Tuesday, November 6, 2012

The Co-op vowel shift results and other stuff

The results of our little survey are in. Sorry it took a while, I have been a bit under the weather.

Thank you to everyone who responded to the survey, we had a much stronger response than in previous surveys :-)

In total we had 20 responses and some very interesting results; not the results I was expecting, which is always a good thing!

16 people answered that they would pronounce Co-op as two separate syllables transcribed here phonetically: /kɒʊ ɒp/ "co - op". These people aged from 30 to 77 years old.

But just 4 people answered that they would pronounce Co-op as a single syllable with a long vowel as follows: /kwɒ:p/ "cwarp". These people aged from 69 to 95 years old.

This surprised me, as I thought that there would be a higher incidence of the single syllable variant particularly in the older age range. Admittedly, the 4 people who pronounce Co-op as /kwɒ:p/ are all in the older age group, and two of these 4 are reported as being born elsewhere than Warrington (Leigh and Bolton). This may lead us to believe that the single syllable pronunciation is not a feature of the Warrington dialect. However, both my parents belong to the single syllable group and they are both Warrington born and bred.

So what can we summise from this?

It appears from the data we have from our survey that there is a possible slight shift in the pronunciation of Co-op from a single syllable to two syllables over time. This shift may be influenced from neighbouring dialects that maintain a long vowel where Warrington has a diphtong; for example, think of a Widnesian or a Boltonian pronouncing "no". These dialects have maintained the long vowel that results in /nʊə/ "noor" as opposed to the more common Warringtonian /nɒʊ/ "no".

However, it is likely that both pronunciations of Co-op have existed side by side, particularly due to the fact that "Co-op" is always pronounced as two separate syllables in its full form in the name "Co-operative". As far as I know, no-one says "Cwarprative". Please correct me if I am wrong.

A couple other comments came in from Gaynor and Tim that I wanted to point out:

Gaynor commented on the good people of Yorkshire not understanding the word "Barm cake". I have to say that I concur. I recently chatted with a colleague who is originally from Huddersfield, and he did not know what a Barm cake is either. This does seem to be confined to the Lancashire area.

And Tim posted a word that I have never heard before in my life: lozzock. He gave the example, "Stop lozzocking around and get something done." Great word! Does anyone else use this word?

1 comment:

  1. "Stop lozzoking around" is replaced by "Stop lolling around" in my vocabulary.

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