I realise I'm a bit late to the party here, but I discovered this thread by accident and found it interesting, more so because I'm a Scotsman.
We have a very complex set of dialects here that varies quite a lot even between towns only a few miles apart, I'm from the Fife area and as such our accent is pretty thick and can be confusing at times for people from outside of Scotland. But I find that when I'm talking to someone who isn't from Scotland that I tend to adopt what I would call my phone voice, which basically means flattening out the accent and removing any slang, I still have characteristics of my accent that can't be toned out though as the way we pronounce certain letters and words is ingrained, similar to how people in some Asian countries have difficulty pronouncing certain letters due to them not naturally using them in their native dialect. As such when speaking to people from other countries they will often mention it but not in a negative way, in my experience people seem to quite like it, or maybe they are simply being polite.
I suspect when you speak to Scottish people when they are abroad the accent you are hearing isn't quite the same as the dialect they would use back home or between each other, we tend to have a habit of trying to compensate by speaking slower and clearer, at times it can sound a little odd.
I personally have difficulty understanding a lot of English accents, especially over the phone where you aren't getting visual cues and are relying solely on sound alone, this isn't typical of Scots though and seems to more my own shortcoming.
Overall though it's a wonderfully colourful and vivid dialect where often the same word can have several meanings that are denoted by tone or context alone, we also have a tendency to fill in spaces between words with profanity that others would see as offensive or insulting, but to us are often a sign of endearment.
This forum gets better every time you hit the ignore button...
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