Recently I've been watching an English tv series called "Peaky Blinders" and I absolutely love it, it is amazing. It is set in Birmingham, so they use the "Brummie" accent, which is a little bit hard to understand for me. I already know that there is a huge amount of accents in the UK, but it seems to me that the Scottish one is the hardest to understand for foreigners,even though I really like it :). Sometimes it doesn't even sound English to my ears (sorry Scottish people, I love your country but I always have comprehension problems when you speak). Therefore, I would like to know if you native speakers feel the same way as me about this topic and how different it is from your own accent.
"sometimes it doesn't sound like English to my ears" hiya Riccardo, well you could be right. Scottish people often mix Scots and English when they talk. In Scotland there are three ways of talking. 1. English but with a Scottish accent, 2. Scots (a dialect of English but with lots of different words all of its own) and 3. Gaelic (a totally different language). Most Scottish people don't speak Gaelic but most of them do speak Scots and they often throw in lots of Scottish words when they're talking English. A "girl" is a "lassie" "pretty" is "bonny" "know" is "ken" and "yes" is "aye". So "yes, I know she's a pretty girl" in English would be "aye, I ken she's a bonny lassie" in Scots.
You not being able to understand Scottish people is not an accent problem. It's a vocabulary problem. If you're an English learner you have probably only learned standard English and haven't studied vocabulary from other dialects of English so you don't understand the words Scottish people are saying.
It's worth remembering that there are many Scottish accents. Scotland has the same population as Denmark and covers a larger area. The Inverness accent is known to be very clear and soft on the ear. There are some posh/educated accents in Edinburgh and Glasgow that are all very clear. My friend from Coatbridge (near Glasgow) has a very distinct Scottish accent but everyone - including non-British people - says he is very clear and they have no problems understanding him.
I live in Birmingham - the land of Peaky Blinders. I have never seen it because I don't like watching violence. There has been some local controversy about the accents in it - they are not modern Birmingham accents because it is set 100 years ago (I think). Within England, Brummies take a lot of stick for their accent - they are more easy-going about it than perhaps they should be.
