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Criticism & Commentary

Scots in English?

The question we are being asked to consider is, "Should we teach Scots in the English class ?" I would like to turn it round and ask, "What should we teach in the language class ?" The area of education we are talking about relates to imparting skill in reading, writing, talking and listening. Obviously this should relate to the language or languages used by the pupils in every aspect of their everyday lives. To try to pretend that, in Scotland, this involves only English is completely out of keeping with the facts. Most Scots children, in common with most Scots people, are bilingual, for we have more than one language at our disposal and most of us make use of this. Some of us speak Scots and English, others, Gaelic and English ; I also know of some who can speak all three; there are those who speak Scots and Urdu or Scots and Punjabi, or Scots and Chinese ; even English incomers find their children picking up Scots, along with their English. Of course there are the Scots who fondly imagine they speak nothing but English, but whose speech is riddled with what used to be called Scotticisms, which nearly two centuries of sustained campaigning have failed to eradicate. Of course many people speak Scots badly, because no one has ever taught them how to speak it well. That seems to me to be a fairly good reason for including it in the curriculum.

I have recently been visiting Glenshee to do evening storytelling sessions with groups of school-children onweek-long ski-courses,accompanied by their teachers. The first of these was from a very nice school in Aberdeen. My stories used quite a lot of Scots and this posed no problem with the children, who responded enthusiastically to them all, and even joined in the songs with which I interlaced the tales. I had heard the children talking among themselves before the session began and they seemed normal Scottish children, who used the usual mixture of Scots and English in their conversation. Judge my surprise, after it was over, when the head teacher who had thoroughly enjoyed the evening and who was full of praise for what I had done, observed, "Of course, none of our children speak Scots at all." Now I could see it was the kind of school, where speaking properly would mean speaking English, and I would imagine that when they were speaking to their headmistress, the children might try to do this. But had she cloth ears for what they spoke at other times ? There's none so deaf as those who don't want to hear. Storytelling, by the way, is an excellent teaching tool for Scots and one that I used a good deal in the classroom. It has many uses : it can teach language skills, both for speaking and writing, it can improve listening - for everyone likes a story - and it can motivate otherwise reluctant pupils to do work, in other words, bribe them !Also, since gaining my PhD from a project based on recording and analyzing the storytelling traditions of Perthshire in the context of the history and lives of the storytellers, and also, since taking early retirement, I have become a storyteller in schools and have given done workshops with parents, librarians, teachers' in-service days and folk festivals.

This is something that really troubled me in my years in the classroom. Why should I subscribe to this denial of existence of what has been a distinct language since the fourteenth century; a language with a history of it own and a literature of it own ? Why should I have to argue with people about the existence of this language and literature, since they are there for all to see and hear ?

We are all familiar with the hoary old chestnuts of the anti-Scots camp : Scots is just a dialect, Scots is just a form of English; Scots is just a "corrupted" form of English ; Scots is just slang ; Scots is "the language of the gutter." Notice how contradictory these statements are. If Scots is a form of English it can't be just slang or the language of the gutter. Slang is not a corruption of language but a form of words that has been universalised by the media to enliven informal conversation. Everyone, from oor wee jock to government ministers, broadcasters and Japanese car-factory workers say "OK" - it has nothing to do with their native languages. It is also inaccurate to call Scots a dialect, since it is perfectly obvious to anyone who lives in Scotland that it is not one dialect but several. In fact the Concise Scots Dictionary recognises no fewer than nine distinct Scots dialects, with local variations of each able to be demonstrated.

Let me briefly dispose of the idea that Scots is just a form of English. While the two languages certainly have common roots, they also share these roots with the Scandinavian languages, German and Dutch - the other members of the Germanic family of languages. No one tries to say that German and Dutch or Norwegian and Danish are not distinct languages., yet they are as like each other as Scots and English. English developed from the West Saxon element of Old English, while Scots grew out of the Anglian dialect of the kingdom of Northumbria, and since that divergence, they have developed along different lines and been subject to different influences. There are, for example, many words that are common to both Danish and Scots that are not found in English at all. There is also a Gaelic influence on Scots that affects both vocabulary and usage. What first raised the status of Scots was its literary use instead of Latin or French by the Medieval Makars, Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas, the last-mentioned of whom being the first to call it Scottism Up till then that had been the name for Gaelic and the language which by now most of the people spoke was called Inglis.

All very confusing you say, but don't worry. There is a very easy way to illustrate the difference between the two languages, even then, by an appeal to the ear. Just compare a reading aloud from one of the Makars, with one from the English poet of the same period, Geoffrey Chaucer. Even though we don't know exactly how these languages sounded at that time, since tape recorders hadn't been invented, if you take the spelling as a guide, you can hear that they are different. Here are two brief quotations to illustrate the point :-

From Chaucer's Prologue to the Canterbury Tales:-

A knighte ther was an that a worthy man
That fro the tme when he first began
To ryden out, he loved chivalrys,
Trouthe and honoure, fredom an curtesye.

And from William Dunbar's Twa Merit Wemen an the Wedow:-

One of the merit wemen tells how she will look for a new man
Than suld I cast me to keik in kirk and in market
And all the cuntre about, kingis court and uther,
Quhair I ane galland micht get aganis the nixt yeir.

She describes the one she has in very uncomplimentary terms and you'll note the Scots words here too :-

I have ane wallidrag, ane worme, ane auld wobat carle .....
To see him scart his awin skyn grit scunner I think.

Already the divergence was apparent. Ever since then Scottis, later Scotch, or nowadays Scots, has been used to designate the language north of the Border.

After the fourteenth century, Scots was the language of all the people of Scotland, including the royal court, the law, the Church and the arts. The effect of all this, as with English, was for a Standard literary Scots to develop. But this was destroyed or eroded by three main events :

• the Union of the Crowns in 1603, which took the royal court south ;
• the Authorised version of the Bible, which affected both English and Scots literature shortly after ;
• and the undemocratically decided Union of the Parliaments in 1707.

But because the Union affected only the ruling class as far as language went, the ordinary folk continued to speak Scots and have continued to do so to a greater or lesser degree to this day.

This underlines the importance of Scots language as being part of our identity and the denial of it to successive generations in their education, is the reason why many Scots today don't know who they are, or think they want to be somebody else, because their language and culture have been marginalised and treated like a stigma. Even in schools where some attention is paid to Burns and Grassic Gibbon, that's about the sum total of the Scots literature content How can we remedy this state of affairs ?

First, we must begin right from the start of primary school to accept and encourage the use of whatever form of Scots is spoken in any particular area. We must introduce children to a wider range of Scottish poetry, particularly twentieth century poetry. In Perth, where I live, our local poet William Soutar wrote a lot of bairn rhymes, believing that if the Scots tongue is to be kept alive, you have to start with the youngest children. His poetry is of the very best quality, and after him, the late J.K.Annand carried on the tradition. These are only two names from a whole galaxy. Older children should certainly study the work of poets, writing in both Scots and English, like McDiarmid, Mackay Brown, McCaig, Goodsir Smith, Henderson, Crichton Sniith, Garioch, Bruce and a wheen o ithers. I also made a point of giving pupils at least a sample of Barbour's Bruce, Blin Hary's Wallace, Henryson's Twa Mice and even Dunbar's Twa Merit Wemen and the Wedow, as well as something of Ramsay and Ferguson. Authors like John Galt should not be neglected and present day Scots plays - if you can get them in published form - are very desirable. The trouble is that many excellent Scots plays, like those of Donald Campbell, for instance, whom I rate extremely highly, have never been published because, while the Scottish Arts Council Drama Department will give grants towards production, it will not do the same for publication. The result is that a lot of very good plays can't be introduced to schools. I found this out when I was preparing a Scots Literature Course for an evening class and wanted to include plays in the recommended reading list.

As well as reading Scots, pupils should be taught to write in Scots, but as I discovered from experience, first someone has to teach the teachers. Now that Scots is being taught in University course, this should become less of a problem, as long as training colleges follow on classroom methods. I was determined to teach my pupils to write in Scots, so I evolved my own method, by trial and error, and for what it was worth, it was outlined in a booklet which the Perth Branch of the Scots Language Society had printed and circulated to primary schools in the district. We also put a resource pack for schools together, which Perth Library published in a very attractive format under the title of Flooers and Beasties, and which included my Scots Scrievin guidelines. This resource pack can now be purchased through the Scots Language Resource Centre in the new A.K. Bell Library in Perth. I have also compiled an anthology for schools in Tayside, which is inall the schools, and which contains material of all kinds in Scots and English and a little Gaelic, from James IV to Dougie Mclean. As regards spelling and usage, we now have the Concise Scots Dictionary and the Concise English-Scots Dictionary to give us plenty of help with these. It can't be stressed too much that speaking or writing in Scots is not just a matter of sticking in Scots words instead of English ones : there are specifically Scots idioms and constructions, Scots ways of putting things, just as there are in any language, and you know what happens when you try to translate from one language to another without taking cognisance of this. I once had a colleague whose sense of humour ran to turning Scots phrases into dog-French. or dog-Latin. "Nunquam caput" was his version of "Never heed," while "Nane o this hingin aboot" became "Pas de ce pendant autour de." The same ludicrous results can come from, simply substituting words without knowing how they are used.

Reading gives you this and also hearing it round about you. I am always amazed by people who say you never hear Scots spoken nowadays. When they are in the supermarket, or a hospital ward, or a doctor's waiting room, or in a bar, or at a bus stop, do they really hear what is going on round about them ? In my experience, with any given class, about a third of the pupils took easily to writing in Scots, getting the hang quite quickly of things like eliminating the apostrophes for so-called "missed out" letters and achieving a degree of consistency in spelling. About another third would be struggling with these, while the remaining third would be either uninterested or unable to do any of it. This seems to me about normal for any learning process, so it does not seem to me that we are taking on anything too difficult in seeking to teach the writing of Scots. Once we have got used to the idea it's just the same as anything else we teach. I don't think I've found the perfect method, so I don't think everyone should rush to adopt it. It was merely aimed at giving teachers a starting point to work from. What I believe would be very helpful would be to use some of the methods practised in the teaching of modern languages. I think it should begin with oral work - talking and listening - and then go on to reading and writing.

In order to do this, we have to overcome our prejudices which are the result of two centuries of brain-washing. This change in attitude is crucial to the raising of the status of Scots language. We must stop equating speaking properly with speaking English and we must challenge this assumption wherever we meet it. I once spent three days as a teacher in industry in the Perth headquarters of an international insurance company. The staff structure there was an upper tier of top experts chosen from all over the country, and a lower tier of secretarial staff, recruited locally. When I was talking to the Personnel Officer, an Englishwoman,, she complained that the local school leavers who came for job interviews used Scots words when they were speaking. When I asked her why they should not use their own language in their own country, she was totally non-plussed. Clearly I was some kind of crank in her estimation and I had visions of her drawing the attention of my superiors to my obvious unsuitability to instruct young people. She would probably be in agreement with the magistrate who took exception to the man who said, "Ay" instead of "Yes" in court. But really such attitudes are quite ridiculous and need to be combated at an official level. What we should really concentrate on is teaching children who mumble and slur their Scots, because they've been taught to be ashamed of it and think it doesn't matter how they enunciate it, that this is a fine, expressive language that they should take pride in and try to use well. We should make it possible for them to use it in the class-room if they want, as well as read and write it as part of their main school work, not as an optional extra that doesn't really matter very much.

When I was teaching, I always preferred my subject to be known as Language and Literature, so that it could include Scots as well as English. I would press very strongly for this to be made official. I don't think this is a politically biassed suggestion: in fac, it is the status quo which is based on political bias and I want to get away from that. The days are long past when we should think it right to deny our children their heritage and impose on them an education that encompasses only a part of their experience. Much has been made of how the Gaels were robbed of their language, forbidden to use it on pain of punishment and thus denied access to their Celtic culture. The rest of Scots have also suffered, but because their language is closer to English than Gaelic is, the injustice has not been so obvious. We need to reclaim our language and our culture for future generations and the best way to do this is to make sure it has its rightful place in the curriculum.