Investigating rhoticity in Scottish Standard English with sociolinguistic interviews and corpus data

Abstract

This paper approaches variable rhoticity in Scottish Standard English (SSE) from a methodological, data‐oriented perspective. The main focus is on how to integrate within a single sociolinguistic framework data that have been elicited under different conditions (sociolinguistic interviews vs. corpus data) and may therefore be incompatible when we take a relatively simplistic approach to stylistic variation. The article first models variation in such an unbalanced ‘patchwork’ dataset in a holistic, unified analysis and then proceeds to deconstruct the results by taking a closer look at the behaviour of the two main components of the data. While previously reported trends in the development of coda‐/r/ in SSE accents are confirmed, it is also shown that, depending on the precise nature of registers (or genres), productions may be considerably more diverse and may go beyond a simple projection of middle‐class identities. The integration of different styles in a single interpretive framework is challenging and far from straightforward.