOCIOLINGUISTICALLY
• Anecdotally, stigmatized already at the times of
Pygmallion by Bernard Shaw
• Less prestige -> more prestige

16. THE DIPHTHONG SHIFT SOCIOLINGUISTICALLY

17. THE DIPHTHONG SHIFT – THE NEWEST TRENDS
• Tendencies towards unshifted variants in London
and Birmingham (Kerswill et al. 2008; Khan 2006)
• A reversal?
• Interesting differences according to age and
ethnicity variables

18. THE STUDY
FIELDWORK IN BIRMINGHAM

19. METHODOLOGY
• Research conducted in Birmingham
• 1 week
• Birmingham City University, Study Lab

20. METHODOLOGY
• 10 people aged between 19 and 32 (mean age: 22.8)
• 7 females and 3 males
• Middle-class speakers
• Sociolinguistic interview
• Wordlist style (all diphthongs, 254 tokens in the b_d frame)

21. METHODOLOGY

22. METHODOLOGY

23. RESEARCH QUESTIONS
• Will I find the Diphthong Shift variants in my subjects?
• Will I find any signs of the reversal in my subjects?
• Will the middle-class speakers display intermediate realisations of the
diphthongs?
• What will be the differences in the realisation of the diphthongs
across sexes and ethnic groups?

24. RESULTS
FOR ALL SPEAKERS

25. RESULTS
FOR MEN
AND WOMEN

26. RESULTS WITH REGARD TO ETHNICITY

27. RESULTS
FOR FEMALE 2

28. RESULTS
FOR MALE 1

29. RESULTS
FOR FEMALE 3

30. RESULTS

31. RESULTS

32. RESULTS

33. RESULTS

34. RESULTS

35. RESULTS

36. RESULTS

37. RESULTS
• FACE, CHOICE, PRICE and MOUTH are subject to the Diphthong Shift
• FLEECE and GOOSE are diphthongised
• No monophthongal qualities as found in Khan (2006) and Kerswill et al.
(2008)
• GOAT is subject to variation; some vowels compatible with Khan (2006)
• The differences between the researched groups are not very big

38. CONCLUSIONS
• The Diphthong Shift in Birmingham is not reversing
• Birmingham should be treated as an accent intermediate between
the north and the south
• The diphthongs were elicited in the most formal speech style
• Diphthongs in Birmingham may be less marked than in London
• More large-scale study is needed to investigate the feature

39. SELECTED REFERENCES
• Britain, David and Andrea Sudbury. 2008. What can the Falkland Islands tell us about Diphthong Shift? Essex
Research Reports in Linguistics. (http://repository.essex.ac.uk/101/1/Falkland_Islands_ERRiL.pdf) (date of access:
1 May 2012).
• Cruttenden, Alan. 2008. Gimson’s pronunciation of English. (6th edition.) London: Edward Arnold.
• Kerswill, Paul, Eivind Nessa Torgersen and Susan Fox. 2008. “Reversing ‘drift’: Innovation and diffusion in the
London diphthong system”, Language Variation and Change 20: 451491.
• Khan, Arfaan. 2006. A sociolinguistic study of Birmingham English: Language variation and change in amulti-
ethnic British community. [Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Lancaster University.].
• Malarski, Kamil. 2013. “Intonation in the perception of Brummie”, in: Ewa Waniek-Klimacz and Linda R. Schockey
(eds.) Teaching and Researching English Accents in Native and Non-native Speakers. Berlin: Springer Verlag.
• Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. Vol. 1: An Introduction. Vol. 2: The British Isles. Vol. 3: Beyond the British
Isles. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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40. THANK YOU
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KMALARSKI@WA.AMU.EDU.PL