To the Doric speaker,

I wanted to shout: 'Gonnae

speak English, hen?'

 

David McVey

 

I've tried to be concerned about the Scots language. I really have. Years ago I read a fine book by Billy Kay and tried to start doing some writing in what I understood to be 'Scots'. I'd produced a story narrated by a working class student from Glasgow and it didn’t work in standard English so I tried redrafting it in the daily speech I'd known since I was a boy in Kirkintilloch. As a story, it probably wasn’t very good. Here's a taste:
     I did come fae a fairly drab workn class hame; ma daein the dinner an the washin an da workn, comin hame an readin the Record until his tea wis ready – ye'll know the kinna thing a mean.
     I submitted it to a magazine that specialised in Scots and received probably the sniffiest rejection letter I've ever received – and I've received a lot. The one thing they didn't say was that the story was rubbish, actually an evaluation I'm always prepared to accept. No; the problem was that the language I had used wasn’t really Scots. The vocabulary was English with a Glaswegian accent. And Glasgow speech was, after all, debased by influences from the Irish diaspora.
     And I suppose, fatally, I hadn't used words like 'aiblins' and 'unco' and 'anent', thus making my language not genuinely Scots. Perhaps I should have signed my Christian name as 'Dauvit'. In any case, I decided to give up writing in Scots. Well, not quite. My local council used to run literary competitions every year, one of them for a poem in Scots. So I wrote a poem that I called 'The Guardians o Lallans; My Last Scots Poem' (as it happens it was also my first). It began:
     The Guardians o Lallans are humourless and dour,
     Ower the language o Scots they hae aa the power,
     They hae goatee beards an aye wear tweeds...
     I also somewhat cheekily laid into the kind of individuals who (in my experience) tended to win Scots poetry competitions. And I had a go at the commissars of literary Scots:
    'The language of Glasgow is debased and vile,
     Tainted with influences from the Emerald Isle.'
     Funny: when it's their ain hooses they're in,
     They speak the English o Kelvinside or Corstorphine.
     I know, I know, cheap, nasty and not very good. But I was annoyed and angry. Even so, I did make one cogent point: how that odd word 'Lallans' sounds like the name of an accountant's bungalow in Bearsden. I came third. Out of four. And had to sit, watching, as the tweed-jaiketed winner strode to the front and smugly read out his aiblins-spattered entry. So by now I had the clear picture; Scots was the everyday language of ordinary Scottish people. It had been denied us in our culture, in our churches, in our schools, in the media and even in our literature. But if you tried to write in it, men – always men – with glasses and beards and tweed jaikets would tell you that you weren’t Scots enough.
     Not so terribly long ago I was at a conference (on the subject of adult literacy) and at lunch the conversation turned to the Scots language. I remarked, in a mild and understated way, upon my experiences with the Lallans commissars. One man turned suddenly to me (and I jerked back because he was a big fella) and exploded, 'The language of the Scots people was stolen from them in a campaign of systematic cultural oppression!'. And, yes, he actually spoke like that. He ranted on in similar vein for quite some time. At the end I said, in emollient terms, 'More tea?'. They should send me to the Middle East.

 

     One interesting thing he said was that the guardians of the Scots Language Dictionary were now beginning to include Glasgow words and phrases in their tome. This struck me as nice of them, even if it had taken them quite a while to include us in their exclusive, goateed club, and I said so. I soon wished I hadn't. I was at another meeting, more recently, when it was pointed out that the Scottish Government was now placing Scots language input in the school curriculum. This was warmly welcomed from the floor by a woman who spoke in the heaviest and (it sounded to me) most affected Aberdonian Doric; I struggled to follow her and was sorely tempted to shout out 'Gonnae speak English, hen?'.
     It's a strength and a blessing in Scotland that we have such a variety of spoken language, whether you corral any of it as 'Scots' or not. But I struggle to see any connection between the peculiar extra-terrestrial inflexions and pronunciations of Aberdonian Doric and the language that I grew up with. Are they both Scots? Are either of them? Is Doric purest Scots, while Glaswegian is some kind of mixed-race lower-caste pidgin?
     The problem with any language is that once you have to start protecting it, it's effectively dead already. Probably half of Scotland's Gaelic-speaking population now work in television and are broadcasting to the other half; it won't save Gaelic as a modern language. Nor will the Guardians o Lallans save any mass synthetic Scots linguistic entity. Lallans will never be used in academic discourse, in publicity copy (even the Scots Language Society's homepage is in English, I notice), in the media or for technical purposes.
     Yet Scots will survive on the streets, on buses, on the football terraces and in the pubs. Users of so-called 'ned' language have, on their own (with, perhaps, a little help from 'Chewin' the Fat'), evolved a uniquely Scottish vocabulary and style: 'You're a pure total wideo, man!'. By contrast, middle-class Scots teenagers speak a mildly Scottish-accented English whose cadences and phraseology are traceable from transatlantic influences such as 'Friends': 'Like, I'm so not ready for this exam, Fiona'. Equally, in England, youth language is evolving with Friends elements in some circles and hip-hop cadences in others: 'You so is not respectin mi'.
     Seemingly alone in the UK, working-class Scottish youngsters are resisting language influences from the USA and helping to shape their own spoken language's future. That's Scots.
     You can't channel or dictate the evolution of language. In literature, Scottish writers will continue to reflect Scottish speech and language in ways of their own choosing. They should be free to do so. It's better to trust our writers than to try to prescribe the language they ought to use.
     I'll certainly continue to write the way I want to, mostly in English but also reflecting the West of Scotland speech I grew up with. If this annoys the Scots purists, I won't lose any sleep over it.

 

David McVey is a writer and lecturer who worked for many years at the then University of Paisley. He writes both short stories and non-fiction