I’ve just uploaded the first lesson in what will be a series of lessons about the Glaswegian dialect, found in the city of Glasgow in Scotland. I’ll try to keep the lessons amusing but useful. There are plenty of words and expressions found in Glaswegian and across Scotland that can confuse foreigners who are visiting, so I hope these lessons will make things easier for anyone planning on visiting Glasgow or other parts of Scotland.
I haven’t really seen any other lessons which deal with particular dialects of English and I think it would be interesting for content providers to make lessons about different dialects of English.
There are lesson notes and a translation into a more standard form of English.
I’ll hopefully be able to write and share another lesson soon but I have a lot of college work to deal with at the moment. I’ll try to release a new lesson every week or so.
The lesson doesn’t seem to be searchable in the library though. Is there a delay between initially sharing a lesson and finding it searchable for in the library?
Thanks Diego! I’ve just realised that I made a mistake in the audio though. Meant to say “wan” but said “man” instead. About to upload replacement audio to sort that. Glad you like it.
I understood the lesson well (being an Australian English speaker). No dictionary hints for that stuff, of course!
I’d love to see Scots as a language here one day. I realise that it’s a sort of continuum and that that text was not quite what could be called Scots, but somewhere in between (maybe a little closer to the “English” side of things).
Glad you liked it Imyirtseshem. Ha ha, yeah, doubt there is a Glaswegian to English dictionary hiding out there.
Yeah, it’s very much a continuum and it varies a lot from speaker to speaker. Nowadays Scots has blended with English to a very high degree so essentially what you get are dialects of English which contain some pure elements of old Scots as well bits of old Scots that have evolved in each region and of course the expected localised colloquialisms and slang that you get from place to place. It’s very hard to say what is truly Scots anymore.
Of course there is a wealth of Scots literature available and putting stuff like that on LingQ could be cool but modern Scots would be tricky to add, especially when little modern Scots is written and is essentially English with bits of Scots thrown in. I think of Scots as being a bit like Neanderthals and English as being like humans. Elements of it lives on through English but as a standalone modern language it is has pretty much died out.
Yeah, it’s a real shame that it’s disappeared almost completely. Surely there are a few speakers out there who still know the old style, but it will never be the same without some sort of revival. It seems like that’s happening, but it’s not a big movement.
There are certainly people out there who know the old style thanks to reading a lot of literature but the language has absorbed English so much that it is now more English than Scots and people are generally happy with the way things are. There are movements to get modern dialects more respect and give people more pride in speaking their dialects but not much of any kind of revivalist movement.
Adding old Scots on here would be nice though. There is plenty of literature that could be uploaded here. I certainly wouldn’t mind recording audio for it.
Maybe a good project for the future Ishikawa. I don’t speak it myself, but I’d be happy to try and help find some resources for it. Surely there would be some website for a Scots organisation/group which would happily get involved.
Hmm, there could be, but I think a lot of groups are more interested in releasing a lot of this literature and audio freely to the public and wouldn’t want to put it through a commercial system, though people can of course view all the content freely anyway so it might not be a problem but we’ll have to wait and see.
That’s a consideration worth thinking about. Perhaps though, there is the other side, that languages have a prestige factor and economics is one reason for a language’s growth or decline. English is only as popular as it is for a couple reasons: economics and pop-culture brainwashing.
Something to be checked out when the time comes. Surely there would be some university professor who can write/speak good Scots and would be happy to see the language go out, in any form. The fact that the texts can exist on another website at the same time, would be perhaps reassuring. All they would need to do is licence the content correctly.
You’re probably right, there will be at least some people out there who would be willing to help get a lot of content onto LingQ. At least if you speak a Scottish dialect, you will be able to pronounce old Scots so we wouldn’t need any academics, just people with an interest and some experience of reading old Scots.
I think I may have stumbled across a great resource people could use for Scots: http://bit.ly/nNGQxq
