I found this to be a really interesting article and there is an interactive map where you can click on the 13 regions and hear that dialect spoken by a local. You can also read what they are saying about their dialect.
Thinking of our wonderful house/car exchange we did in Edinburg for three weeks one year. We saw a lot of Scotland including the Isle of Skye.
And remembering meeting Jim's maternal grandparents for the first time before we got married. They had been given strict instructions by Jim's mom "not to be talking any old Scots to Janice".
With voices changing every 20 miles, it’s difficult to quantify exactly how many dialects come under the Scots language umbrella.
But a rough count suggests lucky number 13, divided up as Orkney, Shetland, Caithness, Black Isle, Moray, Aberdeenshire, South Northern (South Kincardineshire and Northern Angus), North-East Central, East Central, West Central, South Central, Boarders and Ulster (yep, Scots made it over the water to Ireland too with Irish Gaelic).
Inverness and the Outer Hebrides may seem curiously absent from this list. But as these regions were predominantly Gaelic speaking areas, the Scots language didn’t take hold with the same intensity, meaning there’s no specific Scots dialect recorded for these regions – though we have included them on the map here for comparison.
The wildly diverse Scots language
Among the likes of Doric, the north-east regions of Scotland, Southern Scots, Scottish Borders, or Dundonian, the East Central North, all the dialects have similarities, but it’s their differences which make the Scots language so richly varied.
