Scottish Gaelic English translation

Ethnic groups and their linguistic varieties

Ethnic group problems may be correlated with phonological, grammatical as well as with lexical differences. One of the interesting facts to emerge from Labov's New York study, for example, was that there were slight but apparently significant differences in the English pronunciation of speakers from the Italian backgrounds in the USA. The interference of the old language on the new in the first generation seems to be great, but the native American speakers feel a certain hypercorrection of foreign features by the second generation of Italian speakers. For example, one of the characteristics of New York Italians has been the development of high beard -like vowels in the words of the type bad, bag. But it seems that this process has been accelerated by the desire, presumably subconsciously, by the second-generation of Italians to avoid speaking English with an Italian accent, and their children, in wishing to avoid this pronunciation, might have selected the Standard American variant of accent.

A similar kind of substratum effect can be found in the English language of Scotland. Some people in the north and west of mainland Scotland and most people in the Hebrides still speak Scottish Gaelic, but the language has been in decline. For example:

Fàilte Welcome

Ciamar a tha thu? How are you?

Dè an t-ainm a tha ort? What is your name?

Latha math A good day

Madainn mhath A good morning

Feasgar math A good afternoon

Oidhche mhath Good night

Tapadh leat Thank you

Slàn leat Goodbye

The English scholars believe there are approximately 1,000 native speakers of Scottish Gaelic in Nova Scotia and 60,000 in Scotland. Most Scots today tend to think of themselves as simply 'Scottish', but historically speaking they represent descendants of two distinct ethnic groups. To simplify things somehow, we can say that the Highland Scots, whose ancestors came originally from Ireland, were Gaels [geils] (кельты, гэлы), and spoke the Celtic [keltik] language (as many of them still do in the West Highlands and on the Islands of the Hebrides), while the Lowland Scots, who were of Anglo-Saxon descent, were English speakers. Now that English is spoken by nearly every dweller in Scotland, this difference still survives in the type of English one can hear in different parts of the country. The Lowland Scots speak either a local dialect or Standard English with a local accent (or something in between). The Highlanders, on the other hand, speak either Standard Scots English or something not too far removed from it. The Highlanders do not normally say I dinna ken, for example, as the Lowlanders might do, but rather I don't know. However, there is some influence from Gaelic in English spoken by the Highlanders, which may identify them as coming from the Highlands. The native speakers of Gaelic, of course, will often have a Gaelic accent in English, but one can detect lexical and grammatical differences even in the speech of the Highlanders who have never spoken Gaelic in their lives. Examples include differences such as the following:

Standard Scots English - Bring that whisky here.

I can see you.

I don't want that.

West Highland English - Take that whisky here.

I'm seeing you!

It's not that that I'm wanting.

In the English-speaking world there are exist social prejudices to a linguistic ethnic-group speech. It was recognized a long time ago that Highlanders and Black Americans spoke different English than White British and White Americans. The speech was felt to be debased or corrupt, because the Scots and the Black people were racially inferior, i.e. lacking in their mental development. Blacks, it was thought, could not speak English properly since they were simply not capable of it. This view obviously has absolutely no basis in fact, but it cannot be altogether ignored, even today; it was at one time so widely held that it has affected the history of the study of Scots and Black American English.

Since differences in black speech had formerly been ascribed to racial inferiority, the recognition that there was in fact no inferiority seemed to imply to the linguists who might have thought of studying Black English that the black speech was not different. This meant that no one could study black speech as such without appearing to be racist, and the subject was therefore neglected for many years. Eventually, however, linguists realized that differences between social dialects implied linguistic superiority of one variety over another and nothing more.

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