SPEAKING OUR LANGUAGE 2019: A diachronic look at Rhotics in the Scottish Gaelic of the Isle of Lewis

Much has been written on native speakers of Scottish Gaelic in recent years through a perceptual dialectology filter, concerning inter- dialectal attitudes and perceptions which discuss the various ways in which the varieties of Gaelic interact via the media and through Gaelic Medium education. There have been few studies into phonetics of the current generation of native speakers compared to the number of studies from the latter half of 20th century investigating the dialectology of Scottish Gaelic language varieties, with the notable exception of the work of Claire Nance, who looked at the transmission of pitch accent to young native speakers from the Isle of Lewis and young learner speakers from Glasgow.
The aim of my investigation was to expand the phonetic studies of modern Scottish Gaelic in some small way, by comparing the results of the Scottish Gaelic Dialect Survey from the 1950’s to young modern-day Island Gaelic speakers, by means of phonetic analysis of certain features such as rhotics in the accents of fluent, native Gaelic speakers between the ages 18-30 living and working in Gaelic- speaking environments. Additionally this investigation was a comparison between those different young speakers with reference to the context in which they have acquired and used Gaelic. The presentation will cover the results promised from last year's presentation, as well as the fieldwork methods employed in data gathering.