An apparent-time sociophonetic analysis of Belfast English

My study focuses on Belfast Vernacular. The purpose is to give an overview of the accent and deal with sociophonetic aspects that have not yet been addressed.

The thesis is divided into three main parts. The first one is a phonetic overview of this variety of English as the most recent one was written by Milroy in 1981.

The second part looks at the phonetic features of the phonemes /ɜ/ and /ɛ/ before /r/ to verify if the two are merged. The diphthong /aʊ/, which is said to be one of the well-known features of Belfast English, is also examined. These phones are studied in the present thesis as, to my knowledge, no work has yet been conducted on these particular sounds in Belfast. I also aim at determining if sociolinguistic factors such as age, gender, place of birth (neighbourhood), social network, religion/culture of the participants have a significant impact on the participants’ pronunciation of the phones previously mentioned.

The third part examines the ability that people from Belfast have to recognise someone’s ethnic group (C or P) by listening to a recording. Therefore, a perceptual experiment will be run using the recordings of the text read previously for part 1 and 2 of the thesis, then followed by a perception experiment where participants will have to listen to 30 recordings of strangers put in a random order and click on either C which stands for ‘the person is a Catholic’ or P for ‘the person is a Protestant’ at the end of each recording. The people recorded were all from Belfast.

And do the social factors cited above have an impact on the participants’ success in telling the groups apart?