MIDLANDS, The. A region of England often associated with
DIALECT and contrasted with the
North and the South. It is generally held that there were five main dialect areas in medieval England:
Northern,
East Midland,
West Midland,
Southern, and
Kentish. The Midland group are described as having clearly defined boundaries. They were found north of the Thames and Severn and south of a line from the mouth of the Humber to the west coast, south of Heysham, and the line of the Pennines divided the East Midland and West Midland areas. Some dialectologists consider that such boundaries continue to be significant in contemporary language research, others that the post-industrial urban dialects of the cities of
BIRMINGHAM, Wolverhampton, Leicester, and Peterborough now exert greater influence than those of the rural areas. Apart from speakers of RP, most people in the English Midlands share features of pronunciation with speakers from the North rather than the South. They often use /ʊ/ not /ʌ/ in words such
as but,
come,
fun,
some (
put and
putt being homophones), and use /a/ for the RP sounds /æ/ and /α/, so that the vowel sound is the same in
bat and
bath,
lass and
last,
pat and
path. The speech of the Midlands is not, however, homogeneous. People in the West are more likely to use /ŋg/ for /ŋ/ in words such as
singing /sɪŋgɪŋg/ and
tongue /tʊŋg/, to use /ɒn/, not /an/, in words such as
man and
pan, and to be to some degree rhotic in words such as
far and
farm. People in the northeast of the region are generally likely to use /z/ in
us, to substitute /r/ for /t/ in
got a (‘gorra’), and to use an alveolar tap for /r/ instead of the more widely used postalveolar approximant of RP. See
DIALECT (ENGLAND),
EAST ANGLIA,
EAST MIDLAND DIALECT.
