Vowels and diphthongs happY

The unstressed vowel at the end of words in this set varies between tense and lax realizations in northern dialects. Dialects with what Wells (1982: 255–256) terms “happY-tensing” include those of the North-east, Liverpool and Hull. Elsewhere in the North, lax realizations of this vowel as [I] or [ε] are heard. In the happy-tensing areas, the realization may be [i] or even long [i:]. Perhaps because the tense vowel is found throughout the South and Midlands and in RP, both Hughes and Trudgill (1996: 57) and Wells (1982: 258) describe this as a southern feature, which has spread to certain urban areas in the North. However, a closer examination of 18^th century sources reveals that the tense vowel was found both in the North-east and in London, suggesting that this is not such a recent innovation in these dialects (Beal 2000b). In all the northern happY-tensing areas, the lax vowel is a shibboleth of the neighboring dialects: it marks the difference between Teesside and Yorkshire, Humberside and West Yorkshire, and Liverpool and Lancashire. In every case, it is the lax variant which is stigmatized. For example, young, middle-class women in Sheffield, which is on the border of the North and the Midlands, are increasingly using either a more tense variant or a compromise diphthong  , perhaps in order to avoid the stigmatized Yorkshire [ε].