Investigating ethnic accents: A sociophonetic analysis of ‘Glaswasian’ Jane Stuart-Smith*, Claire Timmins+, and Farhana Alam* Department of English Language, University of Glasgow Speech Science Research Centre, Queen Margaret University Edinburgh j.stuart-smith@englang.arts.gla.ac.uk, CTimmins@qmu.ac.uk, f.alam.1@research.gla.ac.uk The increase in minority ethnic groups reported in the 2001 Census, and widespread informal awareness of ethnic accents within and beyond communities, is now being reflected in recent sociolinguistic research, particularly on London and Birmingham (e.g. Khan 2006, Kerswill et al 2008). Our interest is in understanding better the sociophonetic characteristics of regional ethnic accents, and how these relate to ethnicity and identity in second-generation speakers (cf Foulkes and Docherty 1999; also Heselwood and McChrystal 2000, Hirson and Sohail 2007). Specifically, we consider British Asian accents, spoken by several intersecting communities originally from the Indian subcontinent, which form the main minority ethnic group in Britain, and in particular that of Glasgow Asian, the largest minority ethnic group in Scotland. This paper reports findings from a British-Academy funded project on the phonetic features of second-generation Asian speakers in Glasgow, from two small-scale complementary studies (Lambert et al 2007). The first study allowed us to consider specific features in ten Glasgow Asian and Glasgow non-Asian speakers, from recordings of read speech collected by a female monolingual Glaswegian speaker. The second study considered identity and ethnicity in the spontaneous speech of six sixth-form Glasgow Asian girls, collected by a Punjabi/Urdu/Scottish English-speaking member of the Glasgow Asian community after a three month period of ethnography identifying specific Communities of Practice in terms of the girls’ social and cultural practices (Eckert 2000). These data enable us to consider the extent to which those features identified as Glasgow Asian from Study One, might vary with respect to Community of Practice in Study Two. Here we discuss three features which are thought to be typical of Glasgow Asian: a clearer realization of syllable-initial /l/, and closer qualities for the GOAT and FACE vowels. Acoustic analysis yielded a series of measures for /l/ (second formant for the lateral phase, second formant tracks for the lateral/vowel phase, durations of the lateral/vowel phase; Carter and Local 2007), and for FACE and GOAT first and second formants, normalized using the Bark Difference Metric (NORM). All three features show a significant effect of ethnicity between Glasgow Asian and Glasgow non-Asian speakers in Study One, though individual speakers also show fine-grained differences in realization which align with identity. The same features in Study Two show significant effects of Community of Practice, with close alignment between social and cultural practices and phonetic realization. Importantly, however, while all features show an effect of ethnicity, and relate to identity, each seems to pattern differently, suggesting that different features function symbolically in different ways in particular contexts. We conclude by discussing Harris’ (2006) notion of ‘Brasian’, a new ethnicity/identity which he proposes for the young British Asian informants with whom he worked in Southern England. Our data support a similar construct at the phonetic level for second-generation Glasgow Asians, for ‘Glaswasian’, an emerging regional ethnic accent which integrates accent features typical of Glaswegian and Asian together. References Carter, P. and Local, J. (2007), ‘F2 variation in Newcastle and Leeds English liquid systems’, JIPA, 37, 183-99 Eckert, P. (2000), Linguistic Variation as Social Practice, Oxford: Blackwell Foulkes, P. and Docherty, G. (1999), ‘Urban voices – overview’. In Foulkes, P. and Docherty, G. (eds), Urban Voices, London: Arnold, 1-24