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The pronunciation of the BATH vowel is a salient feature of English varieties of the southwest of England, yet neither the status of the TRAP–BATH split in traditional dialects nor ongoing change today is well understood. After reviewing the existing literature, we investigate the quality and length of low unrounded vowels in Bristol English on the basis of sociolinguistic interviews with twenty-five speakers. The picture suggested by these data is complex: there is evidence for a traditional length-only TRAP–BATH split, for a length and backness split diffusing from the east and for a merger diffusing from the north. Some of these changes involve lexical diffusion, especially with loanwords and other distinctive lexical groups. Overall, the rich and contradictory data speak to the contested sociolinguistic status of these variables and to the need to examine individual patterns of variation closely to gain a full understanding of them.

Estudio sobre la fonología dialectal inglesa, la gramática dialectal inglesa y el folklore inglés. -- Pertenece a la colección Varia del Salamanca Corpus. -- Elizabeth Mary Wright, 1863-1958. -- Elizabeth Mary Lea , 1864-1958. -- Rustic Speech and Folklore. -- 1913., [ES]Estudio general sobre la fonología, la gramática y el folklore dialectales ingleses. [EN] Monograph on English dialect phonology, grammar and folklore.

This paper describes and contextualizes placenames on Palmerston Island, a small Pacific island populated by around 50 descendants of a mixed-origin group of settlers in the 1860s. The inhabitants today are monolingual speakers of a dialect that has been described variously as an English dialect or an English-based creole. I show that Palmerston English placenames are rarely complex or detailed descriptive names, and this can be accounted for by the small, isolated and densely-networked nature of the population. The isolation and transience of the community may also contribute to the high number of placenames that index people’s names or other locations.