Publication: Regional (in-)variability of vowel space organisation in Scottish Standard English
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Date
2012
Authors
Schützler, Ole
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Publisher
Peter Lang
Abstract
In this chapter an analysis of psychoacoustically transformed and normalized acoustic vowel data from sixteen speakers of Scottish Standard English (SSE) are presented. Apart from a general discussion of the findings against the background of current textbook descriptions of the accent, special attention will be paid to possible effects the regional provenance of speakers has on the organisation of their vowel spaces. The three regions in question are Edinburgh, Northern Central Scotland (Stirlingshire, West Fife & South Angus) and the Northeast (Aberdeenshire). The resulting vowel plots correspond rather well to articulatory and impressionistic descriptions in the literature and share most of the characteristics of SSE, for instance a rather front /u/ and a considerably centralised /ɪ/. It can also be shown that with regard to some vowel features, the regional background of speakers plays a modest role. While the limitations of the corpus do not allow to generalise very far, the chapter points the direction to future research on regional variation within Scottish Standard English.
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Keywords
Scottish English, Phonetics, Sociolinguistics, Vowels