PREASPIRATED STOPS IN THE ENGLISH OF SCOTTISH GAELIC-

Preaspirated voiceless stops, a well-documented feature of Scottish Gaelic, have also been anecdotally observed in the English spoken in the Scottish Hebrides island chain. This paper presents the first sociophonetic study of preaspirated stops in Hebrides English. Analysis of speech produced by 24 male and female Gaelic-English bilinguals aged 19-75 found that, while most participants produced at least some tokens of preaspiration, only older female speakers from the island of Lewis preaspirated the majority of their voiceless stops. These findings suggest that preaspiration is both geographically concentrated in Lewis and an obsolescent feature in Hebrides English generally. The effects of place of articulation, vowel quality, and stress on the duration and frequency of preaspiration are also discussed