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Pluricentricity and Pluriareality: Dialects, Variation, and Standards
Edited by Philipp Meer and Ryan Durgasingh
[Studies in Language Variation 32] 2025
► pp. 141–164

Chapter 7
A Scottish perspective on the pluricentricity/pluriareality debate

 | University of Koblenz, Germany
This study tests the implications of the pluricentric and pluriareal models with respect to prosody by analyzing the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR) in Scottish Standard English (SSE). Scotland is a particularly interesting example for the pluricentricity/pluriareality debate due to its linguistic and political situation. After a brief introduction of the context, this study applies linear mixed-effects modeling to account for variation in SVLR patterns while taking prosodic features as well as sociolinguistic factors into account. The findings are interpreted from the pluricentric and pluriareal perspectives and show that intralinguistic features rather than geographical factors influence variation in SVLR patterns. I therefore conclude that a mutual juxtaposition of the two approaches is neither necessary nor beneficial when it comes to modeling variation in standard languages.
Keywords: pluricentricity, pluriareality, prosody, suprasegmentals, Scottish Vowel Length Rule, Scottish Standard English, language-internal factors, language-external factors
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Pluricentricity, pluriareality and the interesting case of Scotland
    • 2.1The political status and linguistic history of Scotland
    • 2.2Vowel patterns in Scottish and British English
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Dataset
    • 3.2Data preparation
    • 3.3Statistical analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Linear mixed effects modeling for /i/
    • 4.2Linear mixed effects modeling for /aɪ/
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
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