Abstract
AbstractThe Scottish English phoneme inventory is generally claimed to have a /ʍ/-/w/ contrast, although several studies have suggested that this historical contrast is weakening for Scottish English speakers in the urban areas of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Little is known about whether the /ʍ/-/w/ contrast is maintained in supraregional Scottish Standard English (SSE). This study sets out to explore, based on the phonemically transcribed ICE-Scotland corpus, the distribution of [ʍ] and [w] in SSE, their acoustic properties and potentially influencing social and language-internal factors. A total of 1,241 <wh-> tokens were extracted from the corpus, together with a matching number of <w-> tokens, and the median of harmonicity was measured. The results show that [ʍ] and [w] produced for words beginning with <wh-> are acoustically distinct from [w] produced for words beginning with <w->. [ʍ] is relatively frequent in SSE, but most speakers use both [ʍ] and [w] interchangeably for <wh-> and some never use [ʍ]. The realisation of <wh-> as [ʍ] is determined by preceding phonetic context and speaker gender.
Highlights
In Scottish English, like in some varieties of Irish, US American and Canadian English, the so-called wine-whine merger did not take place, in which historical Old and Middle English /hw/ was replaced by /w/ (Grant 1914: 38; Minkova 2012: 16)
The Scottish English phoneme inventory is generally claimed to have a /ʍ/-/w/ contrast, several studies have suggested that this historical contrast is weakening for Scottish English speakers in the urban areas of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen
The data were drawn from ICE-Scotland, the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English project (ICE; Greenbaum 1991) that aims to collect comparable corpora of all national varieties of English spoken around the world
Summary
In Scottish English, like in some varieties of Irish, US American and Canadian English, the so-called wine-whine merger did not take place, in which historical Old and Middle English /hw/ was replaced by /w/ (Grant 1914: 38; Minkova 2012: 16). Li and Gut which is used to pronounce the digraph in many words such as which, when and what.1 This results in Scottish English, unlike most other varieties of English, having minimal pairs such as which versus witch, where versus wear and whales versus Wales. Some southern speakers even redeveloped the contrast in the sixteenth and seventeenth century due to language contact with Scots pronunciation, which had enjoyed prestige at that time (Minkova 2012: 27–29). It appears that the historical /w/-/ʍ/ contrast is weakening for an increasing number of Scottish English speakers. In Aberdeen, all the speakers analysed by Brato (2007, 2014) produce both [ʍ] and [w] in words beginning with
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