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The correct way to welcome a Turkish ruler visiting Yorkshire

A Turkish bakery/breakfast cafe in Berlin

I can also ask my uncle, who grew up in Nova Scotia, and who has a keener-than-average interest in dialect variation. He's been compiling a word list/atlas of the Scottish Borders for about 30 years or so, but whether it'll ever appear in print is hard to say!

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 4h

Yes, "they are left" seems fine to me if it's Irish English we're talking about, though it sounds like something only older people would say now. I'll be interested to know whether you'd hear it anywhere in Canada these days.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 4h

This wouldn't stretch to forms like "They are left" or "I am become heavier", though, I assume.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 5h

Could the vowel of 'is' be a schwa that's harmonising with its flanking vowels? (i.e. the word is still 'has', but it sounds like 'is' because of its environment). I'm getting the percept of laterality in 'become' too, though it could be something else about the vowel that's cueing it.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

"The only city in the world without a single skyscraper" 🤔

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

In northeast England (Newcastle, Sunderland, Durham) THOUGHT/NORTH/FORCE regularly reaches [o:], so that 'coat', 'caught' and 'court' become indistinguishable. That's if GOAT is pronounced as [o:] rather than something else, like [ɔː], or [ʊə]/[ɵː] as you'll find in Newcastle and Northumberland.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

"For most British English speakers, the CAUGHT vowel is /oː/ (usually slightly lower), not /ɔː/." What's the evidence for this assertion? And what do you mean by 'British English'? I see you're using slant brackets here, which sort of proves your point about the inaccurate use of IPA...

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

The GOAT vowel is a good CV6-style [ɔː] monophthong in lots of varieties in northern England. It can also be a realisation of THOUGHT, NORTH, FORCE and NURSE (yes, really!) in Newcastle upon Tyne. Hence the jokes that depend on the homophony of pairs like 'walk'~'work', 'shirt'~'short', etc.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I'm glad you did. I wasn't aware that anyone had ever claimed its existence, let alone as many authors as you cite. It raises interesting questions about the arbitrariness of whether loanwords are 'nativised', and about the role of morpheme boundaries in intuitions about tautosyllabicity. All good!

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

And rhotic Scottish English too - I grew up with the Brer Rabbit stories, which we were told in primary school, and which I remember were in our local public libraries as well. 'Brer' is homophonous with 'Braer', which is quite a well-known name in Scotland: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Braer

en.wikipedia.org

MV Braer - Wikipedia

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Same here. No differences either between 'phial' and 'file', 'Cowal' and 'cowl', 'royal' and 'roil', etc.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I wonder how assimilated this word is in varieties of English outside of south Asia? It works absolutely fine phonotactically, at least for me. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crore

en.wikipedia.org

Crore - Wikipedia

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

'Drawer' seems to be an unusual case, to judge by how often you see it written as 'draw' (as in 'chest of draws') by non-rhotic speakers. By contrast, I've heard English kids pronounce 'drawer' (someone who draws) as /dɹɔːɹə/, to rhyme with 'flora'. Are 'prayer' and 'prayer' different? 🤔

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I used to ask my students for their intuitions about whether pairs like 'lyre'/'liar', 'lair'/'layer', 'shire'/'shyer' etc. are the same or different, and never got consistent answers. Some said that e.g. 'layer' (as in cake) and 'layer' (as in 'bricklayer') weren't homophones.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Non-rhotic varieties of British English even encourage the insertion of (?)tautosyllabic /r/ after CrV sequences via intrusive /r/, as in 'draw_it' or 'drawing' (/dɹɔːɹɪŋ/, rhymes with 'soaring'). My partner's English niece once wrote "I ♥️ mafs and jroring". Took a bit of work to decipher!

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

In Scottish English, [nʃ] is the normal pronunciation in 'lunch', 'bench', 'pinch', etc. You could argue that the final fricative is 'really' the affricate /tʃ/ with the stop part missing, but I'm not sure why you'd feel that was necessary. /nʃ/ seems fine to me. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insh

en.wikipedia.org

Insh - Wikipedia

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

I can think of proper names which violate this tendency - Frear(s), Creer, etc. - and how about 'drear'? It doesn't strike me as any more odd or difficult phonotactically than, say, 'drawer', which for me rhymes with 'roar'. 'Briar' rhymes with 'byre' (and 'prior', 'friar', etc.) as well.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

If I ever had a strong intuition about this, I've since lost it. Can anyone confirm whether Creamola Foam would have been called juice in '70s/'80s Scotland? I drank plenty of it, for sure, but my memory's hazy now (these two things may not be unconnected). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creamol...

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Where does cordial sit on this spectrum, would you say? It could just be a posher word for squash, on the other hand.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

What we called 'orange juice' when I was a kid was in fact orange squash. Some kids would drink it hot, which I could never stomach. Too acidic. Actual orange juice came frozen, in little cardboard cylinders. My mother would occasionally buy it in that form, as a mixer for gin. Cooncil juice! Yes 😀

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

The definition of 'juice' in Scotland is really wide. It includes fizzy drinks like Irn Bru and Coke, iced tea, etc. Some syrups for diluting, such as Ribena - all of which would be classed as 'juice' - are not unlike actual fruit juice. But others...

Advertisement for Swizzles Squash new range of soft drinks (Raspberry Squash, Bubble Gum, Sour Apple Squash, Lemon Squash, Love Hearts Squash), in various lurid colours.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

True, that [ʊə] variant sounds a bit old-fashioned these days. In Geordie there's also the [ɵː] monophthong, the vowel represented in joke spellings like 'terst' (toast) or 'turtle' (total), while a flirt - according to Humphrey Lyttelton - is a vehicle Geordies use to deliver milk 🙂

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Got you now, thanks. In phonetic terms, your 'hard' Geordie vowel is the monophthong [o:] - i.e., a vowel with a steady quality. The 'posh/harsh' one would be the diphthong [əʊ] (sometimes [oʊ]), with two distinct parts. Geordie has a diphthong as well, but it's [ʊə], something like 'boo-at'.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Kerouac, when you say 'dropping the harsh vowel sounds' do you mean 'using non-Geordie vowels' or 'avoiding the use of Geordie vowels'? Which are the harsh ones? (I guess they're the vowels you don't like, but maybe not).

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Reposted by Dominic Watt

Luke Tryl @luketryl.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Polling for Common Ground on bias against certain accents finds that people think that those with Scouse and Brummie accents are the most likely to experience bias in their day to day lives.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

I took Arabic classes taught by Bustami Khir, from Sudan, at the University of Edinburgh in 1988-89.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Well, there's this: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/laff It's interesting that although the product namers chose to use <ff> and <z> in the spelling of 'Baff Bombz', the decision was made to keep the second <b> in 'Bombz'. Would 'Bomz' have been a step too far?

en.wiktionary.org

laff - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Could rhyme with 'staff', though.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

The house is called Lagangarbh Hut, though it was once a crofthouse. It's owned by the National Trust for Scotland and is managed by the Scottish Mountaineering Club. See more here: smc.org.uk/hut/lagangarbh

smc.org.uk

Scottish Mountaineering Club

Scottish Mountaineering Club Website

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Hmm, turns out that the 'sea mew' > 'smew' etymology probably isn't right after all. It did seem to stretch plausibility. Any rumours you might have heard that the seamew is a maritime relative of the emu are misleading, but not actually false 🙂

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Smew are better described as water birds than seabirds, really, since they are found in places a long way from salt water. Gulls aren't really seabirds either, even if we tend to associate them most closely with coastal areas, and give some species names like 'herring gull' and 'Mediterranean gull'.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Yes, 'pueblo' is better. I suppose 'slew' and 'sluice' used to have initial /slj/. Maybe some people still pronounce one or both of them that way. 'Smew', IIRC, is a contraction of 'sea mew' (cf. German Seemöwe, 'seagull'), though smew are ducks. They're seabirds and the male is mostly white, so 🤷‍♂️

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

How nativised would you say /pw/, as in 'Puerto (Rico)', is in English now? It doesn't seem problematic as an initial cluster in the same way as /tl/ does. Also, let us not overlook the humble smew /smju:/.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 29/07/2026

It is a sort of vowel shift, yes, but not a part of the Great Vowel Shift. In some varieties of English, the /a/ following a /w/ (as in 'water', 'walk', etc.) acquired lip-rounding, under the influence of the /w/. In other varieties that didn't happen, so 'water' still rhymes with 'matter'.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

He used to introduce himself at conferences as "John Honey, Cambridge." He had no affiliation with the university, he just lived there.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

I've only ever seen it in recentish student writing. I don't think there's an Edinburgh connection (I was born and grew up in Edinburgh and did my first degree/had my first teaching jobs at UoE and Queen Margaret University, and don't remember coming across it until the 2010s, in Yorkshire).

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Like Warren, I'm hearing a brief period of creaky voice in the vowel, and given that this is often how glottalling of /t/ is implemented (cf. how 'seating' might be pronounced by some British English speakers) it's not surprising if you infer an intervocalic [ʔ] in Agertoft's 'saying'.

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Dominic Watt @domwatt.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

I Know What You Elided Last Summer

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