‘By Those Provincials Mispronounced’: The strut Vowel in Eighteenth-Century Pronouncing Dictionaries

Abstract

Dobson (1957: 311) dismissed the eighteenth century as producing ‘no writers to compare’ with the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century orthoepists and phoneticians detailed in his monumental study of English pronunciation. This view has since been contradicted by scholars such as Beal (1999), Jones (2006), and Mugglestone (1995), all of whom make use of the large number and variety of pronunciation guides published in the latter half of the eighteenth century to investigate variation and change in the phonology of that period. In this paper, I investigate the extent to which eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries described and commented on what was to become one of the most salient markers of the ‘north–south divide’ in English accents of English: what Wells (1982: 196) calls the ‘foot-strut’ split. After describing the ‘foot-strut’ split and illustrating its salience in the UK today, I summarize the early evidence for the split in the works of seventeenth-century phoneticians. I then go on to examine evidence from eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries in order to answer the following questions:•. Does the evidence from eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries suggest a geographical distribution of split versus unsplit foot-strut similar to that of present-day English in the UK?•. Is there any evidence that northern authors who have not spent a significant part of their lives in the south had any awareness of the foot-strut split?•. What was the role of pronouncing dictionaries in the ‘enregisterment’ (Agha 2003) of unsplit foot-strut as a stereotypical feature of northern English accents?