English Language in England - Northern England

Northern England

There are several accent features which are common to most of the accents of northern England (Wells 1982, section 4.4).

• Northern English tends not to have /ʌ/ (strut, but, etc.) as a separate vowel. Most words that have this vowel in RP are pronounced with /ʊ/ in Northern accents, so that put and putt are homophonous as . But some words with /ʊ/ in RP can have in the more conservative Northern accents, so that a pair like luck and look may be distinguished as /lʊk/ and /luːk/.
• The accents of Northern England generally do not use a /ɑː/. so cast is pronounced rather than the pronunciation of most southern accents. This pronunciation is found in the words that were affected by the trap–bath split.
• For many speakers, the remaining instances of RP /ɑː/ instead becomes : for example, in the words palm, cart, start, tomato.
• The vowel in dress, test, pet, etc. is slightly more open, transcribed by Wells as rather than .
• The "short a" vowel of cat, trap is normally pronounced rather than the found in traditional Received Pronunciation and in many forms of American English.
• In most areas, the letter y on the end of words as in happy or city is pronounced, like the i in bit, and not . This was considered RP until the 1990s. The longer is found in the far north and in the Merseyside area.
• The phonemes /eɪ/ (as in face) and /oʊ/ (as in goat) are often pronounced as monophthongs (such as and ). However, the quality of these vowels varies considerably across the region, and this is considered a greater indicator of a speaker's social class than the less stigmatised aspects listed above.

Some dialect words used across the North are listed in extended editions of the Oxford Dictionary with a marker "North England": for example, the words ginnell and snicket for specific types of alleyway, the word fettle for to organise, or the use of while to mean until. The best-known Northern words are nowt, owt and summat, which are included in most dictionaries. For more localised features, see the following sections.

The "present historical" is named after the speech of the region, but it is often used in many working class dialects in the south of England too. Instead of saying "I said to him", users of the rule would say, "I says to him". Instead of saying, "I went up there", they would say, "I goes up there.

In the far north of England, the local speech is indistinguishable from Scots. Wells said that northernmost Northumberland "though politically English is linguistically Scottish".