Mixing and fudging in Midland and Southern dialects of England

Among the most fruitful users of the findings of The Survey of English Dialects (SED) have been Peter Trudgill and J. K. Chambers. Rightly critical of the Survey on various points in the light of later, especially social dialectological practice, they have nevertheless used its material to good effect to provide evidence of various linguistic phenomena. It is two of these, the pronunciation compromise phenomena which they call ‘mixing’ and ‘fudging’, which are the subjects of this essay.