Urban Voices
April 22nd, 2009
Thorsten Brato: Urban Voices. The Interplay of Scots and English in Glasgow and Aberdeen
Since Labov’s groundbreaking work on social variation in New York English, the study of urban accents and dialects has developed into one of the major branches of sociolinguistics.
In this lecture I will introduce students to the field of urban dialectology by looking at the sociolinguistic situation in Glasgow and Aberdeen. The language in urban Scotland is coined by the interplay of Scots and English with speakers from all social backgrounds drawing on both according to the situational context.
After a brief outline of the historical developments of Scots and English in Scotland I will turn to the detailed discussion of the sociophonetics of the two cities before the backdrop of current research on language variation and change in urban Britain. I will illustrate my lecture with a range of material ranging from sociolinguistic studies, popular TV programmes, stage performances and rock music.
Thorsten Brato studied English and pedagogy at the University of Duisburg-Essen. For his state exam dissertation he carried out a sociolinguistic study on teenage speech in Glasgow. He came to Giessen in December 2005 and works as a research assistant at the chair of English Linguistics and the History of English. He joined the GCSC in 2007. For his PhD project he chose to thematically stay in Scotland. He works on accent variation and change in Aberdonian English.