68 Jane Stuart-Smith, Eleanor Lawson and James M. Scobbie
The main findings were:- The consonant innovations were strongly constrained by linguistic factors and
by several extralinguistic factors including: participation in anti-school social
practices, such as adopting Glasgow street style in place of school uniform;
strong psychological and emotional engagement with the London-based TV
soap opera, EastEnders; reported contact with friends and relatives in England;
and more weakly, with positive attitudes to London accents. - The vowel variables showed almost exclusively significant effects for linguistic
factors, with very little evidence for social factors of any kind. - The results for derhoticisation of postvocalic /r/ were split according to speech
style. (i) In spontaneous speech derhoticisation patterned like the vowel vari-
ables: the predominant effects were for the linguistic factors, with very little
evidence for social factors. (ii) In read speech derhoticisation showed a similar
pattern to the consonant innovations: both linguistic and social factors were
significantly correlated. Plain vowels for /Vr/ were more likely in unstressed
prepausal position (e.g. better#), and they were linked with anti-school social
practices, strong psychological engagement with EastEnders, and the ability
to correctly identify their own local accent from a recording, amongst other
factors (including participation in sport and playing football); only dialect
contact proved to be consistently non significant.
To summarize: there is no evidence that direct contact with non-rhotic English
speakers promotes derhoticisation. But indirect contact with non-rhotic London
English, by psychologically engaging with a TV drama set in London, does seem
to be a factor, but only for a particular speech style, reading a list of words out loud.
The results for derhoticisation indicate that the change is not entirely driven
by system internal forces. At the same time, they contribute to our understanding
of media influence on speech more generally. The evidence from Glasgow shows
that only some phonological features are linked to engagement with the television.
This supports an extension of existing models of media influence in mass com-
munications theory to language, specifically that speaker/viewers use their social
and linguistic knowledge to ‘decode’ televised speech, so here Glaswegians parse
EastEnders through the filter of their own experiences as active members of actual
speech communities within the city (Hall 1980; Gunter 2000; Stuart-Smith 2011).
The assumption is that viewers largely filter out aspects of media language which
are irrelevant in terms of social meaning and linguistic structure (which is prob-
ably the majority of most experienced media material). But sometimes a viewer’s
existing features may be enhanced provided that there are points of reciprocity
and alignment with the viewer’s own local social context and linguistic system
(which is probably quite rare). So the consonant innovations look like diffusing