A major feature of the Mancunian accent is disappearing... but not in one place

A major feature of the traditional Manc accent is still going strong in northern parts of the city, but is disappearing from people’s speech elsewhere.

It’s long been thought that north and south Manchester accents sound different. Dr Maciej Baranowski spoke to 122 people from areas within the M60 to find out if there is any linguistic evidence of this.

Now, the linguistics expert says the ‘north-force distinction’ is disappearing in the south and centre of the city. This quirk of the accent means words like ‘four’ and ‘wore’ have a different vowel sound to ‘for’ and ‘war’.

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University of Manchester researcher Dr Baranowski says the distinction has completely disappeared from the speech of middle-class Mancunians - which means the words in these pairs sound identical, as they do for most speakers of English. You can watch the video above to see what he means.

It’s thought the vowel contrast began disappearing from middle class speech in Manchester decades ago. It is still strong in north Manchester, though it is changing very slowly there as well.So what’s the reason for this very audible difference?

Dr Baranowski says it may be linked to major changes in Manchester in recent years, with a population boom bringing workers from other parts of the country, accelerating changes already happening to the accent.

Meanwhile, ‘dialect levelling’ has led to British English being much more uniform than it once was. Some long-standing aspects of local accents are disappearing, and other features are spreading across the country. For example the traditional working-class Cockney accent is said to be weakening, but Multicultural