64 Jane Stuart-Smith, Eleanor Lawson and James M. Scobbie
Only six years had elapsed by the time we collected the 2003 corpus, so it is dif-
ficult to know the extent to which variation over this time reflects real-time change
(Labov 1994). Comparison of the percentage of use of the plain vowel variant for
coda /r/ for individual speakers in 1997 (8 children) with those recorded in 2003
(36 children) suggests that derhoticisation is a very gradual change in progress.
The speakers from 1997, shown as dark bars, fit within the distribution of the
speakers from 2003; see Figure 3.01020304050607080901001 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 2201020304050607080901001 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22Figure 3. Percentage of the plain vowel variant for coda /r/ used by 42 speakers, 36
recorded in 2003 (pale bars) and 8 recorded in 1997 (dark bars). The first chart shows
female speakers, the second male speakers.Previous studies had concentrated on the two cities at either end of the Central
Belt. In 2007 a corpus of speech and articulatory data (tongue movement) was
collected from working-class adolescents in Livingston, a new town, in between,
but lying closer to Edinburgh than Glasgow (Figure 1); Lawson et al. (2008).
Auditory transcription showed some derhoticisation, but on average only 20% of