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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1161

Part of Session 166: Indigenous Minority Languages in Urban Areas (Other abstracts in this session)

Scottish Gaelic in Glasgow: phonetic variation and local identity

Authors: Nance, Claire
Submitted by: Nance, Claire (University of Glasgow, United Kingdom)

Scottish Gaelic is often associated with rural areas of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Recently however, this geography has changed dramatically and currently nearly half of all Gaelic speakers live in central urban Scotland (MacKinnon 2010). The demographic makeup of these speakers has also changed: previously Gaelic speakers living in urban areas were economic migrants from Highland areas (Withers 1998), but since the opening of Gaelic medium schools in central lowland Scotland, many young people from urban backgrounds are growing up as fluent Gaelic speakers. This paper draws on ethnographic and phonetic analyses of Gaelic-speaking teenagers in Glasgow.

The teenagers in this study come from largely English-speaking families, but have learned Gaelic through immersion primary and secondary education. Whilst they are fluent Gaelic speakers, they choose to speak English among themselves. I here present a phonetic analysis of the vowel /u/ in their Gaelic and English productions. Data are from 21 individual interviews conducted with 13-14 year olds in Glasgow. Tokens of /u/ were labelled in Praat and measures of the first three formants were derived in Emu-R. (Harrington 2010).

I here address three research questions: [1] what is the outcome of contact between Glaswegian English and Scottish Gaelic? [2] Is Glaswegian Gaelic a distinct new variety? [3] Do phonetic productions pattern with local and social identities in a language that these young people never speak to one another? In order to assess the possibility of a new Glaswegian Gaelic dialect, the young people from Glasgow are compared to 18 Gaelic speakers from the Isle of Lewis, a traditional Gaelic-speaking area. 12 of the participants from Lewis were also aged 13-14, and the 6 others were older native speakers of the language.

Results of the phonetic analysis are as follows: Glaswegian Gaelic vowel productions are different from Highland and Island Gaelic, indicating that a new distinct variety of the language could be developing. For one group of Glaswegian speakers, Gaelic vowel productions are similar to their English vowel productions, indicating that their Gaelic may be influenced by language contact from English. However, this is not always the case: a second group of young Glaswegians produce acoustically different vowels in English and Gaelic. There is a relationship between the participants’ friendship groups and the phonetic realisation of their vowels.

The result that phonetic variation patterns with social identity in the Gaelic of these young Glaswegians is striking: it appears that identity can influence phonetic production even in a language that young people do not speak to one another. I discuss the implications of these results for studies of language variation and identity, and studies of new dialect formation.

Harrington, J., 2010. Phonetic analysis of speech corpora. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

MacKinnon, K., 2010. Scottish Gaelic today. In M. Ball and N. Müller, eds., The Celtic languages, 2^nd edn. London: Routledge.

Withers, C., 1998. Urban Highlanders. East Linton: Tuckwell Press.