Advances in Sociophonetics

Chapter 3. Derhoticisation in Scottish English: A sociophonetic journey 83

e.g. an apical tap. (We have no direct evidence from this particular set of ultra-
sound data because taps are too fast for the slow frame rate we used). The gradual
loss of rhoticity in the history of English English also appears to have started in
unstressed syllables (Dobson 1957), and even middle-class speakers who might
otherwise be deemed thoroughly rhotic also show audible weakening in this posi-
tion (Stuart-Smith 2003).

6.2 Tongue configuration and derhoticisation

Derhoticisation probably does not only arise from differences in timing, but also
in tongue shape. In the Glasgow 1997 data, those who were likely to derhoticise
were also more likely to use taps, if they showed articulated /r/, whereas more
rhotic-sounding speakers used more approximants, especially auditorily-strong
rhotics which we transcribed as retroflex approximants [ɻ] (Stuart-Smith 2003).
Lawson et al. (2011) carried out a further investigation using the eastern Central
Belt ECB08 corpus. The design consisted of two parallel analyses of the same data.
The first was an audio-rating analysis of randomized tokens, carried out using
the independent classification of tokens via a Praat multiple forced choice interface
by two rhotic Scottish-English speakers, both originally from the western Central
Belt. Each judge classified the same subset of instances of prepausal postvocalic
/r/ (beer, bear, far, bar, par, purr, fur, for, bore, poor (sure, pure), along a 5-point

0

Stressed non

utterance-final

% of/r/ tokens that are nonrhotic

in each position

Stressed

utterance-final

Unstressed non

utterance-final

Unstressed

utterance-final

Stressed

utterance-final

after breaking

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Figure 10. Percentage of (un)stressed tokens in utterance-final and non utterance-final
position that were audibly nonrhotic. n = 1248. From Lawson et al. (2008).