Major issues in current research

Good summaries of previous phonetic, phonological and sociolinguistic research on Scottish English may be found in Aitken (1984) and Macafee (1997). The most recent fundamental research into the phonetics and phonology of Scottish English has been carried out by James Scobbie (Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh), who is concentrating on empirical investigation of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule using articulatory and acoustic phonetic analysis (e.g. Scobbie, Hewlett and Turk 1999), but who is also working on other aspects of Scottish English, such as the voicing contrast as reflected in Voice Onset Time (VOT) systems in Shetlandic. Closely related to Scobbie’s work is that of Ben Matthews who looked at the acquisition of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule in Edinburgh children. The reader is referred to the full bibliography on the CD-ROM for the relevant studies.

Much other current research on the phonology of Scottish English is concerned with the interrelation of accent and user. Dominic Watt (Aberdeen) is developing research on accent and identity, looking specifically at phonetic and phonological features of Scottish English on the Scottish/English Border, as illustrated by the inhabitants of Berwick upon Tweed. Attitudes and accent change have been investigated recently by Karen Torrance (2002). She tracked the relationship between incoming diffusing features such as /th/-fronting in Glaswegian and attitudes of speakers using such features towards different regional accents of English. Her complex results show that attitudes seem to relate to language use for certain speakers only, thus highlighting the role of the individual in this process. Call centres, outlets of companies which conduct their business with customers using the telephone, have flourished in the Central Belt of Scotland. Features of Scottish English in call centre interaction is thus an obvious but neglected area of research which formed the focus of Suzy Orr’s (2003) study. She found some evidence of accommodation in Glaswegian agents to their callers.

Phonological variation and change in the Scottish English of Glasgow is the subject of my own research with colleagues Claire Timmins, Eleanor Lawson and Viktoria Eremeeva (e.g. Stuart-Smith 2003), which tackles some of the issues raised above and others including sound change in Glaswegian, real time change in Glaswegian, social factors and sound change, mobility and dialect contact in Glaswegian, and acoustic analysis in sociolinguistic investigation. Most of my work has concentrated on consonant change, but Eremeeva (2002) started the work of analyzing vowels in the 1997 corpus. The first phase of the work, which took 11 consonants and considered them both singly and together, has identified innovation and change led by working-class adolescents, with few indications of gendered distribution. What emerges from these results is the extent to which Urban Scots is developing as a dynamic mixture of vigorous local and non-local features. Exactly how and why the dialect is changing in these ways remains the subject of further research.

I am very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for supporting the data analysis with a research grant (F/179/AX) and the AHRB for supporting its writing up with a research leave grant. Thanks are due to Claire Timmins who acted as researcher on the Leverhulme project, and to Wolf-Gerrit Fruh who compiled the Census statistics. I am grateful to Clive Upton for his editing, and to Caroline Macafee, Claire Timmins, Suzy Orr, and Dom Watt who commented on an earlier draft. All errors and opinions remain my own.