Northern England

There are several accent features which are common to most of the accents of northern England (Wells 1982, section 4.4).The "short a" vowel of cat, trap is normally pronounced [a] rather than the [æ] found in traditional Received Pronunciation and in many forms of American English. The accents of Northern England generally do not use a /ɑː/. socast is pronounced [kast] rather than the [kɑːst] pronunciation of most southern accents. In some cases, the RP /ɑː/ instead becomes /aː/: for example, in the words palm, cart, start, tomato. Northern English tends not to have /ʌ/ (strut, but, etc.) as a separate vowel. Most words that have this vowel in RP are pronounced with /ʊ/ in Northern accents, so that put and putt are homophonous as /pʊt/. But some words with /ʊ/ in RP can have /uː/ in the more conservative Northern accents, so that a pair like luck and look may be distinguished as /lʊk/ and /luːk/.

In most areas, the letter y on the end of words as in happy or city is pronounced [ɪ], like the i in bit, and not [i]. This was considered RP until the 1990s. The longer [i]is found in the far north and in the Merseyside area.

The vowel in dress, test, pet, etc. is slightly more open, transcribed by Wells as /ɛ/ rather than /e/.

The Received Pronunciation phonemes /eɪ/ (as in face) and /əʊ/ (as in goat) are often pronounced as monophthongs (such as /eː/ and /oː/). However, the quality of these vowels varies considerably across the region, and this is considered a greater indicator of a speaker's social class than the less stigmatised aspects listed above.

Some dialect words used across the North are listed in extended editions of the Oxford Dictionary with a marker "North England": for example, the words ginnell and snicket for specific types of alleyway, the word fettle for to organise, or the use of while to mean until. For more localised features, see the following sections.

The "present historical" is named after the speech of the region, but it is often used in many working class dialects in the south of England too. Instead of saying "I said to him", users of the rule would say, "I says to him". Instead of saying, "I went up there", they would say, "I goes up there.

In the far north of England, the local speech is indistinguishable from Scots. Wells said that northernmost Northumberland "though politically English is linguistically Scottish".

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