Acoustic and articulatory variation in British Asian English liquids

Previous auditory and acoustic research reports variation in /l/ between ‘Asian’ and ‘Anglo’ speakers of British English, with Asian speakers producing ‘clearer’ realisations of /l/ than Anglo speakers from the same geographical region [8, 11, 22]. Whilst research on /r/ in British Asian English suggests variable rhoticity [8, 9], less work has documented /r/ variation in this community in non-coda contexts. Additionally, no study to date has examined the articulatory realisation of liquids in British Asian English. This paper reports a study of liquid variation between Anglo and Asian speakers of Bradford English, a dialect of British English. We report acoustic and midsagittal B-mode ultrasound data on the realisation of /l/ and /r/ in word-initial and word-medial position. We find differences between Anglo and Asian speakers that support previous studies, but also find individual differences in articulation. We discuss our results with reference to language contact and sociophonetic variation in liquids.