In this talk I discuss two levelling processes due to dialect contact: The FOOT-STRUT split in the East Midlands and the loss of H-dropping in West Cumbria. I apply sociophonetic methodology to investigate the changes and put them into social contexts. The former change takes a surprising movement: While we would expect the STRUT vowel to move to a more open position, it is mainly the FOOT vowel which is fronting and I show that this change is moving northwards. I use sophisticated vowel overlap measurements in order to investigate the split.

The second levelling process which I discuss takes us to Maryport, a town in West Cumbria. I show how social changes on the local and the national level influence the decrease of H-dropping in the community in the second half of the 20th century. Here, excerpts from the sociolinguistic interviews are used to interpret the data. Rehousing parts of the community in the 1960s and the reforms of the Thatcher years seem to have influenced the use of H-dropping quite dramatically in Maryport.