The phonological system

The most comprehensive collection of Welsh English data is in the archives of the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (henceforth SAWD) at the Department of English, University of Wales Swansea. Under the directorship of David Parry, material was collected in rural areas of Wales between 1968 and 1982 (cf. Parry 1977–1979, 1999), and in urban areas between 1985 and 1987. SAWD, which aims to provide an overview of Welsh English phonology, focusing on traditional, rural Welsh English. Use will be made, in particular, of the analysis and description attempted in David Parry’s A Grammar and Glossary of the Conservative Anglo-Welsh Dialects of Rural Wales (1999). Parry (1999) attempts a general phonemicization for Welsh English based on the rural data, drawn from the 60-plus age-group, which can be presented as follows:

Table 1 maps this broad phonemicization against the lexical set. STAY and SNOW are included for comparison with FACE and GOAT respectively, and highlight a tricky area in the phonemicization. In Table 1, the vowels for STAY and SNOW are not given phonemic status, in order to remain consistent with the system above. However, discussion of alternative analyses and the status of the vowels in FACE/ STAY and GOAT/SNOW.

The remainder discusses the phonological system in detail, including realizations of the vowel phonemes and significant regional variations (under headings from the lexical set), followed by a description of noteworthy consonantal and prosodic features.