The Scots dialects and Scottish Standard English: synchronic linguistic characteristics

Now that detailed information on Modern Scots dialects and their Older Scots antecedents is readily accessible in the Edinburgh History of the Scots Language (Jones 1997), the information on Scots below can be relatively brief. Johnston (1997b) provides a dialect map giving the conventional division into Mid or Central (including Ulster), Southern, Northern and Insular Scots, with the addition of a more modern socio linguistic overlay reflecting the spread of innovations from the cities. A discussion and classification of dialect differences is beyond the scope of this work, and I shall generally concentrate on describing common Scots features rather than those which are specific to one dialect.

Scots speakers are likely to exhibit non-standard features in all areas of the grammar. In syntax, many Scots dialects have multiple negation, and there are also regional idiosyncracies like the role reversal of bring and take in Aberdeenshire, as seen in I'm in the garden; could you take me out a drink? In morphology, auxiliary plus negative sequences are contracted to give forms like cannae, couldnae, dinnae, didnae: these contractions have a limited distribution, however, and are replaced by can ye no, do ye no, etc., in tag questions. Scots is also peppered with non-standard lexical items, such as fankle for `tangle', skelf for `splinter', glaur for `wet mud', wabbit for `tired' and, in different parts of Scotland, beagie, neap or tumshie for `turnip'. Some of these lexical and morphosyntactic features also make their way, often in a rather diluted form, into SSE (Miller 1993). However, it is the sound system of Scots and SSE and its development.