Geographical Variations in British English. An Examination with Emphasis on Scotland

Seminar paper from the year 2023 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Wahlpflichtmodul 1 Sociolinguistics, language: English, abstract: As Scotland was heavily impacted by the settling of various social groups and religions over time, the language landscape dispersed and brought up many exciting dialects over time. This paper will give an overview of the development of the significant regional dialects in both historical and contemporary Scotland, as well as linguistic variations and their importance for today's Scots. By the end of this paper the following research question should be answered: 'How has history shaped the contemporary Scottish Language, what are key differences to Standard British English, and how does this affect the linguistic identity and prestige in Scotland today?' The research objective of this study is to give a very rough overview of the Scottish language in general, as well as a cultural insight into its importance. It can already be said that Scotland is a fascinating region to conduct sociolinguistic studies. Its history underlies many influxes of social groups in different time periods, which still contribute to developing the currently existing dialects. This study cannot provide a final summary of Scottish dialectology since this field is so vast that the essay must be seen as an introduction to delve deeper into the Scottish language. Before starting with the historical overview, it must be mentioned that the dates and years of historical events may vary from source to source. Therefore, this study underlies some degree of historical inaccuracy, which will not affect the fundamental understanding of the unravelling of Scottish dialectology. The provided time slots will be tied to the respective source used.