Scottish or Scottish accent

I have a bit of a conundrum. I guess I'd need to ask a real Scot, but I don't have any on hand right. I'll pop to the shops tomorrow.

So. Do Scots know they have an accent?
Or do they feel everybody else has one?

John, my MC and a real Scotsman, meets with a lady of whom he isn't sure that she is. This lady has been living in town all her life, and John believes she might be of Norse ancestry, "as hair this blonde wasn't common around these parts [I can research that myself] and her accent seemed just a tad off at times."

There's the problem. Would John feel her accent is off, or her Scottish?
Normally this would be cut and dry, but Scottish is different from English, even though it uses English words. I play with English, Scottish, and Scottish Gaelic in the story, and now I'm not sure what to make of the accent business anymore.

 

For what it is worth: when I was in Scotland, a young man told me he spoke Scots (not Scottish).

 

I don't know the answer, but I've always thought of accent as the concept of how words are pronounced by speakers of a given language, including things like stress, inflection, etc. Is Scotland big enough to have regional accents? I don't know but England certainly does.

In Inglurious Basterds the British spies were almost caught because the young soldier detected a weird German accent, and that is the word he used to describe it (in the subtitles anyway). It was something like "Where are you from? I can't identify your unusual accent". Technically this did get them caught as it drew the attention of the other officer who confirmed it when the spies used a British hand gesture for the number three.

To me, if the grammar, etc. are correct, I think the character would question their 'accent', assuming the concept existed to him or her.

 

Kinda depends on who you talk to. I've been over several times now, and hopefully will continue to do so, and one person will put their sgian to your throat if you say they've got the accent, and the next one will laugh about it and thicken it while explaining it.
But thanks for bringing it up, because I forgot entirely to look into the Scots/Scottish angle.

You'll find approximately one new accent per street corner. And a guy damn proud to have it. "Aye! Thes es thae East Queenstrreet McDougal's bakery Scots!"
And a guy on the other side of the street going, "What's he saying?"

So yeah, within Scottish (or Scots, as I shall hopefully find out soon) there are definitely accents.

Apart from one character, I'm not Scotsing up the literal grammar. Reader's just gonna have to imagine rolling R's and thick vowels themselves. I really love the Scottish tongue, but ye cannae read et proper-like.
As for her grammar, which I only now realize you were talking about, it's fine. She speaks proper English, and for the sake of argument, she grew up in Scotland. The only reason John notices it at all is because I want the reader to be able to theorize that she is, in fact, a character from another book.
So as usual, in my case, it's not even really important. I just want any Scot that reads it to go, "aw, he did his best for us." ...But, like, in Scottish.

 

Not a scot but I feel like it would be both? You can think of everyone else having an accent while also being cognizant that to other people you're the one with the accent to them. It's not mutually exclusive, but like on simple day-to-day they'd probably just think of everyone else having an accent.

So accent is how you pronounce things so if she's pronouncing things wrong then yeah, her accent's wrong, but there's also dialect which includes not just pronunciations, but also one's general vocabulary and grammar. So if she is from Scotland but just a different part of Scotland from him with its own way of speaking, then it would be a different dialect. (I'm like 99% sure, don't quote me on this.)

 

When Simon Pegg (who is not Scottish, by the way) was cast as Engineer Montgomery Scott for the Star Trek reboot, he was faced with exactly what sort of Scottish accent the character would have, and settled on a sort of hybrid of the accents of Edinburgh and Glasgow, the two main centers of Scotland.

And I seem to recall that when Jimmy Doohan was criticized for his Scottish accent in the original series and first films, he replied, "Well, this series is set in the 23rd century. Nobody knows what a Scottish accent is going to sound like then."

 

You seem to be forgetting accents are a reflection of dialect. and are a result of language drift in isolated areas. They are fading with TV and movies. A good example is in the US, where Many news anchors came from the upper midwest, so the language in general started to follow that accent.
Anyone that spends time in an area with a strong regional dialect will begin to pick it up, subconsciously if not consciously to fit in to the area. Which could be a simple solution for your female character. Though if she has been living in the town all her life I would expect her to be speaking in the local accent. Perhaps she moved there as a small child, and learned a different language early on, which had an affect on her pronunciation.

 

And it's what I'm going with if I can't figure it out. But I always feel there's a bigger than average sense of pride in the Scots. In fact, I was on a tourbus through Scotland once (because sometimes you just like the tourism shoveled right down your gullet) and when smoking with the guide behind the bus at a pretty-picture-mountain stop he at one point actually said, "Yeah, but I'm from Scotland. Everybody is from the rest of the world."

Then, when I told him my rest of the world was the Netherlands, he doesn't miss a beat and goes, "Oh, nice. How do you like the hills?"
You had to be there. Anyway, it's notoriously flat here. Apart from the bit I have to bike over coming home from work. Bastards.

I agree completely with you. I just can't help but think that if people were capable of that kind of thought there'd be a lot less shit going on right now.

What's going on here is more like with a really good actor. You're listening to them play their role, and then suddenly there's this one R in the whole damn movie that doesn't quite roll like the other ones. But they're fun to watch, and good at acting, and the movies great, so it doesn't really bother you. Or other normal people.
I'll be right on IMDb to see if they really are from Scotland.

You bring up a god point there. I'll dive a little deeper into dialects later, but at the moment I've always kinda assumed that a person speaking one dialect doesn't really understand a person speaking another dialect. Glaswegians and Edinburgh... ians can still understand each other...
Wait, I think you just solved the issue. I'm not talking about accents at all, am I?

Would you agree with the following statement?
An accent is what someone from, say, France has when speaking English.
A dialect is what a Scot has when speaking Scottish in a certain part of Scotland. Or a Frenchman speaking French in a part of France.

 

Missed this because I was busy with a long winded reply.

Actually, I skipped over it as it seemed unimportant to introduce the details, but she actually isn't local. People just assume she is, but in truth she actually is the character from another book, and in that book she was American. In this Scottish story, people just kind of assume she's always been there, and she puts on a very convincing act.

But again, all your combined efforts are going to culminate in the change of one word (and maybe I'll even leave it) in an entire story. So... I appreciate it. Gotta say that.

 

Again, not a scot and haven't actually met a scot, but I feel that's like...most people in every country. There's the prideful nationalists in almost every country and at the same time people who were born and raised in their country and don't give a damn. The question is not whether scots in general are prideful but rather is your character themselves a prideful country person?

Yeah, I would say so. I think of dialects in my mind are more regional and "within the country" and accents are more broad-term speaking. This seems a little more complicated because you say the character is from another story, American, but also grew up in Scotland which, depending on how young she grew up in Scotland and for how long--it'd be harder to tell any accent/dialect differences.

 

To Americans, there is a "Scottish" accent (and Catriona Grace is correct, it's properly a "Scots" accent, not "Scottish"), but the reality is that there are probably as many Scots accents as there are American accents. A classic example would be Scotty from the original Star Trek television series. Lately, I've found some YouTube videos put up by a Jeeper gal with a slight accent that I initially thought was faintly Irish. Then she posted a video of a visit back home -- to Scotland.

When I was in college, I spent a summer as a counselor for a boys camp set on an island in the middle of a big lake in Maine. The assistant director had young children, so they bad a nanny to watch the kids during the day. She was a Scot ... and I think over the course of the entire summer I might have understood two (or maybe three) words that came out of her mouth. Yes, her accept was that heavy/strong. I encountered the same thing when visiting Devon in England. My hostess was originally from somewhere around London, so she had an English accent that any America could understand with no problems. Some of the local farmers in Devon? I couldn't understand a word that came out of them to save my life.

As to the question of where to draw the line between "accent" and "dialect," I'm not the person to ask. I studied linguistics, but that was a VERY long time ago. My fuzzy perception is that accent affects how words are pronounced, while dialect goes beyond that, to vocabulary, sentence construction, syntax, and perhaps locally unique phrases or expressions.

 

It must be crazy for you to encounter a hill that's above eye-level

 

@jannert come back

 

A dearly departed and sadly missed member of my writer's group was an elderly lady from Scotland. Despite four decades in Wyoming, she sounded as if she'd just strolled off the boat from Argyll. I loved to listen to her talk, and too often lost track of what she was saying in the delight of hearing how she said it.

 

Scots is actually the official name of the dialect, spoken by many in Scotland, particularly in the Northeast and the Borders. It's not an accent ...it's the actual language/dialect which differs considerably from English ...using lots of words that don't exist in English, etc.

Here's a good explanation of it ...and good luck! https://www.scottishcorpus.ac.uk/document/?documentid=128

A Scottish accent, however, is how English sounds when pronounced by a Scottish person ...and that will differ a lot depending on where the speaker is from. Here's a Glasgow accent (actually a Clydebank accent, but close enough for government work) in full flow:

Everybody has an accent, no matter where they're from! I'm a transplanted Yank, who has lived in Scotland for half my life now ...37 years. And I still have an American accent, which was brought home to me only today, when a lady in a shop asked me where I was 'from.'

 

Well, yes and no. I agree with the first part, about a person speaking a second language who uses the pronunciation (and, more generally, syntax) of their native tongue. (I was amused when re-reading Asimov's Second Foundation to find that the peasants of Trantor use the syntax of Yiddish. It's understandable, since Asimov grew up in a Jewish enclave New York where uneducated people just off the boat from eastern Europe used Yiddish as a common language, and its peculiarities bled off into the English they ended up using.)

But people in the US speak of a "southern accent" or a "midwestern accent" all the time. It's that pronunciation and grammar that is characteristic of a particular segment of the population. (And these can be refined further. There's the Georgian accent, the Appalachian "mountain" accent, the coastal Virginian accent...) I think I mentioned earlier that I know a woman who was from south-western Virginia, whose accent is almost identical to that of southern West Virginia. But she's been living in Baltimore for the last fifty years, and has picked up that accent. Now that she's retired and spends a lot of time on the family farm in Bluefield, I expect that her original accent will come back.

Dialect could be a more proper name for the latter. But it would also include idiosyncrasies of vocabulary or certain catchwords or phrases that you hear in a particular place and nowhere else. Some linguists consider it a first step in the process of a language becoming a different language, just as German morphed into Yiddish, Latin morphed into French and Spanish and the rest of the Romance languages, and Old English morphed into modern English.

 

When I was in Australia about thirty years ago, people I talked to would assume from my accent that I was Canadian, since hardly any Americans were visiting Australia at the time, while there were plenty of Canadian tourists due to the fact that both countries were in the British commonwealth.

 

I know, right? In Ireland I once asked how to get Belfast's version of the leaning tower, but I made the mistake of asking a guy standing outside a pub. So, like, double jeopardy. And I'm still looking.

"It's, like, bigger than a windmill... What do we do with it?"
"It's just a little hill. We just go over it?"
"Witch! Burn him!"

Honestly, tell me how paint dries in Scottish and I'm riveted.

Oh yeah. Amsterdam's got several, but two specifics. The big city people who feel they're very important, and the old school Amsterdammers, who have lived there, according to them, longer than Amsterdam has existed. They have a strong accent and borrow a lot of words from Yiddish and something called Bargoens of which I don't know the origins at the moment. The accent itself is pretty rough and hard, but somehow feels friendly.
I am from Het Gooi, which is considered posh (only considered. Sure as hell isn't) but it has a typical spoiled accent. Very English R, as opposed to the more rolling Rs.
My grandfather, who did a lot of the raising, was from Amsterdam. I had a very rough time in school with those two accents mixed up inside me. That, and I was unaware I looked like an asshole, which also didn't help.
Then you've got your northern and north western accents, which are more peasant-ish. You can hear how they're related, and the more northern you go, the more subdued the speaker gets. Groningers tend to be a little closed off. Friesland, or the Frysians, have their own dialect. And they're Scots-level proud of it. To me it just sounds like they're making a conscious effort to sound distinctly different.
And then there's the south. Ah, yes. "We" look at them like you would your little brother who's got his finger stuck in the faucet because he wanted to know if he could feel the ocean. The below-the-rivers part of the Netherlands is almost it's own country, with their own customs (carnaval!) and ways. Oddly, I don't know if they have a specific language anywhere down there. But accent wise they seem to be "worse". Most notably their Gs. You;ve probably heard a Dutch person say something that ended in them clearing a loogie out their throat. That's what a G sounds like. But in Brabant and Limburg is this soft, sweet breath of warm air, gently caressing your ear, right before it goes in CARNAVAL MUSIC!

It's already pretty hard to find the crossover point between language and dialect, if you ask me.

 

I suppose as a tourist I mostly just see the proud people, the putting nationalist after makes it sound like the wrong kind of pride.
Still, the cabbie was also pretty proud of the streets he drove us through. The vibe Scots give off is hard to describe, but I might just as well be projecting.
My character is just Scottish. He's born into it, and it's nice to be born into this nice a place. Had he not just been accused of witchcraft, he might be rather prideful, yes.

Eh, piece of cake, I'll just read-- Damn, son.

It's doable in small stints, and you really need to channel Billy Connolly (or Kev Bridges) to be able to hear the words in your mind.
In a way, it reminds me of Frysian. At some point it just starts to look like they're consciously screwing up English to be different. I suppose the Frysians could be considered the Scots of the Netherlands. I'm not as versed in Friesland as in Scotland, but it seems there's a lot of overlap there.

 

Which brings us to class distinctions... in Boston, the Brahman accent of the upper class and the accent of the Italian immigrants who follow the Celtics and the Red Sox. In New York, there's dozens of accents, depending on which borough you're in and who you're hanging with. So you can find many, many different accents among the same geographic area.

 

We are very much aware of the multitude of different accents our country has, yes.

Naturally, of course, we all consider our own to be the proper way to speak, as does everyone else, I'm sure.

What foreigners consider a 'Scottish' accent is mostly Southwestern and very different from my own. I am often mistaken for an Englishman at home, thanks to a kind of accent osmosis at Sandhurst, but a complete stranger immediately identified my point of origin in a dubious drinking establishment in Zanzibar a few years back.

If you've ever seen the Disney film Brave, then the character whom all the others struggle to understand is the only individual in the film who isn't simply speaking English in a Glaswegian accent, but actually speaking a slightly more rural version of my native dialect.

 

"Fellarfellarfellary."

Northern Irish for "A fellow fell off a lorry."

 

If you speak vocally, you have an accent. Even if yours is the majority accent in your country or region, even if your accent is considered a neutral accent where you live, you still have an accent.

Anyone with a different accent from yours sounds to you like they have an accent. Likewise, you sound to them like they have an accent.

So, if a character is aware of this absolute, universal fact, then yes, the character will know that they have an accent. If they're unaware of this fact, then they might think that people with their accent don't have one, but they'd be wrong.