Impact of English Parents' Accents on Glaswegian Scottish English Speakers

I am currently working on my dissertation which will study the speech of people who have been brought up in Glasgow. Although there exists a plethora of sociophonetic research on speech in Glasgow and indeed Scottish English speech throughout Scotland, only the impacts of class, age and gender have been considered. Thus there is little to no research available on the impact of parents' speech on Scottish English speakers in Glasgow. I hope to fill this void by contributing to the research and measuring to what extent the speech of parents with English accents affects their children's Scottish accents. I have used recordings of speech of two types of people I know: those who grew up in Scotland with English parents and those who grew up in Scotland with Scottish parents. These recordings include short interviews, wherein I ask the interviewees about their own views of their speech and how they feel about Glasgow, in order to gauge their level of linguistic insecurity and the possible impact of this on their speech in their own opinions. I also created a short passage for them to read aloud which included certain words from Wells' (1982) summary of vowel use in Scotland. I also included post-vocalic "r" words in order to learn the prevalence of rhoticity in the speech of those with English parents, and the infamous /x/ sound in the Scottish English pronunciation of "loch". Thus, I will consider "how Scottish" each participant with English parents sounds in comparison to their Scottish-parented counterparts. Finally, I will use the information gathered to establish the impact of English parents' accents on people brought up in Scotland. In doing so, I will consider sociolinguistic and personal factors for each participant and the role they play in language use.