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The urban British region known as the Black Country is conceived to be a part of England’s “linguistic north”, insofar as speakers typically lack a BATH-TRAP split (Wells 1982: 349). As opposed to the linguistic south, where the BATH set is merged with PALM (Blaxter & Coates 2020: 270–271), northern speakers use a short, low front [a] vowel for both sets (Asprey, Jeffries & Kailoglou 2021: 147–148). However, in our preliminary apparent time analysis of six speakers across two age cohorts (47-54y; 75-82y), we find an unmerging of the TRAP and BATH sets amongst the younger speakers, where BATH articulations are lowered and backed, distinct from both TRAP and PALM. In this paper we present an exploratory investigation of the Black Country BATH-PALM-TRAP system to account for the apparent time patterns emerging in the data.

Our analysis follows Turton and Baranowski (2018) who find that Manchester FOOT and STRUT vowels, while remaining phonemically indistinct, receive slightly different articulations owing to the phonological environments in which they tend to occur. Similarly, we consider system internal explanations for the apparent BATH-TRAP distinction found in the Black Country, including the effect of the phonological environment, as well as the exact quality and relative positions of the BATH-PALM-TRAP system. This will allow us to tease apart potential phonetic and phonological motivations for the observed effect, as we consider the status of the BATH set in the Black Country as either subject to phonological conditioning or perhaps reanalysed as a distinct category.

Additionally, we discuss these results in light of ongoing changes in progress across Britain more broadly, recognising the Black Country’s status as a linguistic ‘midland’ located on the isogloss between England’s linguistic north and south (Chambers & Trudgill 1998: 110). While our data cannot speak directly about social factors besides age, it is important to consider the potential effect of dialect contact in the Black Country, as well as the continual geographical diffusion of features in Britain, usually from the south (Kerswill 2002).

To conclude, we briefly discuss the implication of these findings for our characterisation of varieties in the English Midlands more broadly, which have often been described as ‘transitory’ between the more forthright norms of both north and south (Asprey 2015; Chambers & Trudgill 1998: 110). Given we are uncovering a BATH-PALM-TRAP system which seems to differ from either norm, we highlight the insight that tackling varieties located on linguistic borders can give.