This volume provides a sociophonetic study of the urban accent of Aberdeen. It shows how dialect contact has led to adoption of innovative supraregional accent features and the marginalisation of traditional variants. It uses an innovative method to assess the importance of the individual speaker in innovating and conserving the local accent.
This book is the first major sociophonetic work on the urban accent of Aberdeen in North-East Scotland. The study shows how the accent has changed following the large-scale immigration from other parts of Scotland and the UK since the 1970s. It is rooted in a dialect contact framework and based on sociolinguistic interviews with a stratified sample of 44 Aberdonians. The study uses an innovative method to assess the importance of the individual speaker in innovating and conserving the local accent. Based on six phonological variables, it shows how the traditional variants are replaced or marginalised, supraregional forms gain ground and strongly marked forms typical of Glaswegian or London English are added to the local feature pool.
Aberdeen - Accent - Acoustic phonetics - Conservation - Consonants - Dialect contact - Innovation - Language change - Phonology - Scotland - Scots - Scottish English - Scottish Standard English - sociolinguistics - Sociophonetics - Vowels
Thorsten Brato works in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Regensburg. His research interests include sociophonetics, World Englishes and language variation and change.
