Angus and Tayside Dialect

The dialect of what is now Angus and Tayside falls somewhere between Central and Northern Scots. Strictly speaking, the speech of, say, Dundee and the area to the west of the city, is the same as the dialect spoken in Edinburgh and Glasgow, called Central Scots. The differences between these cities amount largely to accent, rather than different vocabulary. To the north of Dundee the dialect begins to change and merge with Northern Scots. In one old saying the town of Forfar is regarded as standing on the boundary between the two dialect regions: ‘Bi foo, fit, far an fan, ye can tell a Farfar man’. There are in Angus some points of pronunciation which differ from further south. Whereas in the south the sound ‘i’ is usual to words such as muin, spuin and guid, in Angus the same words substitute an ‘oo’ sound, becoming mune, spune and gude (moon, spoon, good). Also, in Angus, the word ane (one) is pronounced as it looks while to the south it becomes ‘yin’. In the city of Dundee there is also a ‘classic’ sound by which native Dundonians may be recognised: ‘eh’. Billy Kay, in Scots The Mither Tongue, gives a good example of this sound in the following sentence: ‘Eh hud meh eh on a peh’ (I had my eye on a pie). There are one or two writers who are connected with this region, such as William Soutar and Violet Jacob, but probably William Lorimer, who translated the New Testament into Scots, is the most well known.