Pre-R Dentalisation in Scotland

The spelling conventions for dental fricatives in Anglic languages (Scots and English) have a rich and complex history. However, the various – often competing – graphemic representations (<þ>, <ð>, <y> and <th>, among others) eventually settled on one digraph, <th>, for all contemporary varieties, irrespective of the phonemic distinction between /ð/ and /θ/. This single representation is odd among the languages’ fricatives, which tend to use contrasting graphemes (cf. <f> vs <v> and <s> vs <z>) to represent contrastive voicing, a sound pattern that emerged nearly a millennium ago. Close examinations of the scribal practices for English in the late medieval period, however, have shown that northern texts had begun to develop precisely this type of distinction for dental fricatives as well. Here /ð/ was predominantly represented by <y> and /θ/ by <th> (Jordan 1925; Benskin 1982). In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, this ‘Northern System’ collapsed, due to the northward spread of a London-based convention using exclusively <th> (Stenroos 2004). This article uses a rich body of corpus evidence for fifteenth-century Scots to show that, north of the North, the phonemic distinction was more clearly mirrored by spelling conventions than in any contemporary variety of English. Indeed, our data for Older Scots local documents (1375–1500) show a pattern where <y> progressively spreads into voiced contexts, while <th> recedes into voiceless ones. This system is traced back to the Old English positional preferences for <þ> and <ð> via subsequent changes in phonology, graphemic repertoire and letter shapes. An independent medieval Scots spelling norm is seen to emerge as part of a developing, proto-standard orthographic system, only to be cut short in the sixteenth century by top-down anglicisation processes.

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Revisiting Hebrides English

Clayton

2018

EWW

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This paper describes a study of phonetic variation in Hebrides English, a variety of English spoken in the Scottish Hebrides island chain. Study participants included 24 English-Scottish Gaelic bilinguals, ten male and 14 female, representing a range of ages and geographic origins within the Hebrides. Three features are considered: preaspiration, preglottalization, and T-glottalling. Preaspiration, once commonplace in some varieties of Hebridean English, is now found to be abundant only among older women, suggesting that the feature is obsolescent. By contrast, preglottalization and T-glottalling, already widespread in urban varieties of Scottish English, now appear to be making inroads in Hebrides English as well. The evidence therefore suggests that Hebridean English is undergoing significant changes, though the precise trajectory or outcome of these changes remain unclear.

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Pre-R Dentalisation in Scotland

Cited by 6 publications

References 15 publications

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Phonotactics, graphotactics and contrast: the history of Scots dental fricative spellings

Revisiting Hebrides English

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