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Vowel duration in a Scottish accent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 February 2009

J. Derrick McClure
J. Derrick McClure
Affiliation:
(University of Aberdeen)
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Extract

A sixteenth-century sound change in Scots has resulted in the appearance in that language of a system of vowel-length variations strikingly different from the common Germanic system still visible in other West Germanic speech forms. The present situation is described by the set of rules known as Aitken's Law (Aitken 1962 and 1977; see also Lass 1974): all vowels and diphthongs are long in stressed open syllables, before voiced fricatives and /r/, and before morpheme boundaries; and short elsewhere; with the two exceptions of /ι/ and /ʌ/ which are invariably short.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the International Phonetic Association , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , June 1977 , pp. 10 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © Journal of the International Phonetic Association 1977

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References

Abercrombie, D. (1954). ‘A Scottish vowel’, in Le Maître Phonétique, pp. 23–4; also in Studies in Phonetics and Linguistics, Oxford University Press, 1965.Google Scholar
Aitken, A. J. (1962). ‘Vowel length in Modern Scots’. Duplicated. University of Edinburgh, Department of English Language.Google Scholar
Aitken, A. J. (1977). ‘How to pronounce Older Scots?’, in Bards and Makars: Scottish Language and Literature, Medieval and Renaissance, ed. Aitken, A. J., McDiarmid, M. P. and Thompson, D. S., Glasgow University Press, pp. 1–21.Google Scholar
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Lass, R. (1974). ‘Linguistic orthogenesis? Scots vowel quantity and the English length conspiracy’, in Historical Linguistics, Vol. II, ed. Anderson, J. M. and Jones, C., Amsterdam.Google Scholar
McClure, J. D. (1975). ‘The English speech of Scotland’, in Aberdeen University Review, Vol. XLVI, No. 2, pp. 173–89.Google Scholar
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