Sociophonetic Variation in Edinburgh

In 2019, I completed my undergraduate degree in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. My honours dissertation focussed on sociophonetic variation in Edinburgh. Specifically, I looked at how women in Leith, a (formerly independent) area of Edinburgh in the north of the city, produced the vowels /e/ and /o/ (as in FACE and GOAT). To conduct this analysis, I interviewed 15 women born between 1938 and 1994 – in addition studying their accent, I also learned a lot about the area and its history. I then transcribed and analysed the vowel tokens (looking at the formants, resonant frequencies which are commonly used to describe vowel sounds in phonetics). I found that, overall, that the women produce “Scottish” /e/ and /o/ (as monophthongs) rather than “English” ones, as described in some other studies.

While my undergraduate dissertation was not published, I used the same interview data in a published study on a different sociolinguistic variable strongly associated with Scotland: (HW). Traditionally, Scottish English speakers retain a constrast between in "which" and in "witch". To study this, I analysed 1400 tokens produced by the 15 women I interviewed in 2018, and by 3 other women interviewed by a different researcher in 2014. I found that, while there is no clear evidence that this contrast is being lost, there is a lot of social variation in how my participants pronounce this cluster. In terms of social class background, working class women tend to pronounce "which" and "witch" the same, while for middle class women they are different. But more interestingly, there are also differences within each category that are not necessarily easy to hear, but can be analysed on a spectrogram.

The full paper can be found here.