ABSTRACT
In the area of the East Midlands where the author grew up, South Derbyshire, there is, or at least was, a traditional-dialect pronunciation feature which seems to have been largely ignored by the literature. This feature involves words such as shirt, worse, burnt, which in most English accents contain the vowel phoneme /з/, usually realised as a mid-central or mid-centralised front unrounded long vowel. In parts of the East Midlands these words were traditionally pronounced with an open or half-open back rounded vowel of the type which usually realises the /ɒ/ phoneme. This resulted, for example, in shirt and shot being homophones at least for some traditional-dialect speakers of the area.
