My complicated relationship with the Scots Language.

Due to its history, the people of Scotland have a particularly complex relationship with one of our native languages – Scots. I share how studying linguistics at university helped me to change my perspective: from thinking that Scots was “improper”, to realising that “speaking properly” had no meaning at all. I hope I can take you on my un-learning journey.

Ever since I can remember, I have been told that there is a right way to speak and a wrong way to speak. Say “yes”, don’t say “aye”. Say “I can”, not “a cannae”. I am your “mum”, not your “maw”. 

Not that I can blame my poor mum for all the language policing that went on in my life. I heard this kind of scolding from grandparents, teachers and other authority figures too. It seemed to me that despite hearing many people around me speaking “slang” (this is how it was referred to) there was something impolite and uncouth about it. I came to associate this way of speaking with what we call “NEDs” here in Scotland: Non-Educated Delinquents; to me this meant people who lived in impoverished areas, got into fights at school and wore tracksuits. Their language included lovely phrases like “bolt ya bam!”, which meant “go away, you idiot!”, and “yer aff yer heid” which means “you’re crazy”. The other group I was told not to emulate in my speech was older people, who would say things like “haud her wheesht an stoap bletherin” which meant “be quiet and stop talking”. I was told that my school peers were brought up in a different area and my grandparents in a different time, they didn’t have the same educational opportunities that I had, and I would be taken more seriously if I spoke “proper English”. Sadly, they were not wrong. So, despite hearing this form of speech called “slang” all around me and associating it with my country and my city, despite these words and sounds forming part of the very fabric of where I’m from, like many of my peers, I was taught not to speak this way.

When I was 11 or so at a school poetry competition, I realised that in certain contexts, for example, when citing Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet, this kind of “slang” speech was not always a marker of the uneducated. On the contrary. Burns said “wit” instead of “what” and “hame” instead of “home”, and yet he was praised for his intelligence and for the beauty of his words. At these times, I was taught that poetry and literature in Scots were part of my heritage, something to keep the history and the culture of my people alive. Yet Burns’ words felt archaic, they sounded like the “slang” I knew so well, but with words like “thy” and “farewell” marking it somewhere far in the past: the ghost of a language that I part-understood. They included Scots words I wasn’t familiar with, words that in Glasgow we might refer to as “teuchter”, a word meaning “from the highlands” that we often used teasingly to refer to any broad Scottish voice that didn’t sound like ours. This included words like “syne” meaning “since” and “bairn” meaning “child”. I was told that, as a Scot, the language of this poetry was mine and yet, I felt like a fraud for claiming it.

It was a surprise when I first saw modern Scots written down. One of the first books I read was the 1993 novel Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh, popularised internationally by the movie of the same name. Like many contemporary authors, Welsh uses Scots not for the whole prose, but as a way of voicing the characters, who come from just outside Edinburgh. For example, the character Renton says “Yuv just goat one thing tae worry aboot. The simplicity ay it aw.” (You just have one thing to worry about. The simplicity of it all. ) (Welsh 1996). Unlike the Scots poetry I read growing up, Welsh did not speak of “bonnie braes” (beautiful hillsides) and “braw laddies” (handsome boys), Scots speech of a time and place so far away from me; he spoke of feeling “scunnered” (tired) and getting “pished” (drunk), he used turns of phrase I would hear often, that related to modern, city life. I was shocked that these “slang” words could be written down to constitute literature, when literature was “proper” and the language I heard around me was not.

The first time I questioned what “proper” meant was in my first linguistics lecture in first year of university. It was titled “English grammar and morphology”, and I remember readying myself for an hour of trying to stay awake. “Awright how’s it gaun. My name is Gary and ah’ll be yer lecturer fir the day” – a distinctly Glaswegian voice came from the front of the hall. Not a “university lecturer” Glaswegian voice, with the limp r’s and slow over-pronounced vowels. It was the Glaswegian I heard in the playground, in the shops, on the street. I was fascinated, not only by the way he expressed himself eloquently in this language I always knew derogatorily as “slang”, but also by the ideas he expressed. I learned that prescriptivism was an approach which prescribes rigid rules to language and defines a “right” and a “wrong” way to speak. A descriptivist approach aims to simply describe the variety of different ways speakers use the language, without determining “right” and “wrong”. Contrary to popular belief, most linguists prefer the descriptivist approach, opting to observe speakers rather than tell them how to speak. For example, in his grammar class, I learned that in English, the plural form of “you” can be “you”, “youse”, “y’all”, and that to call only one of these forms “proper” was a prescriptivist approach, and placed value on the speech of those from a certain area or background.

In historical linguistics, I learned that Scots is not just “slang”, or an old language that Burns spoke in the 18th Century, nor is it “English with a Scottish twist”. Scots is a living, breathing language which has been developing in Scotland over centuries and continues to develop to this day. Whilst many believe that it developed from English, Scots developed alongside English, both stemming from a west Germanic language brought to Britain by the Angles in the 5th Century. Indeed, Scots has been a national language in Scotland, used in law and in courts, and with its own rich literary tradition, since around the 14th Century (Angelosanto 2002). Following the union of Scotland and England, Scotland’s indigenous languages, Gaelic and Scots, were actively discouraged by the crown and fell into disuse. English became the first language of the people of Scotland, and Scots became a second, less used, and much lower prestige language of the uneducated. Now, like myself, most people in Scotland speak English, with a sprinkle of Scots words and pronunciation. Therefore, Scots lies on a continuum between “Scottish Standard English” and “Scots”, and as such, it has become difficult to define whether we are speaking Scots or English. No wonder I was confused!

In sociolinguistics, I learned that the distinction between “language” and “dialect” is often political, as the phrase popularised by sociolinguist Max Weinriech goes: “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy” (Unger 2008: 91). For example, the characterisation of Scots as either a “language” or a “dialect” is often intrinsically linked with questions of whether Scotland is an autonomous nation, or a region of the UK. As such, sociolinguists tend to use the neutral descriptor “language variety” as an all-encompassing term which can refer to any distinctive form of speech. I learned that there are several language varieties in Scotland today: some are closer to English, and some bear more resemblance to traditional Scots. For example, “Doric” is a well-preserved dialect spoken in the North East of Scotland for centuries, and “Glaswasian” is a rather new Scottish language variety spoken by the Asian community of Glasgow (Stuart-Smith et. al. 2011).

Whilst the poetry of Robert Burns is beautiful and culturally significant, I wonder what impact it would have if Scots were taught about the rich history and complex variation of their language from a young age. If I understood that old Scots words like “bonnie” were just as important in the preservation of language and culture as newer (and slightly sillier) Scots words like “bam”, would I feel so disconnected from my “Scottishness”? If I had known that Scots words were not “improper”, but perhaps to be preserved for use with family and friends, and not used with those who may not understand, would these words help me feel connected to my roots? These are questions which may apply to you and your own language community. If so, I encourage you to embrace the value and beauty of variety in language, and do what you can to preserve your culture, new and old.

I hope you enjoyed my very first blog article! Please engage and give me feedback using the comment function below, and tell me what you’d like to hear about next. More articles to come on Scots, language varieties, language attitudes, literature, my personal experiences with languages and more!

References:

Angelosanto, K. 2002. A look at the relationship of the Scots and English Language. In Institute of Linguists Magazine February – March 2002 Edition.

Stuart-Smith, J., Timmins, C., Alam, F., Gregersen, F., Parrot, J., & Quist, P. (2011). Hybridity and ethnic accents. Selected Papers ICLaVE Amsterdam: Benjamins, 5, 43-57.

Welsh, I. (1996). Trainspotting. W.W. Norton

Unger, J. W. (2008). A keek at Scots lang syne: A brief overview of the historical development of the Scots language. In Vienna English Working Papers 17 (1). 91-104. Vienna: VIEWS