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The Scots Language

• raesene9 8y ago
  I generally like Atlas Obscura's articles, but this one has, to use a local phrase, a load of shite in it. I've lived in Scotland my entire life and never come across anyone who speaks "Scots" as their main language. It's not taught as a course in any school that I'm aware of, so the idea that 1.5 million people "read, spoke or understood scots" seems like it required a bit of "flexible thinking" to be true. What is true is that many scottish people understand words which come from scots as their used in vernacular speech. Things like "Auld" == "old" or "Braw" == "good", but I wouldn't equate that with understanding a language.
  • falsedan 8y ago
    One doesn’t have to go far in Embra to hear about the dreich days nor the harr coming off the firth, and it’s the least Scottish city in the country. The vocab is distinct from English, and that puts it beyond an accent to a full dialect and language of its own. Also shite is northern English, Scots would call it a load a bawls pal
    • ppod 8y ago
      "a load of balls" and "pal" are pretty well understood anywhere in Britain. Scouse and Geordie accents have lots of difficult pronunciation and unusual vocabulary like this, and I don't think that they are languages.
      • falsedan 8y ago
        I don’t understand your distinction, mutual intelligibility does not discount a tongue from being a language, and discounting dialects from the accent <-> language continuum seems overly logocentric. I agree that dialects like Scouse, Strine, Geordie are not distinct languages; I also think that a rest-of-The-world English speaker would struggle to understand a speaker going full-on with the vernacular. The trouble with finding equivalent meanings between words with similar spellings/pronunciation is that you’ll conclude English and Dutch are the same language (or Danish/Norwegian/Swedish)
        • kwhitefoot 8y ago
          I've lived in Norway for the last 32 years and from my English vantage point Norwegian and Danish are definitely dialects of the same language. Swedish is the one that has made the most progress to becoming a separate language because of the large amount of vocabulary that is not shared with the other two but it is still not really distinct. All three have essentially the same grammar and syntax. I can converse with educated, well spoken, Swedes because the pronunciation is very similar to Norwegian even though spelling, vocabulary, and usage often differ. On the other hand I struggle with Trøndersk which no one claims is a separate language from Norwegian, and Danish is almost impossible in conversation because the pronunciation is so different from Norwegian but reading it is very easy. These three languages are much more similar than Dutch and English. I think you need a more telling example.
        • ppod 8y ago
          I agree with the principles of what you say but I also agree with the other reply to you. It is definitely a continuum and we can only impose artificial boundaries to it; what is mutually intelligible to one speaker may not be to another. However, from my experience of the accents of the Atlantic Archipelago (owning to my political bias here!), I don't think Scots is more different to RP than Scouse or southern Hiberno-English, perhaps with the exception of some very isolated communities.
    • raesene9 8y ago
      Sorry pal, go watch Chewin' the fat if you want to disclaim "shite" as a scottish term. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM8vOcxatsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM8vOcxatsI)
    • dboreham 8y ago
      Yer haverin'
  • jamescun 8y ago
    Let me see your anecdote with another, growing up in Scotland I had the exact opposite experience. Depending on the area and interaction, you'll find Scots. Formal encounters are most certainly conducted in English with the odd Scots word thrown in however in my experience, particularly when concerned with community work, Scots was more common than not. On a lighter note, I recall visiting a comic theatre production in Arbroath which to my surprise was mostly spoken in Doric, and found myself odd one out and missing many of the jokes. Regarding education, in high school we had entire units where we read and wrote Scots, and the majority of classroom discourse took place in Scots. This was not a special language nor otherwise remarkable school in any sense, it just seemed to be par of the curriculum in Angus at the very least.
    • raesene9 8y ago
      Well times are obviously different where you are. Over in Glasgow we had no contact or mention of Scots as a language in school whatsoever. Out of curiousity, what rough timeframe was your schooling in? I have a feeling that it's been seeing more of a resurgance in recent years, my schooling experience was in the 70's and 80's for comparison. I find Scots words in vernacular speech all the time, but I don't think I've ever heard someone speaking it as a distinct language. I've heard weegies speak Glaswegian, and I've heard people from the kingdom speak with their accent and dialect, but not people speaking "Scots".
      • dboreham 8y ago
        Not parent, but : school in Edinburgh. We code-switched, although the term wouldn't be coined for decades yet. RP in school, some variety of Scots (or whatever we're calling it) outside school.
        • koralatov 8y ago
          In school it's likely you were speaking Standard Scottish English. Received Pronunciation (RP) is an accent, not a dialect -- though most RP speakers speak Standard English, so there's a strong correlation between RP and Standard English. I've yet to come across and RP speaker who speaks another variety, excluding the occasional phrase or borrowed word. Outside of school you were almost certainly speaking Scottish Standard English, rather than actual Scots. Scottish English is a branch of English that's been influenced by Scots and borrowed vocabulary from Scots, but isn't actually Scots. Almost no-one in the 20th century speaks actual Scots; those who do are immediately identifiable and generally hard for a non-Scots speaker to understand. The last vestiges of Scots language speakers are parts of Aberdeenshire and the Borders. Sources: Highlander born and raised, living in Aberdeen for >10 years. One parent is a Gael whose second language is English, the other parent is from the Borders whose first language is that variety of Modern Scots. Native speaker of Scottish Standard English, with a little time spent studying linguistics and an interest in the subject.
  • phillc73 8y ago
    The 1.5 million figure is from 2011 Scottish Census data. [1] [1] http://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/documents/censusresults/release2a/scotland/QS212SC.pdf http://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/documents/censusresults/re...
    • koralatov 8y ago
      I would take that with a huge pinch of salt. Census data is self-reported, and most people don't know that Scots is a distinct language from Scottish English, albeit one sharing the same Anglic root and with a lot of borrowed words and phrases. I live in Aberdeen, and I'm pretty sure if I was to leave my flat and ask people I met in the street whether they spoke Scots or English, I'd get a disproportionate number of Scottish English speakers tell me they speak Scots; I'd also probably get some of the Doric-speaking locals tell me they speak English, even though Doric is actually a descendant of Scots.
  • ppod 8y ago
    It's like saying that some people in London are capable of understanding rural Cork English. It might be true; it doesn't make 'Corkish' a language, even though if you wrote down the language of rural Cork I think it would be as different from London English in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation as Scots.
    • Jill_the_Pill 8y ago
      "There are only two dialects of Irish, plain Irish and toothless Irish, and, lacking a proper acquaintance with the latter, I think I missed the cream of the old man's talk." --Brendan Behan
    • Rattled 8y ago
      More like Wexford English (Yola), which was a remnant of old English.
  • barking 8y ago
    braw is probably borrowed from Gaelic breá which means fine as in fine weather.
    • Marazan 8y ago
      Probably with Norse as an ancestor. The Swedish for Good is bra, pronounced very similarly to braw.
  • koralatov 8y ago
    Here's a repost of an earlier comment[1] I made on the relationship between Scots and English, which also applies here: I think you're confusing dialect with language here. Scots and Scottish English are distinct from one another. The latter does borrow some from the former which leads to confusion. Scots is a language, historically equivalent and closely related to English but still distinct. It's a stretch to argue that "many modern English speakers derive from Scots root". At this point in history, most Scots speak Scottish English with some borrowing from a Scots root -- not the other way around. This is evident in the fact that the vast majority of a modern Scottish person's vocabulary is from mainline English and intelligible by someone from London. That doesn't happen by Scots borrowing vocabulary from English -- it happens from English absorbing vocabulary from Scots. This is the situation for the vast majority of Scottish people. Coming across those who don't fit into the English-with-Scots-influence only reinforces this. Doric is arguably a descendant of mainline Scots which has converged on English, rather than the other way around, and means it's sometimes difficult to parse even for other Scots. Quite a lot of the Borders also speak a dialect which derives from Scots which has converged on English, and is difficult for other Scots to parse. They sound very similar to each other to someone who speaks neither, but are actually quite distinct -- mistaking someone from Selkirk for an Aberdonian will cause offence! The Wikipedia has a pretty good article on Modern Scots, though I think it overstates the pervasiveness of modern Scots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Scots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Scots It's also worth noting that most speakers of Modern Scots also speak Scottish English, and code-switching takes place frequently and fluidly. Gaelic is spoken by ~57,500 people in Scotland. Some of them have English as a second language, having been raised with Gaelic as the language of the home. In some cases this does show their English usage. One common tell is slightly unusual phrasing -- one typical and quite common usage is "You will be having tea?" rather than the more common "Will you be having tea?" Even then, they're still speaking a variety Scottish English and not Scots. tl;dr: Every Scottish person speaks at least one of the dialects of Scottish English. Some also speak a dialect of Modern Scots. An even smaller number speak Gaelic. Sources: Highlander born and raised, living in Aberdeen for >10 years. One parent is a Gael whose second language is English, the other parent is from the Borders whose first language is that variety of Modern Scots. Native speaker of Scottish Standard English, with a little time spent studying linguistics and an interest in the subject.
• craigsmansion 8y ago
  Much as I enjoy the Scots accent, it's just that: an accent. I know: "the difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a navy." (meaning: there is no difference) But insisting Scots is a separate language feels like a nationalist thing. As the article mentions, it's not that Scotland doesn't have a real language all its own, Scottish Gaelic. But that would take time to study and master, and it's easier to really dive into your local pronunciation up to a point where no one understands it as English, write it down phonetically, and claim it's a language. From the article: "Ye may gang faur an fare waur" apparently meaning: "You may go further and do a lot worse", or, "you may go farther and fare worse", if you pronounce it in dialect and just write it down like that.
  • ppod 8y ago
    >but that would take time to study and master, and it's easier to really dive into your local pronunciation up to a point where no one understands it as English, write it down phonetically, and claim it's a language. It's more political than that, there is a protestant/catholic aspect to it too, although that is more pronounces in Ulster.
  • raesene9 8y ago
    Scots Gaelic is the best option if we have to have one, but TBH I'm not sure that the majority of scottish people really resonate with it, as it's not been a significantly used language for the majority of Scottish people in hundreds of years. On the scots pronunciation thing, yeah that's usually how I work out what it is, just say the words out loud with a scottish accent and I can work out what they're getting at.
  • vorg 8y ago
    The article also says > Scots never incorporated all that Norman stuff So wouldn't that mean these 20 Norman words from your English-language comment above: > enjoy, accent, difference, language, dialect, army, navy, insist, separate, nation, article, mention, real, study, master, local, pronounce, point, claim, apparent wouldn't exist in Scots? That's a language, not a dialect.
  • pbhjpbhj 8y ago
• barking 8y ago
  There's the closely related Ullans, practically unheard of pre-1998.
• s0l1dsnak3123 8y ago
  I really enjoyed this article. Scots is certainly a language of its own - to hear it in the wild you must venture out of the more populous areas (Inverness and Aberdeen are exceptions) of Scotland and into the highlands and rural areas. It is also used much more by older, poorer or more isolated demographics within Scotland: as a farmers' son, I met many Scots-speaking people when I went to the market with my father. People who claim Scots is "just an accent" don't know what they're talking about.
  • klipt 8y ago
    > People who claim Scots is "just an accent" don't know what they're talking about. Such definitions are largely political. "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"
    • dboreham 8y ago
      Actually "with poets", no?
  • raesene9 8y ago
    I'd say it's a dialect, not a language. It's more than an accent for sure, for starters scotland has a load of different accents not just one, as I'm sure many teuchters going to Glasgow have found out the hard way. But I find it difficult to get to the idea that people "speak scots" in rural areas. I've lived and worked in Scotland my entire life and in 40+ years, not once has someone start speaking in a language I didn't get in general conversation... not once, and I would not regard myself as multi-lingual. There's local terms that are used for sure, "you ken" But that's not a language, that's a variety of local dialects.
    • falsedan 8y ago
      I expect they’re code switching to match your expected communication preferences based on the normal class/environmental signals.
      • 8y ago
• krallja 8y ago
  For some Scots internet tourism, visit https://www.reddit.com/r/ScottishPeopleTwitter https://www.reddit.com/r/ScottishPeopleTwitter
• randcraw 8y ago
  I'm not a linguist, but Scots sounds less like a language than a creole (a mix of languages which span essential terms), or even a pidgin dialect (an incomplete mix, requiring phrases or a third language to replace missing concepts). The article doesn't say explicitly, but I imagine Scots varies geographically, with the mix reflecting contribution from local tongues (English, Gaelic, French, Pict, etc).
  • Marazan 8y ago
    Yes, there isn't (in my view) such a thing as a singular 'Scots'. The 'Scots language' is effectively a 20th century invention by early century poets like Hugh MacDiarmid. They created a pan-Scottish 'Literary Scots' combining language and grammar from across the country. It's beautiful literary work but it is an artifice, not a reflection of a language actually spoken. The language of the Scottish Borders is a very different thing from the language of the Highlands from the language of a Dundonian.
    • raesene9 8y ago
      +1 From my experience you're absolutely correct. This idea that Glasgwegians speak the same "language" as Dundonians or Aberdonians or (heaven help us) Edinbuggers, is just weird. We don't. There's lots of local accents and phrases and words, but not some "scots language" that we start speaking when foreigners aren't around :)
      • GordonS 8y ago
        Aberdonian here. Yep, doric is very different from dialects elsewhere. I married a girl from Edinburgh, and after more than 10 years we're still discovering new words from each others areas!
  • falsedan 8y ago
    The “native” inhabitants of Scotland spoke Brythonic and Pictish (both Celtish languages); since then, the Gaels (who were also Celts), Romans, Norse, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans arrived from various directions and displaced them utterly. Scots arose from Old English and diverged from Middle English a scant few hundred years ago, when travel and the printing press made it easy for new terms to disseminate and usage to remain reasonable homogenous. There are some touches of these previous languages present in some dialects, like Shetland and Orkney using peedie/peerie (derived from Norn) where standard Scots uses wee.
• roywiggins 8y ago
  The Allusionist podcast did a good episode about Scots recently. https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/scots https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/scots https://www.theallusionist.org/transcripts/scots https://www.theallusionist.org/transcripts/scots
  • bgmeister 8y ago
    I think the Allusionist is a really interesting podcast, and this episode was a great one. It brought back some early childhood memories of my time in Scotland (where I first learnt to speak), and also of the responses to my accent and vocabulary when we returned to Australia.
• sleavey 8y ago
  I'm Scottish, but I work with a lot of Germans and every so often I try to learn some. I have found that Scots has a lot of similar works to German, sometimes more so than English. I guess this must be because it comes from Middle English which is related to High German. A few examples: "ken" (to know; "kenn" in German), "kirk" (church; "kirch" in German), "loch" (lake; literally "hole" in German), "reek" (smell; "riech" in German), "mair" (more; "mehr" in German). It's interesting to me because the other language I sometimes hear in Scotland other than English is Gaelic, which at least to my ear sounds nothing like any other language I've heard.
  • Symbiote 8y ago
    These are words from Norse, you will find often closer cognates in Norwegian, Swedish or Danish. Ken, kirke, (Loch), røg, mere. But also barn (child), hus (House), flytte (move, flit), and no doubt mour if I actually knew any Scots.
    • udp 8y ago
      Also present in North East English, which can be just as far removed from the Queen's English as the Scottish dialect. "Bairn" and "hus" definitely, and also "gan" (to go), "yam" (home, norwegian "hjem"). If Scots is now considered a language, then Geordie surely must be. Here's a nice example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaydon_Races#Lyrics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaydon_Races#Lyrics
      • NeedMoreTea 8y ago
        These trace back to the days of Viking raids and occupations for both Scots and Geordie.
      • BjoernKW 8y ago
        The usual criterion for distinguishing language from dialect is mutual intelligibility. Mutual intelligibility, however, is a continuum, with Scots verging towards the language end while Geordie being more on the dialect end of the spectrum. There’s a limited degree of mutual intelligibility between some other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian and German, too. However, for all practical intents and purposes those are still separate languages. Someone once quipped that languages are dialects with an army, which could explain why Scots historically is considered a separate language while Geordie is not.
• willmacdonald 8y ago
  There are several Scottish words I grew up using which are easily traceable to Swedish: - Scottish = English = Swedish - bairn = child = barn - flitting = move house = flytt - greeting = cry = gråt
  • binbag 8y ago
    Also 'braw' in scots, or 'bra' in swedish, which both mean 'good'. Picked this up while watching The Bridge... there are others as well.
  • Symbiote 8y ago
    "To flit" is also standard English, although more specific than the Scots use. It suggests a very small thing moving or fluttering, like a bird or insect.
    • kwhitefoot 8y ago
      It also means to escape and to leave suddenly, perhaps to avoid paying a bill or to avoid arrest, as in "He's done a flit". I come from the south west of England and flit was a perfectly ordinary word though not used in the RP register.
  • kwhitefoot 8y ago
    Norse or perhaps Norrønt, not Swedish. The modern Scandinavian languages diverged later. And anyway most of the Scandinavians in Scotland were surely Norwegian not Swedish.
• binbag 8y ago
  I'm Scottish. There is a resurgence of Scots in the cities (I'm in Glasgow) but it's a bit hipster. Even most central belt (Glasgow or Edinburgh) Scots think it's a little bit of a joke language. So this is article is interesting even for us. History has done a good and subtle job of ensuring Scots is thought of as a dialect of the poor - a lesser form of English. The interesting thing here is the fact that Scots is clearly Germanic - the resemblance is uncanny. In the cities they have started putting Gaelic place names underneath the English place names on railway station signs etc. Maybe it would have been more appropriate to put Scots versions there, since Gaelic was (and still is) the language of the North and not the lowland cities?
  • netcan 8y ago
    "History has done a good and subtle job of ensuring Scots is thought of as a dialect of the poor - a lesser form of English." Related processes happened all over western europe. Before radio & conscription, regional english dialects ranged from thick to "can't be understood one county over." There was a conscious effort to unify the language under the official dialect, king's english. Something similar was happening in Flanders, Netherlands right up until recently... Dialects were discouraged in schools and speaking in dialect became associated with a lack of schooling.
    • binbag 8y ago
      And kids in Glasgow schools were thwacked across the head if they spoke in Scots.
  • m-i-l 8y ago
    Putting Gaelic on the recently introduced Borders Railway signs did strike me as a slightly odd decision given lowland Scotland has zero historical connection with the Gaelic language. It almost comes across as a form of cultural imperialism.
    • binbag 8y ago
      Yes, absolutely.
• prestonbriggs 8y ago
  Check the books from http://www.itchy-coo.com/ http://www.itchy-coo.com/ "Harry Potter" in Scots is the way it ought to be read.
  • prestonbriggs 8y ago
    Also, consider https://www.luath.co.uk/scots-language/luath-scots-language-learner-an-introduction-to-contemporary-spoken-scots https://www.luath.co.uk/scots-language/luath-scots-language-...
• lordnacho 8y ago
  > The two languages are about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, or Norwegian and Danish. Well I'm in a fairly interesting position to judge this. I speak Danish, and I lived with a Norwegian guy for a long time. And my in-laws are lowland Scots. There are indeed some old words like kerk that are Germanic. But I think it's unusual for people to be speaking something that you'd call its own language. At least the inlaws don't use it full-time. It's more that they have a number of phrases that they sometimes pull out, and then there's a load of Robbie Burns (Auld Lang Syne). They seem to be able to decipher his stuff in a way that I as a mainstream English speaker cannot. They'd know what the gas station sign meant, where I would have a reasonable guess but be unsure. This is probably quite similar to a Dane picking up a Norwegian (or Swedish, which is maybe a step more difficult) newspaper. You'd get most of it, but there would be the odd word you don't get, or there would be an odd spelling, or a noun would fall in the wrong gender. But you'd get the gist of most everything. The problem is without some instruction you won't know what some crucial small words are. (I found when learning German after just a few lessons a whole lot of things fell into place and it went from unintelligible to newspaper standard. Same seems to be happening wrt Mandarin and Cantonese.) One thing to keep in mind is my inlaws insist the resurgence of Gaelic and Scots are artificial; they didn't have any instruction in either. It's like the languages have been reborn from the ashes, rather than having had a continuous existence (which I guess they actually did). But the big rebirth happened after they grew up in the 60s and 70s. Something similar is happening in Wales. Welsh speakers I've met have tended to be young.
  • jacobush 8y ago
    Something similar happened to Hebrew in Israel. It went from curiosity to a bona fide everyday language.
  • unhammer 8y ago
    See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Not https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Not . Similar things have happened and are happening to many other minority languages (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegianization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegianization ). ----- Also, regarding Scots not being that different, people do tend to (not always consciously) modify their speech towards mutual intelligibility when talking to people of different languages. My parents recently visited Tangier, VA[1], and had a conversation with some kids on the ferry, noticing "oh, they speak a bit differently", then they turned to speak to each other and my mom couldn't understand a word. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E
• lewis500 8y ago
  I was real interested in this article since my ancestors were about 80% scots or welsh. Welsh is undeniably a language, but Scots makes you wonder about the difference between a language and a dialect. I found this article by a famous linguist: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/difference-between-language-dialect/424704/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/di... It made an interesting point about English: "English tempts one with a tidy dialect-language distinction based on “intelligibility”...But because of quirks of its history, English happens to lack very close relatives, and the intelligibility standard doesn’t apply consistently beyond it. Worldwide, some mutually understandable ways of speaking, which one might think of as “dialects” of one language, are actually treated as separate languages. At the same time, some mutually incomprehensible tongues an outsider might view as separate “languages” are thought of locally as dialects." This is spot on. The first thing I did after reading the article was go to Scots Wikipedia. I could read the articles pretty well after a minute, since there seems to be a nearly one-to-one mapping between the Scots words and English words, and so I thought "this isn't a language." The grammar was different than standard english, but similar to the way some southerners talk. But had I grown up speaking another language maybe I'd have a different instinct about whether that intelligibility made it a language. Moreover, says something I chose written language for deciding whether it's a language or not: all english speakers are used to not being able to understand spoken english from other places and classes. In the end, I suppose the whole difference is socially constructed and involves politics mixed with what people regard as common sense. Random sample ("featured article") from the scots wikipedia: "The testicle (frae Laitin testiculus, diminutive o testis, meanin "witness" o virility, plural testes) is the male gonad in ainimals. Lik the ovaries tae which they are homologous, testes are components o baith the reproductive seestem an the endocrine seestem."
  • jschwartzi 8y ago
    > The grammar was different than standard english, but similar to the way some southerners talk. It's interesting that you mention this, since there are a lot of Scottish-descent people in the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains in the southeast of the United States. I had some distant relatives there who still had a clan affiliation that I met once when I was a child.
• eaguyhn 8y ago
  There was a very good documentary about the history of English. Episode 4 covers the "Guid Scots Tongue" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7UG6vHXArlk&list=PL6D54D1C7DAE31B36 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7UG6vHXArlk&list=PL6D54D1C7DAE...
• acjohnson55 8y ago
  I'm surprised to read this whole thread and not see any mention of Irving Welsh. When I studied abroad in Wales, I read Trainspotting, which is written in the Edinburgh flavor of Scots. To an American, it was almost as much effort as reading Spanish. Speaking of Wales, if my Welsh roommates were talking amongst themselves, their own flavor of English (distinct from Welsh, which they also spoke) was almost completely unintelligible to me. Perhaps less from grammar and vocab as much as an entirely different cadence and very different vowels.
  • mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Friend I met in my travels turned me on to the movie, loved it but first few times had to watch with subtitles. :D
• tdeck 8y ago
  Here's a great lecture about the Scots language and it's history - in Scots. I found I could understand it if I focus, perhaps given my exposure to British comedy. https://youtu.be/cENbkHS3mnY https://youtu.be/cENbkHS3mnY
• billfruit 8y ago
  Is it the dialect in which many characters speak in Walter Scott novels like Rob Roy and Old Mortality, if so it is very intelligible to an English reader.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• jimnotgym 8y ago
  This strong dialect, almost a language type thing is pretty common in the UK in general. I grew up in the Welsh border counties of England, and it was pretty common amongst remote rural people to speak a dialect that would have been impossible to understand by people in the towns 50 miles away. Bits of it survive, in Shropshire it is relatively common to hear locals say the weather is "cowd", and to pronounce words like "sheep" as "ship" (the old phrase "spoiling the ship for hap'orth of tar", meaning ruining something of value for the want of a cheap bit of maintenance, is apparently not about boats). I find most intriguing that men call each other "mon", like, "Surry mon it's cowd", or "how bin'ee mon". However the equivalent English, "hey man, it's cold today" would be absurd in England. To the old folks "she" was normally replaced with "her", as in "her is cawd". So those are all variant pronunciations or usages, but it goes further. My father is an upper-wommer (a yokel, but more effectionately meant. Literally someone whose house is high up in the hills). When he spoke to his father I used to struggle to follow say all. They would talk of "tumps" (small hill), "unts" (moles), and the lovely "unty-tumps" (yes mole-hills). Owls were "ulerts", gaps in hedges were "glats" bill-hooks were brummucks. There were bits of old-English thrown in, I was once told a brummuck needed "whetting" (as in whetstone, sharpening stone) and was confused enough as a child that I thought soaking it in oil to treat the rust should do-it. By the definitions above, if I as a teenager couldn't understand my grandfather (who I saw regularly) talking to my father, surely they were speaking a different language? Btw despite this being the Welsh borders, Welsh is very uncommon as a language, and whilst I don't speak Welsh, the vocab doesn't seem to come from there. Welsh has a number of sounds like "Ll" that were not used. Post WW2 farming became very prosperous in the area, and lots of farmers became gentrified and sent their sons to the elite English private schools (confusingly known as the Public Schools, for historical reasons). I think this is largely responsible for reducing the usage of the local language. Know you can still find it on building sites, farm labourers, and in little remote pockets.
  • zeristor 8y ago
    Thanks for that, I love the diversity of British accents. This reminds of the scene from Hot Fuzz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCiKYcbCL2g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCiKYcbCL2g Although I assume this is fake London itself seemingly has different accents. I can out people from Barnet, and those from Leyton albeit in people who grew up in the seventies. Is there anything like A Campaign For Real Accents? Perhaps Time Team's Phil Harding could preside, room temperature beer in hand
• emayljames 8y ago
  Ah ken wit yir talkin aboot. Scots isnae English, English 'an Scots developed at the same time, fae the same source.
• etatoby 8y ago
  I just checked on the keyboard app that I use, Google GBoard, and it supports both Scots and Gaelic.