The foot–strut vowel split, which has its origins in 17th century English, is notable for its absence from the speech of Northerners in England, where stood–stud remain homophones – both are pronounced with the same vowel /ʊ/. The present study analyses the speech of 122 speakers from Manchester in the North West of England. Although the vast majority of speakers exhibit no distinction between the foot and strut lexical sets in minimal-pair production and judgement tests, vowel height is correlated with socio-economic status: the higher the social class, the lower the strut vowel. Surprisingly, statistical models indicate that vowel class is a significant predictor of foot–strut in Manchester. This means that, for a speech community without the split, there remains an effect in the expected direction: strut vowels are lower than foot vowels in the vowel space. We suggest that co-articulatory effects of surrounding consonants explain this instrumental difference, as they have significant lowering/heightening effects on the acoustics but are not fully captured by our statistical model. We argue that the perplexing nature of the historical split can be partially accounted for in this data, as the frequency of co-occurring phonetic environments is notably different in foot than in strut, resulting in cumulative effects of co-articulation. We also present evidence of age grading which suggests that middle class speakers may develop a phonetic distinction as they age.

中文翻译：

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不完全相同：曼彻斯特脚撑元音的社会分层和语音条件

这脚撑元音分裂起源于 17 世纪的英语，值得注意的是它在英格兰北方人的演讲中没有出现，其中站着–螺柱保持同音字 - 两者都以相同的元音 /ʊ/ 发音。本研究分析了来自英格兰西北部曼彻斯特的 122 位演讲者的演讲。尽管绝大多数演讲者没有表现出两者之间的区别脚和支撑最小对产生和判断测试中的词汇集，元音高度与社会经济地位相关：社会阶层越高，支撑元音。令人惊讶的是，统计模型表明元音类别是脚撑在曼彻斯特。这意味着，对于没有分裂的语音社区，在预期的方向上仍然存在影响：支撑元音低于脚元音空间中的元音。我们建议周围辅音的共同发音效应解释了这种乐器差异，因为它们对声学有显着的降低/升高影响，但我们的统计模型并未完全捕捉到。我们认为，历史分裂的复杂性可以在这些数据中部分解释，因为同时出现的语音环境的频率在脚比在支撑，导致共同发音的累积效应。我们还提供了年龄分级的证据，这表明中产阶级说话者随着年龄的增长可能会出现语音差异。