Advances in Sociophonetics

chapter 3

Derhoticisation in Scottish English

A sociophonetic journey

Jane Stuart-Smith*, Eleanor Lawson** and James M. Scobbie**

* English Language / Glasgow University Laboratory of Phonetics,

University of Glasgow

** CASL Research Centre, Queen Margaret University Edinburgh

This paper presents the rewards of a sociophonetic journey by focusing on

fine-grained variation in Scottish English coda /r/. We synthesize the results of

some 15 years of research and provide a sociophonological account of variation

and change in this feature. We summarize observations on coda /r/ in Scottish

English across the twentieth century, which reveal a socially-constrained, long-

term process of derhoticisation in working-class speech, alongside strengthen-

ing of /r/ in middle-class speakers. We then consider the linguistic and social

factors involved, information from studies based on listener responses, the

acoustics of derhoticisation, and insights gained from a socio-articulatory ultra-

sound corpus collected. These different views of coda /r/ force us to consider

carefully the complex relationships between auditory, acoustic, and articula-

tory descriptions of (socially structured) speech. We conclude by discussing

the implications of our results for mental representations of speech and social

information for speaker-hearers in this community.

1. Introduction^1

This paper presents the concrete example of the rewards of a sociophonetic jour-
ney by focusing on an area which is particularly rich and informative – fine-
grained variation in Scottish English coda /r/. We synthesize the results of some

1. Jane Stuart-Smith is grateful to the editors for their comments and patience, and to audi-
   ences at the Workshop on Sociophonetics (Pisa), and at seminars at the Universities of Oxford,
   Stanford, and Berkeley, for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper. The research pre-
   sented here was supported by awards to Jane Stuart-Smith from the Leverhulme Trust (F/179/
   AX), the AHRC, and the ESRC (R000239757), and to James M. Scobbie and Jane Stuart-Smith,
   from the ESRC, RES-000-22-2032 and also to Eleanor Lawson, RES-062-23-3246. This article
   has associated sound files and ultrasound video files for Figures 6, 9, 11, 12 and 13. Please find
   them on http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/silv.15.media