Vowel variation in Glaswegian late adolescents' speech (gender and stylistic aspects)

The current article presents the results obtained through the study of vowel variation in Glaswegian late adolescents' speech. The most frequent quantitative and qualitative changes of monophthongs, diphthongs, unstressed and rhotic vowels are revealed and coordinated with extra linguistic factors of gender and situation, thus portraying reading and spontaneous speech styles of Glaswegian youth in the context of web communication through video blogging. The research methodology. The first phase of the study (20112014) was devoted to data collection and systematization. The data was obtained from the Scottish Accent Tag survey, launched on You Tube. The survey contained word lists and questions, which the participants had to read and answer. During the second phase a group of informants was formed. The group included 40 people, 21 female and 19 male speakers aged 16-24, belonging to middle class, born and residing in the city and outskirts of Glasgow. The third phase of the study (2014) provided auditory and acoustic analysis of read and spontaneous speech samples, 137-minute long in total. The vowel analysis procedure included the following stages: retrieval and grouping of target segments in Praat, annotation via auditory analysis, collection of frequency and vowel length data, correlation with extra linguistic factors of sex and style (degree of formality). The average first and second formant values in the speech of Glaswegian adolescents were compared with the same features found in standard varieties of English English (RP) and Scottish English (SSE). The words with the target vowels were grouped according to 38 lexical sets introduced by J. Wells and extended by J. Stuart-Smith. Results. Standard Scottish English and Standard English vowel varieties predominated the speech of Glaswegian adolescents, participating in the Scottish Accent Tag survey. The urban Scots forms made a very small portion of the data sample. Standard Scottish forms were widely used in the speech of adolescents during virtual communication but the influence of the southern pronunciation varieties becomes more prominent. The change comes from the less formal styles and is more vivid in female speech: the number of [ж] realizations in reading and spontaneous speech styles was higher among female informants, in spontaneous speech the number of [ж] realizations increased in both gender groups. In spontaneous speech, there was an increase of [ei], [зи], [is] diphthong realizations. The Standard English [з:] was the main pronunciation variety of (ur), (ir) variables. Spontaneous speech was also home to an increasing number of non-standard forms. The largest deviation from standard varieties was found in monophthongs [i], [a], and the diphthong [ли].

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