The Black Country dialect is spoken by many people in the Black Country, a region covering most of the four Metropolitan Boroughs of Dudley, Sandwell, Walsall and Wolverhampton. It also influences the accents of towns and villages in the rural counties to the north, south and west of the region. It is distinct from the Brummie dialect, which originates from the neighbouring city of Birmingham. Description In general, the Black Country dialect has resisted many of the changes from Middle English that are seen in other dialects of British English, resembling particularly Northern English and West Country English. There is no trap-bath split, so there is no /ɑː/ in words like bath, grass, etc., so to rhyme with math(s), gas, etc. Like most British accents (except Queen's English), there are glottal stops. /æ/ is uniformly pronounced as [a]. There is no foot-strut split, so that cut rhymes with put, and both use /ʊ/. There is no NG-coalescence, so singer rhymes with finger, with both commonly pronounced with [ŋg~ŋk]. Indeed, the accent can be analysed as lacking the phoneme /ŋ/ with that sound instead being regarded as an allophone of /n/. The Black Country accent is non-rhotic, and draw and drawer are nearly homophones. Final unstressed vowels are further reduced, such as /wɪndə/ for window and /fə/ for far. Final fricative consonants can be voiced and so /s/ is pronounced as [z] and /f/ as [v], for example, bus is pronounced buzz. The traditional Black Country dialect preserves many archaic traits of Early Modern English and even Middle English and can be very confusing for outsiders. Thee, thy and thou are still in use, as is the case in parts of Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire. "'Ow B'ist," meaning "How are you?" is a greeting contracted from "How be-est thou?" with the typical answer being "'Bay too bah," ("I be not too bad"), meaning "I am not too bad." "I haven't seen her" becomes "I ay sid 'er." Black Country dialect often uses "ar" where other parts of England use "yes" (this is common as far away as Yorkshire). Similarly, the local version of "you" is pronounced , rhyming with "so." Among older speakers ye is used for you, as it is in most northern parts of England and Scotland. It is also common for older speakers to say "Her" instead of "She" ("'Er day did 'ah?", meaning "She didn't did she?").