I was born in the 1950s in Glasgow so I am part of a generation who learned the language from parents born in the 1930s and grandparents born in the 1900s. As a result my early speech would be considered very broad Glaswegian by today’s standards. I was made acutely however aware from my earliest years of the undesirability of this accent by the same relatives who modelled it. Their good intentions ensured that I was careful to speak standard English at home in a way which would have invited utter ridicule amongst my school friends. Over time my speech became consistently more standard in terms although I retained my West of Scotland accent. This seemed to be a successful strategy until two incidents made me wonder. The first came in my early 50s. I visited a teaching camp for Spaniards learning English as one of the volunteer English coaches along with speakers from all over the English speaking world. At the end of the week one of my fellow attendees from Spain confessed that none of her compatriots wanted to be paired with me because I was too difficult to understand. I was more upset though to hear my fellow English speakers from North America, Australasia, Africa and even England itself agree that they found me equally unintelligible. I was quietly offended and dubious until I met my partner from Dumfries and Galloway a few years later, who proclaimed me ‘the most Glaswegian person’ she’d ever met. I highly doubt this however my attempts at standardising my accent clearly haven’t been as successful as I thought. I am at an age now, or I live in an age, where I no longer feel the need to change.
Tag: Scottish
Michael
I was attracted to your project by the description in today’s Research Professional. I have been affiliated to [university in Scotland] for some 55 years, with gaps, as undergraduate, postgraduate, academic and emeritus staff. I have also worked in England and abroad. I am a lowland Scot and would consider myself as bilingual in Scots and English. People who spoke Scots, when I was a child, had difficulty in distinguishing between English and educated Scots accents: both were regarded as ‘posh’.
Scottish Universities, and [my university] in particular, have a somewhat different history from English Universities with respect to the influence of accent. When I was a student in the 1960s more than 80% of the student population was Scottish, and a high proportion, like myself, lived with their parents and remained embedded in their local communities. This percentage is still substantial, but is no longer a majority. The same was and is true of the technical, administrative and janitorial staff. In contrast, less than 20% the academic staff were and are from Scotland. In the 1960s most of the remainder were English, with similar backgrounds to the academic staff of non-Oxbridge English Universities. Today the non-Scottish academic staff are cosmopolitan.
I have never been conscious of overt discrimination against students on grounds of accent, although covert discrimination is hard to rule out entirely. However as an undergraduate in a large and faceless Chemistry department, I was very conscious that barriers – lack of personal warmth – between staff and students interfered with the learning process, that these barriers were erected more by the students than by the staff, and that they were distinctly reinforced by the pervasive Scots/English divide in speech.
Later, lecturing in Agricultural Chemistry and then in Environmental Chemistry, these barriers tended to disappear in small-group teaching, and language became a less divisive issue even for my English colleagues. However I did meet one other difficulty. The language in which landscapes and their science is described in the literature is quite formalised, and the formalisation has roots in Oxbridge, or sometimes North American, English. Using that vocabulary created barriers for students who had known their own landscapes from childhood, especially if they came from farming families. When you have always known a peatland as a burn, there is an immediate disconnect when your teacher calls it a stream. I had to work hard with my students to connect what they were taught with what they had always known. My English colleagues could not see that problem. My two sons studied in different colleges of [university in Scotland], and it appears that similar but deeper disconnects arise between scientific English and Gaelic.
Molly A.
As a child, I lived in Scotland for quite some time before moving to the US at age 7 or 8. When I started school there, I was often ashamed to speak because my Scottish accent garnered so much attention. I don’t remember if any staff had a reaction, but my classmates were equal parts fascinated and repulsed by my accent: they’d scrunch up their faces because I was apparently impossible to understand, or ask me to say particular words or phrases on cue. Of course, they were only children and really didn’t know any better, but it just highlights the importance of exposing people, from a young age, to other ways of being. Disappointingly, I ended up making a conscious effort to change my accent to an ‘American’ one, in order to fit in.
Louise
I feel awful when talking to people at times. I am Scottish and love being so. But being from a town very close to the border between Scotland and England, I find my accent is dependent on my situation.
I grew up in a very small town in Scotland close to the border to England. I feel, because of the proximity, my hometown accent is VERY pronounced to make sure people are aware we are Scottish. When I moved to go to University and came back to visit my parents, my dad told me ‘for God’s sake Louise, speak Scottish’ where I thought I was. But I wasn’t speaking in my natural dialect. This is when I realised I adapt my accent to where I am, very easily and unintentionally.
Then I began thinking about when I meet Irish people. I live in the west of Scotland and there are a lot of people in Stranraer, also in the west of Scotland that have almost ‘Belfastian?’ And I take on an Irish accent when speaking to people from Ireland. I’m not being, or trying to be offensive it just changes.
My partner’s grandmother is from Barbados and I have taken in saying ‘it’s a-boat time’ instead of ‘about’ and it’s not out of taking the piss but because I love the pronunciation.
I love doing accents and can do them very well, but also can speak German fluently.
My partner has lived in Lancaster, Scotland and London however and I cannot imitate his accent at all! But when he is speaking very northern ‘lancastarian’ I find myself copying him haha!
Just wanted to hear other people’s stories of accents changing 😊
Mairhaich
As the Head of Department at an English University I was asked to tone down my Scottish accent during the visit of the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) as it could be off-putting. As I was seconded to the QAA for 12 days a year this was ironic.
I was also recently asked in an organisation set up by the Scottish Government but headed up primarily by English managers to speak more ‘English.’ This same organisation, set up to collect the stories of Scots, refused to collect them in Scottish.
Locard
I am a Scottish Msc student at an English university in the South of England. During the mere month or so I have been here I have already had many an occasion of English students on campus and locals in the pubs thinking it’s perfectly acceptable to pull out tired old ‘och aye jimmies’ and ‘braw moonlicht nicht the nichts’. The refrain ‘Why cant you just speak normal English like everyone else?’ has also been heard from someone in my department during a night out. These same people recoil as if burnt when challenged on the matter, not seeming to understand that those from another country within the UK could possibly have another accent or language. How could that ever be possible in Greater England?
Most obviously have no malice behind these exchanges; however, it is at best lazy discrimination of those they share the United Kingdom with.
Scottish Claire
I have noticed in the last 20 years (I am nearly 53) regional accents become a lot more acceptable. I got ridiculed for my (not that strong but distinctive) Scottish accent in London in the eighties and also at uni in Edinburgh. I hadn’t met the very rich before that and it was a shock. I was into drama but after feeling isolated among the RP speakers I didn’t return to a group and stopped acting altogether. They seemed to think that anyone with any kind of regional accent was extremely poor and lower working class. There was a clear class divide at the university.
As a student at school I was mocked by the more strong accented kids (in Fife) and told I had been sent to elocution lessons by my mum which was incorrect. There seemed to be a thing about talking as broad as possible to avoid being called a snob (inverted snobbery). I have been told several times I sound like Kirsty Wark and am happy with this. I now live in West Yorkshire and have adopted some of that dialect but never lost my Scottish accent.
Liz
So I am northern Italian, which is already a bit of a strange accent for Italy (long vowels, many consonants fall, etc.), then I moved to England and lived first in Yorkshire where my best friend is from, and then in Oxford, but with two Irishmen and a Scot in the house, and then I met my future husband who is a Welshman raised in Norfolk. The result? After four years in England, I developed what has been recently defined by a friend of mine a ‘Eurotrash’ accent, with bits of Irish, Northern, Scot pronunciation scattered here and there across my fake-RP.
That said, I love English Northern pronunciation and every day that passes I am more and more tempted to ditch the stupid RP and just go for my northern mash!
Senga
Early in the millennium, when voice-recognition technology was still immature, my employer (in TV post-production) aptitude-tested two dozen volunteers to produce texts from TV — a bit like simultaneous translation, but speaking all the parts in a drama or debate, including punctuation, and editing slightly as you go — all whilst listening to the next part. That’s the tricky bit, like rubbing your tum while patting your head.
This was just a new production method for a job we were all experienced at.
When managers emailed us the result of the aptitude testing — the names of six selected for training — I was out of the room. I returned to find a whole chain of comments between a clique of colleagues: as well as adding their own group to the address line, someone had hit reply-all anyway, and everyone on shift at that moment got it. Several more emails from friends went “Quick! Archive your emails now, before you read anything!”
These cliques were the same people who had managed to leave several desktop computers in our hot-desk workplace permanently signed in to their messaging app, so it wasn’t a surprising blunder, and nor was the indignant “OMG!!!” response to my being selected much of a shock: I knew they disliked me as a person. But the blatancy of their snobbery was an eye opener.
They were outraged that someone with speech as “common” and “gutteral” (pun intended) as mine could have been considered adequate at all to use voice-recognition software, and stated that they were stunned that I’d been put forward ahead of most of them. They literally were disbelieving that I could’ve passed at all. Especially since the test had been administered and scored by people who came up from London. The clique were anticipating a great denouement, when the voice-recognition software would melt down on contact with my “terrible” accent.
I have a bog-standard west-of-Scotland accent — a range of registers, like most people in the surrounding conurbation, but defaulting to working-class rather than the “well-spoken” or “telephone voice” that schoolteachers used to try to scold us all into. I speak like most of the population here, and like most of the clique’s own parents and many of their friends. But in our workplace, as in most big organisations in Scotland, it’s the accent of the majority of security guards, canteen staff, cleaners, maintenance crews…but few of the people they maintain.
We had all been briefed on the nature of the output software that those who “went forward” would be using — you would build up a corpus of your own speech through example and correction to make a “model” for the voice software to recognise your own voice. All that matters is that your diction is acoustically distinct.
Handily, the standard working class west of Scotland accent has fully-sounded (guttural, if you like) consonants and more vowels than Standard English. Wales and whales are quite distinct; so are eyes/ice, boot/boat, four/for, and or/oar/awe. “Girls” is a diphthong and can’t be misheard as gulls, gills or gales. And for homophones, the Scottish teacher’s-bane childhood accent easily distinguishes they’re from their (thur) and there (thai-ur).
The weird thing is that, of all people, my colleagues were educationally and occupationally selected to know all this better than just about anyone who doesn’t actually work as a linguist: but even months later, they still seemed mystified that “the machine” discriminates acoustically, not socially.
When two of the clique started their training a few weeks after me, (yes, one was the instigator of the OMG slag-fest) both had more problems than almost anyone with getting consistent voice-recognition. When you are under pressure, or tired, or unselfconscious, your speech tends to revert to what is most ingrained — the speech you first learned. Both individuals had been through years of elocution lessons in their teenage years. Each would teach the machine a beautifully modulated exemplar in their acquired pronunciation, and as the situation got more demanding — eventually live on-air — it would broaden into speech that most people from outside Scotland wouldn’t be able to tell from my own “dreadful” accent. But they hadn’t taught that to their voice-recognition software. They weren’t hearing it themselves.
My revenge was to be as helpful as possible. (I never mentioned that email, though some other colleague surely must have at sometime.) Several people, including me, did try to explain that you have to be “honest” with the software, but these two continued to have a hard time with it.
More distinctly-enunciated consonants. No intrusive-R or missing R. At least two sets of vowel distinctions not in Standard British English. Plenty of acoustically distinct sounds for the software to latch onto: that’s my accent. From what I hear, over a decade later, Siri and Alexa still can’t cope with un-anglicised Scottish or Irish speech. That can only be because we’re literally not worth hearing.
Aram
Today I spoke to a GP who said that if they heard a Scottish accent from a new patient, they would know that this person had a problem with alcohol or drugs. They said this was not prejudice, but merely a reflection of the location where their practice is based, and the fact that in their experience, 100% of the Scottish people in this location have issues with alcoholism or other substance abuse.
They didn’t seem to follow my argument that even if they had encountered 100 people who were Scottish and had such issues, deciding in advance that the 101st person with a Scottish accent was also likely to have such issues was prejudice and akin to racial/ethnic profiling.