Chapter 3. Derhoticisation in Scottish English: A sociophonetic journey 69
features ‘from outside’ the dialect, hopping north from London. While there is
some support for dialect contact being involved, closer up they look fundamen-
tally like local system-internal variation which is, as it were, bubbling up, develop-
ing a variety of social symbolic functions, which in turn speed up the changes in
progress (Eckert 2000). Media influence represents an additional factor through
which speakers enhance their existing variation, thus fuelling their rapid accelera-
tion through the system and the community.
Derhoticisation has been underway for many decades in Scottish English,
apparently without influence of English English. Only in read speech is derhoti-
cisation linked with indirect contact with London English via the TV. This helps
unpick the processes of media influence further. When we recorded the work-
ing-class adolescents reading the wordlists, rather than read them ‘correctly’ (i.e.
approximate Standard Scottish English, e.g. Labov 1972), our informants produced
distinctly non-standard variants. Overall a specific position, or stance towards the
task and fieldworker was taken (Jaffe 2009), as if distancing themselves and their
speech from the University. The wordlists were rattled off, punctuated with laugh-
ter; they were highly performative, in the sense of Baumann’s construction for an
audience (Coupland 2007). In terms of variation, the wordlists showed increased
use of consonant innovations, and more derhoticisation. Previous research on
stance-taking through language has noted that media representations can simplify
social-indexical relationships, and so speed up linguistic appropriation from the
media (see e.g. the spread of the catchphrase ‘Whassup?’ in American English;
Bucholtz 2009: 288). Aspects of language which index nuances of interpersonal
interaction, and subsequently local micro-social relationships, can then be used
in the media, e.g. in advertising, with much broader indexical referents.
We hypothesize that stance, and/or other kinds of social informativity of lin-
guistic variation (Pierrehumbert 2006; Eckert 2008), may be a determining factor
in whether speaker/viewers’ sociolinguistic systems may respond to media lan-
guage. The enhancement of viewers’ existing features may depend on the implicit
recognition, or mapping, of linguistic features indexing particular stances in
media language, with the possible indexing of stancetaking in their own interac-
tions. Crucially, being perceivers and producers of social variation, or being listen-
ers using their ‘speaking brain’ (Keith Johnson personal communication), is also
important here; Kuhl, e.g. (2010). The interesting point about the link between
engagement with the TV and derhoticisation is of course that this change has
never been interpreted as a contact-induced change. These results emphasize
the importance of the speaker/viewer’s local social-phonological system in the
decoding of televised speech. They also suggest mechanisms for how existing local
variation could become accelerated through indirect contact with accent features,
albeit through strong psychological and emotional engagement with a television