h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hey Spiff:

Glaswegian dialect also involves a lot of pretty violent glottal stopping.

There's a famous/apocryphal story about a Glaswegian guy who was arrested after with running off with a fish supper ( = fish and chips) without paying for it. His statement to the police might be first and last lacking any consonants: "Ah ay' i' a'" (I ate it all).

tlah

Aw Glaswegian dialect is great.

I heard someone on television the other night saying that people in Glasgow were now speaking something called 'Jockney' due to the impact of television programmes such as EastEnders - all it amounted to were glottal stops and things like 'bruvver' instead of brother but I'm always suspicious of these sorts of 'reports.' When I was at university a tutor blamed the proliferation of glottal stops in the UK as a whole on people watching programmes like Grange Hill and I completely disagreed. I know that when my dad arrived in my home town (north of England) in the sixties he was amazed at how many glottal stops were going on (!) and that was a long time before all this Cockernee television stuff.

By the way, in my home town I've even heard glottal stops at the *start* of words - such as 'imes' instead of 'times.'

I don't mind glottal anyway - much better than that utterly dreadful 'upspeak' (that's definitely the result of television! Albeit Australian television).

I'm all for glottal stops as well, and accents in general (I'm in Tyneside these days which has a whole slew of ace accents), but how can you have a glottal stop at the start of a word? That's got to be more effort than it's worth, surely.

Mind you, "that" does (in Glasgow) sometimes slur down to " 'a' " with two glottals - e.g. " 'a's a glo'al stop too far ".

The other weird Glasgow one is the "back of the throat rolling R". Instead of pronouncing the R in "rubbish" like the rest of the country does, let the back of your toungue flap about in your throat, like a loose-throated version of the "ch" in loch. It's a bit like a purring, growly noise, and as far as I can see it has nothing to do with an "R" at all.

Someone who knows what they're talking about should look into this.