298 Lynn Clark and Graeme Trousdale
between strangers. It is therefore inappropriate to couple the sociolinguistic
interview with participant observation.
The informants were not questioned using a structured interview. In-
stead, the conversations that comprise the majority of the corpus were col-
lected in the summer of 2006, roughly 2 years into the participant observa-
tion, and centered on a sorting task that the informants were asked to
complete in small groups of friends^4. Consequently, no two recordings are
the same in this study. This does not necessarily mean, however, that the
data from these interviews are not comparable. It is “unlikely that any two
interviews will be the same no matter how structured the approach of the
researcher” (Moore 2003: 45). The resulting data consists of 38 hours of
recorded speech which have been fully transcribed and amounts to a corpus
of 360,000 words.
3.2. TH-Fronting in Scotland
Although Wells invokes ‘TH-Fronting’ to refer to ‘the replacement of the
dental fricatives [Ɵ, ð] with the labiodentals [f] and [v] respectively’ (Wells
1982: 328), we follow Stuart-Smith and Timmins (2006) who adopt the
term only with reference to the voiceless variants (because the voiced and
voiceless variants of (th) pattern differently in Scottish English). The first
reported evidence of TH-Fronting in Scotland is given by Macafee (1983:
54) as occasional and sporadic but the main body of research on TH-
Fronting in Scotland comes from the analysis of two corpora collected in
1997 and 2003, both of which form part of a large research project into
language variation and change in Glasgow (Stuart-Smith and Tweedie
2000). The spread of TH-Fronting has also recently been investigated in the
New Town of Livingston (Robinson 2005) which is situated approximately
15 miles from Edinburgh and 30 miles from Glasgow.
Accounts of TH-Fronting across Britain (e.g. Williams and Kerswill
1999; Kerswill 2003; Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2006) have correlated this
linguistic change in progress with ‘macro’ social factors such as age, sex
and social class and have typically found that this is a change that is being
led by working class, adolescent males. The data for (th) in WFHPB, when
stratified by age and sex^5 , are charted in Figure 2.
Although there are no speakers in the corpus older than 42 years old,
real time data from the Linguistic Atlas of Scotland (Mather and Speitel
1986) suggests that the labiodental variant is not a traditional feature of this