The phonemic inventory of Bermudian English

Bermudian English (BerE) has unfortunately been largely ignored by the field of Linguistics. With Bermuda’s closest neighbour being 900km to the west in North Carolina (Trudgill 2003:217), its geographic isolation has played a key role in the development of the BerE dialect. As ‘small isolated communities may produce slower rates of linguistic change’ (2003:214) contemporary BerE has maintained historical linguistic features such as fronted GOAT vowels and the V/W-confusion phenomena, whereby /v/ and /w/ seem to be reversed. Despite the recent surge of interest in the dialect – albeit minor – (Swartz 2001, Eberle and Schreier, 2013, Trudgill 2003), BerE has largely been left untouched since Ayres’ short article ‘Bermudian English’ (1933) by linguists alike. As this is a commonly cited gap in the literature (Aceto and Williams, 2003, Schreier et al., 2010, Eberle and Schreier, 2013, and so on), I chose to help redress this imbalance in the literature surrounding BerE. A small-scale sociophonetic study was conducted focussing on the two aforementioned features of the dialect, as mentioned by Ayres (1933:8,9), being GOAT-fronting and V/W-confusion. By recording and analysing the speech of 17 Bermudian inhabitants, I hope to establish how these features came to be, what their links are to Carolinas, West Indies, as well as 17th century England, and what their futures look like in Bermuda.