Scots and Scottish Standard English

Scots and Scottish Standard English (SSE) encompass a wide range of socially indexed varieties, which are bound together as ‘Scottish’, and distinguished from other varieties of English, by a particular set of vowel duration patterns, the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR). In this chapter, we exploit recent technological advances for automated speech corpus analysis to provide the first large-scale analysis of vowel timing in 234k tokens from Scottish SPADE, a new meta-corpus of naturally occurring speech from more than 700 speakers of regional Scots and SSE. We confirm that the SVLR is now largely limited to /i ʉ/, and show evidence consistent with subtle weakening over the twentieth century. However, at the same time, our analysis also reveals a new and unexpected general Scottish pattern of very short vowels (an Anti-Voicing Effect) where lengthening occurs in other accents of English, which serves to maintain a clearly distinctive phonological character for Scottish English.