The current study describes and discusses patterns of variation and change in the urban accent of Aberdeen in North-East Scotland, which compared to the varieties of the Central Belt has so far received almost no attention by sociolinguists. Aberdeen is the commercial, cultural and industrial centre of the region, which is considered to be geographically remote and isolated. Therefore, its demographics and linguistic features have developed mostly independently from the rest of the country until well into the 20th century. The discovery of oil in the North Sea and the following large-scale immigration since the 1970s have had major impacts on the social structure of the city, of which the breaking up of the dense social networks is one of the most important in the present context.Rooted in a dialect contact framework (Trudgill 1986), this study focuses particularly on post-contact developments in the variety before the background of three main research propositions:1. The linguistic processes and outcomes of dialect contact in Aberdeen. What is the role of the different migration trends and Aberdeen s peripheral location to the influential varieties of the Central Belt and London in the adoption of resistance to innovation?2. The role of age and other social factors. Following current models of koineisation (Kerswill &
Williams 2000) it takes into account the role of speakers from different age groups in the development of the new Urban Aberdonian.3. Assessing innovation and conservatism. Based on the by-speaker coefficients of a mixed-effects regression model it aims to provide a more objective way of assessing an individual s contribution in adopting linguistic innovations than would be possible by only taking into account qualitative (cf. Stuart-Smith &
Timmins 2010) data.The data stems from sociolinguistic interviews and wordlists of 44 Aberdonians stratified by age (adults, teenagers, children), social class and gender. Six phonological variables (BOOT), (OUT), (HW), (L), (POSTVOCALIC R), (TH) were taken into account. These can be considered a cross-section of local, Scottish and non-Scottish features. The vowels were analysed acoustically, the consonants auditorily. Mixed-effects regression models with up to twelve fixed factors and speaker as random factor were fitted in Rbrul (Johnson 2011).The results show complex patterns of linguistic variation and change along three main categories:1. Levelling/regularisation2. Marginalisation/loss of strongly marked regional variants3. Diffusion of innovative variants.In line with the koineisation models considered here, speakers from different age groups affect the processes currently underway in radically different ways. Adults are overall the most conservative group and only adopt some of the innovations, mainly when these constitute a regularisation or levelling towards the supraregional standard. Teenagers and young speakers are strongly polarised by using significantly more innovative variants and leading the changes by adopting and developing new variants. Other social factors are comparably less important than in stable communities.The assessment of the model of innovation and conservatism shows that there are both advantages and disadvantages to a purely qualitative classification. Because it does not rely on a-priori categorisation of the speakers it is more objective. Also, it can take into account variation patterns within social groups, such as age or gender. The greatest disadvantage is that it obviously relies on by-speaker coefficients, for which speaker effects need to be found. Also, in order to run these regressions there must be enough tokens, which for innovations that are incipient (such as TH-fronting) may not be the case.Overall, the current study shows that research on the phonology of Aberdonian is a much-needed addition to current research on urban varieties of Scottish English and Scots. It has laid the foundation stone for further preferably ethnographic research to fully understand the current changes. ReferencesJohnson, Daniel E. 2011. Rbrul (Version 1.9.9.6), http://www.danielezrajohnson.com/rbrul.html (last checked: 27 March 2012).Kerswill, Paul &
Ann Williams. 2000. "Creating a New Town koine: Children and language change in Milton Keynes". Language in Society 29 (1), 65 115.Stuart-Smith, Jane &
Claire Timmins. 2010. "The role of the individual in language variation and change". In Carmen Llamas &
Dominic Watt (eds.), Language and identities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 39 54.Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.
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