LL-L: "Mutual comprehension" LOWLANDS-L, 23.JUL.2000 (01) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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  L O W L A N D S - L * 23.JUL.2000 (01) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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 From: John M. Tait [jmtait at altavista.net]
 Subject: LL-L: "Mutual comprehension" 16.JUL.2000 (04) [E]

 Ron wrote:

>I could imagine a Scots speaker modifying his/her speech similarly if
>he/she were asked to try an English-Scots conversation with a non-Scot,
>unless, of course, he/she were bent on proving that Scots is nothing like
>English.
>
Not likely to happen, because most Scots can, of course, speak English. In
the place where I used to work - where almost everyone spoke Scots - the
usual method was to speak English directly to recent incomers from England
until they got used to Scots (which some of them found very difficult at
first).

>I also wonder if the simplifications I applied are something like what
used
>to happen when in olden times contacts and merging of related languages
led
>to simplifications, for instance in a reduction of the number of suffixes
>and consequent simplification and loss of flexibility of English sentence
>structure.
>
Compare e.g. Shetland, where it is now necessary for speakers from the
country to modify their speech in order to be understood by younger people
from the town. Many Shetlanders would not so much speak English, even to be
understood by English speakers, as choose English words instead of Shetland
ones (sometimes leading to hilarious results, like the Shetlander who
reputedly said 'I'm a crofter, and I go to the fishing backwards and
forwards' (Shetlandic 'back an fore', Scots 'back an forrit' =
occasionally).

I wonder whether the increasing closeness of dialects - e.g. the fact that
the speech of Glasgow is now so much nearer to English - leads to a
decrease in competence in the standard form - because the characteristics
of Glasgow speech (e.g. convergent past tenses) are not sufficiently
different from English to cause much misunderstanding, there is little
incentive to become bilingual, as there is with completely different
languages such as English and Gaelic; and therefore, rather than the
Shetland situation where you get some people able to speak only Shetlandic
with accomodation to English where necessary, and others (mostly
professional people) able to code switch completely, in places like Glasgow
you perhaps tend to get either speakers of standard English or speakers of
the local variety, both unable to speak the other (This guess is based on a
recent holiday I had in the Highlands, where instructors from Glasgow
seemed unable or unwilling to alter their native speech - e.g. 'I'v came'
etc - even when speaking to English tourists, though this may have been
affected by the fact that I spoke Scots to them and they may have been
asserting their identity.) To put it differently, does a failure to
recognise bilingualism in education encourage social stratification of
language, and the tendency to regard Glasgow speech as - as the author
James Kelman describes it - the Glasgow variety of English?

John M. Tait.

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