Consonants

The consonants of Scottish English are:

 As for the vowels, alternations arise from Scots lexical incidence, but fewer consonants are involved: /v ~ ∅/, e.g. give/gie; /θ ~ ∅/ , e.g. with/wi’; /nd ~ n/, e.g. stand/staun; /t ~ d/, e.g. bastard/bastart; /l ~ V/, e.g. football/fitbaw.

We now have a substantial body of information about the realization of consonants in Urban Scots, largely as a result of recent work on Glaswegian (e.g. Stuart-Smith 2003), but also arising from other studies. To date 11 consonant variables have been considered in detail from the 1997 Glasgow corpus: t, th, dh, s, x, hw, l, r-realization, postvocalic r, k, w. In what follows, I restrict my discussion mainly to Scottish English of the Central Belt; for details for regional variation, particularly in Scots.