Scouse, Geordie, Glaswegian: The British English You Were Not Taught

You pass a C1 exam, arrive in Britain confident, and then someone in Newcastle asks you a question and you have no idea whether it was a question.

This is not a failure of your English. Language exams test a variety of English that a great many people in these islands do not speak at home. What you meet instead are varieties that are older, more local, and in several cases closer to the original than the standard is.

This is the monolingual edition: every term is explained in English, without translation, written for learners from about B1. If English is your first language, the same article exists as a language pair in German, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

Liverpool: Scouse

Liverpool was a port that received enormous Irish and Welsh immigration in the nineteenth century, and its speech carries both. The most distinctive feature is what happens to k and t at the end of words, which soften into a scraped, breathy sound found almost nowhere else in England.

la: a term of address between men, from lad. Used at the end of a sentence rather than the start.

boss: excellent, very good. An adjective, not a noun. That's boss is high praise.

made up: delighted, thrilled. I'm made up for you is warm and sincere, and has nothing to do with cosmetics or invention.

sound: fine, good, agreed. Answers almost any question, and also means a person is reliable. He's sound is a character reference.

scran: food, a meal. Widely used across the north of England.

chocka: crowded, full. From chock-a-block.

devo: short for devastated, meaning very disappointed.

Newcastle: Geordie

Geordie preserves more Old English than any other major variety in Britain. When people say it sounds ancient, they are being literally accurate rather than poetic.

bairn: a child. From the Old English bearn, and cognate with the modern Scandinavian barn. Standard English replaced it; the north east never did.

gan: to go. From the Old English gān. Gannin is going.

canny: a word doing enormous work. It means pleasant or kind, and also quite or fairly. A canny lad is a nice one; canny good means pretty good. Note that in Scotland the same word means shrewd, which is a different sense entirely.

howay: come on, hurry up, an expression of encouragement or exasperation. Howay man is the standard form, and man is used regardless of who is being addressed.

hoy: to throw. Hoy it here.

wor: our. Wor lass means my wife or girlfriend.

divvent: do not. Divvent worry.

why aye: yes, of course, obviously. Two words that together mean an emphatic yes.

Glasgow

Scots is a separate matter from Scottish English, and Glasgow speech draws on both. Some of what follows is Scots vocabulary that has entered everyone's everyday English in Scotland.

wee: small. Universal across Scotland, used constantly, and applied to almost anything including periods of time and quantities of trouble.

aye: yes. Not archaic and not quaint, simply the ordinary word.

the messages: the shopping. I'm away for the messages means I am going to the shops. This is the single most confusing item on this list for a learner, and it is entirely standard.

greetin: crying. Nothing to do with greeting anyone.

peely-wally: pale, sickly-looking. Descriptive and slightly affectionate.

gonnae no: do not, please stop. From going to not. The classic construction is gonnae no dae that.

outwith: outside of, beyond. This one appears in formal Scottish English too, including in university and government documents, and it has no equivalent in English English, which needs a whole phrase.

how?: used to mean why. How no? means why not. This is the one that produces genuine misunderstandings rather than blank looks.

The point that changes how you hear them

None of these varieties is a degraded version of standard English. Several of them preserve forms that standard English lost.

bairn and gan are Old English words that survived in the north and were displaced elsewhere. Aye was general English for centuries. The standard variety is not the original; it is the one that happened to be spoken near the court, the printing presses and the money.

Once a learner understands that, the whole category stops being an obstacle and becomes information, which is the same shift that Andalusian Spanish and Swiss German ask for.

What to do about it

Do not imitate. An accurate ear is welcome everywhere in Britain and an attempted accent is welcome nowhere.

Do learn the twenty or so words above, because they are the ones that block comprehension rather than merely colour it. Not understanding canny or the messages stops the conversation; a strong accent only slows it.

And do ask. Asking what a word means is normal, and in all three of these cities the answer will be given with some enthusiasm.

How to learn them

Write down the sentence, not the word. Canny means three things and only the sentence tells you which.

Give Translate the whole line. These varieties contract and elide heavily, so the word you think you heard is frequently two.

Then let repetition install them. Twenty words with a high local frequency, and the ear does the rest within a month.

The short version

Learn boss and made up for Liverpool, canny and bairn for Newcastle, wee and the messages for Glasgow.

And when someone in Glasgow asks you how?, they are asking why.

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