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.e. both the onset and the peak. Shetland has early alignment, whereas the accent-lending rise in Orkney occurs late, so that in disyllabic words with initial stress the pitch peak does not coincide with the stressed syllable, but is delayed until the post-stress syllable. Finally, the perceptual relevance of the prosodic parameters identified in the acoustic study was investigated.