Additional context:
Native speakers of my mother tongue do not all understand each other due to some pretty extreme dialects. Now that I’m in Europe, I’ve noticed multiple instances of people sometimes not understand the dialect of someone from a village 10-20 km away…
In contrast, for example most American, British, and Australian people can just… understand each other like that?? I never thought much about it before but it’s pretty incredible
Edit: thanks everyone, and clearly I didn’t think of certain parts of the UK when I was in the shower and thought of this…
Idk, I recently heard some thick Scottish English and I couldn’t understand literally anything. That might be in part due to the fact that I’m not a native speaker, but still I believe people outside the British isles would struggle with it.
Some of the uniformity is a result of cultural domination of specific centres and now unavoidable loss of original dialectal variation.
When I was in Glasgow I couldn’t understand anybody older than 40.
People inside the British Aisles would still struggle.
Especially if it was a Weegie
Was it Scottish English or Scots? The line between the two is blurry because intelligibility varies a lot
Pretty sure it was Scottish English. Does anyone outside of super rural places actively use Scots anyway?
Are you confusing Scots and Scottish Gaelic? Scottish Gaelic is the one that’s spoken in the western isles, Scots is across most of the rest of Scotland, including big cities
Scots is hard to tell from English sometimes because Scots has undergone near language death, where it adopted more and more features from English as it was taken over, and Scots was regarded for a decent while as nothing but bad English