On the prosody of Orkney and Shetland dialects.

The aim of this study is to find experimental support for impressionistic claims that there are prosodic differences between the dialects of Orkney and Shetland. It was found that native listeners had no difficulty in discriminating between Orkney and Shetland dialects when presented with speech fragments containing only melodic information. The results of a subsequent acoustic investigation revealed that there is a striking difference in pitch-peak location, which can be characterised as a shift in the location of the entire rise, i.

The relationship between vowel and consonant duration in Orkney and Shetland dialects.

In Shetland dialect, the northernmost branch of Lowland Scots, stressed monosyllables, when closed by a consonant, generally contain either a durationally short vowel followed by a durationally long consonant, or a long vowel followed by a short consonant. This feature, first described in the 1950s, can most likely be ascribed to the Scandinavian substratum of the dialect. Although several experimental investigations into the duration of Scottish vowels have been carried out recently, most of them in the light of the Scottish vowel length rule, none of them so far have looked at Shetland dialect or the relationship between the duration of the vowel and the final consonant.