T-Glottaling and Nina Nesbitt: A Comparative and Intraspeaker Analysis of Speech and Song

Previous work on t-glottaling in Scotland has focused on interspeaker variation, finding that the [ʔ] variant is heavily stigmatised, being associated with the working class and a lack of education (Stuart-Smith et al. 2007; Wells 1982). However, recent scholarship indicates that a shift towards t-glottaling is taking place across the UK (Fabricius 2002; Smith and Holmes-Elliot 2017; Stuart-Smith et al. 2007). The issue of /t/ realisations in music by British artists has been studied since the 1980s, but these studies have centered exclusively on English artists (Beale 2009; Trudgill 1997).

This paper aims to help fill these gaps in the literature by examining how Scottish singer- songwriter Nina Nesbitt uses t-glottaling in both speech and song. Data collected by a university sociolinguistics course is used to establish Nesbitt as an individual who employs glottal replacement with extreme frequency when compared to 16 other famous Scottish women. It then dives into her realizations of the /t/ variable in two contextually contrastive interviews, leading to the conclusion that Nesbitt’s high use of t-glottaling is the result of an ongoing language change, rather than extralinguistic factors. Finally, the paper examines Nesbitt’s use of t-glottaling in her music, and claims that the marked decrease in t-glottaling and emergence of the less- stigmatised /t/ and /ɾ/ variants in song are the results of an attempt to index herself as a part of the mainstream pop industry and appeal to the masses.