Uttoxeter

I thought Uttoxeter deserved a post of its own, because it also raises a transcription and dialect question.

Both /ʊ/ and /ʌ/ have been quoted, by Michael Lamb and John Maidment, as possible pronunciations of the initial sounds, and I agree. But in northern dialects the /ʊ/ ~ /ʌ/ split never happened, so the vowel used by locals unaffected by “education” (as John and I have been!) is still the equivalent of /ʊ/. On the phonological level, this is fine.

However, to transcribe it as /ʊ/ for all northern accents/dialects, as is most often done, leads to parodists of these accents/dialects using the southern English /ʊ/ indiscriminately in both STRUT and FOOT. If I try to recall my own “pre-educated” pronunciation, the nearest southern English vowel is actually a short /ɔː/, and this is certainly what I hear from my unreconstructed friends and relatives who have not had my “advantages”. This means that there are minimal pairs between but and bought, pun and pawn, full and fall, where the distinction is one of vowel length only. (Incidentally, when I’m tired, I may get /ʊ/ and /ʌ/ the “wrong” way round, and am quite likely to say /pʌt ʊp/ instead of /pʊt ʌp/. Birth will out!)

This is the situation for North Staffordshire as I hear it. I can’t find much in the literature about the phonetics of the speech of the Potteries. Certainly TV and radio adaptations of Arnold Bennett never have actors with convincing accents. There are several examples of this undifferentiated vowel from Garth Crooks (former footballer, now broadcaster) here.

The phonetic script (between what are now regularly called ‘forward slashes’) has been corrected on 29 February 2024. I must apologise to any readers of this post who have been disappointed by the corrupted version.

The ‘standard’ pronunciation of the name is now /juʼtɒksɪtə(r)/ but there are less common variants, including some that are definitely purely dialectal. The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (OUP, out of print but usually available from second-hand book shops) gives two more, and a third is /ʼʌtʃɪtə(r)/.