What Happens Next: A Gallimaufry

melancholic romantic comic cynic. bi & genderqueer. fantasy writer. sysrae on ao3.

cardamoms:

what if cheque please took place in oxford and bitty was from scotland and his twitter was all in that scottish… dialect w/ tweets like “magine callin yer maw right quick in tae mornin caus yer ovens gon tae shite..” and “me n ma mates cuttin about tae pettin zoo ma mate jack buried in wee chicks…. this lad..”

and the whole team would do that thing when british young men overreact to everything like [ransom voice] asked bitty to bake a pie for me and he did it!! the absolute madman!!!!!!

On the one hand, this is a hilarious AU concept to me, because Scottish politeness bears very little resemblance to US Southern politeness, so you could have a whole bunch of fun with that by either a) making Bitty incongruous in his home environment or b) expressing his native sweetness in particularly Scottish ways. Though either way, you’d probably have to change what it is he’s baking, because “pies” in the UK generally are of the meat variety - like, those massive berry and cream and what-the-fuck-ever pies you have in the States? Yeah, the UK and Australia don’t really do those so much.

On the other hand, THAT DIALECT IS INACCURATE AND IT PAINS ME. Because if this is going to be done, it needs to be done right. Like. OP is mostly correct, and I’ll give credit for that, but the form of Scots being used in those tweets isn’t (inasmuch as such a thing exists) mainstream Scottish, but a more Northern/Doric dialect, which is something quite different. For instance: ‘tae’ is a form of ‘too’, not ‘the’, so ‘tae pettin zoo’ is… not right. You wouldn’t really call someone ‘right quick’ in the same context, either - that’s more an English (in the sense of British) expression. (In my head, it comes out in a Yorkshire accent because that’s what I associate it with, but it’s more general than that.) 

Basically if you wanted to write a Scottish!Bitty who was kind of (by Southern US standards) genteel in his mannerisms, I’d suggest something like a Morningside Edinburgh background and accent, which is very different. Like, you could definitely do him as Doric or northern Scots or whatever you wanted, but it wouldn’t just change his speech patterns, is what I’m saying - it would, of necessity, change how he expresses hospitality and manners. Also,  that “young British men overreacting” thing tends to be, specifically, white British men from particular urban areas, which would work for someone like Holster but probably not Rans. 

In conclusion, the UK is fucking geographically tiny compared to America but nonetheless contains a startlingly comparable density of regional accents and mannerisms, not all of which are immediately obvious if you haven’t ever visited or lived there. 

(Note: I am Australian, but just spent five years living in the UK, predominantly in Scotland but also in England. So if any actual UK natives chime in and correct me here, listen to them instead!)

(via sleepy-skittles)

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    Please let me know when you write this, friends…
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