ISCA Archive ISAPh 2024
ISCA Archive ISAPh 2024

The sociophonetics of coda /t/ in Dublin English

Chloé Diskin-Holdaway, Debbie Loakes, Kirsty McDougall

We present an acoustic study of sociophonetic variation in the realization of coda /t/ in Dublin English. Wordlist data from 21 DubE speakers (11f, 10m) from the north, south and south-west of Dublin are analyzed using acoustic profiling. Extensive variation is present, with 13 variants of /t/ observed. A fricated variant [t̞] is the most common realization (45.6% of tokens), followed by the aspirated stop (41.7%). The remaining 12.7% of tokens include pre-glottalized realizations (5.6%), affricates (2.7%) and other less frequently occurring variants (total 4.4%). Some patterns for gender, location and age are evident, with fricated variants being most prevalent for female speakers and speakers from south Dublin and neighbouring Wicklow, with some limited evidence of frication being more prevalent in younger participants.