The distribution of /w/ and /ʍ/ in Scottish Standard English

Abstract The Scottish English phoneme inventory is generally claimed to have a /ʍ/-/w/ contrast, although several studies suggested that this historical contrast weakening for speakers in the urban areas of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Little known about whether maintained supraregional Standard (SSE). This study sets out explore, based on phonemically transcribed ICE-Scotland corpus, distribution [ʍ] [w] SSE, their acoustic properties potentially influencing social language-internal factors. A total 1,241 <wh-> tokens were extracted from together with matching number <w-> tokens, median harmonicity was measured. results show produced words beginning are acoustically distinct <w->. relatively frequent but most use both interchangeably some never [ʍ]. realisation as determined by preceding phonetic context speaker gender.