Phonological history of English high back vowels

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Most dialects of modern English have two high back vowels: the close back rounded vowel /u/ found in words like goose, and the near-close near-back rounded vowel /ʊ/ found in words like foot. This article discusses the history of these vowels in various dialects of English, focusing in particular on phonemic splits and mergers involving these sounds.

1 Foot-goose merger
2 Foot-strut split
3 Merger of Middle English /y/, /eu/, and /iu/
4 Shortening of /uː/ to /ʊ/
5 Ruin-smoothing
6 See also
7 References

[edit] Foot-goose merger

The foot-goose merger is a phenomenon that occurs in Scottish English, Ulster varieties of Hiberno-English, Malaysian English and Singaporean English, ^[1] where the vowels /ʊ/ and /uː/ are merged. As a result, pairs like look/Luke are homophones and good/food and foot/boot rhyme. The merged vowel is usually /ʉ/ or /y/ in Scottish English and /u/ in Singaporean English.^[2] The use of the same vowel in "foot" and "goose" in these dialects is not due to phonemic merger, but the appliance of a different languages vowel system to the English lexical incidence ^[3]. The full-fool merger is a conditioned merger of the same two vowels before /l/, making pairs like pull/pool and full/fool homophones.

[edit] Foot-strut split

The foot-strut split is the split of Middle English /ʊ/ into two distinct phonemes /ʊ/ (as in foot) and /ʌ/ (as in strut) that occurs in most varieties of English; the most notable exception is Northern England and the English Midlands.^[4]

The origin of the split is the unrounding of /ʊ/ in Early Modern English, resulting in the phoneme /ʌ/. In general (though with some exceptions), this unrounding did not occur if /ʊ/ was preceded by a labial consonant (e.g., /p/, /f/, /b/) and followed by /l/, /ʃ/, or /tʃ/, leaving the modern /ʊ/. Because of the inconsistency of the split, the words put and putt became a minimal pair, distinguished as /pʊt/ and /pʌt/.

In non-splitting accents, cut and put rhyme, putt and put are homophonous as /pʊt/, and pudding and budding rhyme. However luck and look are not necessarily homophones; many accents in the area concerned have look as /luːk/, with the vowel of goose.

The absence of this split is a less common feature of educated Northern English speech than the absence of the trap-bath split.^[5] The absence of the foot-strut split is sometimes stigmatized, and speakers of non-splitting accents often try to introduce it into their speech, sometimes resulting in hypercorrections such as pronouncing pudding /pʌdɪŋ/.

The name "foot-strut split" refers to the lexical sets introduced by Wells (1982), and identifies the vowel phonemes in the words, though that name may be a bit misleading as the word foot itself may have had a different vowel from put at the time the split occurred and so did not participate in the split.

[edit] Merger of Middle English /y/, /eu/, and /iu/

Middle English distinguished the close front rounded vowel /y/ (occurring in loanwords from Anglo-Norman like duke) and the diphthongs /iu/ (occurring in words like new) and /eu/ (occurring in words like few).^[6]

By Early Modern English, these three vowels merged as /iu/, which has remained as such in some Welsh, northern English, and American accents in which through /θruː/ is distinct from threw /θriu/.^[7] In the majority of accents, however, /iu/ later became /juː/, which, depending on the preceding consonant, either remained or developed into /uː/ by the process of yod-dropping, hence the present pronunciations /d(j)uːk/, /n(j)uː/, and /fjuː/. However, after the consonants /r, tʃ, dʒ/ and /ʃ/ as in rude, June, chew, and chute /iu/ immediately became /uː/ without ever being /juː/.^{[citation needed]}

Middle English /y/ was commonly represented the spellings uCe and ue as in duke and hue, while /iu/ and /eu/ were commonly represented by the spellings ew and eu as in dew.

[edit] Shortening of /uː/ to /ʊ/

In a handful words, including some very common ones, the vowel /uː/ was shortened to /ʊ/. In a few of these words, notably blood and flood, this shortening happened early enough that the resulting /ʊ/ underwent the "foot-strut split" and are now pronounced with /ʌ/. Other words that underwent shortening later consistently have /ʊ/, such as good, book, and wool. Still other words, such as roof, hoof, and root are in the process of the shift today, with some speakers preferring /uː/ and others preferring /ʊ/ in such words.

[edit] Ruin-smoothing

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Ruin-smoothing is a process that occurs in many varieties of British English where bisyllabic /u:@/ becomes the diphthong /UI/ in certain words. As a result, "ruin" is pronounced as monosyllabic /rUIn/ and "fluid" is pronounced as /flUID/.