A Note On The Regional Dialect

I spent my last few months in the U.S. listening to BBC Scotland Radio in an effort to acclimate to the accent. Sure, I'd seen Braveheart, but once you get here you realize that Mel's accent is actually atrocious; it's not just nationalism speaking when Scots rile against him.

Mel notwithstanding, mainstream Scottish accents (found in the big cities and in the south) aren't difficult to understand at all. My friend Laurie is from Kilmarnock and has the type of accent you might want your children to have, even if they are American. Every time he speaks I just want him to read Robert Burns to me for hours while I lounge around under tartan blankets and sip hot whisky. It really is glorious, but I digress.

When I interviewed at the Fife Museum one of the first questions from the panel of trustees was whether or not I would be able to understand the more "indigenous" Scottish accents of the region. I replied that it couldn't be any more difficult to interpret than a deep Southern accent in the U.S. -- an answer which made them laugh, but SHOO was I wrong.

Case in point: I am taking a class (as previously mentioned) on Culture and Society in Modern Scotland. My professor is reasonably legible, but today we had a visiting lecturer come in to tell us about post-war Scottish poetry and he might as well have given the lecture in German for all I understood and copied down. At the bottom of the last page in my notebook are the words "I cannot understand a single thing this man is saying" followed by a couple doodles of transparent cubes and an elaborate drawing of a horse's head coming out of a box.

To give you an idea of what we are dealing with here is an excerpt from a poem by noted Scottish poet Robert Garioch, written in the Scots dialect:

As it's froggin' in the hills,
Or poors pipestapples and auld wives,
Sae Waich Water glents and scrows,
Reels and ratches and rives.

Lappin' on the shirrel,
Or breengin' doon the cleuch,
I can listen to the waters
Lang -- and no'lang -- eneuch.

... If you're thinking 'Whaaat?' then we are in the same boat. If you are nodding and pretending like you understand then you are taking the route chosen by a few of my American classmates. Stop pretending, you silly sallies, you have no idea what's going on and neither do I! Here's to hoping that there isn't a large section on post-war poetry included in the final exam.*

Give me a good ol' Cherokee County accent any day of the week and I can hum right along. This Scots dialect is a whole new bowl of beans. Bless you, Oxford Press, for including copious amounts of footnotes for the handful of us not blessed with the brogue.

* I will (of course) study and read with abandon beforehand and make sure I am not as befuddled as I am now, Mom.