Transcribing your accent

[Garry Oak]

About twenty-five years ago, at a Highland festival in Colorado, I was shown a book about the Scots language. I've no idea where it came from or the scope of its authority, if any. The example that I recall had to do with the word, "raither," with an "i" in the middle of it.

In English, it's "I would rather do this than that."

In Scots, the parallel given was "I had raither do this as that."

I can't and won't claim that I'm right about this. I don't even know if anyone in Scotland ever says this in this way. I merely mention it to show that it's been treated as a worthy topic by academics for a while now. The point that I took from the person who showed the book to me was that the Scots language has its own grammatical rules, and that these do not always happen to be the same as the rules of the English language.

Anecdotal bit of information: there are places on the prairies of the United States in which "I had rather do this than that" is the most common way of expressing the thought. I'm inclined to guess that they're partially following their ancestors' usage rather than having made up the construction out of whole cloth.

[Arlen]

I've spoken to A LOT of professional linguists about that distinction. The majority term Scots and Doric as distinctly different from English but a few claim them only as a severe dialect.

I'm inclined to think of them, spoken in their truest and thickest form, as a different language.
My wife often jokes I have a Scottish accent and a 'Speaking to an American' accent.


I recently gave World of Warcraft a go and have been having fun seeing the various accents that the Dwarves on there have.

[Stratherrick]

It's interesting for me to live in the English borders which has many Scotticisms in the local language, a sort of halfway house language-wise.

My understanding has always been that Scots was a fully recognised language, as different from English as it was from Scots Gaelic at times. Most Northern English would have little difficulty in picking up on the intonation, if not all the vocabulary, but the farther south you go, the more likely they'd get lost with it all.

Slainte

Bruce

[highlander_Daz]

Its kind of an ongoing debate, there simply is NO "scots" Accent or way of speaking the accent and use of words varies across the country, Burns is representitive of of lowland Scots folk used language in his day, most people associate Glasgow as being THE Scottish accent as its the most used on TV etc. If you read the otherwise excelent series of "outlander" novels the leading man "jamie Mckenzie"i s a kind of " Aye ma bonnie wee Lassie Dinne worry" "Dinne" "Wouldnae" "Canne" are words normally associated with lowland acents, rather than Inverness where Jamie is purported to be from. Imagine an episode of "Dallas" with the cast having California accents. etc. If you explore the differences in Scottish accents they can be startling, sing song accents in some parts of the Highlands, to as near as Dammit posh English in other parts of the Highlands, with Rab C Nesbitt as you get further south, Billy Connolly has slowed down and lengthened the vowels in his Glasgow accent (presumably for overseas popularity) as has Craig fergusson. there was a guy on youtube who did some excelent "snippets" of regional accents, the late great Peter Sellers could imitate virtually every accent across the uK including specific parts of Scotland.

[ForresterModern]

One thing I have discovered over time reading "The Steel Bonnets", a book about the Border Reivers, is that much of what was written down at least during those times was done so phonetically, sometimes with the same author using multiple different spellings for the same word in the same document. These were predominantly documents written by government wardens on both sides of the border---scot and english--but both followed similar phonetic styles. I get the feeling that formal spellings for most of the english (and probably scots) language were not standardised at that time or for some centuries to come, as even some documents from the kings during these torrid centuries had similar phonetic spellings. From what I have seen Scots written language is a combination of the local dialect with this phonetic based word forming technique, which may or may not have ever been formalised. English spelling at least has obviously been formalised as is witnessed by the plethora of dictionaries.

Gaelic seems to be totally different from Scots, although I could see how outlanders could confuse one for the other, especially given the large variation in dialects trying to speak the same language over such a relatively small country.

[The Guy in the Kilt at UC]

Perhaps it's because John Rhys Davies (a Welshman!) gave Gimli a Scots accent in Lord of the Rings!

Nah, I have an older video game that gives them Scottish accents.

[thescot]

My understanding has alwas been that Scots was a dialect of English, heavily influenced in some places by Scots Gaelic. When I used to travel to Scotland on business, I would sometimes have to get a Scots-to-Englsih translation if the brogue was too thick, but for the most part I could understand anything said. One young lass with whom I worked (and avery attractive ad charming lass she was) said of one fellow on the team, "I can't understand him half the time either."

Public televion did an excellent History of the Language series years ago which included a segment called, "The Guid Scots Tonge." Their take was that it is a dialect of English as well.

I think of how we in the South (US) speak our own form of English dialect, and I have noted how some "foreigners" (folks from the North) have trouble understanding us when we are engaged in our own local converstion. I think it's the same. We have a lot of words and rhythms that are heavily influence by Gaelic due to the Scots and Scots-Irish migrations, and we also have other words that just aren't used elsewhere. Southerners are big on similes.

It took my brother-in-law years to get where he could understand us in a crowd.

But we still speak English, just not the Queen's English. But as a comedian once said, the queen doesn't run the South.

One example: some very rural folks still say something that sounds like " I hope him get his hay in." The word that sounds like hope is actually is actually a variant of a very old conjugation of help, i.e., holp which is a past tense of help. I would say "I helped him get his hay in."

But then, that assumes that I was still capable of walking through the fields picking up bales and stacking them on the trailer behind the hay baler, a possiblity which is questionable at best! I would have trouble getting all the hay out of my kilt!

[dfmacliam]

ee bah gum, lads.... ee bah gum...LOL

You know... sometimes we use lingo all our lives, that we never realize its not common everywhere.. on other times we use terms.. we never realize its origins.. a poke.. as in a pig in a poke.. but then Scots has its seeds sown in the Appalachian dialect..

[skauwt]

heres a wee Scottish government run site about Scots and its history it has a varied amount of data for anyone wanting to know about dialects and so on
http://www.scotslanguage.com/books/view/2/

this section has some audio for those unsure oh how some things are said
http://www.scotslanguage.com/books/view/2/681

[NewGuise]

As Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich famously stated (quoting an unnamed high school teacher from the Bronx), "A language is a dialect with an army and navy." common example is this: Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are mutually intelligible but considered separate languages; many German 'dialects' are not mutually intelligible but are not referred to as separate language simply because they are all spoken by Germans.

The term "language" is used to mean all sorts of things, and even linguists use the term 'dialect' in different ways. But the key difference is usually one of historical source and derivation. Scots or Lallans is not derived from English, although it has been influenced by it, and has similar Germanic roots; it is therefore considered a separate language.

I work on/with material written in medieval Scots and in several varieties of 'Middle English' ... some of which are considered dialects, others not. I am really happy to see the occasional posting in Lallans/Scots here, even if I neither speak nor write in it myself - keep it up, folks.