Stress

Non-reduction of unstressed vowels

Wood (1987: 126–127) notes as a very salient characteristic of CFE the marked tendency not to reduce vowels in unstressed syllables as consistently as is done in RP (e.g. in CFE possess is typically [pəu^Izes]). He maintains that this is typical across the social scale, and indeed such phenomena were noted across my own data (mainly from middle-class and L1 speakers). While the issue is too complex to analyze in detail here, it most likely relates to innovative changes in RP at the ‘core’ of the English-language speech community, with more conservative varieties like CFE, SAfE, and American, Caribbean and Northern English Englishes being at the periphery.