anyway, it occurred to me that one of the things i'm really interested in is dialects, so i'm wondering if anyone knows any good books about scottish dialects and their features/history and/or differences from my own dialect. specifically i'll be in edinburgh, glasgow and fife, and if there was a book that talked about the differences between them that would be really interesting.
do people in those places speak scots? is there a hard line between scottish english and scots? i don't need a book that is specifically about scottish english. actually it would be cool to read a book about the different languages of scotland.
any linguistic book about scotland would be nice, but i'm especially looking for something easy to read, like Mother Tongue or power of babel, but that is also socio-politically and historically correct.
alternately, any books about cultural differences between scotland or those specific parts of scotland and the US would be cool. though again, i don't want anything too fluffy, like those jokey 'british to american' dictionaries and whatever.
i also thought about reading buddha da, which my mom gave me some time ago and is written in glaswegian dialect, but the story really doesn't interest me so much. are there other books written in local dialects that might be different genres?
thanks!