7 The BATH Lexical Set
The bath lexical set is one of those sets that can only be found in Checked syllables. We find bath in either stressed or unstressed syllables. Like the cloth lexical set, bath is merged in most accents with another lexical set; there are very few accents where bath is pronounced with its own, unique vowel. For the most part, bath is either merged with the trap lexical set—which is generally the case in the accents of North America and the North of England—or with the palm lexical set, as found in the non-rhotic accents in the South and Southeast of England, as well as in varieties found in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia. In these accents, palm is also merged with start. In some accents of Scotland, trap, bath and palm are all merged as one.
bath evolved in England, first as a lengthened version (allophone) of the trap vowel in certain specific settings. Over time, those lengthened vowels moved back to merge with palm, and, as these English accents were non-rhotic, with start. As this was associated with what were then the high prestige accents of the south of England, and RP in particular, bath frequently has served as a mark not only of accent identity, but also of social status. This book primarily focuses on vowel quality as it relates to the lexical sets, but since length has such a significant role in bath’s development, it is worth noting that in some accents where trap and palm/start/bath sound essentially the same, they are recognized as having different lengths, with trap being short, and bath et al having the potential for length.
One can’t discuss bath without also speaking of distribution. While exhaustive lists have been compiled of which words are (or have been) part of Received Pronunciation’s implementation of bath, other accents may not be the same. RP also has some words that are inconsistent in their pronunciation, which Wells dubbed as bath prime; these are words in free variation, where multiple pronunciations of a word are tolerated as being acceptable.
A study[1] of bath in Cardiff, Wales gives an interesting sociolinguistic perspective on how the lexical set is changing in one community. With evolving social expectations around class, speech and identity, some middle class bath pronunciations (traditionally merged with palm/start) are shifting towards one that is associated with the working class (i.e. merged with trap). Though middle class Cardiff speakers in the study said almost all bath words with palm/start, a small list of bath words, such as answer, example, chance, advantage, are now being pronounced with trap. However, the evidence also shows that some working class pronunciations in that same community have shifted towards that which is traditionally associated with the middle and upper classes (i.e. some bath words, such as after, last, class are pronounced with palm/start.) In fact, among working class speakers, a far greater number of commonly used words in the bath Lexical Set ar