Consonants

Varieties of English tend to be both conservative and markedly similar in their consonant systems. There are, however, some minor consonantal differences between Scots and SSE on one hand, and RP or GenAm on the other.

First, Scots and SSE retain the voiceless velar fricative /x/, which other English dialects have lost since Middle English. The distribution of /x/ is limited, and it tends to occur in distinctively Scots lexical items like loch, dreich; place and personal names such as Auchtermuchty, Tulloch, Stra-chan; and sometimes in words originally borrowed from Greek or Hebrew which have <ch>, like epoch [ipɔx] or parochial [paroxiəl]. In Insular Scots, it also commonly occurs in an initial cluster with /w/ in place of other Scots and SSE /kw/ - so question is [xwεstʃən] and queer is [xwi:r].

Scots dialects and SSE also have the voiceless labio-velar fricative /ʍ/ (sometimes symbolized /hw/), which contrasts with /w/ in minimal pairs like Wales /w/ versus whales /ʍ/, or witch /w/ versus which /ʍ/. /ʍ/ is found in most words with 5wh4 spellings, although as Wells (1982: 409) observes, <w> spellings sometimes correspond to [ʍ] pronunciations, as in south-east Scots weasel [ʍi:zl], or <wh> to [w], as in whelk [wΛlk]. In Northern Scots, /ʍ/ has become a voiceless labial or labio dental fricative, [ɸ] or [f], in all contexts, producing such characteristic Aberdeenshire pronunciations as [fe:r] `where' and [fa:] `who'.

A final difference concerns the distribution of /r/. Both RP and Scots/ SSE have this phoneme, but because Scots and SSE are rhotic, its functional load here is far greater. As for realization, very few Scots now consistently use trilled [r], although this is found occasionally in the north. The most common allophonic variants are the alveolar tap [ɾ] and the post-alveolar approximant [ɹ]; Wells (1982: 411) suggests that the tap often appears in the environments V-V and C-V, and the approximant V-C and V- #, with either initially.