Language in Scotland

There are three languages spoken in Scotland - Gaelic, Scots and English. And there is a great deal of nonsense spoken about them as well as in them.

The historical evidence is that prior to the coming of the Gaels and Vikings, the spoken language throughout most of Scotland, indeed throughout most of Britain, would have been a dialect of what we now call Welsh, or what linguists like to call Brythonic, or 'P', Celtic as contrasted with Gaelic which the linguists term Goidelic, or 'Q', Celtic. The modern Brythonic languages are Welsh, Cornish and Breton and the modern Goidelic are Irish Gaelic, Scots Gaelic and Manx Gaelic.

That this Brythonic language was spoken in at least Southern Scotland is supported by the evidence of the 8th century epic poem Y Gododdin, relating the death-or-glory attack by the inhabitants of Lothian against a huge Saxon army at the Battle of Catterick in the middle of the 7th century, and by the numerous Brythonic placenames like Pentland, Penicuik, Pencaitland etc.

When I first encountered the terms P and Q Celtic it seemed to be some highly complex arcane terminology, like some secret code. When I discovered what they meant, I laughed. They derive from the fact that frequently words which begin with a 'P' sound in one language will actually be the same word but beginning with a 'K' sound in the other. For example, the word for head in Brythonic is 'Pen' whereas in Goidelic it is 'Ceann'.

Yes, I've grossly over-simplified that but it'll give you a rough idea of what it's all about.

Over a period of several hundred years, Scotland was invaded by various incomers, with the Gaels gaining the ascendency culturally. By about the 8th century Gaelic had replaced Pictish as the dominant language throughout most of Scotland. People will try to tell you Gaelic was only spoken in the North West. Utter nonsense, completely contradicted by the evidence, like the large number of Gaelic placenames throughout most of the southern part of the country.

In time, the Gaels were joined by tribes of people speaking one or other dialect of Germanic languages, Vikings and Angles being the most influential, Angles in the South East and Vikings throughout most of Scotland. Eventually, the various Germanic dialects coalesced into what by the Middle Ages was regarded as the Scots language (sometimes also called Lowland Scots, Lallans or Doric).

Various dialects of this Scots language began to replace Gaelic, beginning in the south east in Lothian then north along the coastal areas through Fife and what is now known as Grampian region. The Borders and Caithness developed their own dialects, the Borders being greatly influenced by Northumbria and Caithness being under Norse control for much of its history. The Norse influence is also strong in the dialects of Gaelic spoken in the Western Isles.

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Linguistic confusion

The most common and most disastrous error in approaching speaking Scots is to presume that Scots is a dialect of English.

This confusion is not confined to non-Scots; due to what they've been mistakenly taught in school many Scots labour under the illusion that what they speak is English.

Once upon a time a renowned Scottish band had a day off in the middle of tour which they spent staying with friends in Belgium, and their road manager offered to cook a traditional Scottish meal for their hosts.

So he headed out to buy ingredients and came to a greengrocery. In he strode and enquired of the shopkeeper if he spoke English. After a struggle, the shopkeeper managed to decipher what was being asked of him and replied that, yes, he did speak a little English.

"Braw!", says the lad, "Sees twae i thir neeps."

In English, that would be "Good! Please give me two of these turnips."

See the problem? The poor lad had been taught that what he spoke was English, albeit a dialect, and so presumed that he would be comprehensible to anyone who spoke English. In fact, he was not speaking English at all - he was speaking perfectly grammatically correct Scots.

Scots is not a dialect of English any more than Dutch is a dialect of German or Danish a dialect of Swedish. Scots and English are sister languages which both developed from what is known as Middle English. Chaucer refers to them as different languages and in his time educated English and Scots people would have been as likely to speak to each other in French as to attempt to understand each other's own languages.

Where English was greatly influenced by the Latin languages, Scots remained closer to the other Northern European languages but also, naturally, drew much influence from the Gaelic language. The old language of the Northern Isles, known as "Norn", would be equally understandable, with a little familiarisation, by both Norwegian and Scots speakers but would be pretty much unintelligible to an English or French speaker.

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Dilution and distortion

With the Union of 1707, there was a move towards homogeneity in language throught the Union but, instead of simply trying to persuade Scots-speaking Scots to learn English as a formal language in addition to their own, there was a sustained effort to obliterate Scots (in a more subtle fashion than was done with Gaelic, which was actually formally outlawed).

For writers, the largest potential market for their work was in the English-speaking south and so, bowing to commercial pressures, most began to write in English. Consequently, there was little opportunity for future developments in standard spelling and grammar as happened in English, and Scots writers like Walter Scott played an enormous part in the process of obliteration.

Where Scots and English words had a common root, the spelling of the Scots word would be altered to make it more intelligible to an English speaker. In time this became a convention which was understood as indicating that it was merely the English word being mispronounced.

Example. There is actually no "oo" spelling in Scots. That sound is invariably spelt "ou". And "ou" is invariably pronounced like the English "oo", or to be more correct, closer to a German " ü ". So "hous" (from Norse "hus"), pronounced approximately like English "hoos", began to be written as "hoose", the addition of the extraneous "e" at the end indicating that this was simply a Scots pronunciation of the English word. Nobody in their right mind would try telling a Dane that their word is simply a mispronunciation or misspelling of the English word.

One of the worst consequences of this process was the appalling abuse of the apostrophe.

For example, a double "L" is rare in Scots and never found at the end of a word. Where the Scots and English share a root and the English ends in, for example, "all", the Scots will end in a double "a", unknown in English. The Scots "aa" is not pronounced like "awe", a common mistake made by English speakers, but is a broad vowel sound unknown in English, closer to "aah", very like the "a" sound in the German "ja".

English "call" is "caa" in Scots, and so the Scots for "called" is "caad". But it became the practise to spell the Scots as "ca'ed", the quite absurd apostrophe introduced to indicate that this was just the way those odd Scots pronounced the English word "called", with pronunciation being changed to make it closer to English, "cawed" rather than something like "caahed" which is the Scots.

All this can create severe difficulties for someone who wants to sing Scots songs in Scots and I hope, through putting together this bunch of articles, to help to remove the worst of those difficulties.

Modern renaissance

In spite of all the pressures towards Anglicisation, Scots has remained very much alive as the daily spoken language for most of Southern and Eastern Scotland, often as a kind of diluted Scots-Anglo hybrid but frequently in authentic dialects of Scots, particularly in the North-East, Fife, the Lothians and Borders. And of course there is a huge repertoire of songs and poetry in Scots.

Since the middle of the last century, there has been something of a small renaissance in both Gaelic and Scots languages, especially in literature, and we have been gradually losing the "cringe" factor regarding speaking Scots.

At one time many Scots speakers would greet attempts by non-Scots to speak our language with embarrassed laughter, which made it extremely difficult for anyone to learn Scots. Gradually that is being overcome as we regain some of the lost confidence in ourselves and our languages.

As well as the recent renaissance in Gaelic literature through the likes of Sorley MacLean, Murdo MacFarlane and Angus McNicol, and bands like RunRig and Capercaillie singing in Gaelic, we have had since the 1950s the resurgence of Scots folksong and there are now a large number of poets and songwriters writing in the various dialects of Scots. Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead writing in Glaswegian, Michael Marra writing in Dundonian, the late Davy Steel writing in Lothian, and a host of others - I give those merely as examples.

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