Scotland 28

Listen to Scotland 28, a 68-year-old woman from Bathgate, West Lothian, and also from Scottish Borders and Edinburgh, Scotland. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 68

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 13/09/1956

PLACE OF BIRTH: Edinburgh, Scotland

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: Scottish/Caucasian

OCCUPATION: retired teacher/lecturer

EDUCATION: post-degree professional qualification

AREAS OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject has never lived outside Scotland. She lived in Bathgate, West Lothian, from birth to age 18. She then lived in Edinburgh from ages 18 to 23 and in Peebles, Scottish Borders, from age 23 to the time of this recording.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

She lived in Bathgate, a very working-class, mining area, but attended a fee-paying school in Edinburgh, where vowel systems were a marker of class. She became bilingual.

She now lives in Peebles, 25 miles south of Edinburgh, and when she returned to work after children, she spent 25 years teaching in Galashiels, in the Scottish Borders, where she says she found that her speech patterns were considered “posh” or “educated” and seemed to carry authority for no other reason. She says she gradually adopted some of the intonation and vocabulary of the area.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: subject

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 21/10/2024

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I spent my early life in Bathgate, a mining town in West Lothian, with many settlers from Glasgow. My father was a family doctor, hailing from Edinburgh, and I was encouraged to speak as he did, not as the children around me did, so if I said “bu’er,” or “didnae,” I would be asked to say “butter” or “didn’t” instead. At the age of 9, I, like the other local doctors’ children, I was sent to a fee-paying, private school in Edinburgh. There they spoke in a very different accent. I was apparently so unconsciously keen to fit in, that at the end of my first week, the teacher asked my mother which part of England we had come from.

I sang in choirs for many years, and I think that made my diction more clear than it might otherwise have been. Forty-five years of living and working in the Scottish Borders has brought my speech closer to my Bathgate origins but still nearer to Edinburgh than the west. Like most people, my register changes depending on who I’m speaking with. When teaching in Galashiels, my speech was never like the people who were born and bred there, but at the same time, it was perceived by my then-older parents as having become very “broad.” I noticed that I would say “whit ee doin,” rather than “what are you doing.” For the last five years of my teaching life, I lectured at Edinburgh University, but because of COVID, the final two years of that were online, where I had to record lectures and tutorials for students to access remotely. When I listened back to the recordings, I was surprised at how much of a Borderer I still sounded!

TRANSCRIBED BY: subject

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 21/10/2024

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

• Recordings of accent/dialect speakers from the region you select.

• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.

• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.

• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

For instructional materials or coaching in the accents and dialects represented here, please go to Other Dialect Services.