Scottish English

[Speechways at aol.com]

Peter, 
Thank you your quick-fire response, even so late in the day. Language is 
important to most of us as a means of personal and social identity, as well as a 
means of communication.  I am not as sure as you are, that our colleagues in 
the media will wish to dumb down distinctions which are meaningful to the 
communities they are portraying and serving.  One of the strengths of English (and 
even more so of Chinese) is that a dominant standardised language is backed up 
and enhanced by a rich variety of related but distinctive locally spoken 
forms, whether these are tagged as "languages" or not.  I hope you will agree that 
such important cultural realities should not be swept under the carpet in the 
formulation of globalised standards.
David Dalby
Linguasphere Observatory/Linguasphere ICT

 
 
In a message dated 10/20/2005 6:35:11 AM GMT Daylight Time, 
petercon at microsoft.com writes:

I suspect that for the application Karen is dealing with, fine-grained 
distinctions between varieties of Scottish English (or varieties of Scots) is 
probably not that helpful: generally, the people cataloguing the content and the pe
ople retrieving the content aren’t going to know how to tell them apart. I 
suspect that all she cares about is the difference between 
heavily-Scottish-accented English (if it isn’t Scots) and mildly-Scottish-accented English. 
Peter Constable


 
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