I'll describe a new ESRC-funded corpus of individual words and spontaneous discourse, collected as part of a project with Jane Stuart-Smith (Glasgow) and Eleanor Lawson (QMU). The corpus ECB08 has acoustic and ultrasound data, with 15 teenage speakers from West Lothian and Edinburgh.
I'm going to focus on the vowel systems of the speakers, drawing on some analysis by Rochelle Cantwell (as part of a student honours project at QMU) and other work.
The corpus supports our previous findings that there are interesting covert phenomena related to derhoticisation of coda /r/. This derhoticisation may be the early stages of nonrhoticity: but very early from an articulatory point of view.
Presently contrasts are largely being maintained, with the result that the vowel system will likely contain an increased number of acoustic diphthongs and new monophthongs in the near future. (This, and that fact that the Scottish vowel length rule shows incipient phonemicity, means that we can speculate that the vowel inventory may be due to change radically in the longer term.) Though contrasts are being maintained, they may be changing phonetically due to derhoticisation, though this is at an acosutic/auditory level. The articulatory data in particular gives a rather different perspective to impressionistic transcription in which /r/ is missing, so it may be that a phonological analysis in which there has not yet been any change is more appropriate - /r/ is often still present, even as a strong articulation, which speakers seem may make covertly.
As part of the workshop I will demonstrate AAA ultrasound analysis software.