Robert Lawson's Sociolinguistics in Scotland is an edited collection containing fifteen chapters written by subject specialists. This book is suitable for those who have relatively little background in the subject area as the chapters provide good background material but is also of interest to specialists who want to find out more about specific speech communities in Scotland.
The book starts with a foreword by Jennifer Smith, who explains the relevance of this research. The linguistic situation in Scotland is ‘exhilarating and exhausting’ (p. xiii) and although we know that the linguistic situation in Scotland is changing, we are not always sure in which direction! She explains that some varieties may be incorporating new features, whereas other varieties may be disappearing.
Chapter 1 is an introduction by the editor, Robert Lawson, who starts by explaining that this book is an attempt to shed light on contemporary language usage in Scotland. This chapter provides a brief overview of the language situation in Scotland from the fifth century to today. The situation of Gaelic, Scots, and Scottish Standard English are discussed as well as the perception of these varieties throughout the centuries. The chapter ends with an overview of the remaining chapters in the book.
Chapter 2 is a short history of sociolinguistics in Scotland by Ronald Macaulay. He explains that Scotland has a rich linguistic history, albeit a complex one. This chapter provides an overview of sociolinguistic research in Scotland over the last forty years. The chapter is separated into different time periods and shows how research has been carried out within the frameworks described by Eckert (Reference Eckert2012) as the three waves of variation study.
The third chapter is an examination of accent variation and change in North-East Scotland by Thorsten Brato, with a focus on the [f], [w], and [ʍ] variants of the (hw) variable in Aberdeen. The study examines the speech of forty-four Aberdonians, analysing variation among speakers and linguistic context, and results in Brato considering the fact that these speakers may be losing their linguistic conservativeness and shifting to new variants.
Chapters 4 and 5 both deal with rhoticity in Scotland. Chapter 4 is a socioarticulatory study by Eleanor Lawson, James Scobbie, & Jane Stuart-Smith, showing how new articulatory analysis techniques can be used. The changing status of rhoticity and its relation to social class in Scotland can be analysed by examining ultrasound images of tongue movements of different speakers. The chapter suggests that sections of the Scottish population may be moving towards r-lessness, which is not traditionally associated with Scottish varieties. In chapter 5, Dominic Watt, Carmen Llamas, & Daniel Ezra Johnson investigate the linguistic situation around the Scottish-English border, which is treated as one of the most resilient linguistic borders in the English-speaking world. Here coda (r) in four border towns in East and West Scotland and England is examined. This study shows that derhoticisation is complete in England but not in Scotland. Within the Scottish locations there are differences between language style (with word lists retaining rhoticity more than conversational speech), and location (rhoticity is more likely to be found in one Scottish border town than another).
Chapter 6, by Miriam Meyerhoff & Erik Schleef, investigates immigrant adolescents' acquisition of certain features, such as (t) glottalling, pronunciation of (ing) as [ɪn] and quotative be like as used by Edinburgh teenagers compared with Polish teenagers who have moved to Edinburgh. This study considers which of these features nonnative speakers are likely to adopt and whether their acquisition relates to fluency in the language acquired.
Chapter 7 is a study by Ole Schützler of vowel variation in Scottish Standard English. It examines the face and goat vowels of Scottish Standard English and how these differ from RP and Southern Standard British English. These are traditionally produced as monophthongs in Scottish Standard English, but although there is some variation apparent in younger speakers, these vowels do not seem to be moving towards diphthongisation overall.
Chapter 8, by Lynn Clark, reports on research on th-fronting in Fife. The chapter investigates whether this feature is likely to be primed, that is to say, whether speakers are more likely to repeat forms that they have recently heard or produced themselves. Previous research on the effect of priming has tended to focus on syntactic variants, but Clark argues here that priming is also relevant to our understanding of phonological variation.
The influence of the media is discussed in chapter 9 by Jane Stuart-Smith & Claire Timmins. The focus of this chapter is whether other varieties of English, particularly that of London, have influenced Glaswegian speakers. This study seems to suggest that certain linguistic features may be adopted by some speakers; however this does not represent an ‘English’ identity but rather that these features are seen as Scottish (see further Stuart-Smith, Pryce, Timmins, & Gunter Reference Stuart-Smith, Pryce, Timmins and Gunter2013).
In chapter 10, Robert Lawson considers ethnographic methods in sociolinguistic studies and uses these methods to try and understand speakers' social movements and relate them to their linguistic variation. The study shows how speakers moving among different communities of practice change their use of linguistic features to fit in. The following chapter, by Farhana Alam & Ellen Bramwell, looks at the Scottish Pakistani community and deals with two separate projects—one looking at the production of /t/ by Pakistani girls in a Glasgow secondary school and the other investigating naming practices used in the Pakistani Muslim community in Glasgow. The work suggests that the amount of retroflexion in the articulation of /t/ and names that are given to children are multiple markers of identity that work together to produce a ‘Glaswasian’ hybrid identity (made of up both ‘Glaswegian’ and ‘Asian’) to different extents for different speakers.
A completely different speech community on the Scottish East coast is the focus of Robert McColl Millar's study (with assistance from Lisa Bonnici & William Barras) in chapter 12, which examines whether there has been lexical attrition within fishing dialects in the region. This work shows that although some individual words may be remembered by younger generations, much knowledge is disappearing or may be incomplete, so that this particular vocabulary is in danger of being lost to these speakers and subsequent generations.
In chapter 13, John Corbett examines syntactic variation through analyses of different corpora. A description of the SCOTS corpus is given as well as of comparison corpora of British and American English. Different syntactic features (such as negation as well as aspects of modality and tense) are analysed to see to what extent these differ in the Scottish corpus and whether using corpora is an effective way of carrying out such a study. The conclusions suggest that such studies can be difficult as certain features that occur in spoken language may not be present in corpus data. Other features may look as though they are shared with spoken English outside Scotland, but may have different meanings.
Chapter 14 by Cassie Smith-Christmas uses a micro-interactional approach to analyse one speaker's use of Gaelic-English code-switching as a communicative tool in narration. Code-switching is used both to make the narrative coherent as well as to justify the story as ‘tellable’. The chapter shows how code-switching as well as other narrative devices are used to emphasize shared contexts between narrator and addressee.
Mercedes Durham, in chapter 15, discusses real-time attitudes towards Shetlandic to illustrate how usage and attitudes towards this variety have changed over the last thirty years. Using a historical study carried out in 1983 and comparing this to results from 2010 she shows how young people's attitudes have changed, with more speakers using solely English and usage of Shetlandic decreasing among all speakers. The study considers the role of incomers to the islands and how they might have influenced this change. She suggests that shifts in attitudes may be precursors to shifts in language usage.
Although there have been other books, as well as individual journal articles and chapters, written on the linguistic situation within Scotland (as is discussed by Lawson in chapter 1), this book is a valuable update and addition to the subject area. The chapters are engaging, accessible, and include a broad range of topics that are relevant to Scotland—along with many further references if required. This book captures an important time for Scotland, just before the referendum on Scottish Independence (18 September 2014) and highlights some of the interesting linguistic landscapes that can be found there. As commented by Görlach in Reference Görlach and Görlach1985, Scotland is a ‘paradise’ for sociolinguists and this book illustrates that there is much still to learn!
