The dedialectalisation of the short front vowel system in East Anglian English

In recent work on the English of Eastern England, it has been found that its more salient traditional features, such as palatal glide deletion (the deletion of the /j/ glide in words such as ‘few’ [fuː], ‘view’ [vuː] and ‘cute’ [kuːʔ], sometimes known as yod-dropping) and third person present zero (‘she swim every day’, ‘Kevin drink too much coffee’), have been undergoing attrition towards forms usually associated with London and the South-East (no glide deletion after non-coronals ([fjuː vjuː kjuːʔ]) and third person present tense –s (‘she swims’, ‘Kevin drinks’)). In this presentation we address the question of whether much less salient traditional dialect forms are receding, and if so, whether this attrition is occurring so dramatically and rapidly as it is for more salient features. We examine here one honological characteristic of East Anglian English that has not, as far as we know, yet been subject to empirical analysis. In the traditional dialect: • A few words that belong to the DRESS lexical set in standardised accents belong to the KIT set: get, said, yet, forget, again, against, yesterday – ‘get’, therefore, is realised as [gɪʔ] and not [gɛʔ]; • A few standard TRAP words belong to the DRESS set: ‘sat’, stressed ‘can’, stressed ‘have’/‘has’/‘had’ – ‘have’ is realised as [hɛv] rather than [hæv]. We carefully define the variable and contextualise it within developments of the short front vowels more generally before presenting an apparent-time acoustic analysis of a spoken corpus from one village in Suffolk in Eastern England to assess the extent to which attrition is underway. As we will see, there is a shift over apparent time towards a more standard-like realisation of these vowels, but a shift that is far from complete, more advanced for some lexical items than others, and subject to linguistic and social conditioning