The WM dialect as a Northern variety

It is widely recognized that the broader WM dialect, located as it is just on the Northern side of the main North-South dialect isoglosses, has features typical of both Northern and Southern British English accents.

As Wells (1982: 349, 353) explains, the main isoglosses dividing North from South are the FOOT-STRUT split and BATH-broadening. Under such a criterion, the linguistic North includes the Midlands, incorporating the Birmingham-Wolverhampton conurbation, i.e., the West Midlands. Wells notes that the local accent of the WM dialect is markedly different from that of the East Midlands, although there is a transitional area including Stoke and Derby.

Trudgill provides a fuller list involving nine diagnostic features for British English dialects. In terms of this analysis, the West Midlands:

(1) lacks a FOOT-STRUT distinction (shared with Northern Anglo-English varieties; note “fudged” realizations [Hughes and Trudgill 1996: 55]);

(2) lacks a TRAP-BATH distinction (shared with Northern Anglo-English varieties);

(3) has happY-tensing (shared with Southern Irish, many Northern, and with Anglo-Welsh and Southern accents);

(4) is non-rhotic (like most varieties of British English except those of the South-West, parts of Wales and the North of England, and those of Scotland and Ireland);

(5) distinguishes FOOT from GOOSE and LOT from THOUGHT (like most varieties of British English except Scots);

(6) has /h/-dropping as a normal feature (like most varieties of British English except those of the South-West, Wales, parts of the North of England, Scotland and Ireland);

(7) has velar nasal plus – i.e. the possibility of  in cases where other varieties have  or [n] (occurring in a band stretching from the West Midlands as far as Lancashire, and including the urban vernaculars of the WM dialect, Stoke, Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield);

(8) retains yod in the NEW subset of GOOSE (like most varieties of British English except those of the East Midlands, South Midlands and East Anglia);

(9) has broad diphthongs for FACE and GOAT (shared with other Midlands varieties, the South-East and East Anglia). As Hughes and Trudgill (1996: 66) note, Southern and Midlands dialects have undergone long mid diphthonging (Wells 1982: 210–211), such that the more southerly an accent is, the wider are its FACE and GOAT diphthongs.

Such an analysis supports the contention that the WM accent evidences features typical of both the Northern and Southern dialect types. Typical Northern features include (1) and (2), whereas more typically Southern features include (3) and (9) (as well as partial PRICE-CHOICE merger, shared with some London accents).

Of the two main North-South isoglosses (for FOOT-STRUT and TRAP-BATH), the former clearly runs to the South of the West Midlands, while the situation for the latter is much less clear. However, it is perhaps significant that the WM dialect also shares features particularly with North-Western varieties, including (7), as well as [u:] in the BOOK subset of GOOSE, and  in the ONE subset of STRUT.

Trudgill’s (1999: 68) diagnostic test sentence, “Very few cars made it up the long hill”, would therefore yield, for the West Midlands generally, something close to the following:

very fyoow cahs meid it oop the longg ill

For Birmingham (Bm) and the Black Country (BC) specifically (and more precisely), the following broad-accent realizations would probably be typical:

Wells (1982: 363) claims the shifted diphthongs in parts of the WM dialect system resemble London diphthongs, while other parts of the system resemble more typically Northern accents.

Wells (1982: 351–353) notes that in the area that has not undergone the FOOT-STRUT split there is sociolinguistic variation with the prestige norm. In the WM conurbation probably all speakers distinguish STRUT from FOOT, although the distinction is variably realized and sometimes of uncertain incidence. For instance, he notes that Heath’s (1980) study of Cannock found that all except the lowest of five socio-economic classes had some kind of opposition. Wells notes that intermediate accents or speech styles may have either a fudge between STRUT and FOOT, such as , or hypercorrect avoidance of  in FOOT, for example as [ə]. However, Wells notes that short-vowel BATH is retained higher up the social scale than unsplit FOOT-STRUT.

Hughes and Trudgill (1996: 55) also comment on the fudging issue, maintaining that it is especially younger middle-class speakers in the south Midlands who tend to fudge the vowel. The phenomenon is also dealt with in some detail in Upton (1995).