[bɪt] by [bɪʔ]: Variation in T-glottaling in Scottish Standard English

Abstract

The present study investigates internal and external constraints conditioning variable T-glottaling, the realization of the voiceless alveolar stop /t/ as a glottal stop [ʔ], in supraregional Scottish Standard English. Drawing on phonemically annotated speech data from the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English, a total of 12,162 /t/ tokens produced by 138 speakers were extracted from eight formal speaking categories in the corpus and analyzed auditorily. The results showed that about 28% of the analyzed /t/ tokens were produced as glottal stops, with significant inter- and intra-speaker variability. The realization of T-glottaling is subject to both linguistic (phonetic context and word type) and social factors (age, gender, and speech style). Moreover, patterns of various types of T-glottaling differ from each other and constitute distinctive processes of ongoing sound change in Scotland.