Morningside
June 21st 2025
This term has been used disparagingly to: “describe the over-refined, supposedly affected speech of (some of) the inhabitants [of Morningside, Edinburgh], and also their behaviour, attitudes, etc”.
The earliest example in DSL comes from Lowland Scots (1973), a collection of essays edited by A.J. Aitken: “The Scottish Augustans seem to have bequeathed us an inferiority complex and the Morningside accent”.
In May 1999, The Sunday Times noted: “Edinburgh is the least Scots place. That Morningside accent sounds like a Swede trying to talk Surrey”.
Then, in December 2002, The Herald observed that: “The difference between a Morningside accent and a Kelvinside accent is that Glasgow is a funny city, where people are very demonstrative and Edinburgh is a very undemonstrative city where there’s not much humour”.
Finding earlier evidence is always a challenge, but we can get back to February 1953 where The Scotsman published an exchange of letters on the topic of ‘affected speech’: “J. A. A. points out that affectation is not as easy to recognise as it is to condemn, and goes on to give an example of the ‘Morningside’ boy whose natural speech is an echo of his affected parents. He asks: Is the ‘Morningside’ boy’s speech affected or unaffected? But why presume that the speech of the parents is affected when the Morningside accent has unfortunately been going strong for three generations or more?” Will this accent ever catch a break?
Dictionaries of the Scots Language would like to thank Bob Dewar for illustrating our Scots Word of the Week feature.
