Page 99 - 4805

5) Eastern (between the river Humber and the Thames),
6) Southern (South of the Thames).
Their sphere of application is confined to the oral speech of
the rural population in a locality and only the Scottish dialect can
be said to have a literature of its own with Robert Burns as its
greatest representative.
Offsprings of the English national literary language, the
British local dialects are marked off from the former and from
each other by some phonetic, grammatical and lexical
peculiarities.
Careful consideration of the national and the dialect
vocabularies discloses that the most marked difference between
them lies in the limited character of the dialect vocabularies. The
literary language contains many words not to be found in dialects,
among them technical and scientific terms.
Local lexical peculiarities are most noticeable in specifically
dialectal words pertaining to local customs, social life and natural
conditions: laird — ‘landed proprietor in Scotland’, burgh —
‘Scottish chartered” town’, kirk — ‘church’, loch — ‘Scottish
lake or landlocked arm of the sea’, etc. There are many names of
objects and processes connected with farming, such as the names
of agricultural processes, tools, domestic animals and the like, e.g.
galloway — ‘horse of small strong breed from Galloway,
Scotland’. There is also a considerable number of emotionally
coloured dialectal words, e.g. Scot, bonny — ‘beautiful, healthy-
looking’, braw — ‘fine, excellent’, daffy — ‘crazy, silly’, cuddy
— ‘fool, ass’, loon — ‘clumsy, stupid person’.
In addition, words may have different meanings in the
national language and in the local dialects, e.g. in the Scottish
dialect the word to call is used in the meaning of ‘to drive’, to set
— ‘to suit’, short — ‘rude’, silly — ‘weak’, etc.
Dialectal lexical differences also embrace word-building
patterns. For instance, some Irish words contain the diminutive
suffixes -an, -een, -can, as in bohaun — ‘cabin’ (from Irish both

98