Buckie linguistics expert set to shine light on Celtic dialects after success of Scots study
A Buckie linguistics expert is set to probe the many variations of dialects spoken across Ireland and Wales in a brand new study.
Prof Jennifer Smith, who is Professor of Sociolinguistics at Glasgow University, is looking for volunteers to take part in the ambitious and wide-ranging mapping project.
It follows hot on the heels of her Speak for Yersel study which is shining a spotlight on the various forms of Scots spoken today. Begun in 2022, the initiative has so far captured over 7000 voices of people hailing from all walks of life using an interactive online survey.
Prof Smith’s work is probing intriguing wrinkles in the language as spoken by people with their family and friends, such as why almost everyone in Scotland uses phrases like “I’m going to my bed” or how “youse” spread across Scotland.
One of the major discoveries to emerge so far is that, while the many forms of Scots remain fluid to a degree in the face of numerous influences, the language remains robustly alive and kicking.
Prof Smith said: “There's this thing many folk say, ‘Oh, we're nae sounding Scottish any more’ and ‘Nobody's speaking Scots anymore’, but when we say that we've got in our heads Burns or people saying things like ‘It’s a braw, bricht moonlicht nicht’ - which, unsurprisingly, nobody’s saying, if indeed they ever did.
“We really wanted to capture what folk were saying in the streets in everyday situations. We love Scots poems and stuff, but that's not what we're interested in, it’s what folk were speaking. What it has definitely shown overall is that there's still a lot of Scots used out there; so we're still saying oot, we're still saying mair, we're still saying heid, all of those very Scottish things.”
One of the vital things Prof Smith and her team were keen to scrutinise was the effect - if any - of class on how and when Scots was spoken.
She explained: “We have this idea that middle class speakers are never speaking any Scots but we know if you listen to somebody like Ewan McGregor, you can tell that he's Scottish even though he's a middle class boy.
“So we wanted to look at that issue of there are these Scots things, but who is using them and where are they using them?
“What we found was that most of the folk that did not go to university use what I would call iconic Scots forms, they're saying aye, and cain and heed, those classic ones. However, all speakers, regardless of whether they went to university or didn’t go to university, are using other Scots forms that they didn’t even recognise as Scots.
“One example is ‘the car needs washed’. The car needs washed is a Scottish form, in English English it would be the car needs to be washed, or the car needs washing. Also, across the whole rest of the English-speaking world, they say ‘I'm going to bed’ or ‘What have you had for your tea?’ where we say ‘I’m going to my bed’ or ‘Fit have you had for your tea?’. We use a possessive pronoun - my, you, or his - and we stick them in places that you don't normally use them.
“Again, that's off the level of consciousness. Ewan McGregor will be doing it, David Tennant will be doing it, and we have no idea that we’re doing it.”
The study was to throw up quite a few surprises which were, in the main, good news for the survival of Scots as a living, evolving language.
Prof Smith continued: “There's tons of Scots going on, and there's some of it we know about, there's some of it that's hidden and we're using it and we don't know, but the other thing we find is we tend to think ‘Oh, dialects are disappearing, everybody's sounding the same’ but that's not true.
“The way we sound in Buckie versus the way you sound in Glasgow versus the way you sound in Dundee, they're all radically different and they're continuing to be radically different.
“What we found is there's definitely some changes going on that started in London, so normally when you get changes in the language that come in it's normally 16, 17, 18-year-olds that start changing the language.”
She went on to note that communities such as Buckie which have been traditionally tight knit made them more resistant to many of the linguistic changes or trends which may be sweeping the rest of the country.
“Dialects are still well rooted in their origins, their past, despite the stuff that's coming in.
“It depends where you are. Somebody once told me Buckie's a linguistic isolate, it used to be a tight-knit community. If you've got tight-knit communities where, basically, people live close together and they are know each other, the changes are slower and this is why Buckie sounds as it does, because it's a small, tight-knit linguistic isolate.
“Somewhere like Glasgow, though, it had Irish immigration, folk coming from all over, a melting pot. It created a whole new dialect that really sounds radically different to everything else in Scotland. I’m amazed it's 45 minutes on the train from Glasgow to Edinburgh but those two dialects are so different, they just sound so, so different, and that's the makeup of the place that makes it like that.”
Prof Smith went on to say that the influence exerted by American TV and films was more likely to be transient and shallower, linguistically speaking, as people tended to cherry pick the words and phrases they liked rather than through some deeper interaction.
She added: “You have to have face-to-face interaction to make someone really change their language.”
The success of Speak for Yersel - which attracted 4000-5000 respondents in just the first few weeks - gave significant impetus to the next phase of the project focusing on Scotland’s Celtic cousins in Ireland and Wales. While the format will remain much the same the questions asked have had to be rewritten to reflect the dialects used across the three countries.
In Wales, for example, researchers are hoping to find out if people say “daps” or “plimsols” for sports shoes, or whether it is possible to tell a Cardiff accent from a Pontypridd one. Northern Irish participants might share whether they’re “pure ragin” or if they wear “gutties”. Meanwhile, in the Republic of Ireland, the team is curious about phrases like ‘actin’ the maggot’ and whether Kerry speakers sound like those from Kildare.
Prof Smith said: “I'm just really looking forward to seeing what they produce.
“It'll be really interesting to see if this vitality that we see in Scots is the same in Ireland and Wales as well.
“The other thing about this is, we have to be kind of careful with the results, because asking folk what they say versus actually just recording them can be very different.”
To take part in Speak for Yersel Scotland, visit https://speakforyersel.ac.uk/
For Northern Ireland, go to https://speakforyersel.ac.uk/ni/
The Republic of Ireland version is at https://speakforyersel.ac.uk/roi/
To participate in the Welsh study, visit https://speakforyersel.ac.uk/wales/
