David Stewart Born: 21 May 1950 Lives: Hawick, Borders Time lived in area: All my life

Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes

There are a number of aspects of David's speech that immediately identify him as a speaker of Scots dialect. Listen, for instance, to the number of localised alternatives he favours over more mainstream equivalents, such as bass for a plaited straw bag, harden for a coarse fabric made from flax or hemp, twae for two, intae for into, tae for to, yin for one, aye for yes, muckle for great or huge, mind for to remember, you ken for you know, loan for lane and theday for today. Until relatively recently many of these were features of broad dialect in much of the north of England too, but nowadays they're perhaps restricted to the Border areas and other parts of Scotland.

David also makes use of a number of features that are typical of a Borders accent. Above all, he's a rhotic speaker - that is he pronounces the sound after a vowel, at one time a feature of speech throughout the UK. Nowadays, however, it's increasingly restricted to the West Country and the far south-west of England, a small area of Lancashire and most of Scotland and Ireland. Listen carefully to the way he pronounces the words harden, circle, your, joiners, plumbers, another, hammer, over, shoulder, their, other, ladders, sorts, where and working. As with many speakers in Scotland the exact phonetic quality of this sound varies according to certain criteria. Listen specifically to the way David pronounces the in the words circle, your saws, hammer through, hammer head and working. It's a very subtle difference, but in these cases the sound is almost like a whisper compared with a more 'normal' sound. This is an extremely complex phonetic process, whereby the articulation of the becomes devoiced under the influence of the following consonant. Listen also to the distinctive vowel sounds David uses on the words bass, bag, handles, hammer and barrows and put and push.

Finally listen to the way he pronounces the words over and head. In the word over David omits the sound and so it sounds similar to the pronunciation of the word our in a number of other English accents. This in fact reflects an older English pronunciation still common in the north-east of England and preserved in the poetic usage o'er. Crucially, however, he also includes the sound at the end of the word which therefore distinguishes him from speakers south of the border. His pronunciation of the vowel in the word head is typical of a number of Scottish speakers and is indeed a feature of broad dialect speech on Tyneside. This was until relatively recently very common in the north of Britain as a whole and is an echo of a Middle English vowel used in words such as bread, dead, deaf and so on. Likewise his pronunciation of the vowel sound in the words out and about reflects a much older pronunciation that was common both to Middle English and Middle High German and is a perfect illustration of the way in which conservative forms survive in dialect speech long after they've disappeared from the prestige standard language.