Scottish accent will change... but it won’t be as bad as Braveheart
Experts look at how our language has been shaped down the years
The Scottish accent is as instantly recognisable as the country’s iconic lochs and mountains.
Yet ongoing studies have discovered the distinctive brogue has not always sounded as it does now, and in only a few generations world events and migration – both around the globe and beyond – will mould it into a new shape forever.
“Languages change all the time, and every generation speaks very differently from the one before,” said Dr Sadie Ryan, Lecturer in Languages and Intercultural Studies at Glasgow University. “Every generation seems to be surprised when accents start changing, and you will often get older people talking about how younger generations speak strangely, or ‘wrongly’.”
Dr Ryan and her colleagues are working on a project called My Voice, My Glasgow, which studies how young Glaswegians from different linguistic, class and migration backgrounds use language.
“It’s pretty early days, but I work with mainly Polish kids who have moved to Glasgow. Some quickly take on Glaswegian accents, some keep their Polish accents, and some have beautiful mixed accents.
“What we see sometimes in migrant communities is that they are very Scottish and very something else. So, we may see PolishScottish accents developing, or Iranian-Dundonian, or SyrianEdinburgh accents. Already there’s research showing the Glasgow-Asian accent is quite recognisable.”
These mixed accents could permeate and influence the Scottish accent, changing the way the whole population says certain words in the future. Dr Ryan said: “A really big part of what has formed the Scottish accent has been migration into Scotland over the years.
“There’s lot of evidence to show the Glasgow accent was influenced by Irish accents, and there’s lots of crossovers from Gaelic too. If you go back even further, there’s loads of Norse influence from the Vikings.”
It is not just migration that has an influence on accents, large world events do too. In central Scotland, the use of a ‘fi’ instead of a ‘th’ noise (‘fink’ instead of ‘think’) was likely a result of Scottish soldiers moving around during the Second World War.
Jane Stuart-Smith, Professor of Phonetics and Sociolinguistics at Glasgow University said: “There was lots of mixing with people they had never encountered before. And that noise was very much associated with the south of England and Cockney.”
Accents are also closely entwined with our personal identities, and signal information about our socioeconomic background to whomever we are speaking to. During and after the First World War, the ‘r’ at the end of words like ‘faither’ became increasingly weaker for working class Scottish speakers. For the aspirational middle class however, those ‘r’s became stronger.
Jane said: “When you hear a strong ‘r’ at the end of words like ‘far’ or ‘car’ in a Scottish accent, it signals that the person is quite aspirational, and you have an image of a certain kind of person.”
A recent study of the speech patterns of 26 workers living on an isolated research station in Antarctica yielded particularly interesting results.
All English speakers of different nationalities, the study found that after months of only seeing and speaking to each other, their pronunciation of certain words changed. They were developing a new accent.
The study provided an insight into how accents germinate and develop, throwing new light onto, for example, how the American accent grew and diverged from those of the first English speakers who landed there hundreds of years ago.
It also suggested that if humans ever establish a colony on Mars, they will more than likely begin to develop their own Martian accent.
A fantastical idea, perhaps, but not as out there as some of the Scottish accents we hear non-Scot actors attempt on film and TV. Every Scot has cringed on hearing a ropey Scottish accent, be it Aussie Mel Gibson’s cheesy Braveheart intonations, or Jessica Lange’s woeful attempt in Rob Roy.
Jane said: “You feel it’s hard to master because it’s your native accent and you’re an expert in it, so you have much less tolerance for it being bad. I’m English and I can’t stand Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones accent. That character is supposed to be someone like me, so while it’s not a bad accent, the very fine details are not right, and that irritated me – but that’s not her fault!”
Dani Morse-Kopp, a dialect coach based in Edinburgh, added: “Actors often only get about two weeks’ notice, which is not long enough to learn a new accent. Often with something like an American production, the show is aimed at Americans who don’t know the nuances of the Scottish accent.”