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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 1152

Part of General Paper Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Contact between standard accents of English: A multilevel approach to the expanding repertoires of speakers of Scottish Standard English in Edinburgh

Authors: Schützler, Ole
Submitted by: Schützler, Ole (University of Bamberg, Germany)

This paper presents selected results from a study of 27 middle-class speakers of Scottish Standard English (SSE) in Edinburgh who are exposed to a considerable amount of potential­ly anglicising contact with Southern Standard British English (SSBE). Unsur­pris­ingly, for these speakers the norm remains firmly SSE, i.e. the influence of SSBE does not result in the processes involved in koinéization, i.e. levelling or simplification (Trudgill 1986). Rather, it is argued, speakers expand their accent repertoires so that they effectively add another dimension to the well-known Scots-English continuum (e.g. Stuart-Smith 2008). They are thus able to shift – or rather, drift – between the standard accents of SSE and SSBE when the commu­nicative need arises.

Using a hierarchical generalized linear model (HGLM; Hox 2010), the study takes an inno­va­tive multilevel approach to assess the variation between tokens that are nested within styles and speakers. The focus is on the variable (r) in coda position (e.g. car, bird), and the following results are presented to substantiate the general claims made above:

1.Vocalisation of coda /r/ (“derhoticisation”, “r-loss”) is a function of gender: female speakers vocalise coda /r/ at a higher rate.

2.The phonetic choice between the traditional Scottish tap-variant [ɾ] and the friction­less continuant [ɹ] is a function of age: older speakers use a higher proportion of [ɾ].

3.Stylistic variation suggests that the (rhotic) SSE norm remains valid for all speak­ers.

4.Style interacts with age and gender: the factor wordlist results in less /r/-vocal­i­sation especially among younger male speakers.

In urban middle-class accents of Edinburgh the quasi-phonological process of /r/-vocalisation is reallocated to function as a marker of gender, while the phonetic choice between [ɾ] and [ɹ] is reallocated to function as a marker of age. Most interest­ingly, stylistic variation suggests that the SSE norm, while generally effective, differs signifi­cantly in strength between social groups: speakers’ systematically varying sensitivity to sty­lis­tically marked contexts follows patterns not observable in their general, i.e. overt, linguistic behaviour.

The paper will discuss possible consequences of these findings for the notions of variation and change in situations of contact between standard models of speech. Its theoretical and methodological implications are (1) that in certain types of contact situations novel sta­tis­ti­cal tools of analysis are needed to capture subtle patterns of variation that only emerge in­di­rect­ly in specific ‘marked’ contexts, and (2) that it can be more useful to think of contact as result­ing in expanded accent repertoires with a richer functionality, rather than as resulting in koinéization which invariably entails some degree of formal and func­tion­al loss.

References:

Hox, Joop. 2010. Multilevel Analysis. Techniques and Applications. London: Routledge.

Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2008. Scottish English: Phonology. In: Bernd Kortmann & Clive Upton, eds. Varieties of English. Vol. 1: The British Isles. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 48-70.

Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.