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Language and the Influence of the Media: A Scottish Perspective

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Sociolinguistics in Scotland

Abstract

This chapter summarises the findings from over a decade of research on the possible influence of the broadcast media on speech which has been carried out in Scotland’s largest city, Glasgow. Our focus on the media, and particularly television, as a factor (or bundle of factors) in language change, arose coincidentally from an initial variationist study into phonological variation and change in Glaswegian for the Urban Voices volume (Foulkes and Docherty 1999). The format of the Urban Voices survey required us to analyse the same ’London’ English consonant variables known to be spreading rapidly across England (e.g. Trudgill 1988) in this ‘traditional’ Scottish dialect (e.g. Wells 1982). Glaswegian vernacular continues a variety of West Central Broad Scots, with dialect mixing and levelling towards (Scottish) Standard English (Macafee 1983). It is substantially different from English English accents, phonologically and phonetically (Wells 1982; Stuart-Smith 2004). It also has well-established local non-standard variation deriving from Broad Scots. Our analysis contained some surprising discoveries, concentrated in the speech of working-class adolescents: TH-fronting, e.g. [f]ink as well as local [h]ink, DH-fronting, bro[v]er beside bro[r]er, and L-vocalisation to high back (un)rounded vowels in e.g. fill, despite the pharyngealised quality of Glasgow /l/, as more than sporadic in the speech of working-class adolescents (Stuart-Smith 1999; cf. Macafee 1983).

* The research presented here was supported by grants from the Economic and Social Research Council (R000239757), a Royal Society of Edinburgh Caledonian Research Fellowship to Hannover University, hosted by Jannis Androutsopoulos, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Short-Term Invitation Fellowship to Kagoshima University, hosted by Ichiro Ota. We are very grateful to Gwilym Pryce for the statistical design of the project, and to Barrie Gunter for designing the questionnaire and continuing to advise on media effects. We are also very grateful to Robert Lawson and Dave Sayers for their constructive comments on an earlier version.

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Authors
  1. Jane Stuart-Smith
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  2. Claire Timmins
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Birmingham City University, UK

    Robert Lawson

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© 2014 Jane Stuart-Smith and Claire Timmins

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Stuart-Smith, J., Timmins, C. (2014). Language and the Influence of the Media: A Scottish Perspective. In: Lawson, R. (eds) Sociolinguistics in Scotland. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137034717_9

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