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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1335

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

Political party affiliation and phonetic variation in the vowels of Scottish politicians

Authors: Hall-Lew, Lauren (1); Friskney, Ruth (1); Scobbie, James (2)
Submitted by: Hall-Lew, Lauren (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)

Previous work has argued that lexico-phonetic variables may be symbolic resources for a politician’s construction of a political identity (Hall-Lew et al. 2010). Scottish Members of the UK Parliament (MPs) are particularly well-placed to exploit sociophonetic variation in this way, given the spectrum of linguistic differences between Standard Scottish English (SSE) and Southern Standard British English (SSBE). Wells (1982:394) describes 18th century Scottish MPs taking elocution lessons to be understood at the UK Parliament, and Scobbie et al. (1999) observe accommodation towards Received Pronunciation by Scottish MPs more recently. A notable exception is the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) Alex Salmond, who appears to resist this tendency towards ‘anglicised’ speech (Carr and Brulard 2006). One question is to what extent political affiliation accounts for his exceptionality. The SNP defined itself in the last UK election as “Scotland’s party”; in contrast, Scottish Labour is part of the broader UK Labour party. Scottish Labour MPs may have greater motivation than SNP MPs to negotiate between different aspects of their professional identities – to give voice to their Scottish constituencies while simultaneously representing the voice of a UK political party.
One difference between varieties is that there is a phonemic contrast in SSBE between TRAP, BATH and PALM classes while in SSE the low central vowel space is represented by a single phonemic class, CAT (Stuart-Smith 2008). Allophony within that class, however, renders realisations of CAT available for stylistic purposes; this variation has been previously shown to correlate with both social class and regional differences within Scotland. By controlling for class and region, we investigate whether it further correlates with political affiliation. Our analysis is based on seven politicians currently in the UK Parliament – one politically ‘neutral’ Southern English MP, three Scottish SNP MPs and three Scottish Labour MPs. The results show SNP MPs realise tokens of CAT with minimal F2 variation while Scottish Labour MPs vary their productions widely; furthermore, this variability appears to span the F2 range of the SSBE low vowel space without adopting their phonemic splits. We conclude that this difference is motivated by the Scottish Labour speakers’ relatively greater need to negotiate different layers of national identity in their professional lives.
References:
Carr, P. and I. Brulard. 2006. Anglo-English influences on Scottish Standard English Speakers: TRAP / BATH / PALM / START and LOT / CLOTH / THOUGHT / NORTH / FORCE. Scottish Language, 25:31-45.
Hall-Lew, Lauren, Elizabeth Coppock and Rebecca L. Starr. (2010). Indexing Political Persuasion: Variation in the Iraq Vowels. American Speech. 85(1): 91–102.
Scobbie, James M., Nigel Hewlett and Alice E. Turk. (1999). "Standard English in Edinburgh and Glasgow: the Scottish Vowel Length Rule revealed." In Urban voices: accent studies in the British Isles, eds. Gerard J. Docherty and Paul Foulkes. London: Arnold, Oxford University Press.
Stuart-Smith, Jane. (2008). Scottish English: phonology. in Bernd Kortmann and Clive Upton (eds.), Varieties of English: The British Isles. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 48-70.
Wells, J.C. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.