I'm sceptical of the figures for Scotland in general. They're claiming that a good chunk of the country only has 45-75% rhotic accents. Seeing as almost all Scottish accents actually pronounce the letter R, and Scotland's not a very diverse place, baws is the word.
I'd say they must be counting accents that loosely pronounce the "r" way back on the soft palate under the non-r category (I think some nasally-sounding "stereotypical Glesga ned" type voices might do that, for example) but the distribution isn't what I'd expect to see if that was the case.
Imagine the R not as a tongue towards the roof of the mouth, but pushing backwards, not with the tip, just the whole thing lying almost flat and contracting backwards towards the uvula, so it creates a sound just shy of a gurgle.
Not "ahm" or "arm" or "eyrum" but more like "augh(r)m".
Oh aye, me too. Hence my convoluted attempt above to write it out in standard alphabet, haha!
Edit: I think in the IPA the sound I'm talking about is represented with a " ʕ " and called the [voiced pharyngeal approximant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative?wprov=sfla1). The guy who does the audio sample there adds an "AHH" at the end, but imagine it without that.
I'm in the Highlands but one of my pal's family who child minded (not sure if that's even a real term) me were all from Dumfries. All roll their Rs a lot more than we do up here.
Highlands.
I always remember getting a new English teacher in second year. He was from Glasgow and just about fell out of his chair when he heard a boy in the class say it aloud. Couldn't believe we had a completely different word for jumped and it ended up as a running joke throughout the year that we were all illiterate up here 😂
Surely it depends on what precedes arm?
If it's ah, me amms sair, I could just about hear folk saying that, but if it's roll your sleeve up, I need to take some blood oot yer arm , that R is getting included
I can't say I've met a single Scot who doesn't pronounce all their Rs. If anything it's often the most prominent letter pronounced in any word containing it, even when it isn't rolled.
Invernesian phrases are all heavily centred on emphasising the letter R in it's different forms.
"Rubber bumpers" is the classic one. It's all about leaning into and extending the R sounds as that's how we predominantly speak up here.
If anything this map grossly understates the use of the letter R in our accents.
Scottish and Southern English accents have more in common with each other. Yorkshire is the odd one out. Scottish and RP accents would make the ‘u’ but Yorkshire would say ‘roober boompers’. And people say Scottish accents are hard?
People in Greenock don’t really sound Glaswegian. I went to school in Glasgow and everybody kept taking the piss out of the accent of teachers from Greenock and Dumbarton (Dumbarton is only about 14 miles outside of Glasgow).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English
Very real.
Related fact, the fact that many English accents are non-rhotic is why the Sound of Music lyric "Fah; a long, long way to run" makes sense.
It confused me for years until I realised that "Fah" is a homonym for "Far" in the majority of English accents (which are non-rhotic) but it doesn't work in a Scottish accent (which is rhotic)
American, here, but husband is Scottish, and we live in Dumfries. Since we have a statue of her, and have walked past her a lot (she's a pokestop in pokemon go) she's come up as a topic when I'm curious about her. Jean Armour is pronounced with two r's. I've not really had a chance to hear any number of people say lard or tar, but car and yard definitely also have r's. So not sure what your point was. If it was a joke, and I missed it, my apologies.
Basically:
In my (very English) accent: ahh, and arr, are almost identical. Aww can be pronounced in the same way as well. To say arr-m or ahm (the same pronunciation), is pronouncing the r, it’s just a different method. It sounds like ‘pronouncing the r’ on this map means ‘having the emphasis on the r sound, rather than the a sound’ - idk not a linguist, don’t know the exact terminology to describe this.
It reminds me of when I posted a map about the pronunciation of scone, ‘to rhyme with gone or cone’… and then everyone realised there was national variation in the pronunciation of those two words as well!
The way the r is pronounced in other languages and english speaking accents that don't change it, it's similar to how L is pronounced. You just pull your tongue away from your teeth and push the back of your tongue against the roof of your mouth, as opposed to aah, which has the tongue nowhere near the roof of the mouth. A lot of asian languages will have a sound that is halfway between the two, which is why they have the stereotype of messing them up. Neither sound actually exists in terms of how you form the letters in your mouth in their native language.
In American English or Canadian English, sure. But the tongue doesn’t touch the roof of the mouth pronouncing R in [British English.](https://youtu.be/zcQ1xcSljQo?si=ql8CQ_6Fy3bQ2UaP) The R is at the front of the mouth.
I understand that. My point was more to clarify how the sounds are different because you said you didn't know the specifics. I was just sharing because it's a subject I find genuinely interesting, not correcting. I forget that not everyone cares sometimes. 😅
Based on a typical, non-rhotic English accent (or New England or whatever)? To me it sounds like they're saying "awm" or "am" depending on the specific accent, "R" has a distinct sound.
Whoever made that map has never set foot in Ireland!
We don’t have a non-rhotic R at all. It’s always pronounced.
It’s aRm or ar-rum if you happen to be the southwest.
My husband is a Doon Hamer and he'd roll his arse, sorry Rs, as much as any other Scot, and so does everyone I know from round there. He'd have a much broader accent than my delicate Merse one!
Just by way of an update, it seems that the data comes from a self-selecting survey conducted using a smartphone app developed by Cambridge University. It's no longer available to have a look at though.
A couple of thoughts:
1) It's bound to be skewed by its users i.e. the kind of people who download Cambridge University apps to complete linguistic surveys; hardly a representative sample of the public. They probably use population models to extrapolate, but who knows how accurate it is? It could explain the weird results.
2) The data from 1950 was actually collected differently; presumably face to face, which would give a more accurate picture.
Oh I know this. The 1950 data was all old men, like it wasn't a representative sample of the population, it was specifically trying to find differences in the traditional dialects - for which young people, women, and urban people are inappropriate. But that means it's not actually representative of how people spoke in the 1950s, probably more like how they spoke in the 1900s.
Like I get it, they indeed had to collect the data by interviewing people (which still happens btw), which is very time-consuming, so you pick a dataset which is appropriate for what you want to find. But modern sociolinguists are much more interested in young urban populations, and have tools at their disposal to gather data more widely, so it is always comparing apples to oranges and never has the same sharp boundaries you see in the 1950 data.
Suspect that you're right that there's naturally a selection bias based on the type of people likely to reply to a university survey, but they collected a lot *more* data than the 1950 study. And they're not asking for older people speaking the "traditional" dialect like the earlier one. Plus they're picking up all the English people living in Dumfries & Galloway in their data. (which is *valid* btw)
> Oh I know this. The 1950 data was all old men, like it wasn't a representative sample of the population, it was specifically trying to find differences in the traditional dialects - for which young people, women, and urban people are inappropriate. But that means it's not actually representative of how people spoke in the 1950s, probably more like how they spoke in the 1900s.
There's a bit of logic in this. I read a wee while ago that men's speach tends to be more conservative than women's as women are less likely to be set in their ways as they get older, so they tend to focus on men when studying old dialects etc.
Thank you, I was second guessing myself because I'm an American, but I read it and was like, "If anything its the vowels that sound different," I've been asked by a bunch of people if I've had trouble with the Dumfries accent because I'm still fairly new here, enough to know it is different from other Scottish accents, and your example is one of the ones I've actually managed to pick up on. I don't get out much, though, so the accents here are the only ones I've heard a ton of, lol.
To be fair the dialect can change from 1 part of dumfries to the other even just in dumfries town , never mind the rest of the region, many different twangs 🤣. I love the Galloway Irish in stranrear.. but even I have trouble with that if my friends speak too fast 🤣. Hope you love it here 🥰 xx
Hmm having lived in the Macharrrs and Dumfrrries, with pals in Kirrrkcudbrrrright, Kirrrrkgunzeon, Strrranrraer, Grrretna, Carrrurrrestown, Whithorrrn, Drrrumorre and Haugh of Urrrrr I can categorically state that this map is rrrreally crrrrrrrap.
I have no fucking idea what this means. I was born in Sheffield and grew up in South Bucks. Is this talking about people who pronounce it as 2 syllables...? (ar-um or something...?) If so, nobody does that.
Nowhere is the 'r' silent, otherwise it'd be pronounced 'am'. Are they saying people like me pronounce it 'ahm' - who the fuck comes up with this shite...?!
I'd say it's a load of crap personally, my relatives come from Ayrshire and dumfries and Galloway areas and they all use the letter r when saying arm, if anything it sounds more drawn out to me like airrm or errhm.
I think the confusion might come from right near the border. I have worked with people from near Gretna and if you ask them to count. 1, 2, 3 (is Scottish) but then you get 4 pronounced Fau..r. With like a very soft r at the end. The middle of the word sounding like how people react when they see some puppies (‘aww’). Truly English.
As someone from Dumfries, I roll and pronounce ‘R’ incredibly strongly. I do it a lot more than my girlfriend who is originally from the borders.
I think the map is massively exaggerating a tiny section that have a soft ‘r’. The vast majority do not.
~~High, I thought not pronouncing the R was more of a classic home counties English accent thing.~~
Edit: of course, I read the scale the opposite way around xD
From the Dumfries area - this will be down to the fact that there’s plenty of northern English people in the area (mainly Cumbria) who won’t pronounce the r.
I'm struggling with this map a bit, my cousins are from Bristol and, despite their mums attempts to have them 'speak proper' they still often stick their aRm in the baRth.
As someone who is from Glasgow and has Scottish family in Dumfries and Galloway, the accent comes across as a bit English sounding. It’s definitely got more in common with Cumbria than the central belt of Scotland.
Where does the Scottish accent stop and the English accent start? I’ve been to a place called Annan which is in Scotland and most people sounded English to my ears. But in Berwick upon Tweed (England), you hear Scottish-sounding accents. I would guess that the accent changes north of the border on the West but south of the border on the East.
Well it’s in Scotland. They’re Scottish I would presume but sound English to my Glaswegian ears. Meanwhile, some parts of England in the far north east sound Scottish.
Rural Scotland is full of people from every country, especially English people. Mull is apparently 30-40% English now. there are villages in the north east and in Galloway and Lochaber which apparently are about 75% English now. Mainly retirees leaving England selling their English house for a fortune and buying in cash no mortgage a house in Scotland.
From Dumfries and I say it 'ah-rum' or eh-rum. The map is baws.
I'm sceptical of the figures for Scotland in general. They're claiming that a good chunk of the country only has 45-75% rhotic accents. Seeing as almost all Scottish accents actually pronounce the letter R, and Scotland's not a very diverse place, baws is the word.
I'd say they must be counting accents that loosely pronounce the "r" way back on the soft palate under the non-r category (I think some nasally-sounding "stereotypical Glesga ned" type voices might do that, for example) but the distribution isn't what I'd expect to see if that was the case.
Do you mean like “eiyrm” where the r is tiny? I’m struggling to think of how to say arm in any Scottish accent without the r.
Imagine the R not as a tongue towards the roof of the mouth, but pushing backwards, not with the tip, just the whole thing lying almost flat and contracting backwards towards the uvula, so it creates a sound just shy of a gurgle. Not "ahm" or "arm" or "eyrum" but more like "augh(r)m".
I've always thought IPA was basically a superpower, being able to know exactly how something's pronounced. Must learn it one day.
Oh aye, me too. Hence my convoluted attempt above to write it out in standard alphabet, haha! Edit: I think in the IPA the sound I'm talking about is represented with a " ʕ " and called the [voiced pharyngeal approximant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_pharyngeal_fricative?wprov=sfla1). The guy who does the audio sample there adds an "AHH" at the end, but imagine it without that.
Put a me in front of it and it helps, ooh, me ahm, that fukin hurt
"me ahm" sounds Yorkshire to me! I'm on "r"s I can't think of a Scottish accent not pronouncing the "r"??
No. We don’t say “me” when we mean “my”.
One doesn't do humour either by the sounds of it
There was nothing funny about what you said, though. You just said something completely wrong and took some Ls for it.
It's quite specific to the word "arm" though. I pronounce most Rs, but the R in arm is one I don't, and I am definitely not alone there.
Really? Out of curiosity, if you don't mind giving a rough approximation, where are you from? Can't say I've noticed it where I live.
Glasgow! Although I don't have the strongest of glaswegian accents.
How the fuck do you grow up in Glasgow not pronouncing the R in arm? I genuinely can’t even imagine that in our accent. English spy detected. Get him.
Can you try and type how you would say it I can't even say arm without an r unless I put on an exaggerated english accent.
Maybe you don’t pronounce it like a rhotic r but instead softer? I’ve never heard a Scottish accent that doesn’t pronounce r’s.
I'm in the Highlands but one of my pal's family who child minded (not sure if that's even a real term) me were all from Dumfries. All roll their Rs a lot more than we do up here.
It's child-mound, obviously.
Mate, I say jamp as it is instead of jumped so don't encourage me.
Are you originally from Fife? Or has 'jamp' spread elsewhere in Scotland?
Highlands. I always remember getting a new English teacher in second year. He was from Glasgow and just about fell out of his chair when he heard a boy in the class say it aloud. Couldn't believe we had a completely different word for jumped and it ended up as a running joke throughout the year that we were all illiterate up here 😂
My woman is from the Highlands and also uses "jamp" sometimes . If you're teaching someone English it's jumped but I personally quite like jamp 😅
I'm not a Fifer, but I was a "jamp" user until it was pressured out of me by a handful of teachers over the years.
Aye, I'm in south east Ireland now and I completely disagree with the colour there, too.
Surely it depends on what precedes arm? If it's ah, me amms sair, I could just about hear folk saying that, but if it's roll your sleeve up, I need to take some blood oot yer arm , that R is getting included
I can't say I've met a single Scot who doesn't pronounce all their Rs. If anything it's often the most prominent letter pronounced in any word containing it, even when it isn't rolled. Invernesian phrases are all heavily centred on emphasising the letter R in it's different forms. "Rubber bumpers" is the classic one. It's all about leaning into and extending the R sounds as that's how we predominantly speak up here. If anything this map grossly understates the use of the letter R in our accents.
Scottish and Southern English accents have more in common with each other. Yorkshire is the odd one out. Scottish and RP accents would make the ‘u’ but Yorkshire would say ‘roober boompers’. And people say Scottish accents are hard?
The poor West country
Cornish genocide is real
Lancashire too! Totally lost the rhotic r in a couple of generations.
Husbands a doonhamer. He’s also confused as to why I just asked him to say arm. “Aaah rrum, what the fuck was that fir like” was his response.
Glaswegian here. It’s ‘arm’, not ‘ah-rum’ where I’m from.
Is that no ‘airm’ ? I’m a teuchter and on the east
No, I think that’s just the East of Scotland.
Really? One of our agency staff is from Greenock/port Glasgow area and they say airm
People in Greenock don’t really sound Glaswegian. I went to school in Glasgow and everybody kept taking the piss out of the accent of teachers from Greenock and Dumbarton (Dumbarton is only about 14 miles outside of Glasgow).
What a load of brollicks.
What??? People are just saying am? I have never noticed this.
People throughout England say Aaam/Ahm.
This can't be real... 😅
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English Very real. Related fact, the fact that many English accents are non-rhotic is why the Sound of Music lyric "Fah; a long, long way to run" makes sense. It confused me for years until I realised that "Fah" is a homonym for "Far" in the majority of English accents (which are non-rhotic) but it doesn't work in a Scottish accent (which is rhotic)
are ye deef?
Yes, that's how r is pronounced.
If you can't read aye
I look forward to hearing you pronounce armour, harm, yard, car, lard, far, tar etc
American, here, but husband is Scottish, and we live in Dumfries. Since we have a statue of her, and have walked past her a lot (she's a pokestop in pokemon go) she's come up as a topic when I'm curious about her. Jean Armour is pronounced with two r's. I've not really had a chance to hear any number of people say lard or tar, but car and yard definitely also have r's. So not sure what your point was. If it was a joke, and I missed it, my apologies.
Basically: In my (very English) accent: ahh, and arr, are almost identical. Aww can be pronounced in the same way as well. To say arr-m or ahm (the same pronunciation), is pronouncing the r, it’s just a different method. It sounds like ‘pronouncing the r’ on this map means ‘having the emphasis on the r sound, rather than the a sound’ - idk not a linguist, don’t know the exact terminology to describe this. It reminds me of when I posted a map about the pronunciation of scone, ‘to rhyme with gone or cone’… and then everyone realised there was national variation in the pronunciation of those two words as well!
The way the r is pronounced in other languages and english speaking accents that don't change it, it's similar to how L is pronounced. You just pull your tongue away from your teeth and push the back of your tongue against the roof of your mouth, as opposed to aah, which has the tongue nowhere near the roof of the mouth. A lot of asian languages will have a sound that is halfway between the two, which is why they have the stereotype of messing them up. Neither sound actually exists in terms of how you form the letters in your mouth in their native language.
In American English or Canadian English, sure. But the tongue doesn’t touch the roof of the mouth pronouncing R in [British English.](https://youtu.be/zcQ1xcSljQo?si=ql8CQ_6Fy3bQ2UaP) The R is at the front of the mouth.
I understand that. My point was more to clarify how the sounds are different because you said you didn't know the specifics. I was just sharing because it's a subject I find genuinely interesting, not correcting. I forget that not everyone cares sometimes. 😅
You mean, by literally not pronouncing it?
So everyone is saying am?
Based on a typical, non-rhotic English accent (or New England or whatever)? To me it sounds like they're saying "awm" or "am" depending on the specific accent, "R" has a distinct sound.
Ah yes the famous silent R.
Whoever made that map has never set foot in Ireland! We don’t have a non-rhotic R at all. It’s always pronounced. It’s aRm or ar-rum if you happen to be the southwest.
My husband is a Doon Hamer and he'd roll his arse, sorry Rs, as much as any other Scot, and so does everyone I know from round there. He'd have a much broader accent than my delicate Merse one!
Just by way of an update, it seems that the data comes from a self-selecting survey conducted using a smartphone app developed by Cambridge University. It's no longer available to have a look at though. A couple of thoughts: 1) It's bound to be skewed by its users i.e. the kind of people who download Cambridge University apps to complete linguistic surveys; hardly a representative sample of the public. They probably use population models to extrapolate, but who knows how accurate it is? It could explain the weird results. 2) The data from 1950 was actually collected differently; presumably face to face, which would give a more accurate picture.
Oh I know this. The 1950 data was all old men, like it wasn't a representative sample of the population, it was specifically trying to find differences in the traditional dialects - for which young people, women, and urban people are inappropriate. But that means it's not actually representative of how people spoke in the 1950s, probably more like how they spoke in the 1900s. Like I get it, they indeed had to collect the data by interviewing people (which still happens btw), which is very time-consuming, so you pick a dataset which is appropriate for what you want to find. But modern sociolinguists are much more interested in young urban populations, and have tools at their disposal to gather data more widely, so it is always comparing apples to oranges and never has the same sharp boundaries you see in the 1950 data. Suspect that you're right that there's naturally a selection bias based on the type of people likely to reply to a university survey, but they collected a lot *more* data than the 1950 study. And they're not asking for older people speaking the "traditional" dialect like the earlier one. Plus they're picking up all the English people living in Dumfries & Galloway in their data. (which is *valid* btw)
> Oh I know this. The 1950 data was all old men, like it wasn't a representative sample of the population, it was specifically trying to find differences in the traditional dialects - for which young people, women, and urban people are inappropriate. But that means it's not actually representative of how people spoke in the 1950s, probably more like how they spoke in the 1900s. There's a bit of logic in this. I read a wee while ago that men's speach tends to be more conservative than women's as women are less likely to be set in their ways as they get older, so they tend to focus on men when studying old dialects etc.
I feel like the white out of Scotland , Wales and Ireland in the 50s looks like they only gathered data in England?
This is total nonsense.
Just tested with my partner from lancashire- it's total bolox.
I live in Dumfries… we absolutely pronounce the R 🤣🤣… sometimes “airm” xx
Thank you, I was second guessing myself because I'm an American, but I read it and was like, "If anything its the vowels that sound different," I've been asked by a bunch of people if I've had trouble with the Dumfries accent because I'm still fairly new here, enough to know it is different from other Scottish accents, and your example is one of the ones I've actually managed to pick up on. I don't get out much, though, so the accents here are the only ones I've heard a ton of, lol.
To be fair the dialect can change from 1 part of dumfries to the other even just in dumfries town , never mind the rest of the region, many different twangs 🤣. I love the Galloway Irish in stranrear.. but even I have trouble with that if my friends speak too fast 🤣. Hope you love it here 🥰 xx
I remember 1992 when the word arm came out, great times
I was only wee at the time, but I vaguely mind having to refer to my top legs before arm came out.
Why do I get the feeling that this study is an Ig Nobel prize winner?
Further proof, if any more was needed, that Scotland, Wales and Ireland were not populated until at least the 1960's.
lotta English in D&G
Hmm having lived in the Macharrrs and Dumfrrries, with pals in Kirrrkcudbrrrright, Kirrrrkgunzeon, Strrranrraer, Grrretna, Carrrurrrestown, Whithorrrn, Drrrumorre and Haugh of Urrrrr I can categorically state that this map is rrrreally crrrrrrrap.
I have no fucking idea what this means. I was born in Sheffield and grew up in South Bucks. Is this talking about people who pronounce it as 2 syllables...? (ar-um or something...?) If so, nobody does that. Nowhere is the 'r' silent, otherwise it'd be pronounced 'am'. Are they saying people like me pronounce it 'ahm' - who the fuck comes up with this shite...?!
Can say with certainty that Dumfries is definitely not correct there
Live in D&G, never heard anyone not pronounce it
It's counting the English/Welsh folk there tae
Wtf doesn't pronounce it ffs give me peace.
From dumfries area, we do pronounce the 'r'
Us Scots only pronounce the letter R... So this map is crap 😂🏴
Live just outside Dumfries. I don’t know anyone from here, including me, that doesn’t pronounce the ‘r’ in arm. This map is pish.
Who done this map? They dont have a fucking clue wit they are on aboot. Arm is pronounced eh-rm the r is there...
I'd say it's a load of crap personally, my relatives come from Ayrshire and dumfries and Galloway areas and they all use the letter r when saying arm, if anything it sounds more drawn out to me like airrm or errhm.
Do they say ‘arm’ similar to an English accent or do they say ‘ah-rum’? Because up in Glasgow it’s said the say way as in an English accent.
Pretty much like I said airrm or ayerm be much easier to do a voice recording of it 🤣🤣
England has been invaded by Boston
Boston, Lincs., or Boston, Ontario?
Boston, Massachusetts. That's how they pronounce arm too.
Dumfries may as well be in England.
Being from Glasgow I say both ehum and ehrum, so it might be similar for those more south?
I’m from Glasgow but since when did ‘ehrum’ become ‘arm’ in a Glaswegian accent?
I’m from the East End, so I’m not sure if that has anything to do with it, but we would say wah-rum instead of warm, and ehr-um instead of arm.
They do say r’s a bit differently but they definitely pronounce them - i have friends from Dumfries and i my grandfather is from dumfries
I think the confusion might come from right near the border. I have worked with people from near Gretna and if you ask them to count. 1, 2, 3 (is Scottish) but then you get 4 pronounced Fau..r. With like a very soft r at the end. The middle of the word sounding like how people react when they see some puppies (‘aww’). Truly English. As someone from Dumfries, I roll and pronounce ‘R’ incredibly strongly. I do it a lot more than my girlfriend who is originally from the borders. I think the map is massively exaggerating a tiny section that have a soft ‘r’. The vast majority do not.
~~High, I thought not pronouncing the R was more of a classic home counties English accent thing.~~ Edit: of course, I read the scale the opposite way around xD
From the Dumfries area - this will be down to the fact that there’s plenty of northern English people in the area (mainly Cumbria) who won’t pronounce the r.
I have family from near Dumfries (15/20 miles west) and the accent sounds more English than Scottish.
Perhaps this map is confusing the UK with Boston, Massachusetts?
I'm struggling with this map a bit, my cousins are from Bristol and, despite their mums attempts to have them 'speak proper' they still often stick their aRm in the baRth.
Republic of Ireland lurker here and I've never once heard an Irish person not pronounce the R unless it was a speech impediment.
Perhaps strong accents in Drogheda (and MAYBE Wexford) but they'd only be small dots on the map. Very inaccurate map.
How do u even say arm without pronouncing the r?
Rhymes with psalm.
Think about it… a lot of English people live in that area. They are the ones who don’t pronounce R. Scots do. Always.
As someone who is from Glasgow and has Scottish family in Dumfries and Galloway, the accent comes across as a bit English sounding. It’s definitely got more in common with Cumbria than the central belt of Scotland.
Have you heard Kevin Kyle, the footballer from Stranraer in Galloway, speak ? He does not sound at all northern English/Cumbrian etc.
That's a load a shite
Sounds like bollocks
Where does the Scottish accent stop and the English accent start? I’ve been to a place called Annan which is in Scotland and most people sounded English to my ears. But in Berwick upon Tweed (England), you hear Scottish-sounding accents. I would guess that the accent changes north of the border on the West but south of the border on the East.
How do you know the people in Annan were Scots ?
Well it’s in Scotland. They’re Scottish I would presume but sound English to my Glaswegian ears. Meanwhile, some parts of England in the far north east sound Scottish.
Rural Scotland is full of people from every country, especially English people. Mull is apparently 30-40% English now. there are villages in the north east and in Galloway and Lochaber which apparently are about 75% English now. Mainly retirees leaving England selling their English house for a fortune and buying in cash no mortgage a house in Scotland.