View article

It is well known that varieties of English in major metropolitan centres exert influence on the accents of surrounding areas via contact-related processes such as dialect levelling. This has been evidenced in the north-east (Watt 2002) and the south-east (Kerswill 2003; Torgersen and Kerswill 2004) but similar evidence in the north-west region of England is lacking. Despite this lack, popular commentary frequently suggests that dialect levelling is underway in the northwest of England too (eg ‘Much ado about nuffin’Louisa Young, The Guardian, 2 June 1999;‘Scouse is threatened by rising ride of Estuary English’Kathy Marks, The Independent, 1 June 1999). In this paper, we examine the available empirical evidence for levelling in the north-west of England by providing a synthesis of previous work that has explored these issues. First, we demonstrate that whilst work in the north-west is not insignificant in quantity or in …