Introduction: Quality of /r/

The most usual Scottish realizations of /r/ are an alveolar tap, [ɾ], and a post-alveolar or retroflex fricative or approximant, [ɹ ~ ɻ]. The first, [ɾ], seems to be particularly associated with the within-word environments [...]; the second, with the environments V_C and V_# [...]. In initial position (#_V) both are frequent.

There is a range of realizations of R, commonly post-alveolar [ɹ], retroflex [ɻ] and a tap [ɾ], but rarely a trill.

The most common realisation, found in all word positions, is the postalveolar approximant [ɹ]. [...] The tap articulation [ɾ] is commonly found in intervocalic position [...], as well as in initial consonant clusters [...] The trill realisation [r] is very rare.

Introduction: Presence of post-vocalic /r/

Scottish English is rhotic, and most or all vowels can occur before tautosyllabic /r/.

Most Scottish speech is firmly rhotic, with /r/ retained in all positions where it occurred historically

Scottish English remains rhotic [...], although loss of post-vocalic R is reported in the speech of [working-class] Edinburgh children by Romaine (1978) and in Glaswegian by Macafee (1983: 32). R-loss is also found in the 1997 data, mainly in the speech of [working-class] children.

Is rise in non-rhoticity local?

Method

• Data: HCRC Map Task Corpus (Anderson et al. 1991)

  • Speakers from Glasgow (N = 29)
  • Interacting with familiar and unfamiliar participants
  • Word-level time-aligned transcriptions (HCRC 2001)

• Analysis:

  • Corpus querying in Labb-CAT (Fromont & Hay 2012)
  • 5,330 word tokens with pre-consonantal /r/ retrieved
  • Manual annotation based on audition: vocalized, approximant, tap, or trill
  • Mixed-effects Binomial Logistic Regresion Modeling with lme4 (Bates et al. 2015) in R (R Core Team 2022)