ABSTRACT
The fundamental fact which gives rise to most of the characteristic features of the vowel system of Scottish Standard English (SSE: the initials do not stand for ‘Standard Scottish English’) is the radical modification, approaching complete loss, of the common Germanic system of long and short vowels which affected Scots at an early period. This has had results which are readily visible in modern Scots dialects (for the most complete account to date see Aitken 1981), and SSE has been notably affected by this as well as by other aspects of its Scots substratum. It is not the purpose of the present article to examine the respective contributions of Scots and the London-Oxford-Cambridge-accented English of the eighteenth century to the form, at first a hybrid but shortly acquiring its present status as a fully autonomous dialect, now referred to as SSE (see Hewitt 1987 for an account of the historical and cultural background to the linguistic change) 1 nor to elucidate the complex issue of the manner in which Aitken’s Law is manifest in present-day SSE: 2 in what follows the existence of a readily identifiable and recognisable Scottish accent will be taken as ‘given’, and the results of an instrumental examination of the monophthongs of a number of SSE speakers will be presented and discussed.
