Extract from Scots: The Mither Tongue

Back in my home town in Ayrshire recently, a local electrician come up to me in the pub and recounted for me an incident that had happened the day before: 'It was gey nearhaun fower o clock, Billy, sae I says, "Richt, boys, redd up and gaither aw yer graith thegither, it's lowsin time." Juist then a bit came on the wireless aboot the daith o Scots and the expert lamented the fact that "once common words like 'graith' and 'redd' were no longer in currency". Me an the boys juist luiked at wan anither an speired whit kinna planet we wes leivin on!'.

I think of such 'expertise' when I see anti-Scots harangues by such as Michael Fry in The Sunday Times. Mr Fry says that Scots does not exist but, like him, monie o thaim that threaps on aboot Scots wuidnae ken a Scots word gin it lowped up an skelped thaim on the puss! In recent years, we've had the publication of L. Colin Wilson's Luath Scots Language Learner, the completion of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue, the launch of a plethora of Scots websites and the expansion of a series of highly successful children's books by the Itchy Coo project. And every time there is a wave of Scots creativity, as sure as night follows day, there will be a spate of newspaper articles saying what a waste of time it all is, as Scots is a dead or dying language. The detractors are obviously in serious denial, for the past few years or so we have had novels by James Robertson, Matthew Fitt, Janet Paisley and Irvine Welsh, plays by David Craig and Liz Lochhead, festivals, music shows, poetry and performance, all in varieties of a very much living language which the General Register Office survey of 1996 estimated to have 1.5 million speakers - by far the greatest number of speakers of any indigenous minority language in the United Kingdom.

Many of those speakers, like me, experienced a Scottish education system which considered itself successful if each generation was less Scottish than the one before and tholed bizarre anomalies such as being given a prize for reciting the Bard's poetry on Burns Day then getting belted for speaking his tongue every other day of the year. Despite such incongruities, Scots remained a crucial part of my family's identity, enriching every part of our lives, from the joy of a nieces wedding, where my daughter sang the Scots love song 'The Lea Rig', to the sadness of my father's funeral, when he joined my mother under a heidstone inscribed with the words 'Till a' the seas gang dry.'

Yet for most Scottish people, feelings about their native culture are fraught with powerful dichotomies which pull individuals in different directions. Pride and prejudice, love and hatred, reverence and contempt - Scots tend to react with extremes of feeling to different aspects of their culture. You may well say that it is the right of the individual of every free nation, and I would agree. But the extreme reactions in Scotland are a direct result of the lack of Scottish content in the educational system and, to a lesser extent, the shortage of it in the all-pervasive media which helps form ideas in the twenty-first century. When Scottish history or literature is not taught, the implication for many is that it is not worth teaching. Many in fact draw the conclusion that it does not exist. With no grounding in their culture, objective assessment of its worth is well-nigh impossible and frequently people react with a passion which astonishes outsiders. The frequent eruption of letters discussing the minutiae of Scottish speech in The Herald and The Scotsman, for example, and the intensity of the debate provoked, is apparently a uniquely Scottish phenomenon.

This passion for things Scottish is often an instinctive gut reaction to the culture being put down by the authorities, the reaction against it often the product of derived irrational prejudice. Like Pavlov's slaiverin dugs, many Scots are conditioned to react to any aspect their culture with the word 'parochial' or 'tartan' or 'couthy', no matter how universal their content may be. By doing programmes which have posed questions about the people's cultural identity, I have often provoked strong reactions. The ratio is in the region of seven love letters to every three hostile letters. Into the latter category fell a lady from Alloway who wrote in high dudgeon, asserting that Scots did not exist and that my guests and I on Scottish Television's Kay's Originals series were all putting it on. We were a disgrace to Scotland and what would the English think! An example of our putting it on was our use of the place name Glesca. The lady had not, she assured me, heard it pronounced thus since she attended the music halls in the 1940s. In my reply, I asked her which institution she had been locked up in during the intervening years. Many Scots do not want to believe Scots exists and steik their lugs accordingly - I refuse to hear it, therefore it does not exist!