ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the first regional acoustical survey of vowel systems conducted in Shetland. The first part presents the methodology, where the analytical framework presented in Chapter 5 is applied. The principles for the acoustic measurement of vowel formants, vowel formant normalization, and plotting are discussed. The speech materials are presented, and the second part of the chapter proceeds with an acoustic survey of the vowel systems of all fieldwork localities, from Unst in the north to Fair Isle in the south. The final section contains a regional acoustic comparison of key vowel features, which either emerged from the previous section as significant for the identification of regional subgroupings within Shetland, or have appeared in earlier accounts of regional variation not based on acoustic analysis. The chapter closes by spelling out the regional trends emerging from the acoustic survey and connecting these to previously proposed regional groupings. Finally, additional, more advanced acoustic analysis is devoted to a handful of vowel features which, while seen as regional shibboleths in Shetland, have never been subjected to acoustic or more systematic analysis.
