Scottish English (was: LANGUAGE SUBTAG REGISTRATION FORM (fwd)

[John Cowan]

Caoimhin O Donnaile scripsit:

> I reckon that the main use of the tags en-GB and en-US is for the
> written language, to distinguish British spelling (colour, neighbour,
> centre) from US spelling (color, neighbor, center), and that they
> would not form a good basis for spoken language categorisation.
> The difference between Scottish Standard English pronunciation and
> South of England pronunciation is probably as great as trans-Atlantic
> differences.

Pronunciation, fair enough; vocabulary and idiom, definitely not.  That
two hundred years of political (and 5,000 km of physical) separation
has made a huge difference.  I like to say that you don't understand
North American English unless you know both the meaning and the
implicatures of "Johnny went to the bathroom in his pants."

-- 
John Cowan  cowan at ccil.org  http://ccil.org/~cowan
The penguin geeks is happy / As under the waves they lark
The closed-source geeks ain't happy / They sad cause they in the dark
But geeks in the dark is lucky / They in for a worser treat
One day when the Borg go belly-up / Guess who wind up on the street.