Our accents give away more about social class than we think, according to new research led by Lancaster University.
The new sociolinguistic study focusing on Mancunian accents, published today in the journal, Language Variation and Change, shows that the final vowel in words like happy, baby, chilly and city - known to linguists as ‘the happy vowel’ - varies clearly by social class across Manchester.
And, while Manchester has changed dramatically over the past few decades - socially, economically and culturally - some features of the city’s accent have remained remarkably stable, particularly in working-class speech.
The study finds that middle classes say happee while working classes say happeh, with the higher social classes using a tenser vowel overall.
The pattern, says the research, has remained consistent across generations, suggesting long-term stability rather than a sound change in progress.
The research also shows that most speakers sound slightly more ‘middle-class’ in more formal speech, with one notable exception - the lowest social class, whose pronunciation remains stable across contexts.
British Mancunians of Pakistani heritage consistently use the happee variant, whereas both Black and White Mancunians are more likely to use happeh unless they are from higher social classes.
This study also finds the pronunciation difference operates largely below people’s awareness, with speakers rarely noticing the pattern in their own speech.
The pattern has stayed remarkably consistent for decades, with little difference between how younger and older Mancunians speak.
Overall, the Manchester happeh vowel provides a rare case study of a stable vowel feature that reflects social structure, rather than linguistic change.
Study lead author Dr Danielle Turton, who worked with Dr Maciej Baranowski, from the University of Manchester, says: “Our research in Manchester demonstrates how everyday speech can reflect long-standing social patterns.
“Working-class speakers tend towards a very open ‘eh’ sound in happy, almost rhyming with ‘yeah’, while upper-middle-class speakers use a tenser ‘ee’ sounding closer to the vowel in ‘bee’.
Despite rapid changes in the city, this feature of working-class speech in Manchester has remained remarkably stable for generations.”
And, what is more, there is little evidence to suggest the use of happeh is stigmatised within Manchester.
Anecdotal evidence suggests Mancunians are not usually aware of the lax quality of their happeh vowel, though the feature stands out to outsiders.
So, for Dr Baranowski, an outsider to the community, happeh was the most striking feature of the accent when he arrived in the city.
But Dr Turton, a Mancunian, was totally unaware of it until she became a trained linguist and heard comments from outsiders.
The study draws on recordings collected by the researchers from 109 speakers aged 16 to 85 who grew up in Manchester, representing the full socio-economic range of the city, as well as its three largest ethnic groups: White, Black Caribbean and British Pakistani and is part of a larger investigation into speech variation and change in Manchester.
The researchers tuned into interview conversations totalling more than 100 hours of recorded speech with people born and bred Manchester, totalling more than 100 hours of interview speech, supplemented with word list reading of ten words including merry and petty.
The research was funded by the UKRI Economic and Social Research Council.