Additional context:
Native speakers of my mother tongue do not all understand each other due to some pretty extreme dialects. Now that I’m in Europe, I’ve noticed multiple instances of people sometimes not understand the dialect of someone from a village 10-20 km away…
In contrast, for example most American, British, and Australian people can just… understand each other like that?? I never thought much about it before but it’s pretty incredible
Edit: thanks everyone, and clearly I didn’t think of certain parts of the UK when I was in the shower and thought of this…
Was it Scottish English or Scots? The line between the two is blurry because intelligibility varies a lot
Pretty sure it was Scottish English. Does anyone outside of super rural places actively use Scots anyway?
Scots is common throughout the country. There’s also a local variant in the north east called Doric which to others is near impossible to understand. It’s perhaps more rural only, although there’s certainly still people in Aberdeen that speak it.
Do you know where in Scotland this person was from? That might help narrow it down.
Was there a lot of Fs? In Doric the “wh” from English questions is changed to an F.
What? - Fit?
Where? - Far?
When? - Fan?
How? - Foo?
Why? - often how is asked to mean why, or just fit why will be asked
If you are in a Doric shoe shop you can legitimately ask “Fit fit fits fit fit?” which means “Which foot fits which foot?”
Are you confusing Scots and Scottish Gaelic? Scottish Gaelic is the one that’s spoken in the western isles, Scots is across most of the rest of Scotland, including big cities
Scots is hard to tell from English sometimes because Scots has undergone near language death, where it adopted more and more features from English as it was taken over, and Scots was regarded for a decent while as nothing but bad English