14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14)

San Francisco, CA, USA
August 1-7, 1999


Sociophonetic Variation in ‘Glottals’ in Newcastle English

Gerry Docherty (1), Paul Foulkes (2)

(1) Department of Speech, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
(2) Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, University of Leeds, UK

At ICPhS XIII we presented a preliminary acoustic study of glottal and glottalised variants of /t/ as spoken in Newcastle upon Tyne. In this paper we present our full acoustic analysis of glottal variants from 22 speakers. Tokens perceived as glottal stops were typically found to be fully voiced with an interval of laryngealisation. In “glottalised” tokens different speaker groups differed in respect of their acoustic features. Most tokens were characterised by creaky voicing and formant movement. However, 26% also contained an acoustic transient, suggesting either that the oral gesture lags behind the laryngeal gesture. These tokens were significantly more common in the productions of older males. Our findings suggest that very fine phonetic differences of this sort merit further attention in determining the way in which the vocal tract is harnessed for sociolinguistic purposes.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Docherty, Gerry / Foulkes, Paul (1999): "Sociophonetic variation in ‘glottals’ in Newcastle English", In ICPhS-14, 1037-1040.