On the Tail of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule in Glasgow

One of the most famous sound features of Scottish English is the short/long timing alternation of /i u ai/vowels, which depends on the morpho-phonemic environment, and is known of as the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR). These alternations make the status of vowel quantity in Scottish English (quasi-)phonemic but are also susceptible to change, particularly in situations of intense sustained dialect contact with Anglo-English. Does the SVLR change in Glasgow where dialect contact at the community level is comparably low? The present study sets out to tackle this question, and tests two hypotheses involving (1) external influences due to dialect-contact and (2) internal, prosodically-induced factors of sound change. Durational analyses of /i u a/ were conducted on a corpus of spontaneous Glaswegian speech from the 1970s and 2000s, and four speaker groups were compared, two of middle-aged men, and two of adolescent boys. Our hypothesis that the development of the SVLR over time may be internally constrained and interact with prosody was largely confirmed. We observed weakening effects in its implementation which were localised in phrase-medial unaccented positions in all speaker groups, and in phrase-final positions in the speakers born after the Second World War. But unlike some other varieties of Scottish or Northern English which show weakening of the Rule under a prolonged contact with Anglo-English, dialect contact seems to be having less impact on the durational patterns in Glaswegian vernacular, probably because of the overall reduced potential for a regular, everyday contact in the West given the different demographies

Open data policy development: How can municipalities take account of residents’ perspectives?

In many countries, governments encourage municipalities to develop open data policies and subsequently open up data. Municipal open data policies are often supply-driven and not based on residents’ wishes. Municipalities lack insight into residents’ perspectives on opening up municipal data and often do not know how to take them into account when developing their open data policies. This paper aims to reveal residents’ perspectives on municipal open data policies and provide recommendations for municipalities on how to account for them when developing future open data policies. Using Q-methodology and applying it to the municipality of Delft in the Netherlands, we elicited the perspective of four main groups of residents on the development of the municipal open data policy as follows: 1) ‘the oblivious residents’, 2) ‘the distrustful residents’, 3) ‘the trusting, passive residents’, and 4) ‘the open data advocates’. We found that all residents considered transparency important for the quality of public administration, and that municipal transparency is currently lacking. We then provide recommendations for policy makers responsible for municipal open data policies and suggest directions for open data theory development concerning municipal open data policy.Information and Communication TechnologyTransport and Logistic