Southern Shift?: tracking diphthongs in the recent histories of non-standard varieties of English.

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During this Research Leave, I aim to complete a project examining a co-ordinated set of changes that have affected several vowels in many accents of English. This 'chain shift' is known as 'Southern Shift' because the changes are claimed to have affected the accents of the Southern US, Southern England and the Southern Hemisphere Englishes of New Zealand (NZ) and Australia. These accents have a number of pronunciation similarities, most notably the vowels in words such as MOUTH (/au/) and PRICE (/ai/) (which have first elements pronounced at the front of the mouth for /au/ and back for /ai/), and these similarities led researchers to suggest that in all of these places these vowels moved in similar ways, having followed similar routes to get to their present-day pronunciations. Evidence of the route of this change through time was, however, only provided for American English. Since 1998 I have been examining historical and contemporary sources to discover whether they support this proposed route of Southern Shift for southern British accents and those of the Southern Hemisphere Englishes. They may have similar pronunciations to the southern US for these vowels, but did they get there by the same route? I propose to write an article on Southern Shift outside the US, suggesting the vowels changed via a different route to that proposed for the US, and examining the consequences of this different route for contemporary theories of vowel change.The project began by looking at NZ and found that throughout the 150 years that English has been spoken there, /ai/ and /au/ had largely remained unchanged, so examining the history of NZ English itself didn't get us any nearer to explaining the route by which the vowels had changed. I therefore then looked at the dialects spoken in those areas of the British Isles from which migrants had left to go to NZ in the 19th century. This showed that many areas of southern England (the predominant source of migrants to NZ) already had the changed vowel, but other areas had a traditional vowel with a central starting point. Crucially, those vowels which would have given support to the proposed Southern Shift route for this vowel change were absent. Evidence suggested that in southern England the change had followed a different route and that this change was taken to NZ by 19th century migrants. This NZ research is now complete and published, but it led me to ask further questions about two other Southern Hemisphere accents, those of Australia and the Falklands. There has been less research on the history of Australian English than on NZ and what has been carried out has largely focussed on the roles of Cockney and Irish English in the formation of this dialect. I spent 3 months in Australia in 2000 examining the demographic origins of the convicts and settlers to Australia and the subsequent history of this dialect. Like NZ, southern English migrants dominated the early Australian Anglophone population. During the leave, I propose to write an article on the history of the Australian English vowels that are supposedly affected by Southern Shift as well as other dialect features that demonstrate the 'southern English' dominance of input forms to this accent. I hope to present this work at a conference in Cyprus in June 2007. Falkland Island English shows some similarities with the other Southern Hemisphere varieties but, with respect to the Southern Shift vowels, it is quite different from them (with the exception of the sound /au/). I propose to write an article on the vowels in Falkland Island English which have (supposedly) undergone Southern Shift in other accents, showing their very different histories in this South Atlantic accent. This research will be of appeal to those interested in language variation and change and in the history of English and its dialects, and will expose some commonly held myths about how varieties of English outside England have developed.