22 The NORTH Lexical Set
north lexical set is one of the harder to get your head around, as it is paired with force, and a relatively small number of accents retain a contrast between the two. Examples of the north–force sets include horse–hoarse, for–four, war–wore. When an accent has this north–force merger, the items in force are spoken with the north sound, which is essentially the vowel in thought; this is especially true for non-rhotic accents. When an accent distinguishes between the two sets, force is pronounced with a more close articulation, generally in the range of /or/, while north is pronounced with a more open one in the range of /ɔr/. I’ve always found this difficult to remember, but perhaps this might help:
Oh, force is so forcefully close!
Aw, north is openly awesome, so drop your jaw!
I also think that it’s ironic that, on the vowel chart, north is “south” of force.
north has two ways of being pronounced, depending on whether it’s used in a rhotic accent or in a non-rhotic accent. In a non-rhotic accent such as those heard in the south of Wales, the West Midlands in England, India, the Caribbean or parts of the American South, in Boston and parts of Maine, north words feature the stressed vowel “aw,” or /ɔ ~ ɒ/. In some instances, such as some Southern US accents, non-rhotic north has schwa as an off-glide, e.g.[ɔə̯]. In a rhotic accent, such as those heard in some African-American accents and St. Louis, and in parts of the South, as well as in Scotland and parts of Ireland, north features the stressed vowel “awr,” or /ɔr ~ ɒr/. This book uses the standard phonetic notation of centring diphthongs offgliding from a nucleus on the periphery of the vowel space, in this case something in the range of [ɔ~ɒ~ɑ], moving toward a non-syllabic r-colored central vowel [ɚ̯~ɘ̯˞]. There are also accents of English that feature rhoticity with little or no off-glide, where the nucleus itself is rhotic, [ɔ˞ ~ ɒ˞ ~ ɑ˞]. The vowel in north is Free, so it can be in words with no consonant following it, apart from the silent/vowel ‹r› in its spelling: or, for, grantor, guarantor, nor, Thor, tor, war. (Note that that is the complete list of these words, excluding compounds like done-for, warlord.) The north Lexical Set only contains words with this vowel/diphthong followed by ‹r›; for those words without ‹r› in their spellinɡ, see thought.
Wells, who first defined the Lexical Sets, set out three subgroups for north:
- north Ⓐ in free position, and derivative words, an extremely small group of words! (e.g. or, for, nor, war)
- north Ⓑ in checked position, with a following consonant (e.g. resort, quart, warp)
- north Ⓒ with intervocalic /r/ before a vowel (e.g. aura, aural, Laura, Taurus)
n.b. In RP, north Ⓒ is merged with lot: [ɒ] (e.g. aural) while cloth Ⓒ is merged with force Ⓒ & thought: [ɔ] (e.g. coral=choral). In other accents this might not be so.
- 🕊 Free: does not require a following consonant, and can exist on its own
- Can be a “centring di