Wicked Wrong

When I officially knew I was coming on this trip, I didn’t think much about a language barrier or any sort of communication problems due to Scotland being an English-speaking country. However, now after being here for 3 weeks I can say I was almost completely wrong. Although the people here speak English, they have a very thick Scottish accent which makes it difficult to understand at some moments. For example, at restaurants and when asking natives for directions there has almost been 0 instances where I haven’t had to ask “pardon?” or “can you repeat that please?” not only because of the accent, but also because the people here speak so quickly! I swear the Scots just spit out a million words each minute! It has also been interesting traveling to different parts of Scotland and noticing how their accents differ by which part of the country they live in. This makes sense and doesn’t surprise me because it’s just like in the United States where a Bostonian’s accent greatly differs from a New Yorker’s or Southerner’s. It’s funny when most people here after I ask them to repeat themselves respond questioning if I’m American because they recognize my accent as well (which I cannot tell but I guess we all refuse to believe we sound strange to anyone else).

I would have to say though that being here has allowed me to learn to love typical Scottish lingo. Almost every person you talk to here uses “cheers” as a means of saying “thank you” or “goodbye” and to be honest, I have caught myself probably about three times trying to say it myself to be more cultured! I see it as a very casual, quirky way of saying thank you or goodbye and I truly like it very much! In addition, it’s been funny to see what they say as their so-called “spaceholders”. In America, we refer to “like” or “um” as our spaceholders while here in Scotland, most people say “erm” or “ehm” to fill their sentences. It is quite neat to be able to notice these similarities in meaning of words in our languages despite the words themselves being different. Being from Massachusetts I myself say “wicked” to refer to something being really neat or cool. When I used this New-Englander lingo at a traumatic brain injury facility while talking to a staff member they paused with a confused look on their face and asked “what do you mean by ‘wicked’?” This goes to show that what is natural to one culture is not to others and that in communicating, there are many new customs and phrases you can learn every day!