Edinburgh Scots

Spoken in the city itself and surrounding towns such as Bonnyrigg, Dalkeith and Penicuik. The speech of North Berwick, Dunbar, Haddington and Tranent is also heavily influenced by this dialect.

Like all urban dialects 'Embra' suffers from a loss of much particularly Scots vocabulary. The pronunciation of Edinburgh Scots is essentially south east central Scots.

Consonants usually have the same phonetic values (pronunciation) in as in Standard English.

Words that traditionally have Medial and Final <ch> /x/ now generally take the pronunciation of their Standard English cognates i.e. bought (bocht), draught (draucht), enough (eneuch), laugh (lauch), night (nicht), right (richt), rough (roch), sight (sicht) and tight (ticht) etc. /x/ remains in words with no Standard English cognates like loch but pronunciations with /k/ are spreading.

Initial <wh> /ʍ/ is still widespread but is increasingly being replaced by /w/ in words like whales and wheel etc.

The initial <th> in words like thing, naething and think is often pronounced /h/.
<thr> may be rendered /r/ in words like three.
Medial <th> rendered as /r/ is occasionally encountered in words like bother (bather), brother (brither) and mother (mither).

Vowels and diphthongs are generally pronounced the same as south east central Scots.

The <ui> generally takes the Central Scots pronunciation but /u/ is usual before <v>, <th> and <z> in words like buith (booth), muive (move), suithe (sooth), ruise (roose), and in many common words with Standard English cognates.

In words with Standard English cognates the <eu> is usually pronounced /u/ i.e. beuk (book), heuk (hook), leuk (look) and teuk (took) etc.

In many words of Latin origin the pronunciation /i/ has been replaced by the Standard English pronunciation e.g. bapteese (baptise), obleege (oblige), ceevil (civil), oreeginal (original), eetem (item), peety (pity) and leeberal (liberal) etc.

The diphthong /ʌu/ before /k/ is usually vocalized to /o/ e.g. bowk (boak), fowk (folk) and yowk (yolk) etc.

Glottal stops are often seen as the hallmark of urban Scots dialects especially for final /t/ and /k/ and medial /t/ in words like bat, night, bottle, watter and back. The initial /t/, in the infinitive marker tae and where the target syllable is unstressed, may be glottalized.

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