Changing Scots accent stays true to its roots

The Scots accent is changing but unlike England where evidence shows many regional accents are becoming more homogenised the Scots accent appears to be sticking to its roots. Researchers at the University of Glasgow have studied audio recordings from across the decades, including a few rare short recordings from Scots soldiers from WW1, and have discovered that although the Scottish accent is evolving it is sticking very much to its Scottish origins. The three year Sounds of the City study, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, built a state of the art electronic spoken corpus, and focussed on speech sounds of Glaswegians from each decade, past to present spanning the 20th Century. The Glaswegian accent has often been perceived as a particularly strong accent and has often been stigmatised, but research shows that over the decades Glaswegian has changed. Professor Jane Stuart-Smith, Director of the Glasgow University Laboratory of Phonetics, led the Sounds of the City research. She said: "We were quite surprised by what we found. The assumption is that traditional dialects generally across the UK are being eroded and some are dying out altogether, but what we have learned particularly with the Glasgow accent is that Scots accents are actually flourishing.