Language Variation and Change<\/a>, found that while the middle classes said \u201chappee\u201d, working-class people were more likely to say \u201chappeh\u201d, with the higher social classes using a tenser vowel overall.<\/p>\nResearchers have said that while Manchester has changed dramatically over the past few decades \u2013 socially, economically and culturally \u2013 some features of the city\u2019s accent have remained remarkably stable, particularly in working-class speech.<\/p>\n
However, they found there was some variation across different ethnicities, with working-class south Asians more likely to say \u201chapp-ee\u201d, whereas black and white Mancunians would more typically say \u201chapp-eh\u201d if they were from that social class.<\/p>\n
Danielle Turton, a senior lecturer in sociolinguistics at Lancaster University, said: \u201cI think it\u2019s important because it shows that local working-class speech is not just being washed away by social change or redevelopment\u201d in Manchester, \u201ca city changing at a rapid speed\u201d.<\/p>\n
Turton said that \u201clooking at how accents are distributed tells us a lot about society\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome of my students might say that class doesn\u2019t really exist or doesn\u2019t matter any more, that there\u2019s this idea we\u2019re in a meritocratic society and everyone\u2019s got equal access to opportunities and so on and so forth,\u201d she said. \u201cWhereas when we look at something like this we see quite clearly the different socioeconomic brackets speak differently in different ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
When people moved between social classes, Turton said, they \u201ccan and do\u201d change their accents \u2013 but this is not always the case.<\/p>\n
\u201cMore commonly this is felt by people with regional or working-class accents,\u201d she said. \u201cSo for many of us, the pressure we can feel when we start university, we suddenly find ourselves in a different environment, maybe more middle class, and for others it might happen later, maybe in a professional setting.<\/p>\n
She added: \u201cSome people might not feel any pressure to change. Some people retain their accent throughout life, or feel really strongly attached to it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Turton said not all parts of an accent or dialect were equally easy to change.. While it may be a simple shift to go from saying \u201chapp-eh\u201d to \u201chapp-ee\u201d, she said other features are more deeper in the system or they might be so far below the level of conscious awareness that lay people don\u2019t notice them, but linguists might.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo an example with this would be that for many of us from northern England we would rhyme words like strut and foot, but if you\u2019re from the south those are two different vowels, those words don\u2019t rhyme so, it\u2019s \u2018strat\u2019 and foot. That\u2019s really bloody hard to change if you don\u2019t grow up with it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Turton said \u201cadolescence matters\u201d and \u201cone of the arguments is if you don\u2019t acquire a language by a certain age, you will never sound native\u201d.<\/p>\n
Today, she said, the \u201cprestige form\u201d of the English language was \u201cstill being based on those people with the money and the power\u201d. However, she added: \u201cI am actually really hopeful, because I just think with things like more diverse voices on TikTok and podcasts and social media, and things like this, people are hearing different accents and they love them.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think when we don\u2019t pre-judge, because we don\u2019t have assumptions about how certain people should sound, then we actually love it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pronunciation of the \u201chappy vowel\u201d is one of the key indicators of social class in Mancunian accents, researchers…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":667616,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-667615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=667615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/667615\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/667616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=667615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=667615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=667615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}