Vowel length Scots OUT

The selection of the Scots vowel  in a word like house (OUT) tends to correlate with social stratification, such that middle-class speakers will avoid Scots variants and working-class speakers will use them to differing degrees depending on the alternating vowel and even the word involved. Though Macafee (1994) has analyzed the results for 11 alternating vowels in her sample of Glaswegian, the Scots alternation which has received the most attention is that of OUT. The results of these studies confirm that: (i) the Scots form is characteristic of working-class speech; (ii) few lexical items occur in these data (only 12 in the 1997 Glasgow corpus); (iii) speakers always show some alternation (sole use of Scots  is not attested); and (iv) that the alternation appears to be stable over the past 30 years (in Glaswegian at least). This last finding is interesting as it demonstrates that some features of Scots phonology are vigorous.