Lunchtime Talk: Doric in the Cityscape

Talk by Simon Gall, folklorist

Perhaps at no other point in Aberdeen's history has the local Scots/Doric dialect been so prominently on display in its written form in the cityscape as it is today. Folklorist Simon Gall considers its use on city signs, on merchandise, in museum exhibits, on badges, on clothing, on the walls and so on, by a range of actors from private businesses to the local authority, from festival marketers to charities, from museum curators to graffiti artists. Just as scholars suspect that the region is experiencing what they call 'dialect attrition' – the loss of certain aspects of local dialect – so the physical environment appears to be an increasingly important site for linguistic expression.