“Sweet Singing in the Choi/r/”: How Spoken Dialect Affects Choral Phonology in Glasgow and Cambridge

British classical choirs are thought to use a prestige accent when singing in English. In Scotland there are two available prestige accents, local (SSE), and supralocal (SSBE). Does local consonant phonology affect choral phonology? Here, I investigate regional accent effects in a real-time study of choral singing in commercially released recordings of choirs from Glasgow and Cambridge. Postvocalic /r/ is auditorily coded and analyzed using Bayesian models. Rhoticity is widespread in Glasgow reflecting the phonology of Scottish varieties; however, it declines over time, perhaps reflecting change to an SSBE referee, or the impact of the choir director’s accent or preferences.