The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [291]
RESOURCES
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A WRITER’S SHORT GUIDE TO SCOTTISH SPEECH PATTERNS
Using Scots and Gaelic in Dialogue
I get a number of letters from writers who want to use a Scottish setting in their books, asking me for advice and information on using “Gaelic” in the dialogue of their characters, as they’ve found my handling of Scottish “brogue” to be effective. I usually write back to tell them that if they really mean to use Gaelic, I’m afraid the effect is not going to be quite what they think.
With the basic disclaimer that I Am Not a Scot:
A good many people are under the misapprehension that Gaelic and Scots are the same thing, and are likewise confused about the difference between a dialect and an accent. In hopes of lending some small clarification to these matters, following is a short (and highly inexpert) observation on Scottish speech patterns:
“Scots” is an honest-to-goodness dialect of the English language. By this, I mean that it is basically English (and can be—more or less—understood by an English speaker), but has its own specific and distinguishable idiom, sentence structure, and vocabulary. In its most exaggerated form, it’s called “broad Scots,” “braid Scots”) which is the highly accented form of the dialect, in which Robbie Burns wrote his poetry “wee cow’rin’, sleekit, timorous beastie,” etc.).
Gaelic, on the other hand, is a completely different language, spoken (in differing forms) by Scottish Highlanders and the Irish (it is the official language of Ireland, and is taught in the schools—but is not in common use by most of the inhabitants). Both forms of Gaelic are referred to as “Erse” in older reference texts, and the modern Scottish movement prefers to spell their form of the language as “Gaidhlig” (so as to reject English influence), just to make things more confusing.
As a brief example: “My bonny wee lassie” is a Scots endearment—“Mo nighean donn is the Gaelic equivalent (literally, it means “my brown-haired girl”). Spoken (or sung) Gaelic sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before, and definitely wouldn’t be understood by an English speaker.
Now, Gaelic in Scotland is spoken only in the Highlands (and is not all that common there, though the Scottish Nationalist movement has spurred new interest in preserving and encouraging the language. [In terms of the Outlander books, Gaelic would likely have been fairly common in the 1940s, but still restricted to the Highlands]). Scots is spoken throughout Scotland, but occurs in broad form mostly in the Lowlands—if you’ve heard Glaswegians, you’ve heard the broadest—and most idiosyncratic—Scots there is. Highlanders, by contrast, speak fairly pure English, in that there is not a great deal of accent or peculiar vocabulary to their speech, though they do use the Scots idiom and sentence structure.
Now, accent and dialect. As I mentioned above, a dialect has a peculiar idiom, vocabulary, and sentence structure. To illustrate the latter point—
An American hotel clerk will say, “Can I help you?”
An English clerk will say, “May I help you, please?”
A Highland clerk will say, “Can I be helpin’ ye at all, then?” Likewise,
An American will say, “Sorry, I don’t remember that.”
An Englishman will say, “I’m afraid I don’t recall that.”
And a Scot may say (if he’s being old-fashioned about it), “Aye, well, I canna just charge my memory about that, I’m afraid.”
In general, the occasional dropping of the terminal “g” “helpin’,” “doin’”) is a characteristic of Scots dialect, as is the common insertion of “particle” words at the beginning or end of a sentence—things like “then,” “aye,” “well,” or “man,” which aren’t necessary to the meaning of the sentence, but give the speech a characteristic rhythm. Example: “Ye canna be doin’ that, man!”
By contrast, the slight oddities of pronunciation—“canna” for “cannot,” “didna” for “didn’t,” “ye” for “you” (or however an individual writer chooses to render these expressions)—are accent rather than dialect. Consequently, they vary in the strength and frequency of their usage among individuals, and they aren’t invariable