Scotland

Accents and Dialects of Scotland

The linguistic landscape of Scotland is considerably more complex than it is in most of England and Wales, with a broad range of dialects and older language forms contributing to a rich and varied national voice.

Scottish Gaelic: back from the brink

As in Wales, an ethnic Celtic language exists alongside English — in this case Scottish Gaelic. Like other heritage languages, it is experiencing something of a revival as a result of a renewed sense of national identity and recent positive legislation. However, the census of 2001 revealed that less than 2% of the total population of Scotland currently speak any Gaelic.

Unlike the status of Welsh in Wales, Gaelic is not a compulsory subject in the vast majority of schools in Scotland and there are very few Gaelic-medium schools at all. Moreover, Gaelic has for some time been restricted geographically to areas of the Highlands and the Western Isles; the language suffered catastrophically as a result of the Highland Clearances in the eighteenth century. Nonetheless it remains a community language in some parts of Scotland, notably in the Hebrides, and it has left its mark on the English spoken there and in other parts of the country.

English in Scotland

The type of English spoken in Scotland is more difficult to define than elsewhere in the UK. From the time of the Union of Parliaments in 1707, the official written language of Scotland became aligned with that of England. As such, Standard English has been used as the language of religion, education and government and so it became the socially prestigious form adopted by the aspiring middle classes. Unlike in England, however, Standard English continued to be spoken with a variety of local accents.

RP — the regionally non-specific accent of the upper middle classes in England — has a negligible presence in Scotland (unlike Wales, for example, where it retains a certain degree of prestige in some areas). This means that even the most socially prestigious forms of English spoken in Scotland contain elements that are characteristically Scottish. The variety of speech we might recognise as educated Scottish English contains the occasional word — outwith for ‘outside’ — or grammatical structure — I’ve not heard for ‘I haven’t heard’ — that is distinctively Scottish.

Above all, though, Scottish English is recognisable by its pronunciation: speakers do not make the same distinctions in vowel length made by speakers with other English accents and the vast majority of speakers in Scotland arerhotic — that is, they pronounce the <r> sound after a vowel in words likefarm, first and better.

Scots dialect

Alongside Standard Scottish English, the local vernacular language, Scots, a dialect descended from Old English and closely related to Northumbrian dialects has maintained a strong presence, especially in rural communities. There has been heated debate among linguists for many years as to whether Scots constitutes a dialect or a distinct language in its own right. It has recently been officially classified as a ‘traditional language’ by the Scottish Executive and recognised by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, but even in Scotland experts remain divided over the issue. Whatever its status — language or dialect — large numbers of speakers would certainly claim to speak Scots, not English. Indeed Scots boasts a literary tradition dating back long before Robert Burns in the eighteenth century and still thriving today, as demonstrated by contemporary authors such as Irvine Welsh.

Blurred boundaries

In practice, the distinction between those who speak Scots and those who speak Standard Scottish English is rather blurred. In some cases we might instantly be able to categorise an individual according to which variety he or she speaks, but more often than not, perhaps particularly in urban areas, speakers tend to drift between the two alternatives depending on context. In other words, they might speak a version of Standard English with a local accent, but frequently use features that we associate with Scots, such as saying wee for ‘little’, or using grammatical constructions like does nae for ‘doesn’t’ or simply sprinkling their speech with isolated archaic pronunciations such as rhyminghouse with goose or head with heed.

http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/find-out-more/scotland/

(From the lectures of phonetics –the types of English pronunciation)- a national language has 2 material forms 1.written-litrary language 2.spoken- speech of nation. The written form of a national language is generally accepted standard and is the same throughout country, the spoken form of the language is not uniform, it may vary from locality to locality. Such distinct forms are called dialects. In British Isles, there are three large regional types of pronunciation.

1. RP- southern English pronunciation 2. Northern English pronunciation 3. Standard Scottish pronunciaton

The United Kingdom is probably the most dialect-obsessed nation in the world. With countless accents shaped by thousands of years of history, there are few English-speaking nations with as many varieties of language in such a small space.

Received Pronunciation Received Pronunciation –the southern British type in variously known as standard English pronunciation or received English pronunciation and public school pronunciation. Each of these terms has its justification. For reason of commerce, politics, the court- the pronunciation of London region began to acquire social prestige in England. In the course of time it lost some of the local characteristics of London speech. It was finally fixed as a speech of the educated through the public school in 19^th century. With the spread of education dialect speaking school children and university students, who were eager for social advancement felt obliged to modify their accent and acquire this type of pronunciation , hence the term “received pronunciation”, introduced by Daniel Jones. This pronunciation was therefore a mark of position in society. RP became more widely known and accepted through the advert of radio and TV. The BBC adopted this type of pronunciation for it announcements for it is the type which is the most widely understood and the least regional. Thus RP is often identified in the public mind with BBC English.

Northern England pronunciation

Northern England pronunciation is the speech of those who was born and brought up I the region between Birmingham and the border of Scotland. The most marked differences in the distributuin of vowels are 1. [a] for RP [æ]

2. [æ] for [a:]

3. [u] for [ʌ]

4. [e] [e:] for [əɪ]

Northern England English (usually called Northern English in the United Kingdom) is a group of dialects of the English language found in Northern England. It includes theNorth East England dialects, Cumbrian (with a Westmorland sub-set in South Lakeland and a limited sub-set around the Barrow-in-Furness area), the various Yorkshire dialects and Lancashire (increasingly but incorrectly referred to as 'Lanky').

Some words occurring in 'far' Northern accents (Lonning (a Lane) in West Cumbria, Thorpe (a clear area, originally in woodland) in East Yorkshire) and North Eastern Dialects reflect Viking influence—possibly because the area was all north of the Danelaw boundary. Norwegian has had a greater impact on most northern dialects than Danish, but theEast Riding of Yorkshire has been influenced more by Danish.^{[clarification needed]} Authoritative quantification is not readily available but estimates have suggested as many as 7% of West Cumbrian dialect words are original Norse or derived from Norse.

Northern English is one of the major groupings of English English dialects; other major groupings include East Anglian English, East and West Midlands English, West Country (Somerset, Devon, Cornwall/Cornish) and Southern English.  Northern English dialects. The most prominent isogloss is the foot–strut split, which runs roughly from mid-Shropshire (on the Welsh border) to south of Birmingham and then to The Wash.

There are several accent features which are common to most of the accents of northern England (Wells 1982, section 4.4).

• Northern English tends not to have /ʌ/ (strut, but, etc.) as a separate vowel. Most words that have this vowel in RP are pronounced with /ʊ/ in Northern accents, so that putand putt are homophonous as [pʊt]. But some words with /ʊ/ in RP can have [uː] in the more conservative Northern accents, so that a pair like luck and look may be distinguished as /lʊk/ and /luːk/.

• The accents of Northern England generally do not use a /ɑː/. so cast is pronounced [kast] rather than the [kɑːst] pronunciation of most southern accents. This pronunciation is found in the words that were affected by the trap–bath split.

• For many speakers, the remaining instances of RP /ɑː/ instead becomes [aː]: for example, in the words palm, cart, start, tomato.

• The vowel in dress, test, pet, etc. is slightly more open, transcribed by Wells as [ɛ] rather than [e].

• The "short a" vowel of cat, trap is normally pronounced [a] rather than the [æ] found in traditional Received Pronunciation and in many forms of American English.

• In most areas, the letter y on the end of words as in happy or city is pronounced [ɪ], like the i in bit, and not [i]. This was considered RP until the 1990s. The longer [i] is found in the far north and in the Merseyside area.

• The phonemes /eɪ/ (as in face) and /oʊ/ (as in goat) are often pronounced as monophthongs (such as [eː] and [oː]). However, the quality of these vowels varies considerably across the region, and this is considered a greater indicator of a speaker's social class than the less stigmatised aspects listed above.

Some dialect words used across the North are listed in extended editions of the Oxford Dictionary with a marker "North England": for example, the words ginnell and snicket for specific types of alleyway, the word fettle for to organise, or the use of while to mean until. The best-known Northern words are nowt, owt and summat, which are included in most dictionaries. For more localised features, see the following sections.

The "present historical" is named after the speech of the region, but it is often used in many working class dialects in the south of England too. Instead of saying "I said to him", users of the rule would say, "I says to him". Instead of saying, "I went up there", they would say, "I goes up there.

In the far north of England, the local speech is indistinguishable from Scots. Wells said that northernmost Northumberland "though politically English is linguistically Scottish".^[27]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language_in_England

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_England_English