10.18710/EYUPMESchützler, OleOleSchützler0000-0001-8868-0191Leipzig UniversityDataverseNO2026Arts and HumanitiesStandard Scottish Englishacoustic phoneticssociophoneticsDispersion Theoryvowel variationcorpus dataSchützler, OleOleSchützlerLeipzig UniversityLeipzig UniversityGut, UlrikeUlrikeGutLi, ZeyuZeyuLiThe Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing)TheTromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing)2025-07-022026-08-262024-07-01/2024-09-01Annotated acoustic measurements10.1515/9783112213254-00416110617613001201948351767675text/plainapplication/pdftext/comma-separated-valuestext/comma-separated-valuestext/comma-separated-values1.0The study focuses on the vowel categories BOOT and BIT in Standard Scottish English (SSE). The BOOT-vowel tends to be relatively front, the BIT-vowel tends to be lowered and/or centralised, and both are subject to sociolinguistic variation. In addition, this paper argues that they are also competing for limited articulatory (and acoustic) space, so that socially motivated variation may be constrained by the need for vowel categories to remain distinct. The acoustic study that is presented explores the sociolinguistic variation of the two vowels against the background of systemic, space-related constraints. The centre frequencies of the first two formants of all monophthong vowels are measured in <i>n</i> = 46 recordings from the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English. Measurements are normalised and the variation of BOOT and BIT is modelled statistically, using linear mixed-effects regression; additionally, the correlation of random intercepts for speakers are inspected. There are virtually no age and gender effects on the variation of the BOOT-vowel, while younger age and male gender correlate with more centralised variants of the BIT-vowel. These factors apart, there is evidence of a tendency for the two vowels to covary in a way that maintains their distance from each other in acoustic space.Praat, 6.1.51Microsoft Excel, 2408, Build 16.0.17932.20286R, 4.1.1RStudio, 2025.05.1R package 'brms', 2.16.1R package 'lattice', 0.20-44R package 'latticeExtra', 0.6-29<ul> <li> <a href="https://www.ice-corpora.uzh.ch/en.html" target="_blank">ICE-website at the University of Zurich</a> </li> <li> Davies, Mark. 2004. <i>British National Corpus</i> (from Oxford University Press). Available online at <a href="https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/" target="_blank">https://www.english-corpora.org/bnc/</a>. </li> <li> Kirk, John & Gerald Nelson. 2018. The International Corpus of English project: A progress report. <i>World Englishes</i> 34(4): 697–716. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12350" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12350</a> </li> <li> Nelson, Gerald, Sean Wallis & Bas Aarts. 2002. <i>Exploring Natural Language. Working with the British Component of the International Corpus of English.</i> Amsterdam: John Benjamins. </li> <li> Schützler, Ole, Ulrike Gut & Robert Fuchs. 2017. New perspectives on Scottish Standard English: Introducing the Scottish component of the International Corpus of English. In Joan C. Beal & Sylvie Hancil (Hg.), <i>Perspectives on northern Englishes.</i> Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter [TiEL 96]. 273–302. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110450903-012" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110450903-012</a> </li> <li> Access to corpus data: <a href="https://github.com/langres/ICE-Scotland" target="_blank">https://github.com/langres/ICE-Scotland</a> </li> </ul>Scotland, UKGerman Research Foundation (DFG)SCHU 3250/1-1