Writing With An Accent

One of my characters has supposedly come from Scotland, so I tried to write his dialog in a Scottish accent. I'm not so sure I did that well. I remember when I was in Edinburgh I had a difficult time understanding the taxi drivers and sometimes the waiters, but most everyone else I could figure things out. It was clear from that experience that like any place, some people had 'thicker' accents than others! Also I noticed the Sottish spoken word was lyrical with a lovely rhythm to it, but finding a way to implant that rhythm into dialog is very difficult. I'm afraid I had to resort to saying "he said with the sing-song rhythm of his native tongue" or some such contrived notation. However in my quest to rewrite this character better, I did find a lovely web site that featured a Glossary of Scots Dialect which helped a great deal. Another web site had short audio inserts that allowed you to listen to the accent, which again I found some people to be very difficult to understand, but others much easier. I am hoping that by listening once again to the rhythm of Scots speech patterns and knowing some of the writing substitutions used by Scots, my character will sound more authentic. Good luck to you if you wish to write dialog with an accent! I hope these links will be helpful for you!