Something about accents

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 are rhotic — that is, they pronounce the <r> sound after a vowel in words like farm, first and better.