LL-L: "Language conflicts" LOWLANDS-L, 01.AUG.2000 (02) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 01.AUG.2000 (02) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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From: Ian James Parsley [parsley at highbury.fsnet.co.uk]
Subject: LL-L: "Language conflicts" LOWLANDS-L, 31.JUL.2000 (02) [E]

Colin Wilson wrote:

> I'm not so sure about the SLS, and I'll check. As I understand it,
> although its regular income is small, it has had a bank balance in
> the (low) tens of thousands for some years, due to one-off contributions
> (such as legacies) that it received.

Yes, the USLS has a few thousand from similar sources. However, it must be
spent on certain projects (e.g. children's books), and it is very difficult
to get these done. I did one book, "First Thousand Words", but some people
simply will not accept that the Scots for "telephone" is "telephone"! There
are an awful lot of people playing the invention game - we've mentioned this
quite recently on this list.

> Can we take it, though, that the people concerned will actually work in
> return for their salaries, and the fact-finding missions will actually
find
> some facts? The assumption above seems to be that the money will be
> squandered, and I'd be interested to know why.

No, that would be a bad assumption. I wouldn't want to go into it in too
much detail, but the people concerned have generally been appointed from the
lowish ranks of the NI Civil Service and, both in their past and from what I
know in dealing with them since January, have shown absolutely no aptitude
for the development of the linguistic side whatsoever. None of these people
has any linguistic qualification that I know of, nor do any of them speak
anything other than English. Therefore it is rather difficult to see how
they can decide what constitutes a worthy "fact-finding mission", besides
the fact that they wouldn't need to carry them out if they had linguists and
Scots-speakers already employed! In any case, in Northern Ireland "facts"
are generally considered irritating little things designed specifically to
get in the way of romantic idealism (in this case the great idea some people
are working on here of the pure Ulster-Scots race!)

The most obvious example of this were the meetings to decide how to spend
this quarter-of-a-million on an attitudinal survey. I explained earlier why
it was a non-starter. But at the meetings, was there a single Ulster-Scots
speaker in attendance? Or a single professional linguist or linguist
postgrad? Hardly surprising, therefore, that what they came up with was
utterly unworkable. Even the EBLUL representative, despite being
unbelievably hard-working, seems to have had little idea, as an Irish
speaker, of how to deal with a minority language that a) lacks a written
standard and b) is very similar to the main language of the state in which
it is spoken.

> During the campaign to have a question on Scots in next year's Census,
> which ran from 1995 until this year, one of the responses of the British
> government (and then its puppet in Edinburgh) was always that the question
> of whether a particular person speaks Scots, isn't a question that's
really
> amenable to a simple answer of "yes" or "no".

I'm sure you would agree though, Colin, that that's a bit different. After
all, the question of whether somebody speaks Gaelic isn't always a simple
answer of "yes" or "no".

> what's really needed is a more detailed investigation into the
> degree to which Scots language-forms have been retained, and how widely,
> and in which areas.

Absolutely, an investigation which qualified linguists with an excellent
grounding in Scots would carry out. Not civil servants with no
qualifications.

> However, I'm not suggesting that the SLS could mount, or even pay for,
> such a study. All I'm suggesting is a study into public *attitudes* toward
> the promotion of Scots, based on a sample of the population.

Yes, one idea I had was to target schools. Where a certain proportion of
parents (say, 15%) showed an interest in Scots language and literature (and,
in our case, culture and history) being taught in the school, then it would
be taught. Again, this would require Scots-speaking linguists (and
historians) to design the relevant teaching materials, but, if there's
demand, they should be paid to do so. This idea is in its early stages
though, any additional ideas most welcome!

Best wishes,
-----------------
Ian James Parsley

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