Front Vowel Lowering in Northern Irish Accents

The front vowels in Northern Irish accents tend to lower, having a cascading effect on the one that typically occurs below.

When one vowel moves, it often pushes another vowel out of place. With Northern Irish accents, there seems to be a chain of shifts as all of the front vowels have a tendency to go lower in the mouth than what usually occurs in American accents and in Received Pronunciation.

---The image above is from White's Tavern, the oldest tavern in Belfast, established in 1630, taken after a day of recording accents.

Here's a transcript of the video:

I want to talk about front vowels in Northern Irish accents.

So what's a front vowel? The vowels that happen along the front of the mouth here.

So this is the vowel quadrilateral: the back of the mouth, the front of the mouth, the top, the bottom.

So there's a number of vowels that we commonly use in speech that are laid out here along the front.

What happens a lot in Northern Irish accents is that they tend to drop down to the one below them, so that instead of the /æ/ sound as in CAN'T, it oftentimes becomes more this /a/, which is that "Park your car in Harvard Yard." CAN'T. Northern Irish. CAN'T.

The /ɛ/sound tends to drop towards the /æ/ sound, so that a word like END may become more like AND. "There at the end." It's not all the way to /æ/ but it's on its way there.

Same thing happens with the /i/ going towards /ɪ/ and the /ɪ/ going a little bit towards /ɛ/. So that FIN becomes more like FEN. "Do you see the fin of that fish?"

Especially if it's a stressed word you'll notice the change happening a little bit further.

And then something that doesn't happen absolutely consistently but a lot of the time an /i/ sound, that PEOPLE actually moves a little bit down and becomes more like PEOPLE, almost PAPAL. So it sort of moves down to that.

So in Northern Irish accents, throughout Northern Ireland and also up into Donegal, you will tend to hear this vowel drop that happens all the way along the front of the mouth. Oftentimes when a vowel takes another vowels place that vowel has got to move out of the way so that you can still be understandable. So that's a vowel drop along the front for Northern Irish.

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