Welsh English

The principal feature of the English spoken in Wales is its musicality. This clearly derives from the intonation of the Welsh language and gives the pronunciation a wide range of high and low tones with a sing-song, up-and-down effect.

Welsh speakers use few schwa sounds (eg. the first "muttered" syllable in "about") and they sound poetically musical in their speech. Diphthongs often turn into two syllables, therefore "beer" is more like 'bee-yer' and "poor" 'poo-wer'. Welsh English is usually non-rhotic, but 'h's are not usually dropped. A breathy 'h' sound is often noticeable in words such as "which", sounding like 'h-wich', and "when", 'h-wen'. A final 'y' as in "happy" is lengthened to a long 'ee' sound: "happee".

The Welsh language has influenced word order and sentence pattern, and the subject is often delayed eg.

• Strange it was.
• Coming to visit us tomorrow she is.
• Goin' along to the shops we are.
• Time I haven't got to waste.

A few loan words from Welsh are commonly used in English, eg. bach (a term of endearment), del (another term of endearment), eisteddfod (a cultural festival).

There have been two main influences on the English used in Scotland:

• the Gaelic language (spoken in the north)
• the Lowlands dialect ('Lallans', once widespread in the centre)

There is a standard educated form of English spoken in Scotland, quite distinct from the English south of the border, yet it plays the same role as R.P.

On the whole, vowel sounds are much shorter than in RP, although some normally mono-syllabic words where two consonants occur together have two syllables, such as "girl" ('guh-rrul') and "film" (fil-um). The strong Scottish 'r' sound is very noticeable and famous.

• the long RP 'oo' vowel in a word like "pool" is very short, more or less as in "pull";
• the 'ow' diphthong in "found" or "down" becomes 'oo' or even 'uh', therefore "mound" sounds rather like 'mooned' or even 'mund';
• the 'ey' or 'eh-a' diphthongs generally become a short 'eh': eg. "day" ('deh') or "hair" ('heh');
• the 'ah' and 'aah' vowels both become 'a'; hence Pam and palm are both said as a short 'pam';
• 'h' is always pronounced and even sounded in "where" ('h-wer'), "why" ('h-wai'), etc.
• 'ght' - some speakers pronounce these letters more or less like the 'ch' in loch in words such as 'night', 'light', 'bright', etc.

The typical Scottish pronunciation of certain words is shown in the following table:

There are a number of slight grammatical differences:

• 'shall' is rarely used to make an offer, 'will' is used instead as in 'Will I do it for you?'
• 'not' is rarely contracted, hence 'I'll not go.'

There are a number of typically Scottish words, mainly stemming from Lallans and Gaelic, as shown in this list of examples.

And to finish, a famous Scottish poem: