How do you pronounce ‘happy’, ‘baby’, ‘chilly’, or ‘city’? According to a new study, the answer could say a lot about your social class.
Scientists found that people who pronounce these words with an open ‘eh’ sound, as in ‘happeh’, are more likely to be from working-class backgrounds.
Meanwhile, middle-class people tend to say ‘happee’, with higher social classes using a ‘tenser’ vowel sound overall.
These results, published in the journal Language Variation and Change, come from a study of Mancunian accents based on recordings of over 100 people.
What the researchers found remarkable is that this linguistic difference has remained incredibly stable across
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