Scottish/Irish Accents

[highlander_Daz]

Glasgow is very fast and littered with slang and a weegie constantly asks you if you agree with them by making a i sound (Not I as in I but i as in pit) this "i" sound sometimes sounds like the word "Jimmy" hence you get the sterotypical Weegeis saying "See you Jimmy" and that type of stuff. So heres an example

"you all right i?, what you been dooing i?, just goin for a bletehr doon the pub what you think i?"
etc etc.

despite its reputation and bad press the weegies are very nice down to earth people but very hard to undrstand, I remember the BBC Pointlessly interviewing Kenny Dalgliesh after football matches and not being any the wiser, Kenny is one of the greatest player in history however he really has an accent that Alan Turing would struggle to decypher!.

[Andrew Breecher]

I love the Paisley accent. Perhaps that has something to do with a lovely lass from Paisley I once knew.... ;)

Andrew.

[auld argonian]

Having worked in the theatre and having therefore heard WAY too many really bad attempts at various accents....

...I'm almost convinced that you have to go there and live for about six months for it to rub off on you. My brother got sent to Ireland for three months by his company and came back with the "ending every sentence with an interrogative" thing...every sentence ended with "...isn't it?" or "...aren't they?" or something similar...it's a couple of years later and he still does it. I drink in a bar that has a healthy smattering of native Irish and they have the same tendency.

It's not just vowel sounds...it's cadence and intonation...rising and falling inflections...syntax...it's very complex and very subtle. That's probably why a native speaker can spot someone affecting an accent so easily.

best

auld argonian

[yoippari]

YMMV

Some people seem to pick up accents faster than others. My brother and I have lived in the same house our whole life. My mother is from the midwest and parts of the south and southwest. She has found that the northwest has a very neutral accent. So when my brother went to Tampa, Floridia for a couple weeks on an inner city mission trip and then orlando to visit my aunt (charlie hit while he was in orlando) the south carolinians that the mission team was paired up with said that he sounded southern after a week. He was fooling native southerners with whatever accent he picked up in that week.

So depending on how quickly you pick up an accent you may be able to vacation in scotland and start sounding like the natives within a couple of weeks, however; you will probably also loose the accent as quick as you picked it up.

[toadinakilt]

I speak Spanish like a Mexican from Acapulco :-P

My accent, that is. They loved it down there, but my vocabulary is still very small...

I WANT TO LIVE IN SCOTLAND!!!

[highlander_Daz]

Yoippari with respect, I think it a little different changing regional variations of the same accent to actually picking up a new one, Ive heard many many attempts at a "scots accent", actors and otherwise and 99 times out of hunded they fail because they dont latch on to a particular region and work on that, they try and do a generic Scots accent which doesnt exist. but it can be done if you identify exacly which region and just work on that, the accent can vary by village to village.

[KiltedBishop]

And people from the Republic of Ireland often have a hard time understanding Northern Irelanders.
It is true what you are asking is like saying you want an "Southern" accent. Well do you mean Texas? Georgia? etc.

what we think of as Scottish accent in my experience is Edinburough, and Irish is Dublin.

[macsim]

I've always loved accents myself and I've always been a bit of a mimic. Just as fascinating I think, are words and phrases that come down through the years. We've mentioned the book "Albion's Seed" on the forum before and Fischer takes an interesting look at how language in various regions of the USA can be traced back to certain parts of Great Britain. We use the word "honey" here in the south a lot as a term of affection for instance, mostly in a boy-girl kind of way but my grandfather used to call everyone honey. I always thought that was odd until I read the book and found that it was a term that came into the backcountry area from the borders of North Britain and my dad's family lived among these people for two or three hundred years after arriving in America. Not sure yet where they originated in the old country. Or, the way the Scots-Irish in the backcountry pronounced "there" as "thar." My grandmother and dad both say it that way.

Sadly I think we're losing some of the regional dialects, at least to some degree. I have a real southern/country sort of accent but I don't say "thar." I'd say, if I were not being very careful - "I'm goin' ov'ere" for "I'm going over there." My wife was born 70 miles down the road and she has a completely different accent. I don't think I could even spell the way she says a simple word like "bag" and get it across to you. My kids though - I don't know what's happened but they have very clear enunciation, not quite northern but not very southern at all. Maybe it's the great numbers of "furr'ners" that have moved into NC. Talk about yer Tower of Babel! (That's Tire o' Babel for my fellow southerners. )

[bubba]

The loss of regional accents is mostly due to mass media and television. Most programs try to be as accent neutral as possible.

[Tim Walker]

Having worked in the theatre and having therefore heard WAY too many really bad attempts at various accents....

...I'm almost convinced that you have to go there and live for about six months for it to rub off on you. My brother got sent to Ireland for three months by his company and came back with the "ending every sentence with an interrogative" thing...every sentence ended with "...isn't it?" or "...aren't they?" or something similar...it's a couple of years later and he still does it. I drink in a bar that has a healthy smattering of native Irish and they have the same tendency.

It's not just vowel sounds...it's cadence and intonation...rising and falling inflections...syntax...it's very complex and very subtle. That's probably why a native speaker can spot someone affecting an accent so easily.

best

auld argonian

It may be best not to attempt humor. Too much may depend on subtlety.

DVDs include the option of cast commentary. It was mentioned by one actor that Ewen Bremner tried an American accent for Alien vs. Predator, but his attempts at humor failed.