Sounds of change: Dr Jane Stuart-Smith
Issued: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 11:28:00 BST
Dr Jane Stuart-Smith and a research team in the University’s School of Critical Studies are investigating the evolution of the Glasgow accent over the course of the century using state-of-the-art acoustic imaging technology.
‘Anyone having to deal with the spelling of English will have encountered traces of sound changes that have taken place in the past,’ explains Dr Stuart-Smith. ‘We no longer pronounce ‘k’ in knife, or ‘gh’ in night, for example. Sound changes in progress may also be noticeable as variable pronunciations favoured by younger speakers: for example, the use of ‘f’ for ‘th’ in words like think. This fine-grained phonetic variability is a prerequisite for sound change. But despite being able to trace the outcome of changes over time in written historical records, and being able to observe variation in speech in detail at particular points in time, a fundamental aspect of sound change remains mysterious: how do patterns of fine phonetic variation over time contribute to sound change?’
The city of Glasgow has traditionally been an important centre for the study of sociolinguistics. Post-war urban regeneration led to social upheaval, which may also have created disturbances in linguistic patterning. The city’s recent social history together with a distinctive dialect vocabulary make Glaswegian particularly suitable for investigating the interrelationships between fine phonetic variation and different aspects of language use.
This latest research, ‘Sounds of the City’, is supported with a £235,000 grant from the Leverhulme Trust, and will study the evolution of speech in Glasgow over the course of the past century. The research team will reap the benefits of pioneering work carried out in the 1970s by Professor Ronald Macaulay, who recorded and catalogued numerous samples of Glaswegian speech, leaving behind a unique audio resource. Now, Dr Stuart-Smith’s team can study phonetic change across the generations by applying new scientific research techniques to the old recordings.
‘We will extend the methods of the real-time study of speech by building an electronic corpus of Glasgow dialect using a high-speed searchable database, and developing and applying the latest phonetic and statistical methods to analyse it,’ says Dr Stuart-Smith.
Once the team has evidence of how the Glaswegian accent has changed, they will move on to looking at the part that linguistic and social factors may have played in this.
‘Language change is known to result from the interplay of linguistic and social factors,’ Dr Stuart-Smith says. ‘The actual linguistic context is important for whether a sound will change and how that might happen. At the same time, there are also many social pressures on language change, ranging from the kinds of social groups that people belong to, and whether speakers have the opportunity to mix with speakers of other dialects, to the kinds of social personae that people express and develop when they communicate with people every day.’
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