{"id":218,"date":"2006-11-21T22:54:00","date_gmt":"2006-11-21T21:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/?p=218"},"modified":"2006-11-21T22:54:00","modified_gmt":"2006-11-21T21:54:00","slug":"the-difficulty-of-acquiring-a-scottish-accent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/the-difficulty-of-acquiring-a-scottish-accent\/","title":{"rendered":"The difficulty of acquiring a Scottish accent"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I moved to Scotland nearly five years ago, I imagined I would quickly acquire a Scottish accent. That hasn’t happened, however. This is due partly to the number of non-Scottish colleagues I have and to the other varieties of English I hear on TV.<\/p>\n

However, a big problem is not being able to guess pronunciations correctly based on my knowledge of RP. There are at least four major issues:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Syllable-final \/r\/. In common with most varieties of American English, the \/r\/ is pronounced in words like port<\/i>, far<\/i> and better<\/i>. Given that I know how to spell, this is easy enough to do when I have time to think, but I can’t do this perfectly while speaking quickly – not only will I forget to put in some \/r\/s, but I’d also tend to put in some extra \/r\/s in words like bath<\/i>.<\/li>\n
  2. ir<\/i>, er<\/i> and ur<\/i>: In most Scottish accents, the words bird<\/i>, herd<\/i> and curd<\/i> don’t rhyme. It’s the same problem as before: I can do it when I’m given time to think, but not otherwise.<\/li>\n
  3. wh<\/i>: The h<\/i> is not silent in wh<\/i>, and this leads to the same problems as before. The spelling is not always a guide – the h<\/i> is silent in whelk<\/i>, for instance.<\/li>\n
  4. north<\/i> vs. force<\/i>: In common with some other varieties of English (including old-fashioned RP and Jamaican), the vowel in north<\/i> is different from the one in force<\/i>. In this case, I can’t even do it correctly when given time to think about it, because I’d need to relearn all relevant words.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    When I moved to Scotland nearly five years ago, I imagined I would quickly acquire a Scottish accent. That hasn’t happened, however. This is due partly to the number of non-Scottish colleagues I have and to the other varieties of English I hear on TV. However, a big problem is not being able to guess pronunciations correctly based on my knowledge of RP. There are at least four major issues: Syllable-final \/r\/. In common with most varieties of American English, the \/r\/ is pronounced in words like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,105,117],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-featured","category-linguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}