Tweet
Scottish Accent
Charles Menzies, a Scottish lad is born in Bolfracks in 1783. He is schooled in Stirling until the age of 15 when he joins the navy marines as a purchased ensign. I believe his early life was thus in the highlands to the North of Edinburgh. When he grew to manhood, would he speak with a Scottish accent or would it sound something different? Are there different forms of the scottish accent? If there is how would an accent from that part of Scotland be describe?? Love to heard from someone on this topic.
-
-
Re: Scottish Accent
There are several regional Scottish dialects. If you click on this link:
http://www.scots-online.org/grammar/pronunci.htm
and scroll down to the bottom you will find a map of Scotland showing the regional dialects.
At the link below:
http://www.dialectsarchive.com/scotland
you can listen to examples of these dialects.
I have in my collection a very old 45 rpm. record by Andy Stewart in which he recites a poem about how a rumour spread around Scotland and he changes his accent to imitate the various dialects
Right - have just done a quick search and it's on You tube! So here it is.
-
Re: Scottish Accent
Additionally, accents today are not necessarily the same as they would have been in the 18th century. I know that does not help, but is a fact.
SandyComment
-
Re: Scottish Accent
You're right Sandy. Also a lot of the old words have fallen out of use with the younger ones today, although they still know the meanings.
Elda
PS I've got a tape of that Andy Stewart song too.Comment
-
-
Re: Scottish Accent
In regard to accents and/or dialects....I live in Indiana, & when overseas in Germany many years ago, I was able to identify the US state of a guy in the US Army, just by his accent, as I heard his Indiana accent. Also, when one travels to Kentucky, you can hear much different accents there, as well. My relatives up near Chicago sound "alien" to me, & of course, common words such as "pop" here, is "soda" up there, etc. I do agree that with TV, and the internet, that we all seem to meld together with our dialects.
JoanComment
-
Re: Scottish Accent
Some years ago my husband and I were at a dinner function and I got sat next to a man I didn't know. He was having a conversation with a lady across the table to which I was listening for a few minutes. Then someone at the table asked him where he came from and he replied Scotland. I couldn't help it, I blurted out, "No you're not". What he didn't know was that he had a real Scot seated next to him :laugh2:
I've always been pretty good at picking accents and I knew straight away that he was Canadian from the east coast. You can pick them because they have Scottish vowels. You should have seen the look on his face when I picked him. I think he'd been pulling that one for years and gotten away with it.
EldaComment
-
Re: Scottish Accent
It's surprising how much dialects and speech usage can change in a relatively short period of time. Some years ago now, we had a young exchange student here from Glasgow who came to do a spell of hay-making on the station to pick up some extra money. I invited him home for a meal thinking that my father would enjoy a bit of a crack with a fellow Glaswegian. The meeting wasn't a success.
The idioms, slang, etc. current in my father's day had died out, and the modern Glaswegian patter was a mystery to Dad, so they had to be constantly explaining themselves to one another. Also, the young bloke spoke very fast and seemed to run a lot of his words together which didn't help. He used the glottal stop in words containing a "t", which apparently wasn't usual in Dad's day, and missed out a lot of consonants in words; for instance where Dad would say "frae" the young chap just said "fae" and such like.
(Not really relevant, but the Gorbals have apparently changed beyond recognition since the '40s, and the young fellow had never heard of the Heilanman's Umbrella.)
All that change is just within a period of fifty years or so. I suppose we can only imagine how much it must have altered in the last two hundred years when there were no tape recorders etc. to enable us to hear how things sounded then.Comment
Comment