#scots twitter

[victusinveritas]

[allthingslinguistic]

How Twitter is helping the Scots language thrive in the 21st century

The platform has provided a forum for the written Scots language to evolve that wasn't possible before the advent of social media.

An article in The Conversation about Scots Twitter and Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). Excerpt: 

Scots on Twitter is a fascinating source of evidence about how aware people are of the subtle ways their speech differs from other people’s, and the creative ways they find to represent this.

Depending on exactly where someone comes from, their (spoken) Scots will include different sounds, words and sentence structures. We see this represented in Scots CMC. In Scots dictionaries, the word equivalent to English “can’t” is generally spelled in one of two ways, reflecting a traditional pronunciation difference: “canna” in the north, and “cannae” in the south. Indeed, a search for “canna” on Twitter finds tweets from the north east.

However, the spelling “cannae” appears to be quite rare in the southern Scots CMC. Instead, spellings like “canny” appear to be more common.

In Sadie Ryan’s research on the CMC of Glaswegian pre-teens, other spellings used included “cany”, “canni”, “cani” and “kani”. 

Read the whole thing.

[striffyisme]

[sanguineheavens]

I sometimes wonder, if a person had been posed it as a theoretical problem, whether it would have been possible to predict that Scots would be a perfect dialect for the evolving digital culture. And then I remember that someone once tried to write futuristic sci fi in a futuristic Scots dialect and it was apparently an epic disaster. So, possibly not, then.