I'm from Yorkshire, my Dad is from Essex. We used to argue about the pronunciation of umbrella. He would say I pronounced it oombrella and I would say he pronounced it ambrella. Really fascinating to understand why this is. Thank you.
I'm from the north but have the split. Someone from the same town once asked me why I had a southern accent. It's funny how our brains interpret individual sound differences as separate accents.
Very presumptuous of me but could your social class have anything to do with that? Regional accents often seem to be more pronounced in people from working class backgrounds.
@@observer4916 Er ... in case you haven't noticed, "northerner" (like "southerner") is a description of the part of England where you grew up: it says nothing about the social class you were born into, nor about your educational and/or professional history in adulthood. Also, in case you hadn't noticed, there are private schools in the north, and there are northern families who send their children to public schools in the south. My father was a factory worker, but born in Lancashire to Welsh parents, and my mother was from native Lancashire stock but was slightly better educated (secretarial class) than the working-class average. As a result, despite growing up in a town with a preponderance of Lancashire dialect speakers (and about 25-percent Scouse "immigrants"), as far as I can remember I always distinguished the sounds in "foot" and "strut." Later, after going to university in the south of England, my native northern accent faded even further. Be that as it may, I am still as much of a northerner as anyone else.
Oddly, the local vowel pronunciation(s) here in the Pacific Northwest of "roof" can either rhyme with "put" or "goose". It often comes down to where a speaker wants to place stress in a sentence. I might use the second pronunciation if the roof is the primary object, "I need to replace the roof before the rainy season starts," and use the first pronunciation if the roof is a secondary object, "There's a puddle under that leaky spot in the roof."
I'm from the midlands and have done a TEFL course - one of the biggest things i struggled with in the course is that it assumes you have a southeast accent and so when it was trying to explain different sounds it would give examples, like foot and cut given here, to show how different vowels sound - but obviously for me they were the same! Occasionally it would have tests that asked you to match certain sounds or select words that did/didnt rhyme etc and it would tell me that I was wrong despite it being right when I said it aloud. I ended up having to read every example it gave for the rest of the course in an exaggerated southeast accent to figure out what it was trying to get across. Kind of irritating that even though I am a native english speaker it was telling me that the way I speak is 'wrong' and that the only correct way to teach the english language is to teach that one specific way of speaking - interesting to now see this broken down so clearly!
My daughter, born and raised in Greater Manchester trained to be a primary school teacher in Manchester but actually went off to work in London. As you can imagine teaching phonics and reading to London kids involved a bit of an adjustment for her with words like 'cut' and 'but'. Her accent was actually an asset when it came to discipline though as the kids perceived her to be tough when she spoke sometimes.
I'm originally from Dublin and I was just thinking that a heavy Dublin accent sometimes doesn't have the split. Think of say, Conor McGregor. He would say "cut, strut, done" all with the deeper U. Very interesting
I would say that a Dublin accent *never* has the split, but there are posh Southside accents that might actually have them cause they're all west Brits down there like lol
@@EVO6- More accurate to say it "doesn't have the split" rather than it "has the merger" because there were never two separate vowels that merged together. It's the other accents that split the one into two.
Interesting how this has also changed over a short period of time that I am aware of personally. My maternal Grandmother always pronounced 'look' and 'hook' as the 'luke' type of rhyme. My Mother sometimes did in the 1970/80's but shifted gradually toward 'look/hook' as 'luck' rhyming and now never uses the 'older' manner of speech. I have never used the 'luke' version. We're all from Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
In Hull, in my youth, many older people would pronounce book and cook to rhyme with Luke. This has now all but disappeared. Oddly, you never heard look pronounced as Luke.
I was born in the south but grew up in Yorkshire before moving back down again and one thing that always amused me was that at school in the north I was a "puff" whereas down south I was definitely a "poof".
Very interesting video, there are some regional quirks which you could’ve touched on though: firstly, the way ‘tooth’ is ‘tuth’ (with the PUT-vowel) in Birmingham and occasionally in Northern Ireland not just in South Wales; secondly, the way that both possible long ‘oo’ vowels can be heard in ‘goose’ when it’s part of the word ‘gooseberry’ (so it’s not just ‘room’ and ‘roof’ where this is possible); thirdly, the odd way that some in South Wales say ‘luck’ for ‘look’ (the opposite way to Northern England and North Wales); fourthly, the way that some in East Anglia say things like ‘rud’ (both CUT-vowel and PUT-vowel seem to be possible) for ‘road’.
@@johnhockenhull2819 When I worked in Coventry there was one other person in the office from Coventry and one from Leicestershire who used the ‘tuth’ pronunciation, so it certainly seems possible that you’d hear it in Wolverhampton but it’s VERY rare pronunciation indeed in the West Midlands outside of Birmingham itself but nearly as frequent as the standard pronunciation in Birmingham (and probably was the dominant form at one time). I find it all very interesting, a previous contributor to one of Simon’s videos said he knew someone in Kenilworth who said ‘tuth’ and someone claimed they’d heard it in Norfolk but unfortunately didn’t specify whether they were referring to ‘tuth’ with the CUT vowel or ‘tuth’ with the FOOT vowel.
@@fuckdefed I'm from wolverhampton and say tuth, most people here say it unless they think about it. Also my friend from shrewsbury says tuth but with the /a/ sound in strut for southerners
@@Kieronimoo Interesting. It’s rare that you’ll hear it in most of the Midlands outside of Birmingham but when I worked in Coventry, there was one person from Cov and one from Leicestershire who worked with me who said it in the correct/Brummie manner, though they were vastly outnumbered by other locals who said ‘tooth’ in the standard way. In an episode of Father Brown I saw recently, the actor who plays the title role, who’s from Bromsgrove, also says the word like a Brummie, so there must be some people in Worcestershire who get it right too!
I'm from Bradford and definitely remember foot and strut rhyming. Here in LA, my pronunciation of 'bus' sometimes reverts to broad Yorkshire and catches people quite unprepared. 'Bus' here follows the Southern British 'cut'
Raised in the Midlands to an adult, now ive had 21 years living in Australia. I do not now know which way I pronounce words any longer. I'm a mishmash mixed up mongrel.
When I was a child in 1950s England we had a radio programme for children called 'Listen with Mother.' One of the rhymes they often read, especially in winter, was the 1st verse of 'The North Wind.' The north wind doth blow, And we shall have snow, And what will the robin do then, Poor thing? He’ll sit in a barn, And keep himself warm, And hide his head under his wing, Poor thing! They never rhymed Barn with warm. A quick search tells me it is thought to have originated in the 16th century. I suspect in an area of the country where warm and barn rhyme. Do you know?
From the Shakespeare First Folio (1623): "This Figure, that thou here seest put, It was for gentle Shakespeare cut" - Ben Jonson, in his preface to the reader
fascinating topic once again! comparitive english phonetics is always great, makes me think of how i speak it myself, having learned it as a teen. i think i definitely have the foot/strut split, mainly because it sounds super unnatural to put the northern pronunciation of the vowels together with the more southern pronunciation of the consonant!
Hi Simon! I'm a native speaker of a quite phonologically distinct accent of English. (Working-Middle class Suburban New York). I'm prone to t-glottalization and l vocalization but no r-dropping and my back vowels are quite conservative, lacking the father-bother merger except ironically on the word "father". It blew my mind when people from the west coast pointed out how different I talk from them, I never perceived it growing up.
I'm working class urban New York and yeah, I glottalize T sometimes in places thats not very common in American accents, vocalize L and R, conservative back vowels, and almost completely unmerged father-bother
Yeah? Well I’m third generation adopted atlantean (half hindu dalit, half hobbit and half brummie) and I’m prone as fuck to o- glottalisation, but totally not to m-glottalisation and I drop my peas and teas more than a waitress on the Titanic . I do my back vowels at the front and my front vowels round the side and yeah, after a shower I watch myself towel off slowly in the mirror. Hey, at least I’m not completely self obsessed!
Hooray, now I feel special. I'm from the North-West and I've inherited the book, look, took, cook, spook, rebuke rhyme with "Luke" thing. Seems to be becoming rarer these days; but that's the march of time, I suppose. Nobody gets it when I say 'belm' anymore either.
Once again you made a wonderful, educational video! And I love your modesty, as well as your excuses about your hair! 🙂 (Both not needed, though ; ) Love from Portugal!
That's interesting. I assume maybe it's a subtle difference between American and Southern British accents. I don't pronounce cut with the /ʌ/ vowel. I'm American and I pronounce it with the /ə/ vowel. Closer to the word "je" in French.
no need to say anything about your hair. Who are we to judge you ? and nowt wrong with it anyway. We're here for the words which are fascinating and the pictures of your garden
Great video. One think that I think might be missing is the use of dipthongs in some accents in the long o pronunciation. An example could be pool or cool pronounced something like jewel / fuel, meanwhile like you say, this never occurs (to my knowledge) when we have a k sound at the end of the syllable As an aside, I'm from the border of Tameside and Glossop and down the road, they sometimes pronounce the u of curry (like put in my accent) as a dipthong, ciurry
Yorkshire (no split) here. My father (late silent / early boomer) will occasionally, and more often his parents before him ("greatest" generation) would, insist that the word "book" should have the "goose" vowel, whereas my father perhaps through conditioning / resignation - and his children (gen X to millennial) will almost always use the short vowel of "blood". I suspect the insistence goes back to early 20th century schooling where the goose vowel was common, or at least prestigious, and taught as correct. That different words had their "oo" pronunciation change at different times goes some way to explaining why I've always been able to use "blood" as a counterargument to the goose vowel. Clearly, that changed long before any of the aforementioned relatives or their teachers were alive. A curious experiment is to give people a dummy word like "blook" and ask them how it should be pronounced. Despite it looking, to me, very much like short vowel words, part of me wants to give it the goose vowel. It's a very strange feeling.
Excluding dialects where the Foot and Goose phonemes are completely merged (Scottish, Ulster I think?): In Yorkshire, it used to be a common working class pronunciation in "-ook" words to pronounce them with the long vowel. It still is common in some English dialects, like Potteries, Lancashire, Mackem, Geordie, and even Scouse to some degree. I think it also happens in some Republic of Ireland accents too? Either way your family's pronunciation most likely comes from that legacy.
I'd give "blook" GOOSE too - in fact any unfamiliar OO word would have that. This may be because I also don't have the FOOT-STRUT split, so the natural choice if I wanted to indicate the FOOT vowel would be "u", not "oo". In fact, for a long time I was utterly baffled by the Southern references to "oop North" - nobody pronounces "up" as /u:p/!
i lived in Germany up to age 10. Hull between ages 10-19. London 19-27, and Germany again 27 to my current 43. The Hull influence proved strong, as I still don't have the split when using English, which confuses Germans no end as i pronounce universal terms like "software bug" like a northener, whereas they've been taught to say it like "software bag". Tho' curiously i never adopted the other Hullian accents: I say "boat" not "bert", and mostly don't drop the "t". This then confuses the Hullians whenever i go back to visit. Accents are an inconsistent curiosity for hybridian folk like myself.
I'm Northumbrian and have never been able to figure out my own accent in this regard. I don't rhyme foot with strut but my strut doesn't sound like a southerner's. My vowel in cook seems to be high rounded central and causes much hilarity when I talk to non-Northumbrians. However look and Luke don't rhyme. Basically I feel like I can't get any words to rhyme with these vowels!
I'm from Tyne and Wear and have similar inconsistencies that make no sense to me. I wasn't at all aware of it until trying to justify my pronunciation of 'book' and 'nook' to southern university friends!
@@crochet_kat I feel sorry for all the other English-speaking communities who don't understand there's an 'oo' in 'cook' so you pronounce it 'oo'! :-D
This reminds me of my experiences as a librarian in an elementary junior high school here in western Canada. I'm a Geordie but, one - I went to grammar school in the late 50s so dialectal speech was discouraged, and two - we emigrated in 1967 so my Geordie accent has been modified by both teachers and time. However, more than once certain cheeky children here pointed out that I pronounced the word "book" funny. I countered with other double o words and we compared how we prounounced each of them, but my final point was always, I'm English and we invented the language so don't knock my accent, said sweetly with a smile. To Canadians born I've a recognizable British regional accent. To my Geordie family I talk funny now. Can't win.🤷 Yes. To me a book and cook and look are all pronounced with a double o not a u.😉
@@Beruthiel45 it seems to be the salient feature that people who don't have my accent immediately latch onto and it makes them smile or laugh. When they try and copy it, they get it wrong and they use the long 'oo' they themselves use in 'boot'. 'Cook' ends up sounding like Mackem 'cewk' and I try and tell them that's not what I'm saying! Do you say 'look' and 'Luke' the same? I feel like mine both have quite a short vowel but they differ very slightly, maybe with slightly more fronting in Luke. I can't understand why two of my phonemes should be so close to each other in realisation. That's not supposed to happen - they're supposed to merge or diverge. I wonder if my accent is a bit of a gap in the fossil record or something...
im from ireland and i dont have the split you mentioned that the split however IS present in ireland going to ask my parents and friends and find out if any of them have it too
I feel like there’s more that needs to be looked at in the midlands and the southern-industrial north with those because there’s not a simple north-south divide, Liverpool has a very specific form of course with ‘look and book’ but there’s an on oddly mixed condition in and around Birmingham where words like poor can be pronounced like ‘poo-er’, poorly as ‘poo-ly’, sure as ‘shoo-er’ and yet tooth is often pronounced as ‘tuth’.
@@Flooride1 My Dad says 'tuth' as well whilst I say 'tooth', I suppose the former is no more incorrect when compared to 'look, book, cook, hook, took' as more commonly pronounced (ignoring Liverpool for example) and the latter being akin to 'soon, moon, cartoon, balloon'. The ending letters there clearly indicate a trend, but words like 'spook' break that convention. Interesting stuff. Must be funny for a Northerner to hear us refer to Southerners as such as we're all southern to them! Would definitely like to learn more about Midlands accents as there are such a variety between Cannock, Wolverhampton, Dudley, Kidderminster, West Bromwich, Western Brum, Redditch, South East Brum, Warwick, Coventry, Rugby, Nuneaton, Tamworth and so on, for what is such a small area really
Tolkien - the West Midlands accent, also because of the working people were never considered worth educating in terms of their accent (they would just be chain workers, lock workers etc for their lives why bother) the Yam Yam Wolverhampton /Black Country accent best preserves the Anglo Saxon accent. Plus didn't know people in Scotland - lowlands, which Ironically preserves the pre-vowel shift dialect) the word "barmpot" (bampot) meaning you've just done something silly (in an endearing way - the WM meaning anyway, don't know about the Glasgow use of barmpot
Liverpool is something of an anomaly. Though geographically Northern, its diphthong-rich accent shares much with the Midlands accents. Just up the road is St Helens, a massive contrast with its 'pure' Lancashire vowels. Something similar is heard as you move north from Manchester to Rochdale etc.
As an American, I don't always hear the different dialects of English speakers. I certainly wouldn't be able to tell where someone might be from, based on their accent or dialect, like I can with other Americans. It's very interesting how our brains pick up and focus on certain sounds and not others. Animals do the same thing. One of my birds says, "Pretty Bird" every time he hears my voice. He pronounces it perfectly. It looks like you are starting to see the first signs of Spring. I live in CT and it's just starting to feel like Spring here. My Hyacinth is about 6in tall now. It hasn't flowered yet. When I see my Plantain Lillies start to come up, I'll know Spring is here. BTW, your hair is fine. I need to re-dye mine. My roots are showing again. 🤣😝
That's weird, because it's the exact opposite for me, as in all Americans/Canadians sound pretty much identical to me. I guess it depends on one's upbringing.
Hey Simon, have you considered looking into the development of the Southern American accent the way you did with the Northern American accent a few videos ago? It's a topic I've been quite curious about for a while but haven't found much information on.
Southern America links back to Scotland and the 19C migration, explains the flag with the St. Andrew's cross (southern one with a red cross? don,t know what it's called, Confederate Flag?)
I once read an article about the history of English. Around the year 800 AD, the Vikings would attack Europe, England included. King of England at that time was tired of this. He gave the Vikings land to live in Northern England. They interacted with the Anglo-Saxon community in England. Their Scandinavian dialect and sound system penetrated into Old English language, one of the feature of Scandinavian dialect being the [uː] sound, as in "hus, mus, moote/must"...sorts of.
my accent/ dialect is one of the chester ones native to north east wales, but with heavy diluting from RP and some from general american. i donot have the foot strut split. and trying to figure out which of the two sounds my vowel quality was on the IPA chart some time ago was difficult. tbh im still not sure if im doing the bottom heavy U or the upsidedown V. something else tho. when you were talking about the put putt distinction, i learned that Im not actually saying the T at thr end of these words like cut and so on most of the time, and thats how those words were distinguished for me. lastly, when putting on a west wales accent, the cut sound might be this elusive strut/ duck vowel ive been hearing about. just going off where in the mouth u said it was
A related phenomenon seems to me to be the way that some people in the North and even the Midlands say the SCHWA-vowel (which, let’s face it, is much closer to the CUT-vowel than most linguists like to admit, though I think it only fully merges in South Wales), not just the CUT-vowel, as the PUT-vowel. Also underreported and under-analysed is the massive difference in quality between the different forms of the PUT-vowel (when saying words in both the ‘cut’ and ‘put’ groups) in areas where the merger occurs - it’s ‘broader’ in Manchester/Dublin/Staffordshire/Coventry, even though Coventry is south of Birmingham, than it is in Birmingham, Western Ireland and in the broadest varieties of West Country and Southern American and African-American speech.
Here near Manchester, I don't split the foot-strut vowels. I picked it up from the locals back when I was little (I'm from eastern europe), so I'd say that there's no split between the vowels. Although I can't say for sure, since I don't go out often.
These videos remind me a lot about the Autolysia aesthetics, they are very much alike in some mysterious way. Autolysia was formerly known as Mirusbella, some of you might know about her via her Black Metal acoustic covers.
Strange- in my accent (North Wales) I have the foot/cut split but 'put' is pronounced with the /ʌ/ vowel rather than /ʊ/. So it rhymes with 'cut', but for some other reason. I wonder why that is.
My Dad is from County Wexford and has lost a lot of his accent, but still pronounces words in that set with a definite 'oo' sound. He also pronounces 'cot' and 'caught' the same interestingly enough.
It has always struck me that the "Standard" or Southern English pronunciation of the U sound follows the French model, and the U sound in the Midlands and North follows the German model.
I'm from the Midlands, but I don't have what would be regarded as a strong regional accent and I think I have the split, but the vowels are so similar when I pronounce them naturally, that I only hear the difference when I emphasise the words. For me, there's a difference between "look" and "luck", but not much of a difference between "cut" and "put" if I say them in a sentence.
I was born in the South West and moved North when I was 10, and I seem to move back and forth between foot-strut split and merged. Probably one of the reasons many people say they can't place my accent.
Was reading "The Midnight Folk" by John Masefield and in it, a word that was deemed "common" was the pronunciation of sugar - as "shugger". I just can't work out how else it could be said - how does RP do it? I can only think " see-ugah" like "triesers" for trousers
Hi Simon, this was really interesting. For many Scottish speakers, "foot" and "strut" have different vowels, but "goose" and "foot" have the same. Why is this? (In some broad accents/dialects, this is also the same vowel as in "house" (which would be transcribed as "hoose"), I assume due to Scots influence, but how Scots ended up with that pronunciation, and whether it's related to the other thing, idk.) If anyone can help me with any of this, please do!
A little mistake: you said this split is present in most of Ireland but it isn't. I cannot speak for Ulster English, but these vowels are merged in most varieties of Hiberno English although some speakers might unmerge them, although this phenomenon sounds very 'British' to us and is affected for formality. In Dublin the cut vowel is merged to a vowel like in book whereas I think in the rest of the country the book vowel shifts to cut.
I’d say that probably no one pronounces ‘book’ with the ‘cut’ vowel in Ireland and very few people apart from some of the posher Dubliners (like bishop Brennan in Father Ted) and of course many in Northern Ireland even say ‘cut’ with the ‘cut’ vowel but I do see what you’re getting at. You seem to be making the same point I made earlier that in Birmingham, Newcastle and Western Ireland (and a handful of other places to an extent) ‘cut’ and ‘put’ merge but to a less broad form of the ‘put’ vowel than in Manchester/Staffordshire/Coventry/Dublin.
I wonder if it's not in the process of splitting but along different lines than in British English. My parents are from Dublin, in their fifties, they think cut, strut and foot all rhyme, but when I read them, foot doesn't rhyme with cut and strut, it's a bit more forward. I'm not a great speaker for gauaging sound changes though because I moved away from Dublin when I was young, so my accent is a little fucked up ahaha
@@minimooster7258 That’s interesting - it sounds like there may be accent levelling going on. Perhaps some of the more South Eastern varieties of Irish English like Dublin are merging with the Western varieties, at least in terms of these specific vowel sounds? It’s hard for me to judge precisely from across the sea in England of course but when I think of the Dublin accent what immediately comes to mind is the accent that you’ll hear the Dublin rappers ‘Versatile’ use, seemingly the same as the one in the film ‘Plastic Gangsters’, which surely has the broadest ‘u/oo’ sound in the world! Manchester comes close, in both places the pronunciation is so broad that the vowel isn’t only deeper than for most other speakers who have the cut/put merger but it’s often elongated (so it sounds like a deeper and broader version of the vowel used in most of England for ‘jaw’).
@@minimooster7258 They all rhyme for me. Maybe the vowels are very close and I'm mishearing the split as not being there, but as far as I can tell the majority of people from Dublin do not have this. It is characteristic of the accent.
Some accents in the northeast of Ireland (e.g. Dundalk) don't have the foot-strut merger, but some words like book and cook use the goose vowel. This vowel can be pretty far to the front. Are there other examples of this in Ireland?
I think the way you pronounce book in the video is disappearing in the south and midlands and book sounds more like buck now. Likewise good (gud), cook to rhyme with luck and other examples. Is it to try to sound more middle class?
@@joycey845 Yes! I spent time in Oxfordshire in the 70s and also the 90s. The "u" sound in "sun" or "gun" was neither northern or southern. I suspect this may be true of all all accents as they move toward the West country.
It’s strange that I’m from the East Midlands but I also have the split (but I don’t have the trap-bath split). My accent did change a bit since my mum is from Nottinghamshire (and I’m from Lincolnshire) and it became more like my peers. But the foot-strut split also came from it as well (albeit a bit later) so it’s very strange indeed. It happens where I’m from but the overwhelming majority of speakers pronounce both of them as ʊ so idk lol
The 'a' in 'bad' used to sound like the 'a' in 'sad'. Sometime mid-20th century, at least in some places in the U.S., it became a harder 'a', something like 'ba-ed', with the 'a' sound of 'ba-eth' being closer. It is a puzzle to consider the Great Vowel Shift until you realize you have lived through some other vowel shift.
It would be interesting to see Simon’s take on that. There’s also Multicultural London English (MLE), which is only a recent variety of English which also involves a significant shift in vowels - especially the African American influences on the I, A, O sounds - alongside a lot of mainly Jamaican slang (as well as American slang and innovative coinages of its own). A similar process is apparently happening in Toronto too.
@@Schwarzorn The noted linguistics professor William Labov, of the University of Pennsylvania, detailed this specific pronunciation change several years ago.
@@atbing2425 Oh. You mean how the A goes down for the N, but up for the D? Interesting. But it would go up for both _sad_ and _bad,_ right? Does for me, and I don't know why there'd be a difference if they both end in a D. Are there places that raise one, but not the other?
I have seen videos by a chap who has worked out Shakespeare's accent based on hos word rhymes. plus having regard to the fact that he was from the midlands. Apparently when plays were performed for children using the altered accent instead of the anachronistic RP the texts were more easily understood. The video is on Open ,ruclips.net/user/hashtagopenuniversity Shakespeare Original Pronunciation
It is a split in the dialects where that distinction is lexical and there's minimal pairs, and it's not simply a vowel realisation changing depending on the consonants it's surrounded by. The accents where that's the case, to my knowledge, are East Coast dialects running from Baltimore to Philadelphea to New York City.
Could you give an example of what you mean by this split? I would pronounce _an_ as *æn,* rhyming with _am,_ but others here in Washington pronounce _an_ as *ɛn.* Is that what you mean? I'm lost by this "eə" and "ɛə" you speak of.
So is this connected somehow to the square/nurse split, or is it random coincidence? I'm guessing they both have a similar origin because both splits have a symmetry to them.
Good point. The square/nurse, where/whir, fair/fur split is interesting but less discussed. It's less cleanly North/South and can be seen in more Easterly regions, from Middlesbrough to Hull, before morphing slightly in Grimsby but also noticed in parts of Nottinghamshire and more Centrally in Staffordshire. Certainly much room for exploration.
Some of us northerner's ( west Cumbrian) say cook book like and owl to whit to whooo. I do myself. My name en used to sometimes say look in the same way.
What about my surname? i pronounce it to rhyme with 'look' and 'took', and in all those words I use the short vowel that I also use in 'foot' etc. Every so often, though, I run into people who pronounce it with the *long* vowel that I use in 'brood'. They are always people who 'come from away', but some are West Indians and others Scots, and some may hail from the North or Northwest Midlands of England. I find that irritating, because there is a slang word 'kook'with that pronunciation meaning an extreme eccentric. (I may fit the bill, but I don't like to have others say so!)
I’ve always been interested in another North/South difference. When starting a sentence without knowing it’s full content, Northerners tend to say “Err” or “ Ermm”, eg. “ Erm, I don’t know”. My southern friends tend to rapidly repeat the first word while they think of the rest of the sentence, eg “ I, I, I, I, I don’t know”.
“The foot-strut split” sounds like the name of an elaborate dance move 🤔
I always think the 'bath-trap' split sounds like a form of old fashioned punishment.
I'm Irish, from the south-east. The vowels in 'foot', 'strut', 'cut' etc. are identical for me.
Irish English is very conservative
I'm from Yorkshire, my Dad is from Essex. We used to argue about the pronunciation of umbrella. He would say I pronounced it oombrella and I would say he pronounced it ambrella. Really fascinating to understand why this is. Thank you.
Exactly same for me. We would argue about the pronunciation of bun. I said bUn he sad ban
@@03jkeeley nah it's always a bohn
I'm from the north but have the split. Someone from the same town once asked me why I had a southern accent. It's funny how our brains interpret individual sound differences as separate accents.
Very presumptuous of me but could your social class have anything to do with that? Regional accents often seem to be more pronounced in people from working class backgrounds.
@@TheStarBlack probably right.
you can't hoenstly call yourself a northerner if you speak with a foot-strut split. speaking without it is like the most basic linguistic prerequisite
Accents are not picked up from parents but from your peers i.e. your friends and classmates.
@@observer4916 Er ... in case you haven't noticed, "northerner" (like "southerner") is a description of the part of England where you grew up: it says nothing about the social class you were born into, nor about your educational and/or professional history in adulthood. Also, in case you hadn't noticed, there are private schools in the north, and there are northern families who send their children to public schools in the south. My father was a factory worker, but born in Lancashire to Welsh parents, and my mother was from native Lancashire stock but was slightly better educated (secretarial class) than the working-class average. As a result, despite growing up in a town with a preponderance of Lancashire dialect speakers (and about 25-percent Scouse "immigrants"), as far as I can remember I always distinguished the sounds in "foot" and "strut." Later, after going to university in the south of England, my native northern accent faded even further. Be that as it may, I am still as much of a northerner as anyone else.
Oddly, the local vowel pronunciation(s) here in the Pacific Northwest of "roof" can either rhyme with "put" or "goose". It often comes down to where a speaker wants to place stress in a sentence. I might use the second pronunciation if the roof is the primary object, "I need to replace the roof before the rainy season starts," and use the first pronunciation if the roof is a secondary object, "There's a puddle under that leaky spot in the roof."
I'm from the midlands and have done a TEFL course - one of the biggest things i struggled with in the course is that it assumes you have a southeast accent and so when it was trying to explain different sounds it would give examples, like foot and cut given here, to show how different vowels sound - but obviously for me they were the same! Occasionally it would have tests that asked you to match certain sounds or select words that did/didnt rhyme etc and it would tell me that I was wrong despite it being right when I said it aloud. I ended up having to read every example it gave for the rest of the course in an exaggerated southeast accent to figure out what it was trying to get across. Kind of irritating that even though I am a native english speaker it was telling me that the way I speak is 'wrong' and that the only correct way to teach the english language is to teach that one specific way of speaking - interesting to now see this broken down so clearly!
My daughter, born and raised in Greater Manchester trained to be a primary school teacher in Manchester but actually went off to work in London. As you can imagine teaching phonics and reading to London kids involved a bit of an adjustment for her with words like 'cut' and 'but'. Her accent was actually an asset when it came to discipline though as the kids perceived her to be tough when she spoke sometimes.
I'm originally from Dublin and I was just thinking that a heavy Dublin accent sometimes doesn't have the split. Think of say, Conor McGregor. He would say "cut, strut, done" all with the deeper U. Very interesting
I would say this split is nowhere to be heard in Hiberno English, although Ulster English is a different story maybe
Most of Ireland has a merger between them
Hello. What about the penis-vagina split??
I would say that a Dublin accent *never* has the split, but there are posh Southside accents that might actually have them cause they're all west Brits down there like lol
@@EVO6- More accurate to say it "doesn't have the split" rather than it "has the merger" because there were never two separate vowels that merged together. It's the other accents that split the one into two.
In some parts of Lancashire the oo in look, book and root is pronounced similar to an ew sound.
Same in Liverpool
Thanks for clarifying the hair situation. I opened the video and was like "WTF Simon?!"
I'm from India..
I'll come back to your channel everyday
I can't wait for Mr. Roper to host his own television programme. The Brian Cox of linguistics!
As in the guy who played Captain O'Hagan in Super Troopers? I never realized he wasn't American until just recently.
@@AS-wy6cl Nope, as in the professor who often starred in science documentaries in the UK
Big ups to my fellow Northerners who pronounce cut and strut the same.
Aka "the right way" lol!
We talk proper😁
🙌
But cut and strut are the same in most varieties of English. It's just that the rounded one is used in the North and the unrounded open one elsewhere.
W- yorkshire
Interesting how this has also changed over a short period of time that I am aware of personally. My maternal Grandmother always pronounced 'look' and 'hook' as the 'luke' type of rhyme. My Mother sometimes did in the 1970/80's but shifted gradually toward 'look/hook' as 'luck' rhyming and now never uses the 'older' manner of speech. I have never used the 'luke' version. We're all from Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
In Hull, in my youth, many older people would pronounce book and cook to rhyme with Luke. This has now all but disappeared.
Oddly, you never heard look pronounced as Luke.
Get yersen futlrther north and you'll still get book and cook to rhyme with Luke, it's just that Sheffield is becoming the Midlands...
Stoke also has the spook-book pair.
My grandmother has the 'luke' vowel in 'look' and 'hook'. Born in South Liverpool in the late 40s
@@goombacraftI still hear this myself, especially “book” with “Luke” even among people my age (20s) in Liverpool.
I was born in the south but grew up in Yorkshire before moving back down again and one thing that always amused me was that at school in the north I was a "puff" whereas down south I was definitely a "poof".
Proper job geez....I'm not even from London....accents are so interesting...great video again simon
West Country?
Another brilliant video. Ha ha, the title confused me because I was thinking “What split?”. (I’m from Lancashire)
Very interesting video, there are some regional quirks which you could’ve touched on though: firstly, the way ‘tooth’ is ‘tuth’ (with the PUT-vowel) in Birmingham and occasionally in Northern Ireland not just in South Wales; secondly, the way that both possible long ‘oo’ vowels can be heard in ‘goose’ when it’s part of the word ‘gooseberry’ (so it’s not just ‘room’ and ‘roof’ where this is possible); thirdly, the odd way that some in South Wales say ‘luck’ for ‘look’ (the opposite way to Northern England and North Wales); fourthly, the way that some in East Anglia say things like ‘rud’ (both CUT-vowel and PUT-vowel seem to be possible) for ‘road’.
A much more informed version of what I was going to put. I used to know someone from Wolverhampton who very distinctly said “Tuth” instead of Tooth.
@@johnhockenhull2819 When I worked in Coventry there was one other person in the office from Coventry and one from Leicestershire who used the ‘tuth’ pronunciation, so it certainly seems possible that you’d hear it in Wolverhampton but it’s VERY rare pronunciation indeed in the West Midlands outside of Birmingham itself but nearly as frequent as the standard pronunciation in Birmingham (and probably was the dominant form at one time). I find it all very interesting, a previous contributor to one of Simon’s videos said he knew someone in Kenilworth who said ‘tuth’ and someone claimed they’d heard it in Norfolk but unfortunately didn’t specify whether they were referring to ‘tuth’ with the CUT vowel or ‘tuth’ with the FOOT vowel.
@@fuckdefed I'm from wolverhampton and say tuth, most people here say it unless they think about it. Also my friend from shrewsbury says tuth but with the /a/ sound in strut for southerners
@@Kieronimoo Interesting. It’s rare that you’ll hear it in most of the Midlands outside of Birmingham but when I worked in Coventry, there was one person from Cov and one from Leicestershire who worked with me who said it in the correct/Brummie manner, though they were vastly outnumbered by other locals who said ‘tooth’ in the standard way. In an episode of Father Brown I saw recently, the actor who plays the title role, who’s from Bromsgrove, also says the word like a Brummie, so there must be some people in Worcestershire who get it right too!
I'm from Bradford and definitely remember foot and strut rhyming. Here in LA, my pronunciation of 'bus' sometimes reverts to broad Yorkshire and catches people quite unprepared. 'Bus' here follows the Southern British 'cut'
@@marstheplanet1406 Not sure what you mean :P
That's relative to where you're from. 'Duck' in Yorkshire, Suffolk and Los Angeles are quite different.
10:49 haha audio pulled a nice little trick and died for a sec
I really love how your hair looks! Also great video as always.
Wonderful. Love the cuts of the garden
Thanks Simon that helps a lot understanding a bit more about spelling !
Great and informative video as always, Simon, complete with the obligatory poetic B-roll. Hair is looking great by the way!
Was going to compliment Simon on his hair (looks great!) and then he apologized
I was somewhat aware of these things, but not in this much detail. Thanks for this.
Hair looks great brother, keep it up
Interesting content Simon 🙏
Raised in the Midlands to an adult, now ive had 21 years living in Australia. I do not now know which way I pronounce words any longer. I'm a mishmash mixed up mongrel.
When I was a child in 1950s England we had a radio programme for children called 'Listen with Mother.' One of the rhymes they often read, especially in winter, was the 1st verse of 'The North Wind.'
The north wind doth blow,
And we shall have snow,
And what will the robin do then, Poor thing?
He’ll sit in a barn,
And keep himself warm,
And hide his head under his wing, Poor thing!
They never rhymed Barn with warm. A quick search tells me it is thought to have originated in the 16th century. I suspect in an area of the country where warm and barn rhyme. Do you know?
It's still somewhat common in Yorkshire to say "warm" like that. "Water" as well to rhyme with "splatter".
I'm in central Lancashire and I've heard people use the vowel in 'barn' for the word 'warm'. I think it's pretty rare though? :)
From the Shakespeare First Folio (1623):
"This Figure, that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut"
- Ben Jonson, in his preface to the reader
fascinating topic once again! comparitive english phonetics is always great, makes me think of how i speak it myself, having learned it as a teen. i think i definitely have the foot/strut split, mainly because it sounds super unnatural to put the northern pronunciation of the vowels together with the more southern pronunciation of the consonant!
Great video. Hair is looking good.
Hi Simon! I'm a native speaker of a quite phonologically distinct accent of English. (Working-Middle class Suburban New York). I'm prone to t-glottalization and l vocalization but no r-dropping and my back vowels are quite conservative, lacking the father-bother merger except ironically on the word "father". It blew my mind when people from the west coast pointed out how different I talk from them, I never perceived it growing up.
Fugeddaboudit!
I'm working class urban New York and yeah, I glottalize T sometimes in places thats not very common in American accents, vocalize L and R, conservative back vowels, and almost completely unmerged father-bother
Yeah? Well I’m third generation adopted atlantean (half hindu dalit, half hobbit and half brummie) and I’m prone as fuck to o- glottalisation, but totally not to m-glottalisation and I drop my peas and teas more than a waitress on the Titanic . I do my back vowels at the front and my front vowels round the side and yeah, after a shower I watch myself towel off slowly in the mirror. Hey, at least I’m not completely self obsessed!
@@herrfister1477 Moo🐮
@@herrfister1477 you seem like a pleasant person
Hooray, now I feel special. I'm from the North-West and I've inherited the book, look, took, cook, spook, rebuke rhyme with "Luke" thing. Seems to be becoming rarer these days; but that's the march of time, I suppose. Nobody gets it when I say 'belm' anymore either.
LMFAO the moment you touched your camera to fix the focus was also the moment RUclips decided to boost the quality up to full and I was like 😮
Once again you made a wonderful, educational video!
And I love your modesty, as well as your excuses about your hair! 🙂 (Both not needed, though ; )
Love from Portugal!
New video! Yay!
Please do a video on the trap-bath split.
I love your materials so much, I cannot even pronounce it.
A strange technical fault with the audio at 10:49- it did something strange with your voice, unless it's my end!
I screamed when I saw the title
this is great!
will you do the pin-pen merger next?
your hair is absolutely gorgeous btw, no need to apologise! keep it, king
That's interesting. I assume maybe it's a subtle difference between American and Southern British accents. I don't pronounce cut with the /ʌ/ vowel. I'm American and I pronounce it with the /ə/ vowel. Closer to the word "je" in French.
@11:48 the Eric Cartman "school" pronunciation has history!
no need to say anything about your hair. Who are we to judge you ? and nowt wrong with it anyway. We're here for the words which are fascinating and the pictures of your garden
Great video. One think that I think might be missing is the use of dipthongs in some accents in the long o pronunciation. An example could be pool or cool pronounced something like jewel / fuel, meanwhile like you say, this never occurs (to my knowledge) when we have a k sound at the end of the syllable
As an aside, I'm from the border of Tameside and Glossop and down the road, they sometimes pronounce the u of curry (like put in my accent) as a dipthong, ciurry
Curiously, in Australia, especially Queensland, the place of education is something like "skewel", not dissimilar to the Cumberland sound you noted.
wow i think that flew over my head completely
Good video. Have you thought about using PRAAT software for your videos? They might allow technical analysis.
Yorkshire (no split) here. My father (late silent / early boomer) will occasionally, and more often his parents before him ("greatest" generation) would, insist that the word "book" should have the "goose" vowel, whereas my father perhaps through conditioning / resignation - and his children (gen X to millennial) will almost always use the short vowel of "blood". I suspect the insistence goes back to early 20th century schooling where the goose vowel was common, or at least prestigious, and taught as correct.
That different words had their "oo" pronunciation change at different times goes some way to explaining why I've always been able to use "blood" as a counterargument to the goose vowel. Clearly, that changed long before any of the aforementioned relatives or their teachers were alive.
A curious experiment is to give people a dummy word like "blook" and ask them how it should be pronounced. Despite it looking, to me, very much like short vowel words, part of me wants to give it the goose vowel. It's a very strange feeling.
Excluding dialects where the Foot and Goose phonemes are completely merged (Scottish, Ulster I think?):
In Yorkshire, it used to be a common working class pronunciation in "-ook" words to pronounce them with the long vowel. It still is common in some English dialects, like Potteries, Lancashire, Mackem, Geordie, and even Scouse to some degree. I think it also happens in some Republic of Ireland accents too? Either way your family's pronunciation most likely comes from that legacy.
I'd give "blook" GOOSE too - in fact any unfamiliar OO word would have that. This may be because I also don't have the FOOT-STRUT split, so the natural choice if I wanted to indicate the FOOT vowel would be "u", not "oo". In fact, for a long time I was utterly baffled by the Southern references to "oop North" - nobody pronounces "up" as /u:p/!
More videos on splits and mergers in English would be awesome! I love this stuff.
goose is interesting because you (maybe) say gooseberry as guzberry
The foot strut split sounds like a 1950s dance move
Then there's the pool-pull merger in Scotland sending us back to 5 short vowels
i lived in Germany up to age 10. Hull between ages 10-19. London 19-27, and Germany again 27 to my current 43. The Hull influence proved strong, as I still don't have the split when using English, which confuses Germans no end as i pronounce universal terms like "software bug" like a northener, whereas they've been taught to say it like "software bag".
Tho' curiously i never adopted the other Hullian accents: I say "boat" not "bert", and mostly don't drop the "t". This then confuses the Hullians whenever i go back to visit.
Accents are an inconsistent curiosity for hybridian folk like myself.
Ah the Hull accent "gerrin down 't rerd"
I'm Northumbrian and have never been able to figure out my own accent in this regard. I don't rhyme foot with strut but my strut doesn't sound like a southerner's. My vowel in cook seems to be high rounded central and causes much hilarity when I talk to non-Northumbrians. However look and Luke don't rhyme. Basically I feel like I can't get any words to rhyme with these vowels!
I'm from Tyne and Wear and have similar inconsistencies that make no sense to me. I wasn't at all aware of it until trying to justify my pronunciation of 'book' and 'nook' to southern university friends!
@@crochet_kat I feel sorry for all the other English-speaking communities who don't understand there's an 'oo' in 'cook' so you pronounce it 'oo'! :-D
This reminds me of my experiences as a librarian in an elementary junior high school here in western Canada. I'm a Geordie but, one - I went to grammar school in the late 50s so dialectal speech was discouraged, and two - we emigrated in 1967 so my Geordie accent has been modified by both teachers and time. However, more than once certain cheeky children here pointed out that I pronounced the word "book" funny. I countered with other double o words and we compared how we prounounced each of them, but my final point was always, I'm English and we invented the language so don't knock my accent, said sweetly with a smile. To Canadians born I've a recognizable British regional accent. To my Geordie family I talk funny now. Can't win.🤷 Yes. To me a book and cook and look are all pronounced with a double o not a u.😉
@@Beruthiel45 it seems to be the salient feature that people who don't have my accent immediately latch onto and it makes them smile or laugh. When they try and copy it, they get it wrong and they use the long 'oo' they themselves use in 'boot'. 'Cook' ends up sounding like Mackem 'cewk' and I try and tell them that's not what I'm saying! Do you say 'look' and 'Luke' the same? I feel like mine both have quite a short vowel but they differ very slightly, maybe with slightly more fronting in Luke. I can't understand why two of my phonemes should be so close to each other in realisation. That's not supposed to happen - they're supposed to merge or diverge. I wonder if my accent is a bit of a gap in the fossil record or something...
im from ireland and i dont have the split
you mentioned that the split however IS present in ireland
going to ask my parents and friends and find out if any of them have it too
I feel like there’s more that needs to be looked at in the midlands and the southern-industrial north with those because there’s not a simple north-south divide, Liverpool has a very specific form of course with ‘look and book’ but there’s an on oddly mixed condition in and around Birmingham where words like poor can be pronounced like ‘poo-er’, poorly as ‘poo-ly’, sure as ‘shoo-er’ and yet tooth is often pronounced as ‘tuth’.
Tooth or tuth is the debate I have with southerners as I am from Birmingham. I say tuth not tooth.
@@Flooride1 My Dad says 'tuth' as well whilst I say 'tooth', I suppose the former is no more incorrect when compared to 'look, book, cook, hook, took' as more commonly pronounced (ignoring Liverpool for example) and the latter being akin to 'soon, moon, cartoon, balloon'. The ending letters there clearly indicate a trend, but words like 'spook' break that convention. Interesting stuff.
Must be funny for a Northerner to hear us refer to Southerners as such as we're all southern to them!
Would definitely like to learn more about Midlands accents as there are such a variety between Cannock, Wolverhampton, Dudley, Kidderminster, West Bromwich, Western Brum, Redditch, South East Brum, Warwick, Coventry, Rugby, Nuneaton, Tamworth and so on, for what is such a small area really
Tolkien - the West Midlands accent, also because of the working people were never considered worth educating in terms of their accent (they would just be chain workers, lock workers etc for their lives why bother) the Yam Yam Wolverhampton /Black Country accent best preserves the Anglo Saxon accent. Plus didn't know people in Scotland - lowlands, which Ironically preserves the pre-vowel shift dialect) the word "barmpot" (bampot) meaning you've just done something silly (in an endearing way - the WM meaning anyway, don't know about the Glasgow use of barmpot
I thought that was mainly Stoke-on-Trent, not Birmingham. (I live in between those two places incidentally).
Liverpool is something of an anomaly. Though geographically Northern, its diphthong-rich accent shares much with the Midlands accents. Just up the road is St Helens, a massive contrast with its 'pure' Lancashire vowels. Something similar is heard as you move north from Manchester to Rochdale etc.
That's neat. Thanks.
As an American, I don't always hear the different dialects of English speakers. I certainly wouldn't be able to tell where someone might be from, based on their accent or dialect, like I can with other Americans. It's very interesting how our brains pick up and focus on certain sounds and not others. Animals do the same thing. One of my birds says, "Pretty Bird" every time he hears my voice. He pronounces it perfectly. It looks like you are starting to see the first signs of Spring. I live in CT and it's just starting to feel like Spring here. My Hyacinth is about 6in tall now. It hasn't flowered yet. When I see my Plantain Lillies start to come up, I'll know Spring is here. BTW, your hair is fine. I need to re-dye mine. My roots are showing again. 🤣😝
That's weird, because it's the exact opposite for me, as in all Americans/Canadians sound pretty much identical to me. I guess it depends on one's upbringing.
I would be most grateful if you would make a video about New Zealand vowels, which many of us in Australia find very amusing.
Hey Simon, have you considered looking into the development of the Southern American accent the way you did with the Northern American accent a few videos ago? It's a topic I've been quite curious about for a while but haven't found much information on.
Look a bit further back, he's already done it
@@ashildrdorchadon3258 Can you send a link? I don't see any titles that reference the Southern American accent in his catalogue.
Southern America links back to Scotland and the 19C migration, explains the flag with the St. Andrew's cross (southern one with a red cross? don,t know what it's called, Confederate Flag?)
I once read an article about the history of English. Around the year 800 AD, the Vikings would attack Europe, England included. King of England at that time was tired of this. He gave the Vikings land to live in Northern England. They interacted with the Anglo-Saxon community in England. Their Scandinavian dialect and sound system penetrated into Old English language, one of the feature of Scandinavian dialect being the [uː] sound, as in "hus, mus, moote/must"...sorts of.
my accent/ dialect is one of the chester ones native to north east wales, but with heavy diluting from RP and some from general american. i donot have the foot strut split. and trying to figure out which of the two sounds my vowel quality was on the IPA chart some time ago was difficult. tbh im still not sure if im doing the bottom heavy U or the upsidedown V.
something else tho. when you were talking about the put putt distinction, i learned that Im not actually saying the T at thr end of these words like cut and so on most of the time, and thats how those words were distinguished for me.
lastly, when putting on a west wales accent, the cut sound might be this elusive strut/ duck vowel ive been hearing about. just going off where in the mouth u said it was
I’m watching this with extreme bed head. Imagine an extreme version of Flock of Seagulls. So your hair looks great
A related phenomenon seems to me to be the way that some people in the North and even the Midlands say the SCHWA-vowel (which, let’s face it, is much closer to the CUT-vowel than most linguists like to admit, though I think it only fully merges in South Wales), not just the CUT-vowel, as the PUT-vowel. Also underreported and under-analysed is the massive difference in quality between the different forms of the PUT-vowel (when saying words in both the ‘cut’ and ‘put’ groups) in areas where the merger occurs - it’s ‘broader’ in Manchester/Dublin/Staffordshire/Coventry, even though Coventry is south of Birmingham, than it is in Birmingham, Western Ireland and in the broadest varieties of West Country and Southern American and African-American speech.
Here near Manchester, I don't split the foot-strut vowels. I picked it up from the locals back when I was little (I'm from eastern europe), so I'd say that there's no split between the vowels. Although I can't say for sure, since I don't go out often.
Pretty cool to hear words like blood, foot, and book before these changes pronounced almost exactly like they are in modern swedish
These videos remind me a lot about the Autolysia aesthetics, they are very much alike in some mysterious way. Autolysia was formerly known as Mirusbella, some of you might know about her via her Black Metal acoustic covers.
Strange- in my accent (North Wales) I have the foot/cut split but 'put' is pronounced with the /ʌ/ vowel rather than /ʊ/. So it rhymes with 'cut', but for some other reason. I wonder why that is.
Fascinating video Simon. Living in the Midlands, foot and strut is very common, although so is book pronounced toook, as in Peregrin Took.
Interesting! In some Irish areas I've heard people say cook or book with the long oo sound, not sure if it's more of a rural thing...
My Dad is from County Wexford and has lost a lot of his accent, but still pronounces words in that set with a definite 'oo' sound. He also pronounces 'cot' and 'caught' the same interestingly enough.
It has always struck me that the "Standard" or Southern English pronunciation of the U sound follows the French model, and the U sound in the Midlands and North follows the German model.
Norman vs Anglo-Saxon?
Those blasted Normans
the STRUT vowel?
French has historically fronted /u/ into /y/, but /y/ and STRUT are as different vowels as they get
I'm referring to the French pronunciation of "un" (a or one).
But that's not the case.
I'm from the Midlands, but I don't have what would be regarded as a strong regional accent and I think I have the split, but the vowels are so similar when I pronounce them naturally, that I only hear the difference when I emphasise the words. For me, there's a difference between "look" and "luck", but not much of a difference between "cut" and "put" if I say them in a sentence.
I was born in the South West and moved North when I was 10, and I seem to move back and forth between foot-strut split and merged. Probably one of the reasons many people say they can't place my accent.
I come from East Devon. Some neighbours moved in from Liverpool and their children developed this strange hybrid broad Devon/strong Liverpool accent.
Was reading "The Midnight Folk" by John Masefield and in it, a word that was deemed "common" was the pronunciation of sugar - as "shugger". I just can't work out how else it could be said - how does RP do it? I can only think " see-ugah" like "triesers" for trousers
Hi Simon, this was really interesting. For many Scottish speakers, "foot" and "strut" have different vowels, but "goose" and "foot" have the same. Why is this?
(In some broad accents/dialects, this is also the same vowel as in "house" (which would be transcribed as "hoose"), I assume due to Scots influence, but how Scots ended up with that pronunciation, and whether it's related to the other thing, idk.)
If anyone can help me with any of this, please do!
People were already pronouncing it “üûú” and “âåãh” I fuckin died at that part. Great vid though extremely interesting history
A little mistake: you said this split is present in most of Ireland but it isn't. I cannot speak for Ulster English, but these vowels are merged in most varieties of Hiberno English although some speakers might unmerge them, although this phenomenon sounds very 'British' to us and is affected for formality. In Dublin the cut vowel is merged to a vowel like in book whereas I think in the rest of the country the book vowel shifts to cut.
I’d say that probably no one pronounces ‘book’ with the ‘cut’ vowel in Ireland and very few people apart from some of the posher Dubliners (like bishop Brennan in Father Ted) and of course many in Northern Ireland even say ‘cut’ with the ‘cut’ vowel but I do see what you’re getting at. You seem to be making the same point I made earlier that in Birmingham, Newcastle and Western Ireland (and a handful of other places to an extent) ‘cut’ and ‘put’ merge but to a less broad form of the ‘put’ vowel than in Manchester/Staffordshire/Coventry/Dublin.
I wonder if it's not in the process of splitting but along different lines than in British English. My parents are from Dublin, in their fifties, they think cut, strut and foot all rhyme, but when I read them, foot doesn't rhyme with cut and strut, it's a bit more forward. I'm not a great speaker for gauaging sound changes though because I moved away from Dublin when I was young, so my accent is a little fucked up ahaha
@@minimooster7258 That’s interesting - it sounds like there may be accent levelling going on. Perhaps some of the more South Eastern varieties of Irish English like Dublin are merging with the Western varieties, at least in terms of these specific vowel sounds? It’s hard for me to judge precisely from across the sea in England of course but when I think of the Dublin accent what immediately comes to mind is the accent that you’ll hear the Dublin rappers ‘Versatile’ use, seemingly the same as the one in the film ‘Plastic Gangsters’, which surely has the broadest ‘u/oo’ sound in the world! Manchester comes close, in both places the pronunciation is so broad that the vowel isn’t only deeper than for most other speakers who have the cut/put merger but it’s often elongated (so it sounds like a deeper and broader version of the vowel used in most of England for ‘jaw’).
@@minimooster7258 They all rhyme for me. Maybe the vowels are very close and I'm mishearing the split as not being there, but as far as I can tell the majority of people from Dublin do not have this. It is characteristic of the accent.
Some accents in the northeast of Ireland (e.g. Dundalk) don't have the foot-strut merger, but some words like book and cook use the goose vowel. This vowel can be pretty far to the front. Are there other examples of this in Ireland?
I think the way you pronounce book in the video is disappearing in the south and midlands and book sounds more like buck now. Likewise good (gud), cook to rhyme with luck and other examples. Is it to try to sound more middle class?
I'm not Northern, I'm from Warwickshire, and I rhyme foot and cut. Very London centric to call everyone North of London are northerners!
Yes indeed. The London/South-East language is, geographically, the exception rather than the standard.
You can even hear speakers with the merger as far south as Banbury, in Oxfordshire, on the very northern edge of southern England.
@@joycey845 Yes! I spent time in Oxfordshire in the 70s and also the 90s. The "u" sound in "sun" or "gun" was neither northern or southern. I suspect this may be true of all all accents as they move toward the West country.
How does one over-wash their hair? 😲😉
I was wondering that too. I think his hair looks good. He should wash it more often.
I pronounce "but" and "butt" with the same distinction as "put" and "putt".
Simon, you should read "Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decipher the Rosetta Stone" by Edward Dolnick. You would eat up this book.
It’s strange that I’m from the East Midlands but I also have the split (but I don’t have the trap-bath split). My accent did change a bit since my mum is from Nottinghamshire (and I’m from Lincolnshire) and it became more like my peers. But the foot-strut split also came from it as well (albeit a bit later) so it’s very strange indeed. It happens where I’m from but the overwhelming majority of speakers pronounce both of them as ʊ so idk lol
"I also have the split (but I don’t have the trap-bath split)"
Like an American.
The 'a' in 'bad' used to sound like the 'a' in 'sad'. Sometime mid-20th century, at least in some places in the U.S., it became a harder 'a', something like 'ba-ed', with the 'a' sound of 'ba-eth' being closer. It is a puzzle to consider the Great Vowel Shift until you realize you have lived through some other vowel shift.
It would be interesting to see Simon’s take on that. There’s also Multicultural London English (MLE), which is only a recent variety of English which also involves a significant shift in vowels - especially the African American influences on the I, A, O sounds - alongside a lot of mainly Jamaican slang (as well as American slang and innovative coinages of its own). A similar process is apparently happening in Toronto too.
I don't understand. _Sad_ and _bad_ are the same for me. :0
I'm in Washington, USA.
@@Schwarzorn The noted linguistics professor William Labov, of the University of Pennsylvania, detailed this specific pronunciation change several years ago.
@@Schwarzorn think of ban vs bad.
Ban has a different vowel sort of. It's called æ raising, it's a new (20th century) American thing.
@@atbing2425 Oh. You mean how the A goes down for the N, but up for the D? Interesting. But it would go up for both _sad_ and _bad,_ right? Does for me, and I don't know why there'd be a difference if they both end in a D. Are there places that raise one, but not the other?
Effectively it's about how
Good luck sounds
As a northerner, I regularly get confused when southerners say 'cut' because it sounds the same as 'cat' to me
I'm from Southern Scotland and foot is more like fit and cut has the oo sound
I have seen videos by a chap who has worked out Shakespeare's accent based on hos word rhymes. plus having regard to the fact that he was from the midlands. Apparently when plays were performed for children using the altered accent instead of the anachronistic RP the texts were more easily understood. The video is on Open ,ruclips.net/user/hashtagopenuniversity Shakespeare Original Pronunciation
I never noticed southerns pronounce foot and cut differently :o
How on Earth did you [and do you] learn all this
Is the American tendency to pronounce the letter a as "eə" or "ɛə" if it comes before n, m, or r be considered a vowel split?
@UCgOClfJXav0CYaFK22fVXJA I'm from Portland and I've heard all three
@@ethanoux10 I think I deleted my comment by mistake? Do you know if people across the border talk like that?
@@mongke7858 i assume you mean in Washington. Yeah Oregon and Washington have virtually identical dialects
It is a split in the dialects where that distinction is lexical and there's minimal pairs, and it's not simply a vowel realisation changing depending on the consonants it's surrounded by. The accents where that's the case, to my knowledge, are East Coast dialects running from Baltimore to Philadelphea to New York City.
Could you give an example of what you mean by this split? I would pronounce _an_ as *æn,* rhyming with _am,_ but others here in Washington pronounce _an_ as *ɛn.*
Is that what you mean? I'm lost by this "eə" and "ɛə" you speak of.
I'm from stoke and just realised i don't have the split, say "look" and "took" to not "Luk" and "tuk
So is this connected somehow to the square/nurse split, or is it random coincidence? I'm guessing they both have a similar origin because both splits have a symmetry to them.
Good point. The square/nurse, where/whir, fair/fur split is interesting but less discussed.
It's less cleanly North/South and can be seen in more Easterly regions, from Middlesbrough to Hull, before morphing slightly in Grimsby but also noticed in parts of Nottinghamshire and more Centrally in Staffordshire.
Certainly much room for exploration.
Some of us northerner's ( west Cumbrian) say cook book like and owl to whit to whooo. I do myself. My name en used to sometimes say look in the same way.
I meant my mam used to say look to rhyme with too whit to whoo
Hook is another with a long ooo even now. But the younger folk are more southern.
What are some theories to why this change happened?
Can you do a video on Canadian Accents.
What about my surname? i pronounce it to rhyme with 'look' and 'took', and in all those words I use the short vowel that I also use in 'foot' etc. Every so often, though, I run into people who pronounce it with the *long* vowel that I use in 'brood'. They are always people who 'come from away', but some are West Indians and others Scots, and some may hail from the North or Northwest Midlands of England. I find that irritating, because there is a slang word 'kook'with that pronunciation meaning an extreme eccentric. (I may fit the bill, but I don't like to have others say so!)
In Norfolk Cooke is pronounced Coke.
I'm from Derby and foot and cut rhyme
I’ve always been interested in another North/South difference. When starting a sentence without knowing it’s full content, Northerners tend to say “Err” or “ Ermm”, eg. “ Erm, I don’t know”. My southern friends tend to rapidly repeat the first word while they think of the rest of the sentence, eg “ I, I, I, I, I don’t know”.