Vowels

The vowels of Scottish English are: . Describing these vowels is complicated by the fact that they show two distinct but intersecting systems of lexical incidence typical of Scottish Standard English and Scots, which cannot be captured by using Wells’ (1982) lexical sets alone (e.g. Macafee 2003: 139). The picture is further complicated by Scots showing some regional differences for certain vowels. I therefore use three tables to illustrate the vowels of Scottish English. Table 1 shows the phonetic realizations of the vowels of Scottish Standard English together with variants typical of Urban Scots found in Glasgow, which is similar in many, but not all respects, to that of Edinburgh and across the Central Belt (e.g. Macafee 1994: 23–24). Table 2 gives the view from Scots, by showing Scots lexical incidence (after Johnston 1997). The column in the middle reflects the ‘system’ that is found in most Urban Scots speakers in Glasgow, that is certain vowels whose categories, if not realizations, are largely ‘shared’ across Scots and Scottish Standard English, and others which may alternate. Table 3 gives a very broad overview of regional variation in Scots across Central, Southern and Northern dialects according to Scots lexical incidence, which may be translated by detailed reference to Johnston (1997: 453–499); further details cannot be given here. All the tables emphasize phonetic realization, although inevitably the symbols are also used to represent phonemic categories, as in Table 2. After some deliberation I have chosen in general to use narrower transcriptions on the grounds that broader (and more abstract) symbols provoke impressions which may be potentially misleading phonetically and phonologically. This leads to the less usual representation of Scots BIT with  as opposed to /I/, and following from this BET with .