Chapter 3. Derhoticisation in Scottish English: A sociophonetic journey 63
instances of both variants. Middle-class speakers tended to be rhotic, with both
older and younger speakers favouring postalveolar and/or retroflex approximants,
especially younger middle-class girls. (If articulatory /r/ was produced by work-
ing-class speakers, it was usually a tap.)
Overall, the evidence for the twentieth century suggests the development of a
socially-stratified rhotic-derhotic continuum in the Scottish English of the Central
Belt, with weakly articulated, or vocalized, rhotics in working-class speech con-
trasting with audibly strong rhotic approximants in the aspiring middle-classes.
We now turn to the sociolinguistic evidence for the progress of derhoticisation,
and the corresponding development of the continuum, in the early 21st century.
- Derhoticisation in Scottish English in the 2000s
In 2003, a further corpus of Glaswegian was collected from an age-stratified
sample of working-class speakers from the same area as the 1997 corpus (e.g.
Stuart-Smith 2006; Stuart-Smith & Timmins 2010). Figure 2 shows the substantial
derhoticisation that was found in these speakers. Like Romaine (1978), derhoti-
cisation was more prevalent in read wordlists. This stylistic shift away from the
regional standard norm (rhoticity) in a reading task confirms that this feature still
carries the kind of covert prestige suggested by Johnston.
0%
1F10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%100%1M 2F 2M 3F 3M 4F 4M[Vh]
[V]
[V^]
[r]Figure 2. Distribution of variants of postvocalic /r/ in 48 speakers of Glaswegian in 2003,
n = 1889. M = male, F = female; 1 = 10–11 years; 2 = 12–13 years; 3 = 14–15 years; 4 = 40–60
years. [r] = articulated variants of /r/; [V^] = vowels with audible pharyngealisation/
uvularisation; [V] = plain vowel; [Vh] = vowel followed by audible frication.