Trap-bath_split
The TRAP–BATH split is a vowel split that occurs mainly in Southern England English (including Received Pronunciation), Australian English, New Zealand English, Indian English, South African English and to a lesser extent in some Welsh English as well as older Northeastern New England English by which the Early Modern English phoneme /æ/ was lengthened in certain environments and ultimately merged with the long /ɑː/ of PALM.[1] In that context, the lengthened vowel in words such as bath, laugh, grass and chance in accents affected by the split is referred to as a broad A (also called in Britain long A). Phonetically, the vowel is [ɑː] ⓘ in Received Pronunciation (RP), Cockney and Estuary English; in some other accents, including Australian and New Zealand accents, it is a more fronted vowel ([ɐː] ⓘ or [aː] ⓘ) and tends to be a rounded and shortened [ɒ~ɔ] in Broad South African English. A trap–bath split also occurs in the accents of the Middle Atlantic United States (New York City, Baltimore, and Philadelphia accents), but it results in very different vowel qualities to the aforementioned British-type split. To avoid confusion, the Middle Atlantic American split is usually referred to in American linguistics as a 'short-a split'.
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In accents unaffected by the split, words like bath and laugh usually have the same vowel as words like cat, trap and man: the short A or flat A. Similar changes took place in words with ⟨o⟩ in the lot–cloth split.
The sound change originally occurred in Southern England and ultimately changed the sound of /æ/ ⓘ to /ɑː/ ⓘ in some words in which the former sound appeared before /f, s, θ, ns, nt, ntʃ, mpəl/. That led to RP /pɑːθ/ for path, /ˈsɑːmpəl/ for sample etc. The sound change did not occur before other consonants and so accents affected by the split preserve /æ/ in words like cat. (See the section below for more details on the words affected.) The lengthening of the bath vowel began in the 17th century but was "stigmatised as a Cockneyism until well into the 19th century".[2]: 122 However, since the late 19th century, it has been embraced as a feature of upper-class Received Pronunciation.