Scotland Seven - Text
Caithness is the most northerly county in mainland Britain with only one land boundary, that of Sutherland. Caithness speech is a branch of Northern Scots speech, a pocket of Scots in an otherwise Gaelic speaking area. Within Northern Scots speech, the speech of Wick forms a distinct 'pocket'of sound. As with most Scots dialects, there is a continuumn from a strong use of the dialect to standard English with a Caithness accent. Our speaker is an example of the latter. In the stronger form of the accent, the key characteristics found include : the dropping of initial /th/ in there, that, they and especially the which is reduced to the sound /ee/ or /i/, for example, he bides 'e centre 'e toon meaning 'he lives in the centre of the town' and the use of a slightly retroflexed /r/ eg work. You can hear in this sample a stronger version of the East coast tendency to pitch slightly upward on a stressed word as well as the use of the ubiqitous glottal stop eg beautiful, token, little, but. The slightly darkish /l/ sound may have been influenced by the fact that the speaker has studied in Glasgow for four years. Blether is the Scots word for foolish or idle talk.
Recorded by Ros Steen 2001. Length of recording: 00:03:45.
TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH
I come from a small town called Wick, known to the locals as Wack [sp?..] in the far north of Scotland in Caithness, in the area of Caithness. It’s a small town (um) inhabits about ten thousand people, which sounds quite a lot for a small town in the north of Scotland. (Um) The place that everybody will know that’s just beside is John O Groats, and it’s only twenty minutes drive to John O Groats from Wick. Wick is a typical small town that’s full of local characters and it has lots of local businesses as well. There aren’t many things to do in Wick but you get used to that when you’ve lived there all your life. You get used to things like the sea which you miss when you come to a big city, and I guess all the gossip you get as you just walk along the street. A big culture shock for the first time because you are used to (um) walking along and meeting people on the street and having a ....? there for absolutely ages and when you come to Glasgow you just walk...
UNSCRIPTED SPEECH TRANSCRIBED BY KARINA LEMMER, ASSOCIATE EDITOR FOR SOUTH AFRICA, July 15, 2008