On Friday December 15th 2017 the centre director Bryan Stewart spoke about languages in Scotland at Sofia University. The students are masters’ students of the “British & American Studies” department at the university and are embarking on a course of study looking at the languages & cultures of Scotland. Find his speech below:
A Land of Three Languages
(Talk on Scots speech and history of language in Scotland)
Good afternoon, my name’s Bryan Stewart and I operate just across the road at the Scottish cultural Centre and Caledonian School.
I have to say how flattered I am that you good people have taken the trouble to show interest in my homeland and the languages of Scotland. I am honoured to stand here with you and offer you perhaps some insight which may not be so obvious of students coming to the subject from an academic perspective, which is, of course where any intellectual endeavour should come from, however, a touch of the personal experience never did anyone any harm as whatever you feel to be superfluous you are, of course, at liberty to disregard.
I’ll break this up into four short parts. I will start with what is known as ‘The Scots Cringe’ and the dichotomy within the nation itself vis a vis language. I shall continue with the Scottish Enlightenment and the Northern Irish / Ulster Scots aspect. From there we shall move onto the revival of Scots itself and the class differences therein and finish with a quick look at accents and dialects.
My fellow countrymen, it would appear, will celebrate everything and anything from the invention of the TV, telephone and modern roads to Scottish football successes of the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s.
They will do all this but will attempt their level best to do it in English, denying their own language, or that they ever had one, in the process. I’m often reminded of an incident at a printer’s workshop in Ayrshire when an organisation I was a member of was having a map of the country made in Scots. Anyway, when one of the printers took a look at the first sample we were there to check over, he shouted to his colleague: “Hey Andra, taka luk at thon, thuy’v scrievet aw the names wi funny speellin!!” Pretty much says it all. The father of the Scots revival, Billy Kay, he of ‘The Mither Tongue’ fame was more than once called a fascist for having the temerity to promote the language he grew up speaking at home. I can hardly think of any other place where such could happen.
When I was a kid growing up in the 1970’s it wasn’t unusual to be belted for speaking ‘wrong’ ie in the language of your family and home, then be pressganged into a reading at the annual Burns festivities on January 25th with a good belting for non compliance. Absurd but totally true, I can assure you. I wasn’t myself the recipient of such derangement however my school friend Hugh Caulfield was. I remember an occasion in the wake of a belting he’d received for speaking Scots in the English class not three weeks after Hugh had addressed the class for Burns’ day. I should point out that Hugh was the obvious choice for such a performance as he originally hailed from Kilmarnock which is of course deep in Burns’ country. Anyway my friend’s exhortations about the contradictoriness of being hailed one minute then punished the next for the same use of language seemed to leave him in rather a state of confusion. “Never mind” I comforted him, “take it as a compliment, you were punished in English for speaking a foreign language so at least old Woody recognises your tongue!
Many years later while reading Hugh McIlvanny’s ‘Docherty’ many such experiences were brought to mind. McIlvanny was most certainly representing reality through his fiction and I, for one, can vouchsave this with my own recollections of primary school and even at high school.
Things have moved on and progressed, thank heavens. There is at last a more general acceptance of both of our indigenous languages. Of course it wouldn’t be Scottish if it weren’t loaded with tartan irony and the irony on this occasion comes via our dear old class system, which, don’t let anyone fool you, is every bit as pronounced in Scotland as it is in England. Now we are in the dichotomous position whereby the newly enriched and empowered working class has morphed into an English speaking middle class. Meanwhile the resurgence of Lallans has been spearheaded by an elite in the main belonging to the SNP or one or other of its cultural derivatives and has permeated into the educated classes as a badge of honour to display at cultural events and gatherings of the chattering classes. Still, we must be thankful for small mercies and at least the Scots tongue survives in however a diluted form.
A living example of such ‘mobility vs tradition’ again comes from my own home region. I went to school in Cumbernauld which is largely a new town. The people who were decamped there in the 1960’s and 70’s saw upward mobility in the dichotomous social milieu of voting for renewed hope from the slums of Glasgow and Lanarkshire by giving their vote to the Scottish National Party while reprimanding their children for speaking ‘wrongly’. That ‘wrongly’ of course was no less that the beautiful Lallans speech most had been brought up speaking. We were all British now, a perverse reversal of 70’s Glasgow where everyone was proudly Scottish and spoke in that manner while voting for the Unionist Labour Party.
Four miles from Cumbernauld in Airdrie, the populace spoke and continue to speak in a form of the Scots tongue. As a young boy going to watch Airdrieonians FC play at Broomfield, it was somewhat of a comfort to hear people speaking just like my brother and I; good old Airdrie, possible the least pretentious town in all of Great Britain.
Where Scots has maintained its presence in every day spoken communication is, strangely, in Northern Ireland. Indeed, the last UK census for the province came in English, Gaelic and Scots, albeit mostly to placate the Protestant majority as Gaelic is largely associated with the catholic nationalist minority. Feel free to correct me here but if I’m not mistaken this is the first time Scots has appeared on any official British Government documentation. Having been to Belfast on many occasions, I can vouchsafe that the Scots spoken there is the real thing and a joy to behold.
The language went there with the plantation settlement of the 16th century and appears to have survived almost intact down to today as has its cousin in the southern states of the USA, in particular in the Appalachian Mountains, where the Ulster Scots made their home.
Why did Scots lose its prominence in the home country? It would appear that after political union with England, the flowering of innovation and culture which became the Scottish Enlightenment demanded a universal language in which to spread the word. With English so close geographically and linguistically it must have appeared inevitable that Scots was to be relegated to rural Scotland and the north of Ireland. Could David Hume or Adam Smith have reached the ears of Europe’s burgeoning intellectual circles having first to go through the tortuous translation process? Suffice to say that 18th century Scotland wasn’t unlike Poland and Czech in the 90’s and indeed Bulgaria now, whereby all and sundry were rushing hither and thither in a desperate attempt to become at least conversant in English!!
Coming from North Lanarkshire, which lies dead on the accent change border, I was always interested in accents and dialects as a child. The split runs through my hometown with people in Cumbernauld Village and east Cumbernauld speaking with a more pronounced Edinburgh accent using verbs such as ‘ken’ ‘gang’ and ‘spraff’ like nearby Falkirk whereas in the upper town and western end the accent is almost identical to the dulcet tones heard in Airdrie, 4 miles away and with a distinct Glasgow feel. The names of the towns around my home region are the living embodiment of old Scots. Cumbernauld from ‘cummernaut’ meaning confluence of streams and Airdrie, ‘airidh’ meaning a hill pasture.
I have found during my wandering around Europe that the linguistic differences between Edinburgh and Glasgow are far more pronounced than those between many neighbouring nation states. This is, of course, a very sensitive subject and so I shall leave you to ponder suffice to say Bulgaria is not included here!
Can a community of people be classed as a nation even though it doesn’t have a living language of its own?
Ireland; Belgium; Switzerland; Austria; USA and the New World; like the British Isle, most of the countries of former Yugoslavia share a language; Sweden and Norway; Estonia and Finland; Byelorussia; Czech and Slovakia; Kosovo; and last but not least, Bulgaria and Macedonia.
Estonians call their language ‘Estonian’ but the reality is that it is utterly indistinguishable from Finnish. Macedonians do likewise as you are all too aware. The difference between Czech and Slovak is a ‘hachek’ the Irish learn Gaelic in school but you will be hard pressed to hear it on a visit to the Emerald Isle. What do east Ukrainians and Byelorussians speak? Switzerland has three languages, four if you count Romanisch. Austrians speak German, of course. As for the former Yugoslavia I am reminded of a question I was once asked by a Bosnian during the troubled times in that part of the world.
“What’s the difference between a language and a dialect” he posed. Knowing the renowned Sarajevan sense of humour I had a feeling that the answer had nothing to do with syntax, vocabulary or grammar so I conceded my knowledge deficit.
“A language has an army” came the unforgettable answer.
