Phonetic variation in Northern Wales: preaspiration

Preaspiration (aspiration preceding the closure of a voiceless stop) is typologically rare (Laver 1994: 356) and, in the case of many languages and dialects in North West Europe, is noted as being an areal phenomenon. In some varieties preaspiration has been normalised in the phonology, whereas in others it occurs as a non-obligatory feature (Helgason 2002: 2123). The aim of this paper is to ascertain whether preaspiration is present in the repertoire of Welsh-English bilinguals in North Wales. Data was collected via word-list from four Welsh-English bilinguals and was analysed acoustically. Preaspiration was detected in 60.5% of Welsh tokens and was also found, to a lesser extent, in the English tokens (33.3%). As in previous studies, preaspiration is more common in female speech (78.3%) than amongst males (57.7%). The female informants, who were also more active users of the language, were significantly more prone to produce preaspirated English tokens.