| dc.description.abstract | What current changes are taking place in the York accent today? What are their causes? This thesis aims to explore change-in-progress in York English among ten females in their mid-tolate twenties. The data was collected through sociolinguistic interviews performed in York in October 2015. A phonetic auditory analysis was conducted in order to explore variation in the realisation of seven lexical sets, STRUT, BATH, FACE, GOAT, NORTH, FORCE and THOUGHT. The phonetic analysis was further used to determine the informants’ degree of accent levelling. Second, statistical analyses of the relationship between accent levelling and two extra-linguistic factors, mobility and attitudes, were conducted in order to determine how much of the variation in the informants’ realisation of the lexical sets could be caused by these social factors. The phonetic analysis indicated that the STRUT, NORTH, FORCE and THOUGHT vowels are in the process of being levelled towards the southern standard, RP, although the York realisation of the STRUT vowel might not become entirely similar to its RP counterpart, but rather be a compromise between the former northern realisation and the standard southern realisation. Furthermore, the analysis of the NORTH, FORCE and THOUGHT vowels indicated that the traditional York realisation of these vowels is different from the one generally present in the research literature. The BATH vowel appears to be unchanging. The FACE and GOAT vowels have changed almost completely from being mainly realised by monophthongs to being realised by diphthongs. The results also revealed that there was a lot of variation among the informants in their realisations of the lexical sets. However, the variation was not random. The statistical analysis indicated that the informants’ use of traditional variants correlated strongly with and might clearly be caused by differences in attitudes and degree of mobility. As such, this thesis also contributes to the linguistic discussion on motivations for language change. | eng |