/r/

Scottish Standard English is generally rhotic (Wells 1982: 10–11); in the 1997 Glasgow data articulated /r/ made up around 90% of all variants for postvocalic /r/ in middle-class speakers (Stuart-Smith 2003: 128–129.). In Urban Scots /r/- vocalization is becoming increasingly common (Johnston 1997: 511). Romaine (1978) reported loss of postvocalic /r/ in the speech of working-class children in Edinburgh, where she also noted gendered distribution of variants, with girls showing more approximants and boys showing more r-lessness. The analysis of postvocalic /r/ in the Glasgow data confirmed Macafee’s (1983: 32) comments in the discovery of extensive /r/-vocalization in working-class adolescents (Stuart-Smith 2003). Two ‘vowel’ variant categories were set up: vowels with audible secondary velarization/pharyngealization (cf. Johnston 1997: 511), and ‘plain’ vowels with no audible secondary articulation. Interestingly, there appears to be subtle conditioning according to gender in the use of these variants: girls overall tended to vocalize more, and to favor plain vowels, especially in contexts such as before a consonant, e.g. card or unstressed prepausal, e.g. better; boys used both plain and velarized variants before a consonant, but preferred velarized vowels in words like better (Stuart-Smith 2003: 126–135).

The phonetic realization of /r/ is variable. Wells states that trills are unusual, and certainly I have rarely heard them amongst Scottish English students. More usual are approximants, post-alveolar  and retroflex  , and alveolar taps  , which vary according to position in the word, phonetic environment, and sociolinguistic factors. Scots is usually said to favor taps, though Johnston (1997: 510) notes that  , more typical of Scottish Standard English, is encroaching. My analysis of the realization of /r/ in the Glasgow data showed that all variants were present in all speakers, with differences in distributional patterns and tendencies. Taps emerged as more common in working-class speakers (especially men) but only in read speech; retroflex approximants were more common in middle-class speakers. There was a slight tendency for the working-class adolescents, who produced a high proportion of vocalized variants, to use taps for articulated /r/.