Changes in the dialect of Livingston

Abstract

This study investigates language change in the New Town of Livingston in Scotland, comparing the speech of original inhabitants of one of the villages swallowed up by the New Town with that of children brought up in the modern conurbation. The study focuses on three variables, two consonants characteristic of Scottish speech, the voiceless velar fricative and the labiovelar voiceless fricative, plus the innovation of TH-fronting. The situation is shown to be one of rapid and ongoing change in which there is a progressive loss of the Scots and Standard Scottish English pronunciation, with intermediate stages being observed in many of the young speakers. In comparison with girls, boys appear to be both innovators of change and conservers of local informal variants at the expense of standard variants.