Changing sounds in a changing city: an acoustic phonetic investigation of real-time change over a century of Glaswegian.

This paper contributes some new findings towards answering these general theoretical questions about real-time sound change and place. Our study exploits the possibilities offered for a longer-term perspective on real-time change by combining archive recordings from the First World War with those from a real- and apparent-time corpus from the 1970s. We consider three aspects of urban Scots, vowel quality and duration, and the realization of word-initial /l/, using acoustic phonetic measures. The real-time comparisons reveal change in progress in all three features. The direction of the changes is intriguing, since despite the substantial geographical and social changes which have taken place across the UK during especially the second half of the 20th century, and the impact of these in terms of contact-induced changes on urban British accents (e.g. Foulkes and Docherty 1999), it appears that linguistic and social factors to do with the dialect and its location have played a stronger role.