page_title: Kingston upon Hull
section_title: Dialect and accent
hierarchical_section_title: Kingston upon Hull / Dialect and accent
caption_attribution_description: English: View towards location of Philip Larkin's flat 32 Pearson Park, Hull
context_page_description: Kingston upon Hull, usually abbreviated to Hull, is a port city and unitary authority in the East Riding of Yorkshire, northeastern England. It lies upon the River Hull at its confluence with the Humber Estuary, 25 miles inland from the North Sea, 50 miles east of Leeds, 34 miles south-east of York and 54 miles north-east of Sheffield. With a population of 259,778, Hull is the fourth-largest city in Yorkshire and the Humber.
  The town of Wyke on Hull was founded late in the 12th century by the monks of Meaux Abbey as a port from which to export their wool.
  Renamed Kings-town upon Hull in 1299, Hull had been a market town, military supply port, trading hub, fishing and whaling centre and industrial metropolis.
  Hull was an early theatre of battle in the English Civil Wars. Its 18th-century Member of Parliament, William Wilberforce, took a prominent part in the abolition of the slave trade in Britain.
  After suffering heavy damage in the Second World War, Hull weathered a period of post-industrial decline, gaining unfavourable results on measures of social deprivation, education and policing.
context_section_description: The local accent is quite distinctive and noticeably different from the rest of the East Riding; however it is still categorised among Yorkshire accents. The most notable feature of the accent is the strong I-mutation in words like goat, which is [ˈɡəʊt] in standard English and [ˈɡoːt] across most of Yorkshire, becomes [ˈɡɵːʔt̚ ] ("gert") in and around parts of Hull (cf. similar refined pronunciations in Leeds/York), although there is variation across areas and generations.
  In common with much of England (outside of the far north), another feature is dropping the H from the start of words, for example Hull is more often pronounced 'Ull in the city. The vowel in "Hull" is pronounced the same way as in northern English, however, and not as the very short /ʊ/ that exists in Lincolnshire. Though the rhythm of the accent is more like that of northern Lincolnshire than that of the rural East Riding, which is perhaps due to migration from Lincolnshire to the city during its industrial growth, one feature that it does share with the surrounding rural area is that an /aɪ/ sound in the middle of a word often becomes an /ɑː/: for example, "five" may sound like "fahve", "time" like "tahme".
  The SQUARE~NURSE merger is a feature of Hull's dialect. The vowel sound in words such as burnt, nurse, first is pronounced with an /ɛ/ sound, as is also heard in Middlesbrough and in areas of Liverpool yet this sound is very uncommon in most of Yorkshire. The word pairs spur/spare and fur/fair illustrate this.
  The generational and/or geographic variation can be heard in word pairs like pork/poke or cork/coke, or hall/hole, which some people pronounce almost identically, sounding to non-locals like they are using the second of the two variations – while others make more of a vocal distinction; anyone called "Paul" (for example) soon becomes aware of this (pall/pole).
caption: View of Pearson Park
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