English people MUST understand Scottish accents?
This is a real lulu. Anybody who has been there will know that a Scots accent can be hard to understand
"The most senior Labour Party official in Britain was caught up in a bizarre racism row last night after he was accused of insulting people who speak with a Scottish accent. A formal complaint of racism was made against Labour General Secretary Ray Collins when he asked for a `translation' of comments made by a man from Glasgow.
The race row started when Labour's deputy leader, Harriet Harman, took a question-and-answer session at the party's gathering at Dundee's Caird Hall. After some exchanges with delegates, it became clear she was struggling to understand and asked her audience if they were also having `problems with the acoustics'.
When no one agreed, she took a question from a Labour activist from Motherwell. Ms Harman appeared confused by his strong Lanarkshire accent and complained she could not hear what he had said. Mr Collins intervened and said to Scottish Labour Party General Secretary Colin Smyth: `Can you translate that for me?' He then turned to the audience and said: `I have asked Colin to join us, so he can translate.'
Mrs Fee, a Glasgow-based shop steward with shop workers' union USDAW, told The Mail on Sunday: `I heard Mr Collins's remarks clearly. I was upset by what he said and considered it to be racist. The man had a normal Scottish accent and most people could understand him perfectly well.' Several delegates were said to have complained that Mr Collins's conduct was `anti-Scottish'.
Source
12 comments:
This is getting a bit silly now. It is hard to understand what some of them say. Heck, people with a heavy accent from any language are hard to understand and it doesn't mean that someone is racist if he or she are asking for help with translation.
Heck, when I vacation in Japan and when the people there don't understand me, I don't accuse them of being racist!
Well, maybe if the Scots quit drinking all that whiskey perhaps people could understand what the hell they're saying.
LOL, I always have a hard time understanding British accents!
It's true... for the most part I have no problem with the Scottish accent, but the further north you go the harder it is to understand. I've got a friend from Ireland as well, and her relatives can be fairly hard to understand also.
Glasgow area accents are indeed strong, but not all Scottish accents are. Ditto to referring to all accents in the UK as just "British accents", there's a very wide variety!
PS. Scots don't drink whiskey - they drink whisky! (Whiskey is drunk in Ireland and North America)
I'm in trouble now. I've had to ask a few people from the eastern and south eastern U.S. to repeat themselves because I can't understand their accent. Guess I'm 'regionist' at the very least.
It's all moot. When was the last time a Brit or a Scot had something to say that was worth listening to?
I think this is funny!
Of course, this was a public forum held in DUNDEE!!!
Of course people there were going to be speaking with Scottish accents.
I agree that any strong accent can sometimes be difficult to understand but they should really have made some preparations.
2:50 PM - when will you have something to say that's not xenophobic? (btw many of the founding fathers of the US were of Scottish origin - do you think they may have had something worth listening to?!)
The text of the US Declaration of Independence also owed a lot to the text of the Scottish "Declaration of Arbroath" (medieval declaration of independence from England.
12:37 am: some of them did.
Time to bomb england with a bucket of hagar.
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