Variant of English pronunciation in the UK

On YouTube, I noticed a channel "RateMyTakeaway" with a man with interesting pronunciation

One example, at 1:26 in this video:

https://youtu.be/Z7YM7iYtFRY?t=86

He says (as far as I can understand):

no thank, you love, I'm sweet enough

no thank a lot, I'm sweet enough

He pronounces "love" or "lot" as /lov/ and "enough" as /ɪˈnof/ and basically all his speech is a little bit weird and in some way musical.

Can someone please tell me how today's linguists describe it? Or if it's just normal English and I do not have enough experience of real English in the UK?

Solution 1:

Unsplit FOOT-STRUT has /ʊ/ in both

Yes, it’s a “normal” form of English that’s commonly heard in various Northern accents. It just isn’t “BBC English”.

Specifically, you’re listening to a speaker who happens to lack the now-common FOOT-STRUT split that you must be expecting to hear in those words.

Speakers who now have the FOOT-STRUT split have rounded /ʊ/ in words from the FOOT side of this split like in puss, push, put, pull, full, foot, good, book, would, wool, wolf.
But speakers who now have the FOOT-STRUT split have unrounded /ʌ/ in words from the STRUT side of this split like in pus, putt, pun, cut, hut, cull, hull, dull, lull, flood, blood.

Before the FOOT-STRUT split, and even today in those speakers like him who lack it, all those words have the same rounded vowel. This fellow simply doesn’t have that split. No big deal.

Danny Malin

As identified in comments, the speaker is Danny Malin, who comes from Barnsley and now lives in Leeds, both in the Yorkshire region of northern England. The North has its own accents which differ a good deal from what you would hear on the BBC. You can read up on the Yorkshire dialect if you’d like. The actor Sean Bean is also a Yorkshireman. That Wikipedia article mentions that:

Yorkshire people are said to have a strong sense of regional identity and have been viewed to identify more strongly with their county than their country. The Yorkshire dialect and accent is distinctive, although use of dialect words is receding.

Phonetic Complications

Actual phonetic realizations are much, much more complicated than just this. Both /ʊ/ and /ʌ/ can and do come out “every which way” you can imagine when it comes to real speech.

In Geordie, General American, and Southern Michigan accents, /ʊ/ becomes [ʊ̞].
In Cockney, /ʊ/ is sometimes fronted to [ʊ̈].
In Estuary English, /ʊ/ is often advanced to [ʊ̈ ~ ʏ], or advanced and lowered to [ɵ ~ ʏ̞].
In Multicultural London, Estuary English, and rural white Southern American, /ʊ/ can be [ʏ] but the height varies between near-close [ʏ] and close-mid [ʏ̞]
In some accents, /ʌ/ is fronted to [ɜ].
In other accents, /ʌ/ is both fronted and lowered to [ɐ] or [ɐ̟].

Other possible influences here include the FATHER-BOTHER merger, the LOT-CLOTH split, and the THOUGHT–FOOT merger. Wikipedia writes that:

The THOUGHT–FOOT merger is a merger of the English vowels /ɔː/ and /ʊ/ that occurs in morphologically closed syllables in Cockney, rendering fought homophonous with foot as [ˈfʊt]. It is possible only in fast speech.

I imagine this accounts for what you’re hearing happen in his enough.

Unjust Social Opprobrium

Sadly, this fellow may be looked down upon by certain speakers who happen to possess the split that he lacks. This happens in part because the split does occur in quite a few commonly heard North American and British accents like those of Canadian English, Californian English, and Standard Southern British English, and so speakers lacking this split are sometimes stigmatized because of their native natural accents.

Such stigmatization is lamentably common towards speakers of Cockney, Georgie, and various Northern English dialects who lack this split, and sometimes even to certain speakers of Estuary English and Multicultural London who share this characteristic, perhaps under influence of the same.

It is unkind and unfair to think of these speakers as uneducated just because they don’t sound like the way certain individuals think you are “supposed” to speak.

It’s perfectly normal to speak this way in those accents where it is a standard feature, like in this fellow’s. He is a native speaker in full command of his own language.

If you listen closely, you’ll hear that he also has other frequently stigmatized features like his unstressed pronunciation of the weak pronoun my as /mi/. This is another perfectly common, natural, and unjustly ridiculed feature of many British dialects ranging from Cockney to the many accents of Northern English. You can read about the stigma problem there at that link, but it also happens with Cockney English.

Notes

love is typically /lʌv/ — and not /lov/ like the first part of loaves without the /z/.
enough is typically /əˈnʌf/ — and not /əˈnof/ like an oaf might be.