[GordonS]

Hey, parent poster here, also living in and around Aberdeen for most of my life :)

You're bang on about Doric being difficult for people from elsewhere in Scotland; I have family from the central belt and they really struggle to understand some folk up here!

[deepnet]

Aberdonian, Joyce Falconer performs in Doric.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0isMWmwfO34

and Aye Can's Doric page [2] is part an audio map of Scottish Dialect

[2] http://www.ayecan.com/listen_to_scots/north_east.html

Sheena's Granny's Doric [3] has a flavour of the musicality of Scots.

[3] http://media.scotslanguage.com/library/audio/ayecan/census_n...

The Scots sort of sang their words, especially the Gaelic speakers, Orcadians and Shetlandic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v37bgydws0E

The BBC's postwar campaign to establish Recieved Pronunciation made the UK largely comprehensible to each other but at great cost to it's unrecorded linguistic diversity - at the time sadly considered vulgar.

Lang may yer Lum Reek ! ( Long may your chimney's smoke - a Fifer greeting )

Dinnae fasch yersel. - Edinburgh's Don't worry yourself ( Keep Calm )

[koralatov]

Linguistic flattening had been going longer before the Second World War -- the introduction of railways helped it a long a bit, but radio really sped up the process. My grandmother told me that radio, listened to by all the family, was the first time English was spoken in the family home.

[koralatov]

Small world! My email is in my profile if you fancy discussing where to buy the best rolls.