I wrote this in response to a post I saw called “Scottish Glossary for Novelists“:
As a writer who’s emigrated to Scotland and has been living here for a while, I feel the need to warn others that many of the things we associate with Scotland (such as, my apologies, many things on this list) are just not part of contemporary Scottish life.
What’s more, Scots are very canny when it comes to detecting “cod-Scots”, or attempts by outsiders to put on an accent, sell anything that’s covered in plaid, or romanticise some part of what, in reality, was a very difficult history.
This includes scenes like the soft-voiced lassie, striding across the glen with pails of milk, cradling her [baby term] in her arm to meet her [husband term] and return to their [dwelling term].
Oh, and terms for everyday things vary a lot from one part of Scotland to another, so you’ll want to make sure you’re not transposing Highland terminology to Edinburgh, say, or even thinking that people in Edinburgh and Glasgow speak the same way.
I’ve been here eight years, and every day I’m learning some new, different word for something that I would have got wrong. It’s a lot of work.
Happily, if you meet a Scot, you’ll find that they tend to have an interest in what makes them unique, including their language, and will be keen to discuss it.
There are also lots of online resources about the Scots language — which some argue is not just a dialect, but a separate language from English, so you’d no more pretend to speak Scots than you would French or German, just because they’re related.
Here are some starting points:
- BBC Voices
- Scots language poems
- The Wikipedia in Scots
- Scots Online: Pittin the mither tongue on the Wab
- Scots translator
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p>Lang may yer lum reek, fellow writers!