Although /a:/ exists as a contrastive phoneme in northern English dialects, its distribution is more restricted than in the South. In the North, this vowel is notably absent from the BATH set. This feature and the unsplit FOOT–STRUT vowel are the two most salient markers of northern English, but the vowel in BATH words is the more stable and salient of the two. Wells (1982: 354) puts this point elegantly: “there are many educated northerners who would not be caught dead doing something so vulgar as to pronounce STRUT words with , but who would feel it to be a denial of their identity as northerners to say BATH words with anything other than short [a]”. Like the FOOT–STRUT split, lengthening of an earlier short vowel /a/ in BATH words dates from the 17^th century. The history of these words is very complex, but the lengthening certainly seems to have been a southern innovation, which was, in fact, stigmatized as a Cockneyism until well into the 19^th century. Today, it is the northern short /a/ which is stigmatized, popularly described as a flat vowel, but as Wells’s quote suggests, it is a stigma which is worn with pride by the vast majority of northerners. Indeed, in northern universities, students from the South are observed to shorten their pronunciation of the vowel in BATH words, assimilating to the pronunciation of their peers. In some northern varieties, there are lexical exceptions to the rule that BATH words have a short vowel: in Tyneside and Northumberland, master, plaster and less frequently disaster are pronounced with /a:/ (phonetically more like ), but faster with /a/, whilst master alone is pronounced with /a:/ in other varieties (Lancashire, Sheffield). As with unsplit FOOT–STRUT, the short vowel in BATH words is a feature of all northern English dialects, but is also found throughout the Midlands, at least as far south as Birmingham. Nevertheless, these are the features most often referred to in stereotypes of northern speech, and most often mentioned when subjects are asked to name features of northern dialect. All the features discussed below differentiate dialects in the North of England from each other.

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