This article investigates the status of the foot–strut split in the counties of Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in the East Midlands of England. The East Midlands area is a linguistic transition zone between northern English varieties with a phoneme inventory of five short vowels, where foot and strut are represented by the same phoneme, and southern English varieties which have the foot–strut split and therefore six short vowels. However, a lack of research on the distribution of the foot and strut vowels in the East Midlands exists and to fill that gap, this article examines the possible diffusion of the split northwards as predicted by Trudgill (1986). Reading-passage data, stratified by age group, sex and location is used to provide an apparent time, multilocal view on the distribution of the two vowel categories. Surprisingly, the changes that we notice do not concern the increasing distance between foot and strut but mainly foot-fronting in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and strut-retraction in Derbyshire which leads to an increase in overlap between foot and strut in all three counties.

中文翻译：

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前脚和脚撑分裂：东米德兰兹的元音变化

这篇文章调查了状态脚–支撑分裂在英格兰东米德兰的莱斯特郡、诺丁汉郡和德比郡。东米德兰兹地区是北部英语变体之间的语言过渡区，有五个短元音的音素清单，其中脚和支撑由相同的音素表示，而南部英语变体具有脚–支撑分裂，因此有六个短元音。但缺乏对分布的研究脚和支撑东米德兰兹存在元音，为了填补这一空白，本文研究了 Trudgill (1986) 预测的分裂向北的可能扩散。按年龄组、性别和位置分层的阅读段落数据用于提供关于两个元音类别分布的明显时间、多本地视图。令人惊讶的是，我们注意到的变化并不涉及之间距离的增加脚和支撑但主要是脚- 在莱斯特郡和诺丁汉郡和支撑- 德比郡的退缩导致两者之间的重叠增加脚和支撑在所有三个县。