Order 1111627: Scottish English

THE DISTINCTIVNENESS OF THE SCOTTISH ENGLISH

INTRODUCTION

The thesis will explain the meandering nature of the English language as a whole and its development in Scotland. The meandering nature of language explained in this thesis seeks to inform of the development of English that took place in Scotland as well as the influence of the native languages towards it.

In the first chapter, there will be presented Scotland as a linguistically diverse social and geographical area. Further, it seeks to explain the major languages in Scotland and their distribution. Furthermore, chapter 1 will seek to make the reader understand the languages spoken in Scotland and their relation to specific zones.

Chapter 2 will offer a thorough explanation of the features of Scottish English. This chapter will open up the understanding of the reader in relation to the grammar and vocabulary used in Scotland as well as an in-depth study of the similarities and differences between the pronunciation of words in Scottish English and British English. The aim of this chapter is to enlighten the reader about the distinct nature of Scottish English. Additionally, in this chapter one is going to learn the rules that govern the Standard Scottish English. These rules might be similar to those of the British English but in the real sense, they are not. They have slight alterations that make the language diverse and unique.

Chapter three will seek to discuss the methodology, data collection and explanation of data collected. In this chapter, the origin of the Standard Scottish English will be explained the origin of the Standard Scottish English as well as explained the how it developed from the local languages. This chapter will be a concern with data collection and analysis data collected from various respondents in a town in Scotland. Analysis of the data will provide first-hand information on how the Standard Scottish English evolved.

Conclusively, the thesis will touch on all aspects that are vital to explain the Standard Scottish English so that the reader gains insight as knowledge on the linguistically variations in Scotland.

Chapter Two: Features of Scottish English

The purpose of this chapter is to present the characteristics of Scottish English. These features consist of grammar and vocabulary that are characteristic of Scottish English. In addition, examine the differences between the pronunciation of words in Scottish English and British English.

2.1 Vocabulary and pronunciation

The Scottish English is the everyday language of the people in Scotland, but this English differs greatly from the standard written? English that we know. During pronunciations, words that are associated with Scotland are mostly attached with both British and American pronunciation alongside Scottish pronunciation. Scottish pronunciation shows a great difference compared to both British and United States English (Abercrombi:YEAR 18). Words that are pronounced with the same vowel such as bird, nurse, and herd are often pronounced differently in Scottish English. In the Scottish English word that contains the spelling, ear is usually pronounced as /ɛr/. Scottish English usually follows the Aitkens Law. This law is very consistent in the Old English dictionary, especially when pronouncing British English words that contain /ʌɪ/. According to Scottish English if the vowel /ʌɪ/ is accompanied by /v/, /ð/, /z/, /ʒ/, /r/ , a suffix , or is used to end a syllable, then it is pronounced as /aɪ/ (More YEAR:240). However, if placed in a different position it is pronounced as /aɪ/. It is therefore evident that Scottish English creates a great distinction between words that are otherwise pronounced the same as in British English. Such words include tide and tied. In Scottish English they are pronounced as /tʌid/ and /taɪd/ respectively.

In Scottish English has most consonants take the function of a vowel. These consonants include I, m and n. Therefore, it is essential to make it clear when this kind of interpretation is intended, in other words when ambiguity is intended the consonants should appear with a diacritic such as that of the British English. An example is when brackets are used to around a vowel such as /ə/. This indicates that the /ə/ may not be pronounced but in some cases it would mean that the following consonant would be taking the function of the vowel. An example is the name saddle /sæd(ə)l.

However, there are differences between the Scottish English and the U.S English. There is a similarity in that both have /r/ regardless of the sound that follows however, in British English the vowel /r/ only remains when there is a vowel after it. This means that the /r/ sound is present in Scottish English but absent in British English. This is evident in words such as mar(Scottish /mar/, as opposed to British English /mɑː/) (Kay et al 2004).

2.1.1 Stress on words

Stress in Scottish English is indicated by the use of symbols (ˈ) and (ˌ). The first symbol (ˈ) is used at the beginning of a syllable as an indication of primary stress while pronouncing, whereas the second symbol (ˌ) is used to show secondary importance during pronunciation. However, when both symbols are used at the beginning of a syllable, they are used to indicate that pronunciation can have both primary and secondary stress.

It is essential to note that Scottish English uses the "i.e., as a diminutive ending to nouns to indicate that something is small. An example is when describing a young boy or a girl. In Scottish English, they are described as laddie and lassie (Robertson 96).

Additionally, there are minor differences in stress between the Scottish English and the British English. However, the principle underlying stress in a language is the same throughout the English language (Gordeeva and Scobbie) . Scottish English tends to stress particular verbs differently as compared to British English. The latter has a characteristic of highlighting the first syllable in verbs that are suffixed by –ize and –ate. However, this is different from the Scottish English where stress is put on verbs in the second syllable.

2.2 Grammar

In Scottish English progressive verbs are used more often as compared to other forms of English such as British English, for instance "I am wanting a drink" to mean I want a drink. However, in other areas “be” is used as an auxiliary verb together with “after” as the preposition. An example is seen when saying, "He is after going" which according to British English is "He has gone."

It is essential to note that most vowels are formed as a result of merging between the long and short vowels. This merging creates phonemic mergers which refer to the absence of contrastive difference. This merger is concerned with words such as trap/palm and goose/foot. However, most Scottish English speakers have a hard time distinguishing the pairs of vowels. According to Abercrombie, when there is a pose while speaking the contrastive / Ʊ/ takes the presence of contrastive / ɒ/, but the opposite cannot be the same (Abercrombie YEAR and Page). This same rule applies to the contrastive / ɒ/ which makes the existence of contrastive / ɒ/. Among the Scottish middle class, most of the speakers are affected by British English and therefore though their punctuation contains some essential Scottish features they are not perceived to be spoken Scottish English. These speakers have specific contrasts that bear phonemic contrasts as well as a monophthongal realization of diphthongs. Although their accent may seem different, it is the standard form of Scottish English. Although the British English can be used to differentiate between trap and palm words the distinction is however not clear in Scottish English (RobertsonYEAR: 96).

It is quite evident that Scottish English neutralizes the lax/tense difference of the vowels present in words goose and foot. The two words are mostLY pronounced with a high, central and sometimes fronted speech. Most dialects SPOKEN by the Scottish people have the vowel being of a high front or rounded. An example of these is:

foot [ pɑm]

goose [ trɅp]

2.3 Consonants

Consonants in the Scottish English do not differ greatLY deal from that of British English; however, there arises a small difference in phonemics. We THERE WILL BE DISCUSSED are therefore going to discuss some of the Scottish English consonants that are not present in the British English system of consonants.

/ʍ/ and /x/

Consonant /ʍ/ is a unique feature of the Scottish English since it contains a velar secondary articulation that has a voiceless labial fricative. In some cases, it is the voiceless counterpart of /w/. This consonant is mostly seen in the words that have wh. Though restricted only to the consonant clusters it mostly appears at the start of a syllable. Therefore in most English accents the difference between /ʍ/ and /w/ is not present. However, in Scottish English, it is present. This explains the reason why the words Whale and Wale may be considered as homophones? in other English ascents but not in Scottish English (AbercrombieDATA: 48).

The consonant /x/ may have few usageS and A frequency in other English accents. However, this is not the case in Scottish English where it is considered in the consonant inventory. If used, its quality may be weakened by the presence of the high back vowels leaving it to be devoiced. Even with all these, Scottish English conserves its pronunciation, especially where foreign words that are spelled with "ch” are involved.

2.4 Rhoticity

Rhoticity is the feature that distinguishes two types of English; it is the absence or presence of a post-vocalic /r/. Scottish English is described as a rhotic dialect since iot conserves /r/ in word-final position before a consonant while British English is referred to as non-rhotic dialect where the post-vocalic /r/ is lost to create a glide (Gordeeva and ScobbieDATA: 240).

2.5 Prosody

Prosody is a feature of the language that is created by pitch, loudness, and length all combined. British English and Scottish English are not very different from prosodic features however, in Scottish English the process of syllabification is altered (Kay et al 2004STR). This difference is evident with phrasal verbs where a consonant presentS at the end of a word in a closed syllable is syllabicated with the vowel that is presentED in the subsequent word.

2.6 Rhythm

The rhythm of a language is mostly affected by stress patterns. It is through rhythm that an accent is created. THE Rhythm in British English tends to stressed syllables that appear at regular intervals of time. However, those of the Scottish English appear as irregular where the first stressed syllable is short and the second is long. Therefore, both languages have very different rhythmS (Kay et al 2004STR).

2.7 Conclusion

It can be well deduced that Scottish English HAS a particular accent compared with other English languages. Therefore it is tough to limit its borders to the standard forms of English. However, in most situations, the laws underlying the structures of English also apply to the Scottish English. The features discussed well indicate that Scottish English does not fall far from the British English that is common in most parts of the world in fact; most of the new generation in Scotland are diverting from Scottish English and have become more inclined to the British type of English.

Chapter Three:

Diverse nature of Scottish English

The aim of this chapter is to examine the methodology used to come up with the conclusions of the study. The first section seeks to explain the fieldwork process involved as well as the demographics of the respondents that were chosen to take part in the study. For the second section, a questionnaire will be developed and the nature of its contents WIIL BE discussed.

3.1 Design of the analysis and tools used in data collection.

Collection of data was done in a six-day trip to the Portree town, in Scotland. Selection of the respondents was done with the help of a member of one of the oldest families who was a member of the founders of the original social groups in Scotland. The member Mrs.Speckhan took analysts to one of the functions of the local community where she introduced members that matched the study's age group and gender requirements. In addition, she accompanied them to one of the local contacts who have strong ties making it easy to make a good rapport within the community. The analysts made sure that they personally conducted the interviews in order to record all the details that they needed for the study. Questionnaires helped in reaching out to the respondents that could not make it to the one on one interviews. Most interviews were conducted at the respondents' homes and made sure to invite multiple respondents in order to save time as well as to get the most out of a short period of time. Sama to wymyslilas czy skads wzielas? Bo nie ma zrodla

The fact that most of the analysts had an inherent status of the United States America and were interested in their culture intrigued them very much and they were more open and welcoming to share all they knew about their culture. Most of them were very surprised that the analysts were interested in studying how the Scottish English developed. However, the interviews were met with shortcomings. Since most of the respondents were quite old they preferred speaking the native Scottish Language and thus creating a language barrier (Kingstonedata: 315-347). However, they were well prepared and took it upon themselves to make sure they had someone interpret for them the questionnaires into a language they well understood.

Portree was settled in the early sixteenth century and the inhabitancy mostly practiced fishing as a way of life. However, when the fishing industry started falling apart, natives of Portree did not suffer as was seen in other coastal towns. They had gained interest in the oil that had been discovered in the North Sea during the 1970s and their attention shifted from fishing to oil. However, though the interaction at the oil rings would have caused an alteration in their dialect, the local language persisted and was highly differentiated. This was attributed to the strong ties and dense network the community had to its natives (Schutzler data: str). Portree’s rich cultural identity makes it the perfect location to begin the perceptual study on the Scottish Language.

Most of the respondents had to have been born and raised in Portree. The respondents tallied to a total of 50 with most of them having years ranging from 35 to 85.

They were later divided into four groups according to their age brackets:

35-45years (10 respondents), 46-59 years (19 respondents), 60-77 years (15 respondents) and 78-85(7 respondents). It was essential that the last group of respondents which constituted of the oldest people to have more than one translator so that we could communicate effectively the communication was effective. The respondents were composed of 27 men and 23 women. 70% of the population of respondents was born and raised in Portree while the remaining 30% were born in Portree but raised in towns away from Portree. However, among all the respondents, no one had spent more than ten years away from Scotland. Five of the respondents had spent a couple of years away from Scotland; three of them spent 3 years in the United States while two of them spent 4 years in England.

Additionally, the respondent education levels reflected their low geographical mobility. Only 10 of the respondents had a chance to go through post-graduate education, thirty of them completed high school while the remaining 10 did not finish high school. Most of them worked as oil ring crew members while the few who were in the fishing industry were employed by companies offshore (Kingstonedata 315-347). A minority of their population had once in their lives worked in the administrative positions and others as teachers thus leading to the validation of the Scottish English varieties.

3.2 Questionnaire

The questionnaires developed included six pages which the respondents were required to fill out. It involved a section for background information and short answer questions concerned with the Scottish language.

3.2.1 Background information

The first page was concerned with gathering personal information about the respondents such as their age, sex, their occupation, the part of Portree that they were raised, their highest education level and if so the number of years they had lived away from Portree. In addition, the other few pages dealt with how well they knew the community in Portree, what were their contributions to the growth of Portree and whether they still had any relatives in the same town.

3.2.2 Scots language

The Scots Language was composed mostly of a series of questions to that gather short-answers to further understand their perception of the present language situation in Scotland as compared to 20 years back situation. The section allowed free-form responses where respondents could write as many answers to the questions as they wished.

The questions were as follows:

1. What is the main language(s) that are spoken in Scotland?

2. What language(s) do you speak?

3. Are there people in your community that speak or sound differently from you? If so, who? What are the differences?

4. What is Scots? Please describe it to the best of your ability and provide examples of it if possible; do people in Scotland currently speak Scots?

5. Do people outside of Scotland speak Scots? If so, where? and whether or not you believe Scots is spoken today, was there ever a time when Scots was spoken in Scotland? If so, when?

The main purpose of the questions was to assess whether the Scots concept is considered a language or dialect. Furthermore, the questions aimed at understanding whether the respondents could separate Scots from English through the different stylistic variation, i.e. code-switching and style-drifting.

3.3 Scots language analysis, results and discussion

In order to analyse the data by the respondents concerning the Scots language, transcription was done on a spread sheet for all the responses to each question. Afterward, the responses were coded in order to allow more quantification of the results to be done. In the end frequencies of the coded responses were analysed, compared and summarised in form of a table

LANGUAGE	RESPONDENTS WHO SPEAK THE LANGUAGE	RESPONDENTs WHO CLAIM THE LANGUAGE IS SPOKEN
Gaelic	0	40
English	35	38
Doric	23	25
Scots	20	20
Non – native languages	3	8

3.3.1 Results

According to the data collected in the table, it was evident that most of the respondents speak English and claim that most of the people they interact with speak English too. When the respondents were asked to list the language that is spoken in Scotland most of them listed multiple languages but the common ones included Gaelic, English, Doric and Scots most. However, it is noted that non-local languages such as Chinese, Polish and Portuguese among others formed part of the non-local languages that were spoken by a small number of people in Scotland. This is a reflection of the immigration that occurred as well as the great interaction of different people from all over as they worked in the oil rings (Kingstonedata 315-347).

The question, “what language do you speak” had a very interesting answers. This is because most of the respondents claimed that Gaelic was the language spoken in Scotland but none of them appeared to speak the language.

The question of whether people in Scotland speak Scots explained the description of Scots. From most questionnaires, the respondents answered that Scots was a language spoken mainly in lowland Scotland.

An overall view of the respondents’ answers would clearly show that the main language that is spoken in Scotland is English. This is because a majority of the respondents speak the language and claim that they know most people who speak the language.

HERE SHOULD BE FIGURE TO BE MORE RELIABLE or extend chapter 2 because you wrote a lot of pages in the questionnaire

3.3.2 Data Explanation

According to the data, it seems that the most popular language in Scotland is Gaelic. However, most people in Scotland are English speakers. The reason for this seems to date back to 1700 when Scotland political arena took a turn an accepted the Union of parliament to take over thus Scotland becoming united with England (Boyledata 98-104). It is then that most languages such as Scots ceased to be the language of law and government. The language was diminished to the extent that it was spoken in the lower levels of Scotland and English from England took over as a national language. However, the English language was affected by the Scots language where the people were not very fluent and the English contained some Scottish dialect in it (Boyle 98-104). Thus the reason for the language to be called Scottish English. Later on, it was described as Standard Scottish English. According to Wells Standard Scottish English was Standard English spoken with a Scottish accent. It is, therefore, a modified form of Standard English that is spoken in Scotland. However, from the two native languages in Scotland both the Gaelic and Scots there evolved two distinct Scottish English accents. The one influenced by Gaelic accent is popular in the Highlands and is commonly referred to as the Highland English while the latter which is influenced by the Scotts’ being referred to as the Standard Scottish English (McClure 1994: str). Though, SSE the common form of English in Scotland, there are a specific group of population that speaks British English. This is as a result of the influence of education in private schools where British English is taught. The British accent is commonly referred to as the accent of the landowning class who are described by McClure to be “Anglicised".(data:str)

4. CONCLUSION

From the data collected it is quite evident that there is a multi-faced attitude towards the Scottish language. This is explained by the fact that though Scots is perceived to be spoken throughout Scotland, it was not considered as a separate language. Rather most of the languages that are spoken in Scotland are considered as Scottish varieties.

More often than not respondents chose to speak English as opposed to Scots which was a clear indication that the Scottish English had taken root and had been adopted by most people even those that were geographically immobilized (Wells 1984:str). This shows that the language had taken root and although the local accents are present in the respondents while they are speaking most of them seem to slowly accommodate British English in their speech.

The age group between 35-45 years that seemed to be more intellectual than the other age groups had more seemed to be more conversant with the Standard Scottish English. This is a clear indication that the younger generation in Scotland would face out the native languages and adopt the British English as the commonly spoken language throughout Scotland.

CONCLUSION SHOULD BE LONGER ONE ALL PAGE