Scottish English

John.Cowan jcowan at reutershealth.com
Mon Oct 24 07:49:19 CEST 2005


Doug Ewell scripsit:

> Do we have some sort of evidence that this film is not really in
> Scottish English, and that Karen or Sony has misidentified it, or are we
> just grasping at straws?

There's a dialect continuum between broad Scots and Standard English with
a Scottish phonology.  In this particular case, we have two versions of
_Gregory's Girl_ at different points on the continuum.  Since we don't
have a way to say "85% Scots, 15% English" (and it's not clear that
it would make sense if we did), I believe it is pragmatic to exploit
the already-existing "sco" vs. "en" distinction to differentiate the two
versions of the film, one mostly intelligible in Scotland, the other
intelligible in most other anglophone parts of the world.

Good movie, anyhow.

-- 
Using RELAX NG compact syntax to        John Cowan
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pleasures in life....                   http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
        --Jeni Tennison                 <jcowan at reutershealth.com>


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