The Gilbert Scott Building
Contemporary Scottish Research
The Glaswegian Context
Nate Lindgren Haj Bakir

Glaswegian research
•Seeing Speech project (2011-2019) UofG one of 6 universities
•NOW: Perception of sung vowels and /s/ in transgender Glaswegians
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Religion in (socio)phonetics
•(London)Derry - McCafferty (2001) found no difference among Protestant and Catholic Northern Irish
Christians
•Alam’s (2015) on young South Asian Muslim Glaswegian women
•Community of Practice was statistically significant for /t/ and /i ʉ/
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•Then – why is the UK treating all South Asians as homogenous?
•Do Punjabi heritage speaking Sikhs and Muslims speak identical Glaswegian?
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Isolation, integration, and variation:
a sociophonetic study on the role of religion in Sikh and Muslim Glaswegian
•Glottals in three phonetic contexts
•Intervocalic e.g., Scottish
•Pre-vocalic word-boundary e.g., get a
•Pre-pausal e.g., that…
•Young, second generation, male Glaswegians
•Sikh or Muslim, with Punjabi spoken at home
•Interview register
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Examples (Sikh – Raj Singh from the Punjabi band Tigerstyle)
•Intervocalic: both of us ended up joining the Scottish police force
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•Pre-vocalic: I’m trying [to] get a budget
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•Pre-pausal: there’s no way we could ever afford that… em
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Findings
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Findings
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Findings
•No significant difference in linguistic pattern or freq from each other!
•Also – no difference in pattern or freq from white Glaswegians (Stuart-Smith 1999)
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•What it means:
•Overt variable
•Identify as Glaswegian
•Census data
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Findings
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•Formal topic caused over-correction compared to white Glaswegians at the same register (Schleef
2013)
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Future research
•Look at less overt features
•Retroflex /d t/ e.g., talk, do
•VOT in /p t k b d g/ (Punjabi has “true” voiced stops)
•Vowel quality e.g., FLEECE, BOOT, GOAT, FACE vowels
•Liquids /l r/
•Broader participant pool
•Age – adolescent pre- or post-9/11
•Spontaneous speech
•In depth interviews
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Bibliography
•Alam, F. (2015)  ‘Glaswasian?’ A Sociophonetic Analysis of Glasgow-Asian Accent and Identity. PhD
Thesis, University of Glasgow.
•McCafferty, K. (2001) Ethnicity in Language Change: English in (London)Derry Northern Ireland.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company
•Schleef, E. (2013) Glottal replacement of /t/ in two British capitals: effects of word frequency
and morphological compositionality. Language Variation and Change, 25, pp. 201- 223.
•Seeing Speech: https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/
•Stuart-Smith, J. (1999) Glottals past and present: a study of T-glottalling in Glaswegian. Leeds
Studies in English, 30, pp. 181-204.
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The University at sunset
#UofGWorldChangers
@UofGlasgow
Thank you!
Nate Lindgren Haj Bakir
2298547L@student.gla.ac.uk