Survey Results

Thank you to everyone that responded to the survey!

We didn't get as many responses as I had hoped for, and as such it is a little difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions. However, here is a little information on the phenomena we can see at work in the responses we received, and one conclusion that we can draw from the available data:

The omission of the "T"s in the "Go get them" sentence is a common linguistic phenomenon known as glottalisation. The term comes from the part of the throat known as the glottis, where the vocal chords are situated. Glottalisation occurs when the vocal chords are temporarily closed to obstruct the passage of air through them. This creates the sound that we think of as representing the omission of the "T"s.

If you now say "Go ge' 'em" to yourself, you will notice that there is a very brief gap in between ge' and 'em; this is the glottalisation, or as it is often called, the glottal stop.

The replacement of the "T"s with "R"s is another common linguistic phenomenon known as a linking R. The linking R occurs between two words; the preceding ending in a vowel sound, and the following beginning in a vowel sound. Note, we are referring to the sounds now, and not the actual letters! So, in the sentence "Go get them", in the natural speech of many Warringtonians, the verb get loses the final consonant and thus ends in a vowel sound /e/, and the pronoun them loses its initial consonants and begins with a vowel sound /e/, and hence we have the required prerequisites for the linking R to occur. As as our survey shows, it does indeed occur :-)

The second part of our survey requires us to know a little about a linguistic phenomenon known as phonetic transcription. As the name suggests, it belongs to the field of phonetics, which is defined as the study of the sounds of human speech. We need not go into this area in great depth, only to say that the sounds of any language are represented in written text by the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA (which can be seen in dictionaries next to the word entry).

To be clear, the IPA does not refer to the spelling of words with letters (orthography), rather the sounds that make up words!

Our survey was interested to see if and when there has been a change in pronunciation of the vowel sound in "book". The two coexisting pronunciations are represented in the IPA phonetic transcription as follows (note that phonetic transcriptions are always surrounded by forward slashes):

1. book (rhyming with stuck) /buk/
2. book (rhyming with puke) /byk/


Of the six responses we received, five of them reported that they pronounced "book" as /buk/. Only one reported a pronunciation of "book" as /byk/. What is interesting about this is that those using the /buk/ pronunciation are born from 1950 onwards. The one /byk/ pronunciation was born pre-1950. On its own this carries very little weight, but in the absence of further responses, I factored in the pronunciation of my own Warrington-born relatives born pre-1950, and they all pronounce "book" as /byk/.

We can therefore conclude, albeit tentatively, that there was the start of a vowel sound /y/ - /u/ shift in the Warrington dialect at some point circa 1950!

This pronunciation shift is also relevant for similarly pronounced words such as: "look" and "cook".

Again, a big THANK YOU to all those that took /tuk/ not /tyk/ the time to answer. Your participation is very much appreciated :-)