Introduction

British English is a language of dialects. Wherever one goes in England, or elsewhere in Britain, there are very obvious differences between the ways in which people speak in different places. It is so with the words used, with the grammar or the way in which words are organised, and very noticeably with pronunciation or accent. (Upton, 1987:7)

Everyone who has visited different areas of the British Isles will have noticed that the claim made above is more than true. Hence, the English language is not reduced to some single standard form. On the contrary, it exists, as Wardhaugh (1991:22) so neatly put it, "[…] in a number of varieties and is in one sense the sum of those varieties" like most of the world's languages. There is an entire continuum of varieties to be discovered beyond Standard British English or 'BBC English', not mentioning all those other varieties from all four corners of the world. But what are those varieties, then? Even in modern Britain, accent and dialect are a means of expressing pride and interest in their roots for most people. Therefore, one can encounter a tremendous number of dialects, be it regional or social, standard or non-standard, rural or urban.

However, fascination with dialects does not stop on the popular level, for Great Britain has a long history of scientific interest in this field, too. In the decades, even centuries during which research into variation in the English language has thriven on the British Isles, the focus has mostly been on rural dialects: researchers preferred studying old or traditional linguistic forms, which could still be found in the villages at that time. In order to guarantee that the material elicited by fieldworkers showed the oldest possible stage of dialectal variation, informants were more often than not selected from one particular group within society, namely older, white, working-class males, who lived in rural communities and had never left their community for any length of time. Usually, they would work in agriculture and would have received only little education. This applies to such major dialectological works as the Survey of English Dialects (SED) (Orton, 1998) and the like. The reason for this was, first and foremost, dialectologists' desire to capture traditional dialectal forms before they disappeared into oblivion. In doing so, the development of modern, urban dialects and accents has generally been neglected until fairly recently. In 1972, for instance, Trudgill conducted a study into the British English of Norwich, loosely basing it on Labov's New York study from the mid-60s. Furthermore, Graham Shorrocks examined the dialect of Bolton in detail as recently as 1998, to name but a few.

This is where I intend to do a bit of probing with my thesis: I want to examine a region, the county of Greater Manchester, which is rather heavily urbanised. The choice was obvious in as far as I know the area fairly well thanks to a six-month work placement I had spent there in 1999. The dialect and accent of this region as such has hardly been researched so far with the exception of the above-mentioned Shorrocks (1998), Peter Wright (1976) or Alan Cruttenden (2000) of Manchester University, who conducted a study on intonational patterns in Salford.

Greater Manchester, situated in the northwest of Britain (see map 1), belonged to the county of Lancashire until 1974, when the Local Government Act of 1972 came into force, restructuring the local government and administration of England and Wales (cf Frangopulo, 1977:xi). It is composed of ten administrative districts, namely Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, and Wigan, Manchester itself being a major regional centre and the heart of one of the largest metropolitan areas of the country beside London, as well as the cultural hub of the northwest. In mid-2000, Greater Manchester County had a resident population of 2,585,800. In former times, it used to be a focal point of the textile industry and is considered the cradle of the industrial revolution by some. Today, the manufacturing industry is still one of the county's most important sources of revenue. However, the social sector, tourism and education - four sizeable universities are situated in Manchester and Salford - are equally important providers of employment (cf Greater Manchester Research, 2000).

It is my aim to take a close look at the variation within this area. My focus, though, will be on phonetic and phonological features, the accent, that is, while bearing in mind grammatical and lexical variation at the same time. In order to do so, I will first give a brief introduction into the history of British dialects as well as the subject of dialectology and its terminology per se. Secondly, I will present a concise summary of the phonological features of the most prestigious accent of England, Received Pronunciation (RP), so that this set of characteristics may be used a means of comparison. I will then proceed to the main part of this paper: after outlining the accentual variables of the English of the area under investigation, I will present a detailed analysis of eight interviews I carried out in several parts of Greater Manchester, attempting to provide explanations of certain linguistic phenomena we will come across as we go along. These interviews comprise a number of rather formal speech samples, e.g. the reading of a short text as well as a word-list and the answering of a questionnaire. On the other hand, they include a more informal section in the form of 20 to 30 minutes of free conversation conducted with each informant. Having completed this, I will try to summarise the findings. Moreover, I will briefly consider the question of whether dialects are on their way out due to the seemingly overwhelming pressure from a highly influential standard or whether they are still thriving as ever.

In order to give as comprehensive a picture as possible, I will provide reading samples and an excerpt of the free conversation for each informant, the texts of which can be found in the appendix, as well as a number of particularly significant examples on tape, which I will transcribe in IPA (for reference see IPA chart on p 128 in the appendix) where necessary. The examples will be included in the analysis either as single words or as a sequence of several words, if they stem from the reading tasks or the questionnaire, or as entire sample sentences from the free conversation. The recordings of these examples will then follow the same sequence as the examples in the text. I will provide references to the examples in the text where possible.

Before we get too absorbed by the subject, let me add that by no means does this study claim to be either extensive or representative, as such a relatively small amount of data cannot possibly portray the whole picture, the task of which will unfortunately have to be left to projects larger than this. Instead, the modest objective of my thesis is merely to take a look at some aspects of the phonetics and phonology of the dialect of a fairly mixed cross-section of the population of Greater Manchester.

map 1 (Taylor, 1996)