Scots is nothing more than an English dialect. Stop romanticising a second-rate version of English.
---------------------------
K Wilson (1998) Scots: Language or dialect? Kenneth Wilson examines the question of what actually constitutes a language (and decides that frankly Scots ISN'T one). Extract from a 1998 Cencrastus article.
Scots: Language or dialect?
Extract from a 1998 Cencrastus magazine article by Kenneth Wilson.
Avis au Lecteur: Please read what follows in the spirit in which it is intended, i.e., one of good-humoured, open, honest debate. I have been giving some thought to the discussion concerning whether Scots is a language or a dialect. The linguist David Crystal, author of The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, states that the distinction between language and dialect is one of the most difficult to draw in the domain of theoretical linguistics. If one is not a linguist then one must, at least, be cautious.
Apropos of this debate, I bumped into an extremely well-known Scottish folklorist and scholar recently. When I asked him if Scots is a language or a dialect, he replied, ‘does it really matter?” I think he has a point. Yet, one is still faced with the fact that the issue does matter to a great many people, particularly in Scotland’s literary community, and this requires explanation.
For some countries language is an extremely important aspect of personal/national identity. Take the case of Irish Gaelic in Ireland. It was not mere coincidence that Michael Collins, and the other Irish signatories to the treaty of 1922, signed in Gaelic. This is just one instance of the importance Irish people attached, and continue to attach, to their indigenous language.
I believe that the importance that has been placed on the dialect/language debate with regards to Scots arises for reasons similar to those which pertained, and continue to pertain, in Ireland. The operative word here is similar, not identical. Irrespective of whether Scots is a language or a dialect, its role in Scottish history and culture deserves to be treated on it own terms.
There is no doubt, in my mind, that Scots is neither widely spoken nor widely understood in Scotland today. The dominant mode of communication is a variety of English called Scottish English. Of course, this claim could be tested. One could go out to Princes St or Union St on a Saturday afternoon and ask people if they know what ‘Auld Lang Syne’ means. It is my contention that, put conservatively, less than half could give the correct answer.
It does not follow that Scots is not important; it is. Equally, while I freely accept that Scots is an important aspect of Scottish identity, neither does it follow that Scottish identity would somehow improve, if everyone started using it widely again. Were Herr Doctor Karl Marx still alive, he would be quick to point out that people’s well-being depends on matters other than language, such as access to the essential resources required to sustain an adequate life-style. Thus, in the light of this, one has to ask: is the emphasis, placed by many, on linguistic identity a decoy or distraction from issues such as what might constitute a more egalitarian form of socio-economic organisation? In answer, I freely admit that the policy, often implicit, to demean people because they speak in a “brogue” is undoubtedly morally repugnant, and much recent work has been done to redress this moral wrong. At the same time, a number of commentators have pointed to what they describe as the “narcissistic politics of identity,” by the ruling establishment. This requires a little explanation.
Today, issues of identity have the stage, whether of national identity, sexual identity, racial identity, and indeed, linguistic identity. What is not on the agenda, at least since the beginning of the rise to ascendancy of the New Right in the early to mid 70s, is the notion that socio-economic organisation can more equitably provide for citizens’ needs. Indeed, there is hard historical evidence that narcissistic identity politics were actively encouraged by the ruling establishment internationally, as a means of blocking the more fundamental radicalism which drove the upheavals of the mini Enlightenment, i.e. the sixties…It is for reasons such as these that I am extremely suspicious of identity politics.
Clearly linguistic identity has an important role to play. But it would be a grotesque mistake to suppose that the solutions to our problems are to be found solely in its terms (postmodernists actually make this error). We live in a complex world. The answers to the grave problems human beings face are not to be found by a valorisation of language and the aesthetic; rather, we need to identify and solve problems by the use of something the Enlightenment was rather strong on - REASON.
To return, more particularly, to the issue with which I began: if Scots is a dialect then, in my opinion, that is no less valuable or respectable than if it is a language. Of course the issue takes a twist if the claim is made that Scots has been inaccurately described as a dialect on, say, political grounds. Since I am neither post-modernist nor relativist, I believe an assessment can be made regarding the status of Scots qua dialect or language, independently of political considerations. To reiterate, this is a matter for linguists, not philosophers, historians, poets or novelists.
Nevertheless, I do have an opinion on the matter. I think it is a dialect. One argument which would go some way to changing my mind is if I were shown a clear example of a substantive grammatical difference between Scots and English. From my own, all too limited, knowledge of Scots, I can not think of such a substantive grammatical difference - perhaps you can. I think that such a criterion is useful in the debate, on the ground that variations in pronunciation and orthography are not sufficient to describe variation of language. What I mean is that variations in pronunciation and orthography, by themselves, are not enough to confer linguistic distinctiveness.
There is a second argument which underlies my belief that Scots is a dialect, which runs as follows. Recently the estimate of the number of languages on Earth was revised upwards from about 5,000 to about 10,000. Given the difficulties which language barriers currently present to trans national communication, I do not think it helpful to posit more difference than there already is - unless one can be sure that that additional difference is absolutely justified. Put abstractly, this amounts to a theoretical preference for not proliferating difference unnecessarily.
This argument can be put differently. English, French, German etc. are “dialects” of an Indo European root. Some historical linguists have, in fact, posited a language called proto-Indo-European, even though it is likely to be virtually impossible to reconstruct. So, on this view, both English and Scots are dialects - given that this entails an unusual construal of ‘dialect’. This brings me to another pertinent argument. The lexical and grammatical differences between, say, French, English and German are sufficiently marked, in addition to mutual unintelligibility (not untranslatability that they are standardly referred to as distinct languages. But unintelligibility is a necessary, but insufficient, condition alone, to distinguish one language from another. In other words, because one does not understand what someone says, does not mean that it is a different language - only that it may be. For example, many Edinburghers testify that they have difficulty understanding a broad Glaswegian accent. They do not then seriously make the inference that the Glaswegian accent is a different language. Again, this can be put theoretically. One ought not to admit of difference unless it is absolutely necessary.
The question of whether or not Scots is derived from English is an interesting one. In principle, evidence could be adduced to settle the matter one way or the other. In practice, there is doubt in my mind regarding the sufficiency of evidence which might be gleaned form historical archives. (Forgive me for having struck a sceptical note.)
Also, this is a specialist area for historians of language, certainly not for, say, students of philosophy. If Scots is not derived from English, then I have to confess it is a resolution which has no relevance to issues of socio-economic importance (which I described earlier), and should not be presented as if it does. Equally, the converse, i.e. that Scots is derived from English, is not relevant to socio-economic issues either. How ever, it is an important historical issue.
In conclusion, there is wisdom in the view of the anonymous folklorist mentioned earlier, that the Scots dialect/ language matter does not much matter; that is, if one wishes to build a view of how our world is to be a better place. In other words, it is a poor starting point from which to build one’s politics, irrespective of which label one adopts. Scotland is not Ireland. The role of the indigenous Gaelic of Ireland does not correspond to the Scots of Scotland. I believe it is utterly quixotic to think that by attempting to rejuvenate Scots, somehow Scotland will rise to independence, freedom and well-being. One day Scotland may take her seat at the assembly of the United Nations. If she does, it will not be on the back of the Scots tongue.
And there, for the moment dear reader, I rest my case - with a definite curiosity as to what your reply might be.
http://www.scotsgate.com/cencrastus.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Scots language is a load of Auld Lallans
Extract from Sunday Times 21.11.99 Allan Massie
Last week in the Scottish parliament Michael Russell, former chief executive of the SNP and now one of its most lively MSPs, invited us to step further into a land of fantasy and make-believe: he demanded that Scots become one of the parliament's official languages, joining English and Gaelic on all the parliament's signs and public notices, and that, like English and Gaelic, it should be permissable for MSPs to use it in addresses to the parliament…
…His appeal is, of course, sentimental. Many of us have a tenderness for what, in softer moments, we may lovingly call the "auld Scots tongue", or, if you prefer, "the auld Scottis tung". (Though just how you make a word peculiarly Scots by spelling it the way almost all English speakers pronounce it, baffles me.) It is one thing to indulge in sentimentality, another to invite us to indulge in national self-delusion. For the truth, sadly, is that there is no such thing as the Scots language. By that I don't mean that people don't speak some variety of Scots, or Scots-English but there is no standard form of Scots either spoken or written. There was once, in the 15th and 16th centuries…
…That language had itself grown out of the northern variety of Old English or Anglo-Saxon, and in the 15th and 16th centuries had diverged from the variety of English spoken in the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge, and in London, which was to become standard English. Had the divergence continued Scots and English might now be as distinct as Dutch and German. But it didn't. What happened has been well described by the poet and critic Edwin Muir, in his essay Scott and Scotland. "Scottish literature, considered linguistically," Muir wrote, "may be divided into Early Scots, Middle Scots, and Anything At All.” …
…Muir makes the point that though poerty continued to be written either in "some local dialect, or in some form of synthetic Scots, such as Burns's, or Scott's, or Hugh MacDiarmid's, Scots prose disappeared altogether, swept away by Knox's brilliant History of the Reformation" (written in English) "and the Authorised Version of the Bible." Russell, who has read Muir, and indeed written a rather good book following in the track of Muir's Scottish Journey, must know all this very well. He knows that, despite the brilliance of W L Lorimer's Scots version of the New Testament, there is no Scots language that can offer, as Muir put it, "a means of expression capable of dealing with everything the mind can think or the imagination can conceive". What remains of Scots is no such language. If I attempted to write this column in a form of Scots, readers would cringe in embarrassment, whether I did it well or badly. They would cringe because it would ring false. …
…Most of what is presented today as Scots prose, in occasional letters to the newspapers for instance, reads as if it was laboriously translated out of the standard English in which the writer first thought. Of course there are still varieties of spoken Scots, which Muir identified as dialects. In some parts of the country this Scots is still vigorous and pleasing. The Aberdeenshire Doric for instance has a lot of life in it yet. … Nevertheless, even in Aberdeenshire, even in Buchan, the language is thinner than it was when I was young. It is also localised, and west-coast Scots have as much difficulty in understanding a Doric speaker as an Englishman might have. Something similar might be said of the Borders where much Scots is still spoken. As for the urban vernaculars of Scotland, they bear only a vestigial resemblance to the historical Middle Scots. There are a few grammatical peculiarities - the use of "went" as past participle as well as the past tense of the verb "to go", for instance - but, in truth most of what passes for urban Scots is little more than English (sometimes slovenly English) with a strong Scots accent. The distinct vocabulary is tiny. …
…By all means let us try to keep what remains of Scots alive. We would be poorer if it died and if we could not even read Dunbar and Douglas. But don't let's pretend we are what we are not. Russell would do well to think about what Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote about Irish Gaelic and the "reverence" for that language: "Holding high esteem for a language you don't actually use while holding the one you do actually use in low esteem, is to be in a parlous mental and moral condition".
---------------------------
K Wilson (1998) Scots: Language or dialect? Kenneth Wilson examines the question of what actually constitutes a language (and decides that frankly Scots ISN'T one). Extract from a 1998 Cencrastus article.
Scots: Language or dialect?
Extract from a 1998 Cencrastus magazine article by Kenneth Wilson.
Avis au Lecteur: Please read what follows in the spirit in which it is intended, i.e., one of good-humoured, open, honest debate. I have been giving some thought to the discussion concerning whether Scots is a language or a dialect. The linguist David Crystal, author of The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, states that the distinction between language and dialect is one of the most difficult to draw in the domain of theoretical linguistics. If one is not a linguist then one must, at least, be cautious.
Apropos of this debate, I bumped into an extremely well-known Scottish folklorist and scholar recently. When I asked him if Scots is a language or a dialect, he replied, ‘does it really matter?” I think he has a point. Yet, one is still faced with the fact that the issue does matter to a great many people, particularly in Scotland’s literary community, and this requires explanation.
For some countries language is an extremely important aspect of personal/national identity. Take the case of Irish Gaelic in Ireland. It was not mere coincidence that Michael Collins, and the other Irish signatories to the treaty of 1922, signed in Gaelic. This is just one instance of the importance Irish people attached, and continue to attach, to their indigenous language.
I believe that the importance that has been placed on the dialect/language debate with regards to Scots arises for reasons similar to those which pertained, and continue to pertain, in Ireland. The operative word here is similar, not identical. Irrespective of whether Scots is a language or a dialect, its role in Scottish history and culture deserves to be treated on it own terms.
There is no doubt, in my mind, that Scots is neither widely spoken nor widely understood in Scotland today. The dominant mode of communication is a variety of English called Scottish English. Of course, this claim could be tested. One could go out to Princes St or Union St on a Saturday afternoon and ask people if they know what ‘Auld Lang Syne’ means. It is my contention that, put conservatively, less than half could give the correct answer.
It does not follow that Scots is not important; it is. Equally, while I freely accept that Scots is an important aspect of Scottish identity, neither does it follow that Scottish identity would somehow improve, if everyone started using it widely again. Were Herr Doctor Karl Marx still alive, he would be quick to point out that people’s well-being depends on matters other than language, such as access to the essential resources required to sustain an adequate life-style. Thus, in the light of this, one has to ask: is the emphasis, placed by many, on linguistic identity a decoy or distraction from issues such as what might constitute a more egalitarian form of socio-economic organisation? In answer, I freely admit that the policy, often implicit, to demean people because they speak in a “brogue” is undoubtedly morally repugnant, and much recent work has been done to redress this moral wrong. At the same time, a number of commentators have pointed to what they describe as the “narcissistic politics of identity,” by the ruling establishment. This requires a little explanation.
Today, issues of identity have the stage, whether of national identity, sexual identity, racial identity, and indeed, linguistic identity. What is not on the agenda, at least since the beginning of the rise to ascendancy of the New Right in the early to mid 70s, is the notion that socio-economic organisation can more equitably provide for citizens’ needs. Indeed, there is hard historical evidence that narcissistic identity politics were actively encouraged by the ruling establishment internationally, as a means of blocking the more fundamental radicalism which drove the upheavals of the mini Enlightenment, i.e. the sixties…It is for reasons such as these that I am extremely suspicious of identity politics.
Clearly linguistic identity has an important role to play. But it would be a grotesque mistake to suppose that the solutions to our problems are to be found solely in its terms (postmodernists actually make this error). We live in a complex world. The answers to the grave problems human beings face are not to be found by a valorisation of language and the aesthetic; rather, we need to identify and solve problems by the use of something the Enlightenment was rather strong on - REASON.
To return, more particularly, to the issue with which I began: if Scots is a dialect then, in my opinion, that is no less valuable or respectable than if it is a language. Of course the issue takes a twist if the claim is made that Scots has been inaccurately described as a dialect on, say, political grounds. Since I am neither post-modernist nor relativist, I believe an assessment can be made regarding the status of Scots qua dialect or language, independently of political considerations. To reiterate, this is a matter for linguists, not philosophers, historians, poets or novelists.
Nevertheless, I do have an opinion on the matter. I think it is a dialect. One argument which would go some way to changing my mind is if I were shown a clear example of a substantive grammatical difference between Scots and English. From my own, all too limited, knowledge of Scots, I can not think of such a substantive grammatical difference - perhaps you can. I think that such a criterion is useful in the debate, on the ground that variations in pronunciation and orthography are not sufficient to describe variation of language. What I mean is that variations in pronunciation and orthography, by themselves, are not enough to confer linguistic distinctiveness.
There is a second argument which underlies my belief that Scots is a dialect, which runs as follows. Recently the estimate of the number of languages on Earth was revised upwards from about 5,000 to about 10,000. Given the difficulties which language barriers currently present to trans national communication, I do not think it helpful to posit more difference than there already is - unless one can be sure that that additional difference is absolutely justified. Put abstractly, this amounts to a theoretical preference for not proliferating difference unnecessarily.
This argument can be put differently. English, French, German etc. are “dialects” of an Indo European root. Some historical linguists have, in fact, posited a language called proto-Indo-European, even though it is likely to be virtually impossible to reconstruct. So, on this view, both English and Scots are dialects - given that this entails an unusual construal of ‘dialect’. This brings me to another pertinent argument. The lexical and grammatical differences between, say, French, English and German are sufficiently marked, in addition to mutual unintelligibility (not untranslatability that they are standardly referred to as distinct languages. But unintelligibility is a necessary, but insufficient, condition alone, to distinguish one language from another. In other words, because one does not understand what someone says, does not mean that it is a different language - only that it may be. For example, many Edinburghers testify that they have difficulty understanding a broad Glaswegian accent. They do not then seriously make the inference that the Glaswegian accent is a different language. Again, this can be put theoretically. One ought not to admit of difference unless it is absolutely necessary.
The question of whether or not Scots is derived from English is an interesting one. In principle, evidence could be adduced to settle the matter one way or the other. In practice, there is doubt in my mind regarding the sufficiency of evidence which might be gleaned form historical archives. (Forgive me for having struck a sceptical note.)
Also, this is a specialist area for historians of language, certainly not for, say, students of philosophy. If Scots is not derived from English, then I have to confess it is a resolution which has no relevance to issues of socio-economic importance (which I described earlier), and should not be presented as if it does. Equally, the converse, i.e. that Scots is derived from English, is not relevant to socio-economic issues either. How ever, it is an important historical issue.
In conclusion, there is wisdom in the view of the anonymous folklorist mentioned earlier, that the Scots dialect/ language matter does not much matter; that is, if one wishes to build a view of how our world is to be a better place. In other words, it is a poor starting point from which to build one’s politics, irrespective of which label one adopts. Scotland is not Ireland. The role of the indigenous Gaelic of Ireland does not correspond to the Scots of Scotland. I believe it is utterly quixotic to think that by attempting to rejuvenate Scots, somehow Scotland will rise to independence, freedom and well-being. One day Scotland may take her seat at the assembly of the United Nations. If she does, it will not be on the back of the Scots tongue.
And there, for the moment dear reader, I rest my case - with a definite curiosity as to what your reply might be.
http://www.scotsgate.com/cencrastus.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Scots language is a load of Auld Lallans
Extract from Sunday Times 21.11.99 Allan Massie
Last week in the Scottish parliament Michael Russell, former chief executive of the SNP and now one of its most lively MSPs, invited us to step further into a land of fantasy and make-believe: he demanded that Scots become one of the parliament's official languages, joining English and Gaelic on all the parliament's signs and public notices, and that, like English and Gaelic, it should be permissable for MSPs to use it in addresses to the parliament…
…His appeal is, of course, sentimental. Many of us have a tenderness for what, in softer moments, we may lovingly call the "auld Scots tongue", or, if you prefer, "the auld Scottis tung". (Though just how you make a word peculiarly Scots by spelling it the way almost all English speakers pronounce it, baffles me.) It is one thing to indulge in sentimentality, another to invite us to indulge in national self-delusion. For the truth, sadly, is that there is no such thing as the Scots language. By that I don't mean that people don't speak some variety of Scots, or Scots-English but there is no standard form of Scots either spoken or written. There was once, in the 15th and 16th centuries…
…That language had itself grown out of the northern variety of Old English or Anglo-Saxon, and in the 15th and 16th centuries had diverged from the variety of English spoken in the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge, and in London, which was to become standard English. Had the divergence continued Scots and English might now be as distinct as Dutch and German. But it didn't. What happened has been well described by the poet and critic Edwin Muir, in his essay Scott and Scotland. "Scottish literature, considered linguistically," Muir wrote, "may be divided into Early Scots, Middle Scots, and Anything At All.” …
…Muir makes the point that though poerty continued to be written either in "some local dialect, or in some form of synthetic Scots, such as Burns's, or Scott's, or Hugh MacDiarmid's, Scots prose disappeared altogether, swept away by Knox's brilliant History of the Reformation" (written in English) "and the Authorised Version of the Bible." Russell, who has read Muir, and indeed written a rather good book following in the track of Muir's Scottish Journey, must know all this very well. He knows that, despite the brilliance of W L Lorimer's Scots version of the New Testament, there is no Scots language that can offer, as Muir put it, "a means of expression capable of dealing with everything the mind can think or the imagination can conceive". What remains of Scots is no such language. If I attempted to write this column in a form of Scots, readers would cringe in embarrassment, whether I did it well or badly. They would cringe because it would ring false. …
…Most of what is presented today as Scots prose, in occasional letters to the newspapers for instance, reads as if it was laboriously translated out of the standard English in which the writer first thought. Of course there are still varieties of spoken Scots, which Muir identified as dialects. In some parts of the country this Scots is still vigorous and pleasing. The Aberdeenshire Doric for instance has a lot of life in it yet. … Nevertheless, even in Aberdeenshire, even in Buchan, the language is thinner than it was when I was young. It is also localised, and west-coast Scots have as much difficulty in understanding a Doric speaker as an Englishman might have. Something similar might be said of the Borders where much Scots is still spoken. As for the urban vernaculars of Scotland, they bear only a vestigial resemblance to the historical Middle Scots. There are a few grammatical peculiarities - the use of "went" as past participle as well as the past tense of the verb "to go", for instance - but, in truth most of what passes for urban Scots is little more than English (sometimes slovenly English) with a strong Scots accent. The distinct vocabulary is tiny. …
…By all means let us try to keep what remains of Scots alive. We would be poorer if it died and if we could not even read Dunbar and Douglas. But don't let's pretend we are what we are not. Russell would do well to think about what Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote about Irish Gaelic and the "reverence" for that language: "Holding high esteem for a language you don't actually use while holding the one you do actually use in low esteem, is to be in a parlous mental and moral condition".