I always smile when attempting to read works by Robert Burns. I studied English (!) Literature as an extra at Edinburgh University, and the Scots were anxious to include him in that category. My problems arose when I first saw the texts for study. They consisted almost entirely of apostrophes sparsely sprinkled with the odd letter. This punctuation was intended to convey the pronunciation of Scots, a language I hadn't in those days come across. Cockney also has much the same addiction to the apostrophe in an attempt to represent the glottal stop. So gnu you're quite right, many of these sorts of things are trying to help us appreciate dialect/accent. The only way to do that totally accurately of course is by the use of Phonetic Script, but not everyone has learned that.