Violence has a financial dimension. War has devastating effects on a country's economy. Yet the greatest cost to society comes from a very different form of violence. It is not military conflict – but domestic violence – that has the highest cost worldwide. Conflict researchers Anke Hoeffler and James D. Fearon say that the resulting financial impacts are several times larger than the cost of war.

The new sociolinguistic study focusing on Mancunian accents, published today in the journal, Language Variation and Change, shows that the final vowel in words like happy, baby, chilly and city – known to linguists as ‘the happy vowel’) varies clearly by social class across Manchester. 

And, while Manchester has changed dramatically over the past few decades - socially, economically and culturally - some features of the city’s accent have remained remarkably stable, particularly in working-class speech.