**GEEK ALERT**

Ok, so I'm a big Dungeons & Dragons fan. Over the years, I've noticed that almost every people I've played with has given dwarves a Scottish accent. And several friends of mine have independently said the same thing.

I recently started reading a comic strip called "Order of the Stick," which is a D&D parody. They, of course, have a dware in cast. And they transcribe his speech in the comic to impart a Scottish accent. Later on in the series (episode 305), the character is writing a letter. Another character reads it and points out that the dwarf didn't have to actually write the letter with an accent.

I started thinking... and I've seen several posts here that have been written in Scots, which I as a "Huhmerican" have to actually say out loud half the time in order to be able to understand it.

I recently read a story by Sir Walter Scott (as in yesterday) entitled "Wandering Willie's Tale". The entire story is written in Scots, which made for slow reading for me Again I had to speak most of it. And even then some didn't make sense. Good story nonetheless. In the anthology, there are a few other stories that were originally in French or some other language, and they were translated into standard English... this one story written in Scots? Nope. No "translation"

No real point in this post. Just idle musings regarding the nature of our "common" language ith: