Celtic influence

[Rick Mc Callister]

[snip]
>	Yes it will.  The kingdom of Scotland had been Gaelic-using till
>shortly (as linguistic time is measured) before.  Thus, just as in
>England, there had been little time for divergence to evolve.

	I'd strongly suspect that in much of Scotland that class
differences were based on language rather than dialect differences. The
Edinburgh region, AFAIK, never spoke Gaelic and I'd imagine that in
Glasgow, Briton was the language of lower classes for a few centuries. And
then around the time the lower class Glaswegians learned Gaelic, the
nobility settled on Lallans. Does this sound right?

>>Lowland Scotland, which spoke a Northumbrian dialect, was never conquered by
>>the Normans, and the court and nobility there used Lallans right down to the
>>late 17th century.

[snip]

>	Accent, which in popular usage is generally taken to refer only to
>sound features, is not the same as dialect, a point you repeatedly fail to
>appreciate.  Thus Southern Senators like Ernest Hollings and Strom
>Thurmond have a southern accent, and in acordance with custom speak in a
>regional dialect (as British lords used to), but they do not speak a lower
>class dialect.  The lower class dialect of the regions they are from is
>appreciably different.

	And younger middle and upper class Whites now tend to speak with an
accent that is much closer to Midwestern English. Although Lowland South
Carolina is one of the places where a Southern accent is hanging on to a
greater degree than most areas of the South.