[lg policy] What does the Scots language have to do with Scottish identity?

Sat Jan 9 15:51:31 UTC 2016

What does the Scots language have to do with Scottish identity?

It can sometimes seem like hardly a day passes by in Scottish politics
without a social media storm. Yet the occasion of the latest disturbance
may have seemed puzzling as the independence-supporting *National* sported
a front page describing Labour’s latest “stairheid rammy” and calling the
SNP “underdugs”. The occasion? A column
<http://www.thenational.scot/comment/matthew-fitt-jings-or-whit-a-spang-new-column-in-the-mither-tongue.12022>
by Matthew Fitt, the Scots Scriever (writer-in-residence at the National
Library of Scotland).

The reactions were numerous – and perhaps surprising. According to
widespread opinion, Scottish identity is a (if not the) major driving
factor in support for independence. Something as Scottish as the Scots
language should surely find broad support in that camp? But no – widespread
derision followed from all sides. “Jings and crivvens, help ma boab”; “My
parents never left Angus but don’t speak that”; “This isn’t even Scots,
just broken English”; and that most damning description of all, “slang”.

The consensus among academics, if maybe not among laypeople, is that
historically Scots is indisputably a sister language of English, sprung
from the same Old English root, with a liberal admixture of Scandinavian
speech, through the dialects of what is today the north of England. Scots
spread through the Lowlands (and Northern Isles, and not to forget the
north of Ireland) as Gaelic consolidated in the Highlands, becoming
elaborated into a language of literature and law at court and throughout
the country’s burghs. After the Union, as English became the language of
getting on, the tradition waned as Standard English displaced it – an
unmistakably Scottish variety of it, but not a direct descendant of Older
Scots.

Who even speaks Scots today? That question is both easy and devilishly
difficult. Easy, because a question on Scots was included in the latest
census, with over a million people stating they had at least some skills in
the language. Difficult, because drawing hard lines in among the rich
variety of current Scottish speech is not a task for the faint-hearted.
And, more to the point, is there such a thing as Scots still, or has it
merged with the sea of English stretching from Wellington and Lagos to New
Delhi and Anchorage?

Certainly there are places in Scotland where people are proud of local
speech, such as the Borders, the north-east with its “Doric”, and the
Northern Isles. But, you will hear, that has nothing to do with the
artificial Scots of the occasional parliamentary publication
<http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/help/79056.aspx>, or Hugh
MacDiarmid’s “synthetic
Scots” <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176168>. Similarly, everyone
recognises the existence of distinctive varieties spoken in Scotland’s
cities: but you probably won’t find people outside the academy calling
Glaswegian or Dundonian “urban Scots”, though many of their distinctive
features go back to traditional Scots speech.

The Scots language is trapped in a confused identity. Local speech is
thriving
<http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/17/glasgow-accent-scottish-dialect-homogenised-london>,
and it is understood to be authentic and rooted in a community, but
precisely for that reason it resists being used as a common vehicle of
communication (unless the local colour is part of the point), and so “no
one speaks the standard”. Well, reply the advocates, that’s what a standard
is — people don’t really speak English as if they were writing it, either.
Yet that does not appear to convince. Why?

Scottish nationalism is not driven by or even widely associated with
language rights. Unlike Wales, where Plaid Cymru has always been a
pro-Welsh language party, or Catalan and Basque autonomist movements, the
SNP does not distinguish itself on the language policy front – for
instance, it continues the policies of the Gaelic Language Act, passed
under Labour with cross-party support, but does not preside over a
sustained push for the expansion of Gaelic
<https://basedrones.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/scots-gaelic-scots-law-and-scots-attitudes/>;
and unlike Northern Ireland, where language has become enmeshed in
community divides, it is not generally a battleground for party-political
contention <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-29886175>.

Attitudes to written Scots culture are shaped instead by the overall
marginalisation of non-standard varieties, pushed as they are on the one
hand into the twee tartan world of the Broons and on the other hand
strongly associated with the speech of the urban working class and
therefore seen as having little cultural value. Criticism of language
rarely has to do with language itself: it acts, most of time, as a proxy
for social attitudes. In Scotland, it still remains to be seen whether
written Scots becomes an instrument of democratic empowerment, conferring
prestige on hitherto marginalised voices, or whether it does get finally
relegated to an intensely local medium of communication.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/devolution/2016/01/what-does-scots-language-have-do-scottish-identity

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