Iona MacDonald

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 389.

C) audiofile: BBC Voices_scotland-portree.ram

Born:7 October 1961

Lives: Portree, Isle of Skye

Time lived in area: More than 10 years

Listen to: Iona remembers her confusion over language when her friends from Falkirk came to visit.

Transcript

IONA: We used te have some friends from the Falkirk area, who used to come up and stay with us every year in the summer time and they had a very, very strong accent, very strong Central Scots accent, and Sandy had been playing outside and came running in, very windy day, came running in an' he said te ma mother, "yer streecher's fa'n doon, yer clays on e' grun", and we all looked at the poor boy blankly and he repeated himself again, "yer streecher's fa'n doon, yer clays on e' grun", and we were still making absolutely nothing of it, we had to say, right slow it down Sandy and "yer streecher's faa'n doon an' yer clays are on the grun'", aw right we've got it now, meant yer clothes pole has fallen down 'n' yer clothes are on the ground..laughter..and he just stomped his foot and looked so put out and said, "yoose are aw too polite"..laughter.

More about the speech in the clip

Extremely broad dialect speakers can occasionally prove unintelligible at first to speakers of other dialects, as Iona's anecdote illustrates here. The features contained within the utterances she cites are examples of broad Scots and demonstrate perfectly the sorts of variation that distinguish dialects within a language. The term dialect refers to a specific variety of a language, which differs systematically from other varieties in terms of pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, but which is still generally comprehensible to speakers of other dialects within that language.

In the statements your streecher's fallen down and your clothes are on the ground and yous are all too polite, Iona's friend demonstrates a number of aspects of his particular dialect. Streecher, as explained here is a local word for clothes-pole and is thus an example of the vocabulary of the Falkirk area. He also uses a non-standard grammatical construction in using a second person plural pronoun, yous - something that's typical of a number ofScottish dialects and indeed characteristic of speech in places like Merseyside and Tyneside, but not part of Standard English usage.

There are also a number of pronunciations that are very revealing. Listen, for instance, to how Iona quotes the way her friend deletes thesound in the words fallen and all and uses a vowel sound in the two words that differs from most mainstream English dialects. This pronunciation would cover a number of words spelt with , such as walland ball and includes words such as talk and walk. The sound in the words talk and walk is, of course, no longer pronounced by speakers in most English dialects, but this speaker from Falkirk extends the principle to cover other words in the set - a phenomenon that's peculiar to anumber of Scottishdialects and broad dialect speech in the far north-east of England.

Listen also to the vowel sound used here in the word down. This actually reflects a much older pronunciation that was common both to Middle English and Middle High German and is an illustration of the Germanic origins of modern English. This was until fairly recently common in broad dialect speech in much of the northern half of Great Britain, but nowadays it's perhaps restricted to the far north-east of England andparts of Scotland. Likewise listen to the vowel sound her friend uses in the word ground. There are several words in English that end in , whose modern German equivalents end orthographically in : pound - Pfund;hound - Hund; round - rund and so on. Although the vowel sound most speakers in the UK now use for this set of words has changed over the course of time, there are still many speakers in the north-east of England andparts of Scotland where the pronunciation reflects the original Germanic vowel. You can still hear speakers in this part of the country pronouncing round, found, pound and so on such that they rhyme with the first syllable in under, just as here on the word ground. This demonstrates perfectly how conservative forms are often retained in traditional dialect long after the 'prestige' standard language has moved on.

Finallylisten to the way Iona imitates her friend's pronunciation of the vowel sound in the word clothes. This pronunciation, too, reflects the Germanic origins of the word and shows very clearly the links to modern German Kleid. In fact clathes was again the favoured regional alternative in dialect speech in much of the northern half of Great Britain until relatively recently, although it's now arguably restricted to use in Scotland alone. It could perhaps be regarded as a word in its own right, although it's clearly related to Standard English clothes and therefore demonstrates how difficult it is to decide whether a certain form is illustrative of variety in terms of dialect vocabulary or pronunciation.