[For an outline of the project written for non-linguists, click here]

It has been claimed that the greatest concentration of distinctive linguistic features in the entire English-speaking world is to be found along the length of the Scottish/English border (Aitken 1992). In spite of this the spoken vernaculars of this region remain surprisingly under-researched. The project addresses this gap, and as such represents the first empirical sociolinguistic study to investigate linguistic variation along a national border viewed as a whole.

Previous sociological research carried out in and around Berwick-upon-Tweed (Kiely et al. 2000) shows that regional and national identities in the area are unexpectedly complex and fluid, and that linguistic behaviour plays a central role in making and marking these identities. It is as yet unclear, however, exactly which features are used to index, for example, ‘Scottishness’ versus ‘Englishness’.

Through detailed investigation of speech production patterns, combined with perceptual testing and the elicitation of attitudinal data from participants, the project aims to establish what these features are, how their use is distributed socially, and whether they are currently undergoing change. These questions will be addressed through auditory and instrumental acoustic analyses of speech elicited by interview and questionnaire from socially stratified samples of speakers in four border localities (Berwick, Eyemouth, Carlisle, Gretna; see map below). By so doing the project will not only further the current state of knowledge in the field of variationist sociophonetics, but will also contribute significantly to the bodies of work which focus specifically on the language/identity nexus and the emerging field of linguistic border studies.

This research is supported by a grant from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (RES-062-23-0525).