It's a sair fecht for Scots as native dialect dies out

[Harold F. Schiffman]

http://news.scotsman.com Tue 19 Oct 2004

It's a sair fecht for Scots as native dialect dies out

FRANK URQUHART


SINCE time immemorial, the ability to say "its a braw bricht moonlicht
nicht the nicht" has separated the Scots from every other race on the
planet. But no more. New research shows that, even in the north-east of
Scotland, the heartland of the rich Doric dialect, the use of the velar
fricative - the "ch" sound produced in the back of the throat for words
such as loch, broch and fecht - is in danger of dying out. Young people
either have a problem getting their tongues around the linguistic niceties
of the Scots language or have just turned their back on tradition.

The threat to Doric in particular, and the Scots language in general, was
revealed by Dr Jennifer Smith, a lecturer in linguistics at York
University, who conducted research into the use of various dialect markers
in her native Buckie. She said that, while distinctive Doric words such as
"fit" (what), "fan"  (when) and "far" (where) were still being used by
almost the whole population, the Scots "ch" sound is increasingly absent
from young peoples speech.

"The velar fricative in words such as richt, which is so much a
characteristic of Scots speech, definitely seems to be dying out, as are
past-tense endings such as workit and sleepit, instead of worked and
slept," she said. Dr Smith looked at three age groups - 20-30, 50-60, and
the over 80s. She said: "While the over 80s use the velar fricative a lot,
it drops to 40 per cent in the middle group and the younger speakers are
using it only about 10 per cent of the time. So that particular form is
definitely disappearing from our dialect.

"There is something about the velar fricative that they are rejecting.
Some younger speakers are saying they dont want to sound like their
granny, but then others are embracing other forms and are quite happy to
say far ye gaun or fit ye deein. "There must be something else, other than
just standardisation of the language, as an argument for things
disappearing or not disappearing."

Dr Smith stressed, however, that her research showed that it was far from
complete gloom and doom for Doric.  "Other features, such as regularised
verb forms selt and telt, are used just as much by the younger speakers as
the older ones," she said. "Some forms, particular to Doric, are as strong
as ever. For example, nearly everyone I interviewed used the f sound in
words like what and where. Your salient local forms like fit, far and fan
are robust and being used as much by 20-year-olds as they are by
85-year-olds."

Michael Hance, the manager of the Scots Language Resource Centre, said
that the research confirmed his suspicions that changes were taking place
in speech across the country. He said: "Some features of our Scots
dialects seem to be under particular threat. The use of the velar
fricative is dying out all over the place. It will be a sad day when Scots
cant pronounce simple words like loch properly. Of course, the almost
total absence of the Scots language from the school curriculum only
exacerbates this situation."


This article:

  http://news.scotsman.com/scotland.cfm?id=1213092004