Languages & Linguistics
Scottish English
Scottish English refers to the varieties of the English language spoken in Scotland. It encompasses a range of accents, dialects, and vocabulary influenced by the Scots language and Gaelic. Scottish English is characterized by its distinct phonological, lexical, and grammatical features, reflecting the historical and cultural influences on the language in Scotland.
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10 Key excerpts on "Scottish English"
eBook - PDFA Handbook of Varieties of English
A Multimedia Reference Tool. Volume 1: Phonology. Volume 2: Morphology and Syntax
- Bernd Kortmann, Edgar W. Schneider(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Scottish English: phonology * Jane Stuart-Smith 1. Introduction Defining the term ‘Scottish English’ is difficult. There is considerable debate about the position and appropriate terminology for the varieties which are spoken in Scotland and which ultimately share a common historical derivation from Old English. Here I follow Aitken (e.g. 1979, 1984) and describe Scottish English as a bipolar linguistic continuum, with broad Scots at one end and Scottish Standard English at the other. Scots is generally, but not always, spoken by the work-ing classes, while Scottish Standard English is typical of educated middle class speakers. Following Aitken’s model, speakers of Scottish English either switch discretely between points on the continuum (style/dialect-switching), which is more common in rural varieties, or drift up and down the continuum (style/dia-lect-drifting), which is more characteristic of the urban dialects of cities such as Edinburgh and Glasgow. Throughout Scotland, Scots is increasingly becom-ing limited to certain domains, for example, amongst family and friends, while more formal occasions tend to invoke Scottish Standard English. Of course the boundaries between Scots and Scottish Standard English, and English English, spoken by a small percentage of the population, are not discrete, but fuzzy and overlapping. Scottish Standard English, taken here as Standard English spoken with a Scot-tish accent, is a possible variety for many speakers across Scotland, depending on social context. There are only slight regional differences in Scottish Standard English across the country. Scots is also widely available to speakers in the ap-propriate context. The Scottish National Dictionary recognizes four main dialect divisions of Scots whose names reflect their geographical distribution across Scot-land: Mid or Central Scots, Southern or Border Scots, Northern Scots, and Insular Scots.
eBook - PDF- Bernd Kortmann, Clive Upton, Bernd Kortmann, Clive Upton(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Scottish English: phonology * Jane Stuart-Smith 1. Introduction Defining the term ‘Scottish English’ is difficult. There is considerable debate about the position and appropriate terminology for the varieties which are spo-ken in Scotland and which ultimately share a common historical derivation from Old English. Here I follow Aitken (e.g. 1979, 1984) and describe Scottish English as a bipolar linguistic continuum, with broad Scots at one end and Scottish Standard English at the other. Scots is generally, but not always, spo-ken by the working classes, while Scottish Standard English is typical of edu-cated middle class speakers. Following Aitken’s model, speakers of Scottish English either switch discretely between points on the continuum (style/dialect-switching), which is more common in rural varieties, or drift up and down the continuum (style/dialect-drifting), which is more characteristic of the urban dialects of cities such as Edinburgh and Glasgow. Throughout Scotland, Scots is increasingly becoming limited to certain domains, for example, amongst family and friends, while more formal occasions tend to invoke Scottish Stan-dard English. Of course the boundaries between Scots and Scottish Standard English, and English English, spoken by a small percentage of the population, are not discrete, but fuzzy and overlapping. Scottish Standard English, taken here as Standard English spoken with a Scot-tish accent, is a possible variety for many speakers across Scotland, depending on social context. There are only slight regional differences in Scottish Standard English across the country. Scots is also widely available to speakers in the ap-propriate context. The Scottish National Dictionary recognizes four main dialect divisions of Scots whose names reflect their geographical distribution across Scotland: Mid or Central Scots, Southern or Border Scots, Northern Scots, and Insular Scots.
eBook - PDFModern Scots
An Analytical Survey
- Robert McColl Millar(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
I have not attempted to define what I mean by this term, however. Partly this is because this book is not concerned with that variety, its use and its development; it needs to be recognised, though, that neither Scottish Standard English nor Scots exist in a vacuum in contemporary Scotland. As we will see regularly, there is consider-able leakage – and confusion – between the two. It is quite possible – indeed necessary under most conditions – to speak about a continuum between dense varieties of Scots and the most standard forms of Scottish Standard English. Most Scots – I am one of them – ‘commute’ along this continuum on a day-to-day basis, depending on context. Many – by no means all – activists for Scots seem to prefer a vision of two separate languages, one of which being a ‘Scots in the mind of God’. It would be tempting to say that Scottish Standard English is simply Standard English spoken in Scotland. Such a definition is encouraged by the use of the term British English by many linguists (although, when you read deeper into their discussions it becomes increasingly apparent that what they generally mean is the English of (southern) England). But Scottish Standard English is more than just a local form of the international variety (although it is certainly that as well), it contains features within it which derive from Scots. These are largely lexical, but do include morphosyntactic features as well. Further references to these phenomena can be found elsewhere. What needs to be emphasised here, however, is that, while Scottish Standard English has undoubtedly influenced Scots, the opposite is also the case. Despite all of these issues, however, I will continue to use the word language advisedly – along with the words variety and vernacular – to help avoid confusion with dialect , which I primarily use to describe geo-graphical and social varieties forming part of Scots as a whole.
eBook - PDF- Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Political recognition for Scots at the start of the 21st century appears ineffectual. 1 Modern Scots and Scottish English The present linguistic ecology of Scotland is more complicated than most other regions in the English-speaking world. It is an English-speaking country, in the sense that the main working language in writing, and for many people in speech, is Scottish Standard English (SSE), discussed in Section 2.5 below. But a Q-Celtic language, Scottish Gaelic, is also spoken, by fewer than 60,000 people out of a population of around 5.2 million. This is a disastrous decline from even a hundred years ago, however, when possibly a million people could speak the language. In 2005, Gaelic was given special legal status in Scotland by an act of the Scottish Parliament. This suggests a bipolar relationship between Gaelic and SSE in Scotland similar to that between Irish and English in Ireland. This is not the case. In non-Gaelic Scotland, several highly distinctive dialects are spoken. The normal sociolinguistic rules partially apply: rural and older speakers are more likely to speak traditional dialects than are either urban working class people (who speak modified local dialects which differ from the standard more in phonology than in lexis or struc-ture) or middle class speakers. But these dialects do not fit the routine patterns of dialects in the English-speaking world entirely, however. Firstly, the dialects involved are in many senses those least like Standard English of any in the “English”-speaking world (with the exception of English-lexified creoles). It is difficult for outsiders to understand dense (McClure 1979) southern or central dia-lects without considerable exposure. The northern and insular varieties are almost impenetrable; in the case of the dialects of Shetland, even other Scottish people have some difficulty following conversations without practice (see, for instance, Millar 2007).
eBook - PDF- Tatiana Ewa Kaminska(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
of the present chapter. 1.2. Scots and Scottish Standard English: Clarification of the Terms in the Historical Perspective The traditional approach to the presentation of the history of the English language is to view it as a history of Southern English. This situation is a result of the long-lasting political, economic and cultural domination of England over neighbouring peoples and countries. Consequently, most available histories of English provide records of linguistic variants which survived because they were prevailing linguistic forms in the geographical territory which possessed power and control over the nations which were less privileged historically. It is the limitations of such a one-sided view of the history of English which make dialectal studies particularly important, interesting and challenging. Dialectal data frequently elucidate and clarify the character of the Southern changes, since by being geographically removed from the standardizing force of the South, they retain forms which provide evidence for earlier stages of linguistic phenomena only the final results of which can be attested in the South. We shall start the discussion of Scots by first trying to define the terms Scottish and Scots. Our survey will be based on the following sources: on Murray's excellent historical summary (1873: 1-93), which although already more than one hundred years old remains an enlightening and valuable study for dialect scholars, on Grant's Dictionary (1931), which analyzes exhaustive cross-dialectal synchronic linguistic material (including borrowings) often with reference to diachronic developments, on Daiches 1 monograph (1960), which offers the broad cultural-historical and literary context for linguistic phenomena; as well as on Vaiana Taylor's dissertation (1972), significant for its updated detailed analysis of dialectal material of the Southern Counties of Scotland.
- A. Judge(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Then, in the twentieth century, the Scottish National Dictionary, which deals with the language from 1700 onwards, appeared between 1931 and 1976, and includes ten volumes. Scots boasts, in fact, more than 50 000 words different in Scots from English. A systematic study of present-day Scots was undertaken by Professor Angus McIntosh as part of the Linguistic Survey of Scotland project based at Edinburgh University. Commenting on the survey, Price states that it came ‘perhaps, just in time’. He goes on to state that having been excluded from all official contexts, and being open to the influence of English to a degree much greater than Gaelic for obvious reasons, ‘what one hears over the greater The Regional Languages of Scotland: Scottish Gaelic and Scots 203 part of the south or east of Scotland where Scots used to be spoken is merely a regional form of southern English, with a Scottish accent and a Scots element (greater or smaller according to the locality and according to the individual) in its vocabulary.’ He also quotes the editor of the Scottish National Dictionary as having forecast that by the twenty-first century, ‘it is doubtful whether it will be anything that is recognizably Scottish, at least in the ordinary historical meaning of the term’ (Price 1984: 192). With this one may, however, disagree. The reason for disagreeing is that such attitudes are strictly prescrip- tive. They imply, indirectly, that outside influences spoil languages, which no longer survive in a ‘pure’ form. They reject all forms of change which are not purely natural and inherent in the language itself, but brought about by external forces (which most are). It is hardly surprising that English, a collateral language of Scots, should have influenced its development. This does not mean that it is no longer ‘Scots’. Indeed viewing Scottish programmes on television has led many a southern English speaker to wish for subtitles.
eBook - PDF- Neil Blain, David Hutchison, Neil Blain, David Hutchison(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
This chapter can only, then, o ff er a sketch of the complex relationship of Scots and English in the modern Scottish media, and touch fl eetingly on the rise in provision for speakers of community languages. The story of Scots in the media has been obscured for a number of reasons, one of which is alluded to above. Historically, Scots is distinguished from English by a distinctive vocabulary, grammar and accent. However, much vocabulary and grammar is shared between Scots and English, to the extent that the two language varieties are usually mutually intelligible. In addition, since the late sixteenth century, there has been a marked shift in Scotland towards the adoption of English conventions for formal writing, a process strengthened by the gradual development of written, standard English and the rise of mass education. Since the eighteenth century, southern English norms have also modi fi ed the speech of the Scottish upper and middle classes to the extent that a ‘polite’ middle-class Scottish accent emerged (Jones 1995). By the turn of the twentieth century, broad Scots writing was con fi ned to literature and some journalism (Donaldson 1986), and broad Scots speech was the domain of the rural peasantry and urban working classes. Since the decline in the functional range of written Scots predated the rise of a standard written English, no widely accepted and taught standard variety of Scots developed. Scots now exists largely as the sum of regional and social varieties spoken by particular communities in Scotland, and in those areas of Northern Ireland where speech patterns were strongly in fl uenced by the ‘plantation’ of Scottish economic migrants in the seventeenth century (Jones 1997; Montgomery 2005).
eBook - PDF- Graeme Trousdale(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- EUP(Publisher)
Note that there is no direct correlation between language and nation (otherwise both Scots and American would be con-sidered as languages); nor can we appeal exclusively to formal features, since the grammars of English, Scots and American are much more similar to each other than any of them are to German. They are all clearly related to each other historically, but the formal and functional divergence of German from the other varieties is sufficiently great that there is widespread agreement that this is a different language. At various points in history, both Scots and American have officially been classified in different communities as languages. For instance, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, ratified by the United Kingdom in 2001, specified that Scots, in both Scotland and Northern Ireland, should be seen as a minority language, and afforded both protection and promotion; and an act of legislature in Illinois in 1923 proclaimed that “the official language of the state of Illinois shall be known hereafter as the American language and not as the English language” (Act of Legislature of Illinois, chapter 127, section 178, 1923 – cited in McArthur 1998: 221). Such political intervention in the classification and organisation 8 AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH SOCIOLINGUISTICS of linguistic varieties is known as language planning, which we will address in Chapter 3, by considering the formal and functional issues involved. Because there is little consensus on the formal and functional differences between Scots and English, some people erroneously con-sider Scots to be simply ‘bad English’. However, this concept of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ varieties is another factor we need to take into consideration when we think about the classification of different varieties into lan-guages and dialects. 1.4 Good and bad English An alternative way of thinking about what ‘English’ is is to ask speak-ers of the language, and evaluate their attitude towards English.
eBook - PDFCreating and Digitizing Language Corpora
Volume 1: Synchronic Databases
- J. Beal, K. Corrigan, H. Moisl, J. Beal, K. Corrigan, H. Moisl(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
Our primary interest is sociolinguistic, matching linguistic patterns to social and demographic categories. Our current chronological cut-off point is 1940, though earlier materials may be included if they are of special interest or contribute to filling gaps. Our informants are not J.C. Beal (eds.), Creating and digitizing language corpora © Joan C. Beal, Karen P. Corrigan and Hermann L. Moisl 2007 limited to native speakers, since anyone who has lived in Scotland for a substantial period of time may well have been influenced by Scots or Scottish English. Information on place of birth and residence is avail- able in the corpus metadata. Even our starting point presents the analyst with problems. Informa- tion is lacking on how extensively and in what contexts Broad Scots is used, while the range of features characterizing Scottish English is not fully defined. Indeed, many of its speakers are unaware that their usage differs in anything but accent from that of speakers of so-called Stan- dard English. Speakers employ features of Broad Scots and Scottish Standard English to different degrees, often depending on context, so that, rather than regarding them as two distinct varieties, it is more accurate to talk about a linguistic continuum running from Scottish English at one end to Broad Scots at the other. 3 At the Scots end there is the further complication of considerable regional diversity, with, for example, marked differences in the speech of the north-east, Glasgow or the Northern Isles. Such diversity is compounded by the fact that there is no agreed spelling system for transcribing these variations. These and other problems will be discussed as the chapter progresses. 2 Data collection SCOTS was launched in the wake of the devolution of political power from the British Government in London to Scotland.
eBook - PDF- Raymond Hickey(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Schleef, Erik, Miriam Meyerhoff and Lynn Clark 2011 ‘Teenagers’ acquisition of variation: a comparison of locally-born and migrant teens’ realisation of English (ing) in London and Edinburgh’, English World-Wide 32.2: 206-236. Shuken, Cynthia 1984 ‘Highland and Island English’, in: Trudgill (ed.), pp. 152-166. English and Scots in Scotland 77 Stuart-Smith, Jane 2003 ‘The phonology of modern urban Scots’, in: Corbett et al . (eds), pp. 110-137. 2004 ‘The phonology of Scottish English’, in: Kortmann et al. (eds), Vol. 1, pp. 47-67. Stuart-Smith, Jane, Claire Timmins and Farhana Alam 2011 ‘Hybridity and ethnic accents: A sociophonetic analysis of “Glaswasian”’, Proceedings of ICLaVE 5 . Amsterdam: John Benjamins Stuart-Smith, Jane, Claire Timmins and Fiona Tweedie 2006 ‘Conservation and innovation in a traditional dialect’, English World-Wide 27.1: 71-87. 2007 ‘“Talkin’ Jockney”? Variation and change in Glaswegian accent’, Journal of Sociolinguistics 11.2: 221–260. Thomson, Derick 1994 The Companion to Gaelic Scotland . Glasgow: Gairm Publications. Tristram, Hildegard L. C. (ed.) 1997 The Celtic Englishes . Heidelberg: Winter. Trudgill, Peter (ed.) 1984 Language in the British Isles . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wakelin, Martyn 1984 ‘Rural dialects in England’, in: Peter Trudgill (ed.), pp. 70-93. Wales, Katie 1996 Personal Pronouns in Present-day English . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watt, Dominic and Catherine Ingham 2000 ‘Durational evidence of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule in Berwick English’, Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics 8: 205-228. Watt, Dominic, Carmen Llamas, Gerry Docherty, Damien Hall and Jennifer Nycz 2010 ‘Speaker awareness, differential use of linguistic variables, and the expression of identity’, Paper presented at LAUD Symposium, Landau 15-18 March 2010. Wells, John C. 1982 Accents of English, Vol. 2, The British Isles . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, Joseph 1905 The English Dialect Grammar .
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