ABSTRACT
Specifying Scottish English can seem as tricky as the party game in which, blindfolded, you have to pin a tail on the drawing of a donkey. For example, many words that Scots consider typically Scottish are common to all varieties of Northern English and some occur quite far away, such as bide (= ‘stay’), which turns up in Hardy's novels. Another example is the use of though at the end or in the middle of a clause and used by the speakers to concede that such-and-such is indeed the case in spite of their expectations to the contrary: e.g. It's cauld the day, though (= ‘It's cold today but who would have expected it’). This construction is very frequent in the speech of Scottish speakers but it occurs outside Scotland and is given in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.
