The distribution of /w/ and /ʍ/ in Scottish Standard English

Abstract

Abstract The Scottish English phoneme inventory is generally claimed to have a /ʍ/-/w/ contrast, although several studies have suggested that this historical contrast is weakening for Scottish English speakers in the urban areas of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Little is known about whether the /ʍ/-/w/ contrast is maintained in supraregional Scottish Standard English (SSE). This study sets out to explore, based on the phonemically transcribed ICE-Scotland corpus, the distribution of [ʍ] and [w] in SSE, their acoustic properties and potentially influencing social and language-internal factors. A total of 1,241 <wh-> tokens were extracted from the corpus, together with a matching number of <w-> tokens, and the median of harmonicity was measured. The results show that [ʍ] and [w] produced for words beginning with <wh-> are acoustically distinct from [w] produced for words beginning with <w->. [ʍ] is relatively frequent in SSE, but most speakers use both [ʍ] and [w] interchangeably for <wh-> and some never use [ʍ]. The realisation of <wh-> as [ʍ] is determined by preceding phonetic context and speaker gender.