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The trap-bath split is a Vowel Split that occurs mainly in southern varieties of English English (including Received Pronunciation ), in the Boston Accent , and in the Southern Hemisphere accents ( Australian English , New Zealand English , South African English ), by which the Early Modern English phoneme was lengthened in certain environments and ultimately merged with the long of ''father''. (Wells 1982: 100–1, 134, 232–33) In this context, the lengthened vowel in words such as ''bath'', ''laugh'', ''grass'', ''chance'' in accents affected by the split is referred to as a broad A (also, in Britain, '''long A'''). Phonetically the vowel is a long back in Received Pronunciation (RP); it is a fronter vowel, or , in some other accents, including many Australian and New Zealand accents, and it may be a rounded in South African English . In accents unaffected by the split, these words usually have the same vowel as words like ''cat'', ''trap'', ''man'', the short A or '''flat A'''. The sound change probably occurred during the late Eighteenth Century in southern England, and changed the sound of to in words in which the former sound appeared before , leading to RP for ''path'' and for ''sample'', etc. The sound change did not occur before other consonants; thus accents affected by the split preserve in words like ''cat''. See the Variations section below for more details on the words affected. British Isles accents The presence or absence of this split is one of the most noticeable differences between different accents of English English . An Isogloss runs across the Midlands from the Wash to the Welsh border, passing to the south of the cities of Birmingham and Leicester . North of the isogloss, the vowel in most of the affected words is usually the same short as in ''cat''; south of the isogloss, the vowel in the affected words is generally long. (Gupta 2005) There is some variation close to the isogloss; for example in Brummie most of the affected words have a short , but ''aunt'' usually has a long vowel. Additionally, some words which have in most forms of American English , including ''half, calf, rather'' and ''can't'', are often found with long vowels in northern England. In some West Country accents of English English where the vowel in ''trap'' is realized as rather than , the vowel in the ''bath'' words was lengthened to and did not merge with the of ''father''. In those accents, ''trap'', ''bath'' and ''father'' all have distinct vowels , and . (Wells 1982: 346–47). In some other West Country accents, and in many forms of Scottish English , there is no distinction corresponding to the RP distinction between and . Southern Hemisphere accents Evidence for the date of the shift comes from the Southern Hemisphere accents, those of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In Australian English , there is generally agreement with southern British in words like ''path, laugh, class''. But before N+consonant, as in ''dance, plant'', most Australians use a flat A (''aunt'' and ''can't'' are exceptions and are invariably pronounced with ). Phonetically the broad A is . In Australia there is variation in the word ''castle'', both pronunciations are commonly heard. For more information, see the table at Australian English Phonology . South African and New Zealand accents have a similar distribution of sounds to RP. North American accents Most accents of American English and Canadian English are unaffected by the split. The main exceptions are parts of New England (''see Boston Accent ''), where the broad sound can be used in some of the same words as in southern England, such as ''can't, aunt, ask, bath'' etc. Of these, the one in widest use is ''aunt''; those who speak this way find calling a close relative "ant" jarring, and say that it's spelled differently from that word. A related, but distinct, phenomenon is the phonemic æ-tensing in the accents of New York and Philadelphia . Variations The change did not happen in all eligible words. It is hard to find a clear reason why some changed and others did not. Roughly, the more common a word the more likely that the change from flat to broad took place. It also looks as if monosyllables were more likely to change than polysyllables. Here are some examples from RP, to illustrate the variety:
There are some words in which both pronunciations are heard among southern speakers:
Use of broad A in ''mass'' is distinctly conservative and probably rare now. The other fluctuations are both common, but with further complications. While ''graph, telegraph, photograph'' can have either, ''graphic, graphology'' always have flat A. The broad A is more likely when the ''s'' is voiceless (thus ''transfer'' , ''transport'' ) than when it is voiced (thus ''translate'' , ''trans-Atlantic'' ). BAD-LAD SPLIT The bad-lad split is a Phonemic Split of the Early Modern English short Vowel phoneme into a short and a long . This split is found in some varieties of English English and Australian English in which ''bad'' (with long ) and ''lad'' (with short ) do not rhyme. (Wells 1982: 288–89, 596; Horvath and Horvath 2001; Leitner 2004). The phoneme is usually lengthened to when it comes before an or , within the same syllable. It is furthermore lengthened in the adjectives ''bad'', ''sad'', ''glad'' and ''mad''; ''family'' also always has a long vowel, regardless of whether it is pronounced as two or three syllables. Some speakers and regional varieties also use before , , and/or ; such lengthening may be more irregular than others. Lengthening is prohibited in the past tense of irregular verbs and function words and in modern contractions of polysyllabic words where the /æ/ was in an open syllable. Lengthening is not stopped by the addition of word-level suffixes. Note that British dialects with the bad-lad split have instead Broad in some words where an or follows the vowel. In this circumstance, Australian speakers usually (but not universally) use , except in the words ‘aunt’, ‘can’t’ and ‘shan’t’, which have broad . , dropped this distinction. Commonly also in these accents, ''can'' 'able to' is , whereas the noun ''can'' 'tin' or the verb ''can'' 'to put into a tin' is ; this is similar to the situation found in æ-tensing in some varieties of American English . Australian speakers who use ‘span’ as the past tense of ‘spin’ also have a minimal pair between ‘to span’ (the bridges the river) and , the past tense of ‘spin’ (the ball ). Various other minimal pairs can be created in the slang speech of social groups as meaning ‘agriculture’ vs , a La Trobe University –specific term referring to the part of the Uni known in full as the Agora. Apart from Jones and '' and written with ''aaə'', Dictionary makers have never shown a difference between these varieties of the historical . In the 11th (2003) edition of ''Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary'', which is derived from the Third unabridged, the distinction is discussed in an introductory section on pronunciation but ignored elsewhere in the text. The editors justify their decision by maintaining that "this distinction is sufficiently infrequent that the traditional practice of using a single symbol is followed in this book" (p. 34a). æ-TENSING In the Sociolinguistics of English , æ-tensing is a process that occurs in some Accent s of North American English by which the vowel is raised and lengthened or Diphthong ized in various environments. The realization of this "tense æ" varies from to to to , depending on the speaker's Regional Accent . The most common realization is probably (that is, a centering diphthong with a starting point closer than the vowel as in ''dress''); that transcription will be used for convenience in this article. Phonemic æ-tensing in the Mid-Atlantic region In Philadelphia and New York , the tense is a separate Phoneme from , since certain minimal pairs can be found:
In these accents there has thus been a s before the , , , , and , as well as the words ''mad'', ''bad'', and ''glad''. In New York, tensing occurs in all those environments as well as before voiced Stop s and . Lax usually occurs before , , and voiceless stops, and also usually occurs in open syllables regardless of the following consonant. In Philadelphia, tensing in some lexical items before and nontautosyllabic nasals has been reported. The main exceptions to the above generalizations are: #When a Vowel -initial word-level Suffix is added to a word with tense , the vowel remains even though it has come to stand in an open syllable: #:''mannish'' has like ''man'', not like ''manage'' #:''classy'' has like ''class'', not like ''classic'' #:''passing'' has like ''pass'', not like ''Pasadena'' #When a polysyllabic word with in an open syllable gets truncated to a single closed syllable, the vowel remains: #:''caf'' (truncation of ''cafeteria'') has , not like ''calf'' #:''path'' (truncation of ''pathology'') has , not like ''path'' 'way, road' #:''Mass'' (truncation of ''Massachusetts'') has , not like ''mass'' # Function Word s and Irregular Verb tenses have lax , even in an environment which would usually cause tensing: #:''and'' (a function word) has , not like ''sand'' #:''ran'' (an irregular verb tense) has , not like ''man'' The phoneme is also used in these accents before intervocalic in words like ''dairy'' and ''Mary'' and in Non-rhotic varieties of these accents in words like ''square'' and ''scarce'' (which rhymes with ''glass'' for many non-rhotic speakers). The phonemic tensing of ''æ'' is similar to the Broad A phenomenon of certain other dialects. The environment of broad A overlaps with that of æ-tensing, in that broad A occurs before voiceless fricatives in the same syllable and before nasals in certain environments; and both phenomena involve replacement of the short lax vowel with a longer and tenser vowel. However, the "broad A" is lower and backer than , while the result of æ-tensing is higher and fronter. It is also related to the phenomenon, so the split can't occur there; that 'sad' is long; and that lengthening can occur before /g/ and /l/. See that article for more information. Non-phonemic æ-tensing In accents that have undergone the Northern Cities Vowel Shift , the phoneme is raised and tensed in all environments, to or even higher. Most other dialects of American English display an which is raised and tensed in some environments and lower and laxer in others, without splitting it into two contrasting phonemes as the New York and Philadelphia accents do. Geographically the most widespread is the "nasal system", in which is raised and tensed to exclusively before Nasal Consonant s, regardless of whether there is a syllabic or morphemic boundary present. The nasal system is found variously in speakers of the southern Midwest , northern New Jersey , and Florida , among other regions, but it is most prominent—that is, the difference between the two allophones of is greatest, and speakers with the nasal system are most concentrated—in eastern New England (''see Boston Accent ''). More widespread among speakers of the Western United States and southern Midwest is a "continuous" system. This resembles the nasal system in that is usually raised and tensed to before nasal consonants, but instead of a sharp divide between high tense before nasals and low lax before other consonants, Allophones of occupy a continuum of varying degrees of height and tenseness between those two extremes, with a variety of phonetic and phonological factors interacting (sometimes differently in different dialects) to determine the height and tenseness of any particular example of . For some speakers with continuous systems, particularly in Canada and the northern and northwestern United States, a following tenses an as much as or more than a following nasal does; in much of Minnesota and Wisconsin , this extends to the point that actually Merges with before , so that ''flag'' rhymes with ''plague''. In the . However, many speakers from the South have the nasal æ-tensing system described above, particularly in Charleston , Atlanta , and Florida , and speakers from New Orleans have been reported to have a system very similar to the phonemic split of New York, as well as some Florida speakers. SEE ALSO REFERENCES Trap-bath split
Bad-lad split
æ-tensing
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