Buchan Words and Ways

The speech of the North-east is one of the best preserved in Scotland, and still flexible enough to adapt to modern times. New ways of looking at the world come in, and words of earlier days, sayings and ways of speaking inevitably fall by the wayside. If we can keep a record of what is passing, we will still be able to sense the flavour and atmosphere of the days of our fathers and grandfathers. It is the aim of this book to do just that. It is a blend of English and the Buchan dialect, and it contains a very full word list. ‘Even the Buchan dialect is full of words that came from elsewhere. This by no means weakens it. Its flavour and identity grow out of the sum of its parts, and that should be so for the English language as a whole. Sometimes the words come from away back in a forgotten time. We didn’t always speak the Buchan dialect, which is a dialect of Scots, but also Gaelic, even Pictish. Perhaps a lot of our words, and especially place-names, are Pictish, if we could identify them. It’s a pity nobody really knows in any detail what the language was. But we can identify Gaelic words, at least.’