4.1 Introduction
A number of early audio recordings of speakers of Received Pronunciation (RP) at the beginning of the twentieth century are available. These recordings reveal forms of RP which differ from those today. One of the chief differences between RP then and nowFootnote 1 involves voiceless stops: they show considerably less aspiration in the early recordings than they do at present, and it is this issue which is examined in the current chapter. This study is exemplary of the types of insights which can be gained from examining early audio recordings and is similar in approach to the others found in the chapters of this book. It also shows (in Section 4.4) how change can be traced from the beginnings of audio recording down to the present day.
The earliest recordings of RP are of members of the royal family and some prominent cultural and literary figures in the years between the two world wars. One of these recordings is that of Virginia Woolf, a recording made for a BBC broadcast on 29 April 1937. In it she talks about the words of the English language and how a contemporary writer might or might not use them. It is the only recording of her voice.
4.1.1 Three Early Twentieth-Century Writers in England
4.1.1.1 Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
Among the foremost novelists of the early twentieth century, Woolf was born in London, the daughter of the notable academic Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904) and was educated by her parents in Kensington. As a member of an upper-middle-class family in London, she would have acquired an accent typical of Received Pronunciation at the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 2 The recording of Virginia Woolf confirms that this was her native accent. As she spent all her life in London and its surroundings and was active in London literary circles, it is reasonable to assume that her RP accent, evident in the extant recording, is what she spoke all her life.
Virginia Woolf was also a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group, the loose circle of English writers and intellectuals who congregated around the area of Bloomsbury in London in the first half of the twentieth century. Members of the group such as Virginia Woolf herself, the biographer Lytton Strachey and the novelist E. M. Forster were insiders in several senses. They were English born and bred and many of them were graduates of Cambridge.
4.1.1.2 Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965)
One of the major poets of twentieth-century English, Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri and went through his schooling there, moving to Milton, Massachusetts when seventeen and then to Cambridge, Massachusetts to study at Harvard. Eliot left the USA and transferred to Europe in 1910 at the age of twenty-two but returned to Harvard until 1914, when he moved to England permanently, first to Oxford and then to London, where he settled for the rest of his life, becoming a British subject in 1927 after his conversion to the Anglican church. Eliot stated later in his life that ‘[I] wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England’. Given that he spent the first seventeen years of his life in Missouri, there is no reason to believe that he acquired anything but the supraregional Midwest American English accent of the late nineteenth century. However, the recordings of Eliot reading his own poetry reveal that as an adult in England he had an accent clearly recognisable as early twentieth-century Received Pronunciation. There are a number of recordings of T. S. Eliot. The most complete set and those of best quality are contained on the vinyl LP published by Caedmon Records in the Caedmon Literary Series. The recordings were made in September 1955 when Eliot was in his late 60s.
4.1.1.3 Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
Born in Dublin where she spent the first eight years of her life, Bowen moved to Hythe, Kent in 1907 with her mother and continued her education in England while maintaining her connections throughout her life with Bowen's Court in Co. Cork, the estate house which she had inherited in Ireland. Bowen is what is labelled an ‘Anglo-Irish’ writer, born in Ireland but with strong connections to England. In her writings she dealt with Anglo-Irish themes, e.g. in the novel The Last September (1929) the country estate in Co. Cork is at the centre of the action and plot.
4.1.2 Eliot and Bowen and the Bloomsbury Group
Both T. S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bowen were outsiders to the Bloomsbury Group. Eliot had emigrated to England and was keen on being accepted in established literary circles in England and maintained a friendship with Virginia Woolf. Bowen also associated with the group, though not as much as Eliot did. However, she entertained friendships with established members of the English upper middle classes of the time, such as the Oxford-educated novelist Rose Macaulay.
In sociolinguistic terms, both Eliot and Bowen can be regarded as upwardly mobile outsiders seeking to become members of a literary and intellectual establishment whose members were speakers of early twentieth-century RP. An essential part of this desire to be accepted in higher English society was the adoption of an accent identical with that of insiders in that society. And in the case of Eliot, casting off whatever American accent he brought with him to England led to an over-assimilation to early twentieth-century RP in one essential feature: the non-aspiration of voiceless stops.
Before proceeding to the quantitative evaluation of this feature Table 4.1 shows some of the salient features of early twentieth-century RP and how these occur in the speech of Virginia Woolf, as a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group, along with T. S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bowen as outsiders, not least because one was American and the other Irish.
Table 4.1 Distribution of seven key phonetic features for early twentieth-century Received Pronunciation
| Non-rhotic | strut low + central | goat central onset | trap raising | ai/au smoothing | Lax happY vowel | VOT for /p,t,k/ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Virginia Woolf | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | slight |
| T. S. Eliot | yes | yes | yes | variable | yes | yes | negligible |
| Elizabeth Bowen | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | yes | slight |
The first three of these features are uncontroversial and have remained more or less as they are down to present-day RP. trap-raising was reversed in the second half of the twentieth century (Upton Reference Upton, Kortmann and Upton2008: 242; Weiner and Upton Reference Weiner and Upton2000). ai/au smoothing refers to the lack of an upglide for the diphthongs of the price and mouth lexical sets (Wells Reference Wells1982: 149, 151) when occurring before a tautosyllabic /r/ as in the words fire and hour respectively. There are other features which are typical of the time: a fairly back realisation of the goose vowel and a mid open back vowel for the thought lexical set; these are uncontroversial in the present context.
4.2 Voice Onset Time in the Literature on Varieties of English
Among the features of varieties of English which varies least among native speakers is the aspiration of voiceless stops. A lack of aspiration has been noted for forms of Scottish English (Wells Reference Wells1982: 74, 112), but elsewhere in Britain, in Ireland, in North America and in the Southern HemisphereFootnote 3 native speaker varieties of English show audible aspiration of voiceless stops in the onsets of stressed syllables, e.g. pan [pʰæn], two [tʰuː], keen [kʰiːn], except where any of these follows /s/, e.g. spit [spɪt], stick [stɪk], skin [skɪn].
In Wells's three-volume work on accents of English, there is a single sentence on stop aspiration in RP: ‘Initially in a stressed syllable, U-RP /p, t, k/ (U-RP = ‘upper-crust’ Received Pronunciation, Wells Reference Wells1982: 280) often have surprisingly little aspiration’ (Wells Reference Wells1982: 282). His characterisation as ‘surprising’ is appropriate: in the context of native varieties of English across the anglophone world, a noticeable delay in Voice Onset TimeFootnote 4 (henceforth: VOT, Docherty Reference Docherty1992: 13–14; Harrington Reference Harrington2010: 125–132) is normal. Although in varieties of English in Scotland voice onset is, or at least was, markedly closer to the release of voiceless stops, this has not spread south to other forms of English. Indeed the relative delay in VOT has been analysed to characterise the border between southern Scotland and northern England; see Docherty et al. (Reference Docherty, Watt, Llamas, Hall and Nycz2011).
When discussing early twentieth-century RP Daniel Jones (Reference Jones1964 [1918]: 153) remarks that with ‘initial voiceless plosives … breath is heard immediately after the plosion. The sounds are then said to be aspirated;’ (emphasis in original). In his discussion of individual voiceless stops Jones (Reference Jones1964 [1918]: 138, 141, 146) mentions that they have ‘considerable aspiration’ when in the onset of a stressed syllable without any discussion of variation among speakers of RP (like himself). In his monograph The Pronunciation of English (1909), originally published nine years previous to An Outline of English Phonetics (1918), Jones remarks that ‘when k commences a strongly stressed syllable, it is somewhat “aspirated” in Southern speech. This means that there is a slight puff of breath, i.e. a slight h-sound, immediately following the plosion and preceding the vowel’ (Jones Reference Jones1956 [1909]: 74). Again there is no discussion of this issue, apart from a brief remark at the end of the same paragraph that ‘[i]n the North k is often not aspirated at all’.
There are recordings of Daniel Jones reading in his own early twentieth-century RP accent of English. Here one can recognise that his voiceless stops had smaller VOT values than those an equivalent speaker of present-day RP would have. For instance, his pronunciation of /t/ in Tempest has a VOT value of 32ms and 26ms in two, which is far less than half the value found in Queen Elizabeth's 2014 Christmas broadcast (see below). It is perhaps safe to conclude that Jones's awareness of the low VOT values of his RP contemporaries was not great because these values were characteristic of his own speech as well. Nonetheless, it is remarkable that between 1909 and 1918, the years of publication for his two early books on English pronunciation, Jones changed his description of voiceless stops in RP from being ‘somewhat aspirated’ to having ‘considerable aspiration’.
4.2.1 Handling Voice Onset Time
Voice onset time is a chronological aspect of speech production and a typically scalar, non-discrete phenomenon. There is no absolute measurement technique for determining its values and it is not possible to normalise it across a population of speakers, as the parameters which determine it are difficult to quantify. While it is true that vowel length is the parameter which varies greatest between fast and slow speech styles, VOT can nonetheless vary depending on at least the parameters shown in Table 4.2.
| 1 | Style (free speech, text reading, word list) |
| 2 | Rate of delivery of individual speaker |
| 3 | Status of words, major lexical class (nouns, verbs) and minor lexical class (prepositions, particles, modal verbs) |
| 4 | Phonetic structure of word: monosyllabic or polysyllabic; point of articulation Footnote 5 |
| 5 | Discourse features: high prominence sites, beginning of sentence, theme of utterance, conversational interaction with an interlocutor, etc. |
For an investigation like the present one, the relative values for VOT are what matter. Consider that in their section on VOT Ladefoged and Johnson (Reference Ladefoged and Johnson2011: 153) give a value of about 55ms for VOT with English stressed initial /p/ and a value under 20ms for English /p/ after initial /s/. These relatively high values, compared to those presented in the tables here, probably stem from measurements of words spoken on their own, i.e. in word-list style, although the authors do not mention this.
The measurements presented and discussed below were done using the phonetics software Praat (version 5.1.43) to analyse segments of speech. These were gained by dissecting the available sound files using the sound-processing program Audacity (version 2.1.1). Determining VOT values involves considering two key questions on which values depend (Thomas Reference Thomas2011: 117).
1. Where does the release burst of a voiceless stop set in, bearing in mind that velars can have two or more bursts? Following Cho and Ladefoged (Reference Cho and Ladefoged1999), measurements for the present study were made from the last burst.
2. When does glottal pulsing (voicing) set in for F1 (first formant)? There are different approaches here (Thomas Reference Thomas2011: 117): for instance, one in which the onset of recognisable voicing for F2 is used for determining VOT values. But for many of the poor-quality recordings examined for the present study, F1 could be more easily recognised and so was used. This means that the VOT values may be slightly lower than other sets gained by measuring glottal pulsing for F2 (or higher formants).
4.2.2 Voice Onset Time and Point of Articulation
The results here correlate with the findings of other scholars (cf. Stuart-Smith et al. Reference Stuart-Smith, Rathcke, Sonderegger, Macdonald, Torgersen, Hårstad, Mæhlum and Rɸyneland2015: 233 confirming the work of Cho and Ladefoged Reference Cho and Ladefoged1999: 208) that VOT is increasingly shorter when the point of articulation is further forward in the mouth: i.e. /k/ > /t/ > /p/ is the sequence indicating an increasing reduction in VOT. Lisker and Abramson (Reference Lisker and Abramson1964: 397) also confirm this in the case of Korean, where the distinction between unaspirated and aspirated stops is phonemic. There would also seem to be a difference, in principle, between /k/ and /t/ on the one hand and /p/ on the other. A reason for this might be that it is easier to build up pressure behind the velar and alveolar stops, as the muscles involved can produce greater tension than the lips in the articulation of /p/ and hence a greater burst on plosive release for /k/ and /t/ ensues. In the quantitative evaluation of aspiration with /p/ in the historic recordings examined here, the burst was less evident than with /k/ and /t/, and so it was frequently less easy to measure it because of the poor quality of the recordings.
4.2.2.1 Voice Onset Time: Phonetic Context and Lexical Incidence
The context for VOT examined in this study is the pre-stress, pre-vocalic position of voiceless stops. There are a number of common words in English where a sonorant is found between a voiceless stop – /p/ or /k/ – in the onset of a stressed syllable and the nucleus vowel of that syllable, e.g. praise, play; create, climb. With all speakers the VOT value in this context is higher than when a vowel immediately follows.
Again across all speakers, the word time seems to have the shortest VOT value of all /tV-/ syllable onsets. As this is a very common word in English it may be that the older pronunciation of the word with a low VOT value survived longest into the twentieth century. Even George VI, who of all English monarchs had relatively long VOT values, has the shortest for this word. T. S. Eliot has an average of 9 ms for VOT across the seven instances of this word measured in his reading of The Four Quartets. If a low VOT for time was salient in early twentieth-century RP, then it is understandable that Eliot, in hyperadapting to this accent, had the lowest of his VOT values for /tV-/ in precisely this word.
4.2.3 Increase in Voice Onset Time During the Last Hundred Years
The hypothesis to be tested here is that VOT for varieties of English, which previously had low values, has been on the increase throughout the twentieth century and down to the present. In their investigation of nine Aberdeen English speakers, Watt and Yurkova (Reference Watt and Yurkova2007: 1522) confirm that ‘VOT for /p/ across the entire subject group as a whole is inversely correlated with speaker age, in that older speakers in this sample show a tendency to have shorter VOT for this plosive than younger ones’. In their recent study, Stuart-Smith et al. (Reference Stuart-Smith, Rathcke, Sonderegger, Macdonald, Torgersen, Hårstad, Mæhlum and Rɸyneland2015) conclude that aspiration is becoming more characteristic of Scottish English in general, i.e. the values for VOT are on the increase.Footnote 7
For Tables 4.3–4.6, four measurements, each for /p, t, k/, were aimed at. The items are ordered in ascending length of VOT. The values for /p/ show that all speakers had very little aspiration, i.e. a negligible VOT.
Table 4.3 VOT values for Virginia Woolf (recording c. 1937)
| /p/ | VOT (ms) | /t/ | VOT (ms) | /k/ | VOT (ms) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| properly | 7 | teach | 26 | because | 25 |
| appear | 7 | tell | 28 | cannot | 30 |
| part | 9 | teaching | 41 | incarnadine | 53 |
| passing | 10 | taught | 44 | create | 74 |
| average | 8 | average | 35 | average | 43 |
Table 4.4 VOT values for T. S. Eliot (recording 1955)
| /p/ | VOT (ms) | /t/ | VOT (ms) | /k/ | VOT (ms) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| paper | 5 | time (7) Footnote 6 | ;;9 | comic | 12 |
| park | 8 | tea | 11 | cups | 14 |
| peace | 9 | take | 11 | can | 15 |
| pen | 9 | talk | 11 | candle | 17 |
| average | 8 | average | 10 | average | 15 |
Table 4.5 VOT values for Elizabeth Bowen (recording c. 1956)
| /p/ | VOT (ms) | /t/ | VOT (ms) | /k/ | VOT (ms) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| perhaps | 10 | at ∩all | 11 | characters | 22 |
| people | 11 | temperament | 21 | carry | 25 |
| possible | 12 | towards | 23 | because | 29 |
| person | 19 | take | 33 | kind | 62 |
| average | 13 | average | 22 | average | 37 |
Table 4.6 Comparative ranges of VOT for /k/ with Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bowen
| lowest/highest value | range | |
|---|---|---|
| Woolf | 25 ms – 74 ms | 49 ms |
| Bowen | 22 ms – 62 ms | 40 ms |
| Eliot | 12 ms – 17 ms | ;5 ms |
4.2.4 Voice Onset Time in the Recording of Virginia Woolf
At first hearing, the speech of Virginia Woolf conveys an impression of being articulated in a closed manner towards the front of the mouth. The word which occurs repeatedly in her recording is words which she pronounces as [wɸ̱;ːdz] rather than [wɜːdz]. She also has considerable trap-raising but little goose-fronting, and her thought vowel is not as closed as it would be in present-day RP. She also has a slightly-rolled /r/Footnote 8 in positions of discourse focus, e.g. she has gone aroving [əˈrəʊvɪŋ].
Some of the voiceless stops in the Woolf recording contain VOT values which are similar to today's values, e.g. the word echoes (admittedly in post-stress position) has a value over 50 ms which shows that Woolf had a variable use of aspiration, a situation which linguistically would point to a change from earlier categorical non-aspiration to categorical aspiration of voiceless stops in RP today.
4.2.5 Voice Onset Time in the Recordings of T. S. Eliot
There are recordings of Eliot reading all his major poems such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday and The Four Quartets. For the VOT measurements these recordings were used. This means, of course, that for Eliot, as opposed to Woolf and Bowen, one is dealing with recitals of poetry rather than stretches of speech where the author is explaining something.
In the case of Eliot, the lack of aspiration with voiceless stops, which he hyperadapted to on his arrival in England in the early twentieth century, was idiosyncratic and obviously of no further consequence for RP. Lack of aspiration would seem not to have been a feature which Eliot brought with him to England from America. For instance, Robert Frost (1874–1963), a slightly older American contemporary of Eliot, in his 1948 recording of Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening has clear aspiration of voiceless stops – for example, the /k/ in kept has a VOT value of 68 ms – equivalent to modern American English usage (although his speech is non-rhotic as would have been typical of late nineteenth-century New England where he moved to when he was eleven).
Eliot's negligible VOT remained a feature of his speech which became increasingly old-fashioned as RP speakers gradually increased VOT for voiceless stops. There was secondary gain here for the poet, though probably unconscious: Eliot's voice was clearly recognisable, and his readings of his own works remained popular and were regarded as uniquely characteristic of the man himself.
4.2.6 Voice Onset Time in the Recordings of Elizabeth Bowen
The recording of Elizabeth Bowen is one where she discusses various techniques in novel writing and was broadcast by the BBC on 3 October 1956. Her speech is broadly early twentieth-century RP which contains features like a rolled /r/ for focused elements in a discourse, similar to that found with Virginia Woolf, but more pronounced. She also had [ʍ] for wh- as in when [ʍen] which was already a recessive RP feature in the early twentieth century (Cruttenden Reference Cruttenden2014: 233–234; Upton Reference Upton, Kortmann and Upton2008: 250). However, this sound would have been well represented in the Irish surroundings in which she spent a considerable amount of her time, especially in her childhood.
4.2.7 Hyperadaption and VOT
T. S. Eliot did not participate in the variability of VOT with /k/ as did Elizabeth Bowen. This is typical of adult hyperadaption which does not evince the nuances of target distributions which children show when internalising a speech feature.
Eliot is the most consistent in the use of very short VOT values. For instance, in the first five lines of Burnt Norton from the Four Quartets there are seven occurrences of the word time, and the VOT average for these is 9 ms (see Table 4.4). Elizabeth Bowen has the word time twice in her recording with an average VOT of 24 ms which is low by present-day standards but still nearly three times longer than Eliot's average value.
4.2.7.1 Post-Stress Voiceless Stops
The measurements of VOT, discussed so far, have been of voiceless stops in immediately pre-stress position. But these stops also occur in post-stress position, especially /k/ both as a final, released consonant as in pick, take, back and in a pre-vocalic context, e.g. echo (in various forms). With Viriginia Woolf the /-k-/ in the word echoes has a VOT value of 64 ms. Again in Eliot's Burnt Norton, the word echo(es) occurs twice with an average VOT value of 39 ms. So even in this phonotactic position, which favours longer VOT values, Eliot is lagging behind Virginia Woolf, his anchor within the RP-speaking Bloomsbury group.
4.3 Language Change Over Time: The Speech of English Monarchs
The discussion so far has concerned the speech of three writers with a view to determining how two of them (outsiders) adapted to contemporary speech norms of a country (England) in which they were not born. The assumption was also mentioned that, in the course of the twentieth century, longer VOT values became typical of RP in England. For the remainder of this study, the validity of this assumption is to be scrutinised, this time by examining the speech of individuals – various English monarchs – who were the most established members of the country they ruled over.
The speech of English monarchs has not gone unnoticed by linguists: the broadcasts of Elizabeth II have been examined by Jonathan Harrington and his colleagues, and the results have been published as Harrington, Palethorpe and Watson (Reference Harrington, Palethorpe and Watson2000), which looked at the Queen's realisation of monophthongs, and Harrington (Reference Harrington2006), which is an examination of happY tensing (Wells Reference Wells1982: 257–258) in the Christmas speeches delivered by the monarch over several decades.
In the following section, the VOT values for a range of English monarchs are presented. The first of these is George V (1865–1936) for whom recordings are available, namely Empire Day and Christmas Day messages, beginning in 1923 and continuing until shortly before his death. The quality of these is poor, with low frequency hiss present throughout the entire recordings. This makes it difficult to establish where a stop is in the signal and hence where the burst of its release begins. Nonetheless, it has been possible with signal noise reduction and amplification techniques to determine, admittedly with an undesirable margin of error, what the VOT values were in his speech (see Table 4.7).
The second monarch considered here is Edward VIII, whose reign lasted less than a year before his younger brother George VI ascended the throne after Edward's abdication on 11 December 1936. The recording used for VOT evaluation is his abdication speech (Table 4.8).
George VI reigned in the period from 1937 to 1952. A private figure who shyed away from publicity, there are not many recordings of his voice, the speech from 1939 speaking to the nation about the impending war with Germany being the most famous. For the measurements in Table 4.9 his opening speech at the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow in 1938 and the speech on victory in Europe on 8 May 1945 were examined.
In 1953 the current incumbent on the English throne was crowned Elizabeth II. Beginning in that year, she has regularly broadcast a Christmas message in which she explicitly addresses the English people and those in the countries of the Commonwealth. The first of these messages was broadcast in 1953 from Auckland, New Zealand and was used for the current study. Two further broadcasts were investigated in order to provide a longitudinal comparison of VOT for the current monarch: those from 1984 and 2014. One very early recording, broadcast from Cape Town in 1947 on the occasion of the 21st birthday of Elizabeth Windsor (the later Queen Elizabeth), was also analysed (see Table 4.10).
In this early period Queen Elizabeth still shows much variation in VOT values (see Table 4.11). For instance, in the 1957 broadcast the word television occurs (stressed on the first syllable) with a VOT value of just 27 ms.
In the broadcast used for Table 4.12, the Queen, at 58, had a quicker rate of delivery than as a young woman in the late 1940s and early 1950s and than as an 88-year-old woman in 2014 (see Table 4.13 and Figures 4.2, 4.3 and 4.4). This might account for the VOT values for /k/ which are lower than in the first two recordings. It is also noticeable that VOT values for /t/ when followed immediately by /r/ are considerably longer than others because the /tr-/ sequence is really an affricate, cf. trust [trʌst] which had a VOT value of 91 ms.
4.3.1 Assessing the Speech of the Monarchs
For a span of over ninety years there are recordings of the English monarchs in which a development in the values for VOT can be recognised. This development is not a straight line from the earliest to the latest recordings as can be seen from Figure 4.5.
George VI was the most ‘modern’ with relatively long VOT values overall, longer than those of his elder brother Edward VIII. One of the reasons for this might lie in George VI's stammer, which could have caused him to pronounce words with more force when he did manage to speak them, this leading to a slight lengthening of VOT.
Between George V and Elizabeth II one can recognise an increase in VOT for /p/ of just over a third. But it is with /t/ that the clearest rise in VOT is to be seen. The word talent in the 2014 Christmas broadcast has a VOT of 90 ms which is 64 ms more than the highest VOT for any word in the Empire Day broadcast of her grandfather George V. Furthermore, in Queen Elizabeth's 2014 Christmas broadcast, the keyword time has a VOT value of 73 ms which is two to three times the length of the VOT values of all the others in this study, both her relatives and the authors examined.
4.4 Conclusion
We cannot say for certain whether late nineteenth-century speakers of RP showed the lack of voiceless stop aspiration which can be recognised in the recordings of T. S. Eliot, as this could be the result of hyperadaption on his part. But recordings such as that by Virginia Woolf suggest that there was a generation at the beginning of the twentieth century for whom VOT values were on the increase, starting at the velar point of articulation and proceeding forwards. Support for this interpretation is found by comparing the VOT values for /p/ and /t/ in the older and more recent recordings of Queen Elizabeth II. In the course of her lifetime, the degree of aspiration for these two stops increased, pointing to the completion of a change in RP which probably had begun already in the late nineteenth century: the increase in aspiration for voiceless stops. This view is furthermore supported by the investigations of VOT values for Scottish English (Stuart-Smith et al. Reference Stuart-Smith, Rathcke, Sonderegger, Macdonald, Torgersen, Hårstad, Mæhlum and Rɸyneland2015; Watt and Yurkova Reference Watt and Yurkova2007) which is moving towards the universal pattern for all native speaker varieties of English, namely significant aspiration for the whole series of voiceless stops.
