Written by Linden Alexander Pentecost. Note that the articles in this part of the site are intended to function more like a "wiki", and this page will be updated over time. 

 

Doric is a form of the Scots language that is spoken in eastern Scotland, and is especially associated with Aberdeenshire, including with the city of Aberdeen, or Aiberdeen in Doric. Doric is distinct from dialects to the north of Inverness, for example Black Isle Scots, Caithness Scots, and the Orkney and Shetland dialect groups, with the language of Shetland sometimes formalised as its own language, known as Shaetlan. 

Doric is still spoken quite widely in Aberdeenshire, and Doric word pronunciations as well as traditional Doric, with its grammar and vocabulary, can still be heard spoken there, commonly. There is quite a lot of literature in Doric, including a translation of the Old Testament, or The Doric Aul Testament as the book is known. At one time, "Doric" was used to describe the Anglic dialects of the north in a more general way, and only later came to mean specifically the language of eastern central Scotland and in particular Aberdeenshire. Historically some Gaelic has been spoken in Aberdeen, as well as there being evidence of earlier languages there, some threads of which can be described as "Pictish", although the nature of Pictish is up for interpretation, as I explain elsewhere. 

Some of the particular features of Doric include:

1. The pronunciation of initial wh- as f-. For example, what, where, when become fit, far and fan in Doric, for example: fan are we gyaun tae Aiberdeen? - "when are we going to Aberdeen?". Or for example far is 'e hoos, far 'e ithers are? - "where is the house, where the others are?" 

2. The vowels most commonly represented by aw and au in Lallans Scots, tend to be be pronounced as a long "a" in Doric, [aː], for example Doric snaa - "snow", more standard Scots: snaw

3. The initial [ð] in words like there and tha/the is frequently dropped. For example 'e hoose - "the house", and aire - "there".

In some forms of Doric in the extreme northeast of Aberdeenshire, i.e. in Buchan, the [ð] phoneme can appear, e.g. in the word noth - "nought", replacing the -cht and -ght in standard Scots, albeit not in all words, a more common Scots form of the word "nought" is nocht for example.