Regional Varieties of British English: Scottish Standard English

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Tubingen (Englisches Seminar), course: Englisch Grammar: Phonetics, language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction

It's a braw bricht muin-licht nicht the nicht.

(literally: It's a beautiful bright moonlight night tonight.)

Kiddingly, Scottish people love to let English people try to pronounce this

sentence from Scots. For English people it is hard to pronounce the Scottish

sentence since it contains the /x/-phoneme that English Standard English does not

know. Therefore Scots is in the eyes of English Standard English Speakers a quite

foreign language. But what happens when the two languages ¿ English Standard

English and Scots ¿ merge and make up a new language, namely Scottish Standard

English? When did the influence of English on Scots start? How much of the

language heritage from Scots was imported into SSE? Which special features in

phonetic, grammar and lexis can be found? What other languages influenced SSE

and which so-called loanwords can still be found? This term paper will try to give

answers to these questions.

Therefore in (2.) will be given a definition of SSE in contrast to Scots. Then there

will be given a rough overview of the historical background and development of SSE

(3). Afterwards, certain differences of SSE and English Standard English in phonetic

(4.1), grammar (4.2) and lexis (4.3) will be described. Then there shall be given an

insight in SSE nowadays (5).

2.