Don’t Glottal Stop Me Now

A Comparative Study of /t/-glottaling in Edinburgh English in the 1970s

Abstract

This paper analyses the speech of Edinburgh speakers from a range of ages and socioeconomic backgrounds: established middle class (EMC), new middle class (NMC), and working class (WC). Findings were compared to previous studies, particularly Titheridge (2020), which examines the same data set collected in 1975. The results show that /t/-glottaling significantly correlates with social class but not age. The following phoneme and position of /t/ within the word were shown to be significant predictors of /t/-glottaling. Evidence of an interaction between the following phoneme and the speakers’ social class was found, which could suggest that NMC has a different ordering hierarchy of the aforementioned factors from WC and EMC.