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Although Bristol English (BE) is a linguistic variety perceived by its speakers as dissimilar from north to south Bristol (Cork, 2021; Garvey, 2020), it still remains diatopically unresearched (Coates, 2018, Wakelin, 1986). Thus, this case study combines perceptual dialectology (Preston et al.,1987; Preston, 1999) with quantitative methods (Mooney, 2018) to provide empirical evidence on the veracity of local perceptions. Three key issues are discussed in this paper, namely: the identification of perceptual linguistic divisions within Bristol, the existence of sub-dialect acoustic cues in BE, and Bristolians’ ability to match local speech samples with their correspondent dialect areas.

To identify perceptual linguistic divisions within Bristol, informants drew on a landmark map (Lameli et al.,2009) the areas where they perceived variations of BE (Preston, 1999). A resultant composite map elaborated with ArcGIS (Montgomery & Stoeckle, 2013), suggests a hierarchical dialect division within Bristol (Inoue, 1996; Long, 1999; Montgomery, 2007), because from the areas depicted,
19% represented a twofold north-south perceptual division of BE, yet 71% of them were distributed into four subdivisions within the north-south dialect classification, namely: the south Bristol district of Bedminster, a further south cluster encompassing four council estates, the north Bristol suburb of Southmead, and a northwest cluster covering three adjacent neighbourhoods.

To pinpoint vocalic acoustic cues for sub-dialect identification within BE, voice samples of sixteen speakers from these areas were analysed acoustically and statistically (Mooney, 2016) via PRAAT (Boersma & Weenink, 2018) and Rbrul (Johnson, 2019). The results indicate that place of origin of the voice samples is a significant predictor of duration, height and backing for a group of seven monophthongal and eight diphthongal vowels, distributed in close-front, central, open-mid-back, and open-back positions. These findings suggest that Bristolians’ perceptions of dialect areas are likely to be based upon specific fine-grained phonetic variations throughout Bristol.

To determine whether or not listeners could identify the place of origin of the foregoing phonetic cues (Clopper & Pisoni, 2004), a multiple-choice online survey was conducted. Participants selected the abovementioned speakers’ places of origin from the listed four dialect areas (Purnell et al.,1999), while listening to speakers read a section of The North Wind and the Sun (Deterding, 2006), which featured the vowels that differed the most between areas according to sub-study 2. The resulting identification rates were statistically tested using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) (Jiao et al.,2022) revealing that levels of identification were low (between 15-20%), when the correct identification criterion was the specific speech from each of the four perceptual dialect areas. Whereas rates of correct identification increased significantly (between 41-45%), when a broader north and south Bristol speech parameter was used. Thus, providing some factual basis for the hierarchical dialect division argument mentioned above, as well as for locals' claims that they can distinguish between BE speakers from north and south Bristol.

These results help to inform us of the current state and status of BE, alongside theoretical and methodological paradigms that substantiate the acoustic basis for the interface between folk’s aerial perception of language and sub-dialect identification.