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Ann Morrison Geddes Parsonage
Lives: Glasgow, Glasgow
Time lived in area: 5 to 10 years
Occupation: Librarian
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Ann, a librarian, tells us when things become 'muckit'.
Language of interview: Scots
Duration: 00:40 (mins/secs)
The participants were asked to describe how they spoke in their own words.
How do you describe your accent: "Scottish."
Have there been other influences on the way you speak: Not Given
Do you have skills in languages other than English?: No
Other languages: None
ANN: Well I sometimes go out and give talks about George's work, y'know to guilds and rotary clubs, round tables. And often if I'm describing the state of lifebelts flung into the river, when they come out, when George collects them out of the river, they are so muckit, so filthy dirty in other words, and covered in glaur. It's a sticky, horrible, greasy substance that needs chemical cleaners to take the dirt off them, ah believe. So I think muckit and glaur are very expressive words to use to try and get through to people just the state these are in when they come out of the river.
Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes
Despite popular opinion to the contrary, there's still a great deal of lexical diversity in the UK and there are numerous words in everyday use that have only local or regional currency. Ann describes a couple of words used locally to differentiate between different types of dirty: muckit - clearly related to the more mainstream mucky - and glaur. The word muckit is possibly originally muckèd and the pronunciation here might reflect the former tendency to pronounce the grammatical ending in all English words, an echo of which we retain in the archaic pronunciation in biblical and idiomatic contexts of the word blessèd.
The origins of the word glaur, however, are more obscure, though its use was noted in the Survey of English Dialects - the first comprehensive survey of its kind into native English dialects undertaken by the University of Leeds in the 1950s. It was recorded in a number of sites in Northumberland to refer to thin mud, in contrast to clarts - thick mud. This matches perfectly with the use described here and, as Ann implies, gives a very vivid sense of the nature of the slime and muck to which it refers.
There are a couple of interesting features of Ann's speech that differentiate her and many Scottish speakers from people with other English accents. It's a distinctive feature of English spoken in Scotland that words spelt with are differentiated from those spelt with . Listen to Ann's pronunciation of the word when. Many speakers in Scotland still make a distinction in their pronunciation of pairs such as which and witch or where and wear. Listen also to the way she pronounces the words greasy and cleaners. She uses a sound for the final consonant in the word greasy - a pronunciation shared by many Scottish speakers and some older speakers in parts of the north of England. Intriguingly, however, she uses an <s> sound for the final consonant in cleaners. This is a distinctive feature of a number of Scottish accents - words that end orthographically in , such as letters, trainers and jumpers have a plural form that ends phonetically with <s> rather than .
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