The sociolinguistics of /l/ in Manchester

3.1 Social factors

The potential for change over time in Northern English /l/ was raised earlier in the paper, where we noted that older dialect reports from 1950s data (Orton et al. 1978) show light /l/s in the north, but more recent phonetic research shows the opposite for some parts of the north i.e. dark variants in all positions (Carter 2002; Kirkham 2016; Turton 2017). We considered whether this discrepancy was due to earlier fieldworker difficulty in transcribing the sound accurately by ear or, alternatively, that the /l/ has changed since the dialect data was collected. Our results provide support for the latter possibility i.e., /l/ has become darker over time in Manchester. Our model indicates that speakers with an earlier birth year have lighter initial /l/s, with a trend in apparent time towards darker initial /l/s for speakers born more recently (see Figure 2). The picture remains the same when we exclude the two speakers interviewed in the 1970s and use age as a predictor instead of birth year. The trend in the opposite direction seen for the youngest speakers, that is, those born since the 1990s is likely not an indication of a reversal of the change, but rather a reflection of the conservative behaviour of children, reflecting their parents’ generation’s speech, resulting in what is often referred to as the adolescent peak (Bermúdez-Otero 2020; Labov 2001; Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2009); a similar pattern has also been found in the fronting of the goose vowel in Manchester (Baranowski 2017).

Figure 2:

Initial /l/ across year of birth (darker tokens have lower F2–F1 values).

In any case, even the older speakers with lighter initial /l/s do not approach the level of lightness found in Received Pronunciation or speakers from the South East of England. For example, the average F2–F1 difference in initial /l/s for speakers born earlier than 1959 is 949 Hz, but in Kirkham et al.’s (2020) recent study, Londoners average around 1,100 Hz for initial /l/ today (data available from Kirkham 2020).

This change towards a darker initial /l/ over time raises an interesting question. Is this darkening of initial /l/ responsible for the claimed lack of allophonic distinction (where, if present, word-initial /l/s are lighter than word-final ones; Turton 2014, 2017) in Manchester i.e., have younger speakers collapsed a previously existing distinction resulting in dark /l/ in all positions? We revisit this question after first considering social class.

The social class results reveal a near-monotonic trend: the higher the social class, the lighter the initial /l/, as seen in the estimates of the F2–F1 difference in Table 1. Although comparisons between individual classes do not reach statistical significance, the inclusion of class overall is significant by likelihood ratio test. Moreover, the estimates indicate that the trend is unlikely to be accidental in that we have a near-monotonic pattern. In terms of initial and final position, additional models reveal that social class 1 (the lower working class) show next to no difference between initial and final /l/ realisations, whereas 5 (the upper middle class) have fairly light initial /l/s. We suggest that this relative difference could be used as a proxy for an allophonic distinction in the upper middle class. Evidence for this comes from a separate regression looking only at word-final /l/s, where social class is not significant. This means that all social classes have roughly equal word-final /l/ darkness, but a monotonic trend in word-initial /l/ darkness. Thus, the lightness of word-initial /l/ could be taken as a rough proxy for the allophonic status of /l/; Figure 3 visualises this trend. Previous articulatory results from ultrasound tongue imaging suggesting that middle class Mancunians may hold a distinction gives us added confidence in this argument (Turton 2014; Turton and Baranowski 2015). The similarity of upper middle-class speech in Manchester to that found in the south of England has also been reported for goat-fronting (Baranowski 2017) and for the foot-strut distinction (Turton and Baranowski 2020).

Figure 3:

/l/ in different social classes (darker tokens have lower F2–F1 values). The left panel shows initial leap-type tokens only and the right panel shows initial leap-type and final peel-type contexts (Class 1, lower working; 2, upper working; 3, lower middle; 4, middle middle; 5, upper middle).

In the left-hand panel of Figure 3, social class is plotted as a continuous predictor of the lightness of initial /l/ (lighter tokens have a larger F2–F1 difference). This visualises the monotonic relationship between social class and lightness of initial /l/. The right hand panel of Figure 3 shows initial versus final /l/s for each social class presented as factors. The figure demonstrates that the upper middle class speakers have a greater difference between initial and final contexts. Still, these initial /l/s of the upper middle class do not reach the averages of initial /l/s in young Londoners, for example, mentioned above (mean F2–F1 initial /l/ for our upper middle class Mancunians = 985 Hz, London = 1100 Hz). The lower working class show complete overlap, while the in-between classes show a small difference in the expected direction: initial tokens are lighter than final. There is a large amount of overlap between contexts, which is expected given the nature of measuring segments such as /l/ from spontaneous speech data. We tested various interactions between all pairs of social factors – birth year, class, ethnicity and gender – but none constituted a significant addition to the model. As can be seen in Table 1, females have darker /l/s than males, leading the change toward darkening. Although an interaction with class is not a significant addition, separate models on each social class find that the gender effect is much stronger in the lower working class, who has the starkest gender difference in /l/ realisation. This may be the effect reported by Labov (2001:308); that “males in the lower social classes show a consistent pattern of retreating from or resisting a female-dominated change”.

The effects of word position across different social class categories raise questions about potential change over time in the allophonic status of light and dark /l/. Recall that we posed this question earlier: is the darkening of initial /l/ over time responsible for the collapse of a previously held allophonic distinction? The results show that the data is not consistent with such an argument. There is no evidence for older speakers being more likely to have an allophonic distinction, as ascertained by comparing word-initial and word-final /l/s in models and data visualisation. An additional model of word-final /l/s only shows an almost identical estimate for birth year as the model for word-initial /l/ presented above: /l/ is 3–4 Hz darker with every additional birth year for both initial and final position. The overall picture is then that there is no change in the allophonic status over time, but that younger speakers are darkening all of their /l/s across the board, that is, in all positions. Further evidence of this comes from visualising this pattern through the prism of social class (Figure 4). We pick out the two extreme classes which show this effect most clearly (the other three classes have no discernible pattern). Figure 4 demonstrates there is no change in the difference in the relationship between word-initial and word-final /l/ over time, or in other words, no change in the lack or presence of allophony over time in Manchester: both sets of lines move in parallel.

Figure 4:

F2–F1 differences across age in the extreme social classes (1, lower working class; 5, upper middle class).

Figure 5:

/l/ across ethnic groups.

We report new results on variation in the ethnic background of our speakers in Manchester. In comparison to white speakers, Black Caribbean and Pakistani Mancunians have much lighter /l/s (Figure 5). In terms of Pakistani speakers, similar findings have been reported elsewhere in the UK: lighter /l/s in British South Asian speakers are reported in Bradford (Heselwood and McChrystal 2000; Kirkham and Wormald 2015), Glasgow (Stuart-Smith et al. 2011), and Sheffield (Kirkham 2016). These clearer variants are also found in Indian English more generally (Wells 1982; Sharma 2012). Commenting on the light realisation of /l/ in Glaswegian Asian speakers (in contrast to dark /l/s in Glaswegian in general), Stuart-Smith et al. (2011) suggest that “[c]learer realisations of /l/ could ultimately go back to Punjabi/Urdu /l/ which is typically very clear”. In reference to this, Kirkham (2016) notes that often speakers do not need to be proficient in a second language to acquire their multi-ethnic variety (see also Cheshire et al. 2011).

Interestingly, in Manchester, we note Black Caribbean Mancunians have the lightest /l/s of all. This could also be a heritage effect, as lighter /l/s are reported for Caribbean Englishes (Wells 1982: 570). Van Hofwegen (2011) finds that lighter /l/s are a traditional, though receding, feature of African American English.^[2] Almost all of our Black speakers have either parents or relatives from Jamaica and report close links with their Caribbean heritage, including being in touch with family members from Jamaica and visiting there for holidays. At the same time, these lighter variants could also occur as a feature of Multicultural Manchester English and be available to speakers without this same heritage (Cheshire et al. 2011; Drummond 2017, 2018). The authors have noticed impressionistically that some young white working-class Mancunians in multicultural areas of the city may now have adopted this light /l/ into their own speech, although it remains to be seen if this feature is part of their vernacular or whether it is adopted in certain styles only.

A closer inspection of the data shows that younger ethnic minority speakers, both Caribbean and Pakistani, have darker /l/s than older speakers from the same ethnic background, demonstrating that all ethnic groups participate in this change (recall there is no significant interaction between age and ethnicity). Thus, even though Black youngsters have lighter laterals than their white counterparts, their /l/s are still darker in comparison to older Black speakers. The same age pattern is true of Pakistani speakers in general, although there are some speakers who do not follow this trend. Izna L., 21 years old, upper working class, is one example of this. She has much darker /l/s than Pakistani speakers her age, more typical of white speakers. Although Izna identifies as British Pakistani and lives and attended school in a multi-ethnic area of Manchester, her mother is a white Mancunian and her friendship network is white. Izna’s pattern demonstrates that further work is needed to understand this kind of variation on a micro level, and that closer attention to biracial speakers experiences (which are relatively overlooked in the existing literature; cf. Holliday 2016) is needed to understand identity patterns and parental or peer-group influence.

Both Black and Pakistani speakers, on closer inspection, do seem to have lighter word-initial /l/s than word-final tokens. This means it is possible, in contrast to white Mancunians, that these speakers do have an allophonic distinction. The complexities of using non-controlled data to reach such conclusions are described in Turton (2014) and are best verified by further laboratory study. Nevertheless, this result provides a compelling basis for future research in multi-ethnic variation in Mancunian /l/s.

3.2 Non-social factors

In terms of linguistic and other non-social effects, the results are precisely what we would predict given what we know about coarticulation and contextual circumstances. Figure 6 shows preceding context and following vowel height side by side. The role of preceding context is clear: utterance initial /l/ is the lightest (e.g. leap over), following a vowel comes next (e.g. a leap) and following a consonant is the darkest (e.g. big leap). The right-hand panel of Figure 6 shows that initial /l/ is affected by following vowel height in the expected direction: following high vowels predict lightest /l/s (e.g. leap), followed by mid vowels (e.g. leg), with the darkest found after low vowels (e.g. last). A preceding front vowel (e.g. pill) shows lighter /l/s than a preceding back vowel (e.g., pull), but this effect is weak and not significant in the model when everything else is taken into consideration. Duration is a significant predictor of darkness in the expected direction: darker /l/s are longer (Lee-Kim et al. 2013; Sproat and Fujimura 1993).

Figure 6:

/l/ in different phonetic contexts.