Consonants

 in SING

This phoneme is not part of the inventory of dialects in the south-western corner of the North as here defined, i.e. from Liverpool and South Lancashire as far across as Sheffield. Here,  is only ever pronounced before a velar consonant, e.g. in singing  . Thus  in these varieties is an allophonic variant of /n/. Speakers in other parts of the North would often have  for the bound morpheme -ing, but would have  elsewhere, thus singing would be  . In the areas which retain the velar nasal plus pronunciation,  occurs as a less careful, stigmatized variant, whilst  is perceived as correct, almost certainly because of the spelling. The  pronunciation was not perceived as incorrect until the later 18^th century, when it began to be proscribed in pronouncing dictionaries. John Rice in his Introduction to the Art of Reading with Energy and Propriety (1765) writes that whilst /in/ is “taught in many of Our Grammars” it is “a viscious and indistinct Method of Pronunciation, and ought to be avoided”. However, well into the 20^th century, this pronunciation was also perceived to be stereotypical of the English aristocracy, whose favorite pastimes were huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’. In the words something and anything, a variant pronunciation  is heard throughout the North, though in the North-east, the nasal may be dropped altogether to give . These words are not used in traditional northern dialects, where the equivalents would be summat and nowt, so the  pronunciation here is perhaps hypercorrect.