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Poles in Scotland rescued by slang dictionary

PR dla Zagranicy
Nick Hodge 15.04.2014 14:39
An employee of Edinburgh City Council has compiled a dictionary of Scottish slang in a bid to help Polish immigrants who have been left dumbfounded by the local dialect.

Photo:
Photo: wikipedia

Kasia Michalska's A Scots-Polish Lexicon provides Polish translations of countless confounding words and expressions.

After studying the tome, immigrants will no longer be mystified by menus offering neeps and tatties, or chemists who commiserate that a customer looks peelie wallie.

Michalska, who currently works as an English language teacher for Edinburgh City Council, admits that she herself was bamboozled when she first came to Scotland, despite having an MA in English Philology from Gdansk University.

“I just could not understand what people were saying to me and I was not the only one,” she told the Edinburgh Evening News.

Michalska spent two years writing the book, which also includes sections on cuisine and culture, taking in everything from haggises to caber-tossing.

A survey by Oxford University’s Migration Observatory found that from 2001 to 2011, Scotland's Polish-born community grew from 2505 to 55,231, making Poles the country's biggest minority. The main catalyst for the rise in numbers was Poland's accession to the EU in 2004. (nh)

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