STARN: Scots Teaching and Resource Network
Unblocking the right nostril
William Soutar, the Perth poet, wrote in his Diary of a Dying Man in 1942, "My right nostril is Scottish but my left is English." Many Scots feel divided between their social life, in which it is natural to speak Scots, and their schooling, which has brain-washed them into thinking that speaking "properly" means speaking English. Being bilingual is not unusual in Europe or the world and thereby people breathe in the air of more than one culture. It's worth remembering that what drivies imaginative and progressive thinking is often called "inspiration." The tragedy is that in Scotland, for most people, the right nostril is blocked.
We are fed the myth that Scots is an inferior language, a "corrupted" form of English, a kind of slang that we should avoid at all costs if we want to "get on'. This nonsense is uttered by people with little understanding of the nature of language. There is nothing inferior about a language that has had a rich literature since the fourteenth century, not to mention a great poetic renaissance in the twentieth. Of course it has common roots with English, but also with the Scandinavian languages and German and Dutch, the Germanic language family. Why is it that so many of those who claim that Scots is just a form of English, say they cannot understand it when it is spoken ? They can't have it both ways. The idea that speaking English is necessary to success in one's career is just snobbery, which won't stand up in the present day, when people are not allowed to discriminate against others on grounds of colour, sex or age.
Is there any other European country in which the native language is left out of education ? We are fortunate in Scotland to have three languages at our disposal - Scots, Gaelic and English. Gaelic has been given recognition and funding to promote itself in education and on the media. It is time the same thing was done for the language spoken by the majority of the population. Research has shown me that Scots usage has survived all the efforts made since the 18th century to eliminate what were condemned as "Scotticisms."
A recent ill-informed article in The Big Issue accused protagonists of Scots of romanticism and described the Scots Dictionary and the Scots Bible as "exercises in nostalgia." I buy The Big Issue from people who speak Scots. Who's conning who ? When the Big Issue conducted a survey of people in the street, they found that eighty percent of those asked thought Scots should be taught in schools. They want their language; they want their heritage.
When it comes to education, as any teacher, like myself, knows, everyone who has sat in a classroom becomes an expert on it, in their own eyes and most teachers are sick of the endless "reforms" being imposed on them. But the teaching of Scots doesn't come into that category. Now that our Universities are teaching Scots in a serious way, and training colleges are supporting them, teachers should be appearing, with a knowledge of Scots and its history, able to teach their pupils how to learn the Scots they say they don't know or improve the Scots they have but are discouraged from using.
There is now a Scots Language Resource Centre in the A.K. Bell library in Perth, funded by the Scottish Office and local government and enterprise, and poised to start producing resource material that schools will need in order to provide the teaching of Scots in the new courses for 5-14 year-olds. The media can help by giving a higher profile to Scots in our newspapers and radio and television programmes. Once the attitude changes, anything is possible, and a change of attitude costs nothing. The teaching of Scots is now being debated by several educational bodies, including the Scottish Consultative Council for the Curriculum and the Scottish Association of Teachers of English, at conferences on the 24th and 25th of February in the National Library of Scotland and the Brunton Theatre in Musselburgh.
People argue that Scots can't be taught, because there is no Standard Scots, as there is Standard English. They argue endlessly about spelling and about not being understood by the English, something that has never bothered the English much, in their dealings with foreigners. But there is no Standard Gaelic either, and it is being taught. A Standard will emerge of course, because of this. So if we want a Standard Scots, we must teach the forms of Scots that exist, encourage it, allow it to be used and raise its status, as I tried to do in my quarter century in the classroom, and we must start with Scots as it is at the moment and progress from there. To quote someone who speaks Scots badly and then condemn everyone who uses it, on that basis - as an "outplacement counsellor" in the Big Issue article did - is another flawed argument. We can't put the clock back and we can't stop language changing. but we can help Scots to know their language, improve their use of it and adapt it to the twenty-first century, unlock the door to their literature and history, which has been kept closed for too long, and, most important of all, be proud of it all.