Research and innovation

Sounds of change

Issued: Wed, 07 Mar 2012 23:59:00 GMT

Dr Jane Stuart-Smith and a research team in the 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.

Dr Stuart-Smith was the first researcher to examine changes in Scottish pronunciation in reference to changes to the English spoken in England, specifically southern England. Her sociophonetic study of Scottish speech, carried out in the late 1990s, surprised many by showing similarities in evolution between Scots English and southern England English.

Dr Stuart-Smith speaking about innovations in Glasgow speech:

Dr Stuart-Smith speaking about innovations in Glasgow speech

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 by Professor Ronald Macaulay in Glasgow in the 1970s. Professor Macaulay recorded and catalogued numerous samples of Glaswegian speech, leaving behind a unique audio resource. This presented Dr Stuart-Smith and her team with an ideal opportunity to study phonetic change across the generations by applying new scientific research techniques to the old recordings.

Once they have evidence of how the Glaswegian accent has changed, the team will move on to looking at the part that linguistic and social factors may have played in this.

Dr Stuart-Smith: 'Language change is known to result from the interplay of linguistic and social factors. The actual linguistic context of a sound is important in whether a sound will change and how that might happen. Linguistic constraints can include: any adjacent sounds, the kind of phrase that the sound occurs within, it also incorporates the intonation of the phrase, or where in the phrase the sound occurs: all these factors can affect sound change. At the same time, there are also many social pressures on language change, ranging from the kinds of social groups that people belong to, the strength and persistence of social networks, 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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