A study by researchers at the German universities of Leipzig and Bamberg has found that young people in Scotland report far higher use of the quotative "like" — the habit of prefacing reported speech with "like" — than their counterparts in England.
The team quizzed 104 Britons aged 18 to 33 from locations ranging from Cornwall to Caithness. Of the 61 respondents who live in Scotland, 82% said that most or all of the people they know use the quotative like, compared with 34% of the English sample. That proportion among Scots is notably higher than the 47% figure recorded in a survey of Edinburgh teenagers about a decade ago, the researchers said.
Researchers described the quotative like as an import from California that has become a common verbal tic among younger generations in Britain. The pattern, which gained wider public notice in part through popular culture and comedy, signals reported speech or thought and is distinct from the use of "like" as a filler or comparative word.
The study relied on respondents' perceptions of language use among their peers rather than direct audio recordings. That method provides insight into how widespread speakers believe the feature to be, but the authors and other linguists note it does not substitute for acoustic or corpus-based measures of actual usage. The sample in the study was modest and limited to adults aged 18 to 33, which the researchers acknowledged when discussing the findings.
Despite the rise of quotative like, the researchers reported that more traditional Scottish forms remain in general use. Terms such as "youse," a plural second-person form with roots in Irish and Hiberno-English dialects, continue to appear in everyday speech alongside newer features.
Linguists have long studied quotative like, tracing its increased visibility in spoken English to late 20th-century Californian youth speech and its spread through media and interpersonal networks. The new findings add to a growing body of work documenting regional variation in how quickly and extensively such features diffuse across different parts of the English-speaking world.
The study's authors said the results reflect changing patterns of spoken English among younger Britons but urged caution in generalizing beyond the sample. Further research using larger, audio-based samples would help clarify how frequently speakers actually produce the quotative like in conversation and how its use interacts with other regional markers in Scottish and English varieties of English.