The Outlandish Companion - Diana Gabaldon [292]
Now, representation of Scots dialect in written form is another question altogether. When writing accented speech, representation is a matter of judgment on the writer’s part. You may use “canna,” “cannae,” “can na” or whatever seems best to you and easiest on the reader’s eye and comprehension.
Two general points of advice:
1) “Eye dialect” spellings (strictly phonetic spellings that often involve a lot of apostrophes) are more difficult to read.
2) Accent is best used sparingly when writing dialogue. Too much of it is both jarring to the ear and hard on the eye. It’s better to depend more on idiom and sentence structure than on accent to get the “flavor” of speech, without annoying the reader.
It’s a common mistake among authors writing Scottish characters to write straight English dialogue, merely substituting “ye” for “you” throughout (the most irritating ones also put “yer” for “your,” which is characteristic of some kinds of Irish speech, but not usually of Scots, though lower-class Lowlanders and some people from the northern parts of England do it sometimes). If you listen to Scots speak, they don’t invariably say “ye”—sometimes the word sounds like “ye” (especially at the beginnings of sentences) and frequently it’s clearly “you,” depending on the rhythm of the sentence and the words surrounding the pronoun. Making it “ye” every time makes the sentences read awkwardly, I think, and the rhythms of English and Scots are distinctly different.
If you are writing about the historical Highlands, and you do want to give your Highlander a salting of Gaelic (it’s useful for picturesque cursing where you want to make it clear that a person is using dreadful invective1 by the shocked expression of his companions—without offending your readers or having to try to think up accurate period curses that will still sound like bad language to your readers), you can use the occasional Gaelic phrase or sentence, provided (as with any other foreign-language insertion) that you make the meaning clear—whether you do this through direct translation or merely by context.
As with any writing that involves the British Isles, the language of the characters will be affected by their social class. Lower-class Scots do not speak the same as upper-class Scots, though both may use similar expressions, depending on the circumstances of the story. Lower-class characters will tend to use more strongly accented speech; upper-class characters will use fairly clear standard English—though often with the unique Scots sentence structures and idioms. Lower-class characters are likely to show more strongly accented dialect.
Obviously, making effective use of dialect and accent depends on developing a good “ear” for these elements. One thing I’ve found useful is to listen to tapes of Scottish bands and singers; beyond the lyrics of the songs themselves, the bands in “live” recordings will often banter with the audience between numbers, giving you a chance to hear real Scots talk naturally.
Novels set in Scotland—preferably written by native Scots—are also helpful. One very good reference, which includes several meticulously rendered Scottish accents from different social classes, is Dorothy L. Sayers’s Five Red Herrings (Sayers wasn’t Scottish, but she had a wonderful ear and a painstaking approach to nuances of accent and social class). I’d also recommend The Big Book of Scottish Stories, which is composed entirely of stories—both historical and contemporary—by Scottish authors, and gives a wide range of depicted accents and idioms. For more modern depictions of Scottish speech, the novels of Irvine Welsh or Iain Banks are excellent; Welsh uses very idiomatic (and phonetically spelled) Edinburgh patois, while Banks’s characters tend to use