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Linguistics

Notes allophones is not the only possibility in English, however. In some accents, /l/ is always realised as
clear; this is true, for instance, of Tyneside English (or ‘Geordie’), Welsh English, and some South
African varieties. On the other hand, in Australia and New Zealand, /l/ is consistently pronounced
dark; and indeed, realisations may be pharyngeal rather than velar, or in other words, pronounced
with a restriction even further back in the vocal tract. In London English, there is a further allophone
of /l/, namely a vocalised (or vowel-like) realisation finally or before a consonant: in sell, tall, people,
help, /l/ is typically realised as a high or high mid back vowel like [• ] or [o]. For younger speakers,
vocalisation is also taking hold in medial position, in words like million; and the process is also
spreading beyond London, as part of the shift towards so-called ‘Estuary English’, a mixture of SSBE
and London English which is arguably becoming a new standard for young people, especially in
urban centres in the south of England.
The other English liquid consonant, /r/, also provides plenty of scope for realisational differences, /
r/ is typically an alveolar or slightly retro-flex approximant for SSBE and GA, but at least in medial
position, is frequently realised as an alveolar tap in SSE (the tap is also a common realisation in South
African English). In some parts of the north of England, notably in Northumberland and County
Durham, a voiced uvular fricative [W] is quite commonly found, although this may be receding
gradually.
In other areas of northern England, this time notably Yorkshire, Tyneside and Liverpool, [‹] appears
as an allophone of /t/, typically between vowels and across a word-boundary, as in not on [nZ‹Zn],
lot of laughs [lZ‹ c ...], get a job [le‹ c ...]. In Merseyside, voiceless stops are very generally realised as
fricatives or affricates in word-final position, so that cake, luck, bike will be [kewx], [l• x], [bawx]: whereas
in Scots and SSE the appearance of [x] in loch constitutes a systemic difference, as there are minimal
pairs establishing an opposition of /x/ and /k/, in Liverpool the velar fricative is clearly an allophone
of /k/, so that the accent difference between, say, SSBE and Merseyside English in this respect is
realisational, but not systemic.
Turning to vowels, one particularly salient example involves the FACE and GOAT vowels, which in
SSBE, NZE and Australian English are pronounced consistently as diphthongs. In GA, the FACE
vowel is diphthongal, while the GOAT vowel may be a monophthong; and in SSE and SgE, both are
monophthongal, with the predominant allophones being high-mid [e] and [o] in both accents. The
NURSE vowel in SSBE is mid central [3+]; the same phoneme in NZE is very generally rounded,
while in SgE it is typically raised to high-mid back unrounded [q], or high back unrounded [‚] (as
we might expect, Hokkien has [q], Malay has both [q] and [‚], but both lack [f]).
Sometimes, although these realisational differences have no direct impact on the phoneme system,
they do lead to neutralisations of otherwise consistent contrasts. For instance, we saw in the last
section that SgE speakers raise /e/ to [e] before plosives and affricates; the monophthongal
pronunciation of /e/ as [e] in FACE words, and the lack of any systematic vowel-length distinction
in SgE means that the contrast of /e/ and /e/ is suspended in this context, leading to identical
pronunciations of bread and braid, or wreck and rake. It is also possible for realisational differences in
vowels to lead to allophonic differences in consonants. For instance, right at the beginning of this
book, we identified an allophonic difference between velar [k] and palatal [c], with the latter appearing
adjacent to a front vowel. In SSBE, SSE and GA, this will mean that velar realisations will be produced
in cupboard and car, palatals in kitchen and keys. However, the distribution differs in other varieties of
English, depending on their typical realisations of the FLEECE and KIT vowels. In NZE, FLEECE has
a high front diphthong, so that keys will still have [c]; but no fronting will take place in kitchen, since
the KIT set in NZE has central [ c ]. On the other hand, in Australian English, KIT has a rather high,
front [i] vowel so that kitchen will certainly attract a palatal [c]; but in some varieties at least, the
diphthong in keys is central [ c I], which will therefore favour a velar allophone of /k/.
17.9 Distributional Differences

Distributional differences fall into two subclasses. First, there are differences in lexical incidence:
certain individual lexical items will simply have one vowel phoneme in some accents, and another in
others. For example, British English speakers are quick to comment on American English /a• / in

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