Editing Coventry (section)

==Accent==
=== Origins ===
Coventry in a linguistic sense looks both ways, towards both the 'West' and 'East' Midlands.<ref name="Chinn">{{cite web |url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/coventry/content/articles/2005/01/07/voices_05_chinn_history_feature.shtml |title=What did the Vikings ever do for us? |date=18 April 2008 |access-date=1 October 2009 |work=BBC News Online |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110219102712/http://www.bbc.co.uk/coventry/content/articles/2005/01/07/voices_05_chinn_history_feature.shtml |archive-date=19 February 2011 |url-status=live }}</ref> One thousand years ago, the extreme west of Warwickshire (what today we would designate Birmingham and the Black Country) was separated from Coventry and east Warwickshire by the forest of [[Arden, Warwickshire|Arden]], with resulting inferior means of communication.<ref name="Chinn"/> The west Warwickshire settlements too were smaller in comparison to Coventry which, by the 14th&nbsp;century, was England's third city.<ref name="Chinn"/> Even as far back as Anglo-Saxon times Coventry—situated as it was, close to [[Watling Street]]—was a trading and market post between King Alfred's Saxon Mercia and [[Danelaw]] England with a consequent merging of dialects.<ref name="Trugill">{{cite book |title= English Accents:An Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of English in the British Isles |editor1-last=Trugill |editor1-first= Peter |editor2-last= Hughes |editor2-first=Arthur |editor3-last= Watt |editor3-first= Dominic|year= 2005 |publisher=Hodder Stoughton |isbn= 978-0-340-88718-9}}</ref>

=== Coventry and Birmingham accents ===
Phonetically the accent of Coventry, like the perhaps better known accent of Birmingham, is similar to Northern English with respect to its system of short vowels. For example, it lacks the BATH/TRAP (Cov. /baθ/, Southern /bɑːθ/) and FOOT/STRUT (Cov. /strʊt/, Southern /strʌt/) splits.<ref name="Trugill"/> Yet the longer vowels in the accent also contain traces of [[Estuary English]] such as a partial implementation of the London [[diphthong]] shift, increasingly so amongst the young since 1950. We also see other [[Estuary English]] features, such as a /l/-vocalisation whereby words such as 'milk' come to be pronounced as /mɪʊk/.<ref name="Trugill"/> However, the distinction between Coventry and Birmingham accents is often overlooked. Certain features of the Birmingham accent (e.g. occasional tapping of prevocalic /r/ in words such as 'crack') stop starkly as one moves beyond Solihull in the general direction of Coventry, a possible approximation of the 'Arden Forest' divide perhaps. In any case, Coventry sits right at a dialectal crossroads, very close to isoglosses that generally delineate 'Northern' and 'Southern' dialects, exhibiting features from both sides of the divide.<ref name="Trugill"/>

=== Coventry accent on television ===
The BBC's 2009 documentary ''The Bombing of Coventry'' contained interviews with Coventrians. Actress Becci Gemmell, played Coventry character Joyce in the BBC drama ''[[Land Girls (TV series)|Land Girls]]''.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/06_june/04/landgirls.shtml|title=Land Girls Press Pack|date=3 June 2009|access-date=10 October 2009|work=BBC News Online|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090609093450/http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/06_june/04/landgirls.shtml|archive-date=9 June 2009|url-status=live}}</ref>