In Scotland, language can change quickly. Accents shift from one town to the next, words change and meaning bends depending on where you are and who you’re talking to.
It’s easy to reduce Scottish language to a handful of obvious markers - Gaelic words, rolling rrr’s and familiar phrases, but that only scratches the surface. The reality is much richer and far more complex. Scotland has never spoken with one voice. Our language is layered, complex and regional, shaped by geography and history.
My mother is from Avoch, a wee fishing village in The Black Isle, just north of Inverness. The accent there has a unique rhythm of it’s own. Vowels stretch, consonants soften and sentences are carried as much by tone as by words. To an un-trained ear, it can sound almost musical. It’s an accent that holds its ground.
Elsewhere, the differences are just as distinct. In Dundee, you might hear the word teckle for good. In Edinburgh your more likely to hear braw in it’s place. Travel north-east and Doric still runs deep - not as a novelty, but as a living dialect that can leave even fellow Scots completely lost in conversation.
These variations aren’t affectations. They’re the remnants of ancient history - of Norse influence in the north and islands; of trade routes, farming, fishing - communities shaped by distance and self-reliance. Language carries place with it, whether we notice or not.
Our master jeweller, Inness is from Fair Isle; a tiny island half-way between Orkney and Shetland. His accent is broad and unsoftened by time away. Watching suppliers at trade shows lean in and struggle to follow him is always amusing - but it’s also telling. A great deal of history can live in a voice.
What’s striking is how unremarkable this feels within Scotland itself. Difference is expected and not every word needs to be understood to grasp the meaning. Tone, rhythm and context do as much work as vocabulary. Accents and dialects form part of Scotland’s cultural texture and they remind us that identity is rarely singular.
You don’t need to understand every word to recognise where someone is from. Often, the sound alone is enough.
