ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a description of the accent of Derby, and discusses the role of instrumental phonetics within the variationist tradition. It refers both to these Derby data and also to subsections of the Newcastle data outlined by Watt & Milroy. It presents data drawn from acoustic analysis of two consonantal variables: glottal(ised) variants of intervocalic /t/ in Newcastle English, and non-glottalised pre-pausal /t/ in both Newcastle and Derby speech. Instrumental phonetic techniques have long been exploited to solve problems in the interconnected fields of language change, phonology and dialectology. Glottal forms of /t/ have been studied extensively in sociolinguistic work on British English. Newcastle English, however, is characterised by having two distinct types of glottal variant. The two types of glottal variant in Newcastle English are not only subject to different phonological constraints; they also enter into quite different sociolinguistic patterns.
