Ian Clayton

Preaspiration in Hebrides English

Preaspirated voiceless stops, a well-documented feature of Scottish Gaelic (Ni Chasaide 1985, Clayton 2010, Nance & Stuart-Smith 2013), have also been reported in the English spoken in the Hebrides island chain (Borgstrom 1940, Wells 1982, Shuken 1984). However, a detailed description of preaspiration in Hebrides English has previously been unavailable. This paper presents the results of a phonetic study of preaspirated voiceless stops in Hebrides English, based on the speech of 24 English–Scottish Gaelic bilinguals from nine regions within the Hebrides island chain. The paper describes the effect of linguistic features on the duration and frequency of preaspiration, including place of articulation, word position, and vowel context. The paper also considers the role of social factors, including speakers’ geographic origin, age, and gender, finding that preaspiration is more frequent among women and among older speakers, especially older female speakers from Lewis. The paper concludes that preaspiration is likely to be an obsolescent feature in Hebrides English, rather than an innovative feature as in other varieties of English such as Tyneside or Aberystwyth (Docherty & Foulkes 1999, Foulkes, Docherty & Watt 2001, Hejna 2015).

The articulation of lexical palatalization in Scottish Gaelic

Scottish Gaelic (Gaidhlig, henceforth SG) exhibits a rich system of consonant mutation, which is mostly governed by its morphology (Ladefoged et al. 1998; Gillies 2002; Stewart 2004). For instance, bata “boat” changes to [v] when the word undergoes morphological inflection—e.g., a bhata “his boat”, in which the sound spelled bh is pronounced as [v]. Using ultrasound imaging, the present study investigates palatalization in SG, which is considered as one of lexicalized consonant mutation types. Experimental data was collected in Sabhal Mor Ostaig, a college on the Isle of Skye. Preliminary results show a clear sign of palatalization across different consonant types in palatalization environments (i.e., when morphologically conditioned), represented by higher tongue contours in the front region of tongue. While the articulatory distinction between plain and palatalized consonants is significant, different syllabic positions (i.e., word-initial vs. -final palatalization) often yield individualized patterns.