Mind your language
See if you can understand this: ‘We want tae mak siccar that as mony folk as can is able tae find oot aboot whit the Scottish Pairlament dis and whit wey it warks.’ It looks at first like one of those annoying novels that represent dialect phonetically. In fact it is a product of the Scottish Parliament. The Parliament lists ‘Scottish citizen languages’ as ‘Arabic, Bengali, British Sign Language, Chinese, Gaelic, Punjabi, Scots and Urdu’. Polish does not get a look-in.
The delusion under which the Parliament labours is that Scots is a different language from English. In reality it is a dialect, no more different from standard English than the dialects of Northumberland or Devon. It has sometimes been called Lallans (Lowland Scots) because people in the Highlands used to speak Gaelic, as some still do.
To write well in one of the varieties of Scots is a splendid thing. An edition of Gavin Douglas’s early 16th-century translation of The Aeneid sits on the shelf behind me, and I suppose the best-known sample of Scots dialect poetry is the ‘Lament for the Makaris’ by Douglas’s contemporary William Dunbar, which Sir Arthur Quiller Couch put into the Oxford Book of English Verse: ‘Unto the Death gois all Estatis,/ Princis, Prelatis, and Potestatis,/ Baith rich and poor of all degree: — Timor Mortis conturbat me.’ Dunbar admired Chaucer, and both relied on vocabulary derived through French from Latin. Robert Burns nearly three centuries later wrote a different Scots principally because there was a fashion for the rustic. In the meantime, the Bible in Scotland was read and heard in the standard English dialect, and kings and big men took up standard English. Such ironing out of local dialects was going on in all parts of Britain where English was spoken.
Thus Lallans or Scots came to seem as eccentric as William Barnes’s Dorset poetry, which is still requested on the BBC’s Poetry Please: ‘There she zot, wi’ breast a-heaven,/ While vrom zide to zide, wi’ grieven,/ Vell her head, wi’ tears a-creepen/ Down her cheaks, in bitter weepen.’ It is no easier to comprehend than examples of modern Scot.
The triumph of the Scottish Parliament is to render publicity into Scots which retains the dull phraseology of officialese: ‘Wir premises is awready designit tae be as accessible as possible. Hooanever, gin ye are disablit and hae ony specific requirements, ye’re gey walcome tae contact us afore yer visit.’
Dot Wordsworth
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