If I were to travel to Scotland, which town or city would be best to hear spoken Scots that is more than just heavily accented English? (And I don’t mean people who are consciously using a “word-a-day” attempt to be distinct from English, I want natural speakers using their “mither tongue”)
My MIL visited relatives in England and Scotland a few years back. IIRC, Edinburgh and Glasgow had the thickest accents.
Glasgow or Edinburgh aren’t really noted for being strongholds of Scots, though. You’d have to go further north, towards Aberdeen to find speakers in any numbers. Aberdeenshire has a version of Scots called Doric that’s extremely hard to penetrate.
Then there’s also the Gaelic spoken in the highlands and Hebrides, if you’re after any Scottish language that’s distinct from Standard English.
ETA: Also, the number of Scots speakers is quite low Further, isn’t Scots itself just heavily accented English with various dialectical words? It isn’t clear to me where Scots begins and heavily accented English starts. I’ve never understood why it’s considered a separate language, compared to every other accent and dialect, many of them hard to penetrate, in the British Isles.
It’s not, is it?. It’s English but often peppered with so much local slang that it’s hard for outsiders to understand.
Try reading Trainspotting. Pretty impenetrable at first but once you get the hang of the Glasgow lingo it becomes easy.
I’ve tried reading “But-n-Ben a-go-go” by Matthew Fitt which is written entirely in Scots and while you can get the jist of it most of the time, I do get lost in several passages (although I wonder how natural the text is). On the otherhand, I speak French and the same could be said with when I try to figure out Italian–I get about two thirds of the words and can figure out what is probably going on.
I think Scots and English are considered a seperate languages rather than dialects of each other (unlike English dialects like cockney or geordie) because it has a long history of literature (such as Burns and MacDiarmid).
For the variety of “Scots” spoken in Northern Ireland have a goo here.
Isn’t Trainspotting Edinburgh lingo? Not that it makes that much a difference to those not familiar with either, but in the interest of accuracy and all.
Anyhow, the only person I really had tremendous difficulty following in the months I spent in Scotland hailed from the northwest corner of the Highlands. I’m sure I’d have more difficulty if I hung out in the rougher areas of Glasgow and Edinburgh, but the general city accent wasn’t that difficult to understand, especially in Edinburgh, whose general accent I kind of thought of as the “Queen’s Scottish.” It was distinctly Scottish, but had that urbane sophistication of one of the posher London accents.
We’ve done the ‘dialect vs. separate language’ bit, both as regards Scots and relative to other languges – Dutch/Flemish comes quickly to mind – quite a few times.
My own criterion: It’s a separate language historically that has converged with English. It had a standard literary dialect, laws and courts using it, etc., when Scotland was an independent nation. It evolved from the northern Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon that stretched up to Lothian at the same time as the dialects (Wessex, Mercian, East Anglian) that would converge to form Old English were sorting themselves out. Down through Burns it had a clear separate existence; Scott probably was one of the first authors to write fiction in English with Scots dialectal speech in the dialogue. To call it a separate language today is a bit pedantic but stresses its distinct origin – unlike Yorkshire, West Midlands, or Scouse, it was not historically merely a regional use eschewed by the elite, but the language of a people distinct from the English. But improvements in transportation and communication through the 19th and 20th centuries levelled it into a regional speech, a dialect.
But whether Scots is or was a distinct language is less a GQ type question with a definite answer than it is a question of where a descriptive linguist chooses to draw the language/dialect line.
Right, so to get back to what was more my original question, are there areas in Scotland where this “levelling” isn’t quite as level as the rest of the country?
When I was in Edinburgh, I was mostly in touristy places, so it was pretty easy to understand people. As I got closer to the highlands (Isle of Skye), it got increasingly difficult to understand. In Inverness, also a touristy place (Loch Ness), it was mostly understandable. By the time I got to the Isle of Skye, there were some locals who I really couldn’t understand.
Of course, these were just random people I ran into, so YMMV. I noticed that in Ireland and Scotland, a lot of bartenders would speak in their normal dialect, and then switch over to their “understandable to an American” voice, which I was thankful for.
Yeah you’re right, so long ago since I read it but I remember part of the story taking place during the Edinburgh festival.
Out on the islands. I once knew a guy from a really small island up in the north - couldn’t understand a word he said.
Post #3? You need to go north, and into the hills and islands.
Assuming we are discounting Scottish Gaelic, which really is a separate language, I find full on broad Glaswegian harder to follow than, say, the accent of a Highlander or someone from the far North. I say this as a half Scot, educated in England and Belfast who lived in Dundee for several years.
Actually, in terms of thickness of accent and widest divergence of word choice from standard English, I think social class will make more difference than location.
Repeat post
In my experience years ago when I had cause to speak to our company’s drivers all over the east of Scotland, the thickest accents were spoken by people from rural Aberdeenshire, Fife and parts of the Borders… The west and north may well have at least as difficult accents/dialects as well but that area was administered from Glasgow.
As a tourist in Edinburgh you’re not likely to run into much extreme ‘Trainspotting’ lingo unless you go looking for it, although you’re quite likely to hear a fair number of less common words in use.
As others have stated, the linguistic difference between English and Scots is much greater in Aberdeen and the North East than it is in Edinburgh or Glasgow.
Mutantmoose mentioned the islands as being places where the dialect is thickest - this only applies to Orkney and Shetland, as Scots isn’t really spoken in the Western Isles or anywhere else with a current or recent Gaelic heritage.