Why you need to learn Scots to understand Scottish English
However, I was rather disappointed that I almost never met any speakers of Scots, and at the same time SSE speakers often seemed to mumble — for instance, foot sometimes sounded more like /fɪt/ than /fut/ [fyt] (the expected mapping of RP /fʊt/). Other examples included you sounding like /ji/ rather than /ju/, use (the verb) sounding like /jez/ rather than /juz/, dog sounding like /dʌg/ rather than /dɔg/, and thirty sounding like /θɛrte/ rather than /θɪrte/. Strangely, whenever I asked people to repeat one of these words, they invariably produced the vowel I had expected in the first instance (e.g., /fut/, never /fɪt/).
The alternative to my theory that all Scots were mumbling was to assume that the SSE phonemes had extremely varied and overlapping realisations — in other words, I speculated for a while that /u/ perhaps could be realised as [u, y, ɪ, i, e]! However, that’s obviously not true — while foot can be [fɪt], [fut] and [fyt], it can’t be *[fit] or *[fet], and so on.
Things didn’t click into place until I started learning Scots as a foreign language. When I learnt that the Scots words for foot, you and use were fit, ye and uise (pronounced as if it had been written yaize), it suddenly became clear that many SSE speakers were just using many more Scots words than I had realised, rather than mumbling English words as I had been assuming.
Once I had sussed this, several of my Scottish friends that I had till then perceived as mumbling SSE turned out to be speaking very clearly but using a lot of Scots words. In other words, not only had I been wrong about the mumbling, but I had also completely underestimated the usage of Scots — it’s just the case that it’s normally used mixed up with English rather than as a separate language.
Foreigners moving to Scotland should definitely learn some Scots. It’s not just the language of Burns and many other great poets, but it’s also currently mixed up with English in everyday conversations throughout Lowland Scotland, and it’s hard really to understand what people say without being bilingual in Scots and English like them.
RT @thomasmwidmann: New blog post: Why you need to learn Scots to understand Scottish English http://t.co/Fd1TlwOFLo
I remember driving from Glasgow through Southern Scotland and back up to Edinburgh, and having huge problems understanding what people were saying. When I finally arrived in Edinburgh, I was so relieved when I entered a pub and actually understood what the barmaid was saying. Imagine, then, my disappointment when she told me that she was Irish… 🙂
BTW, almost entirely unrelated: Do you know the comedian David Kay? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kPWxm4xmps
RT @thomasmwidmann: New blog post: Why you need to learn Scots to understand Scottish English http://t.co/Fd1TlwOFLo
I never realised that outwith was a Scots word! I could never fathom why Microsoft Word marked it was incorrect. Now I know!
I remember when I first started in the dictionaries dept – half the staff were foreign, of the others, 70% were English – all of my team was English… I used to come out with words like ‘outwith’ and they’d stare at me as if I was from Mars!
I’m going to struggle teaching English abroad because i don’t know how to get by without words like outwith, dour, thrawn etc.
Awwh – loads of wee Greeks speaking about dreich weather’ll be awful cute – when I taught in France my whole class pronounced the colours with a Glasgow accent by 6 months in – it was very cute!
Me and Helen Miller once taught some poor Japanese girl in Canada that raining in English is “pishinitdoon”
Karen, aye, outwith has a long history in Scots, e.g., “Outewith the realme” [1427], or “In purchessing of lordschip outwith burgh” [1583].
Cath: In my travels and through having many family members and friends who are not native English speakers, I’ve realised that ‘International English’ is a Thing in itself and different from even my relatively ‘standard’ southern English English. I have to be careful too to remove from my speech words that even fluent International English speakers won’t understand. It irks me that International English is more a flavour of American English than my own English.
Phrasal verbs are a particular challenge for speakers of International English …
I remember Sabine saying to me Rob (after a good 25 years in the UK) (Sabine is a mutual friend Cath, who is Swiss and her English is perfect) that she was never as amazed as when she sat listening to her infant sons speaking English as they could use phrasal verbs without it making any mistakes! She looked so in awe of them!
Jamie Hynds liked this on Facebook.