Cauld Blasts and Clishmaclavers (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

The 2011 Scottish Census found that more than 150 languages other than English are used in Scottish homes.

Scotland is a nation of peoples woven together like a tartan or tweed. The overall effect may be one of Scottishness but the individual threads have a uniqueness of their own. Celt and Pict; Gael and Angle; Norse and Norman; Roman and Romany; Italian, English and Irish; African, American, Asian and Australasian and many more have all brought something to the lexicographers’ ceilidh that is our language – and continue to do so.

At the re-convening of the Scottish parliament in July 2016 the poem ‘Threshold’ by the Scots Makar Jackie Kay was read. In it Kay beseeches the parliament, the nation, not to ca’ canny but to be bold and open our hearts and to welcome the future with the voices of all the peoples who call Scotland hame. She uses Scots to call out a welcome not only to share our domestic living space but also to repopulate the wide open spaces of Scotland, historically emptied of people, and to create a brilliant gathering of the clans of the world.

Poetry is by its very essence a celebration of the diversity and meanings of language used to describe the human condition and the world around us. It has long been a kist of riches for the Scots tongue. It is from the works of Kay’s predecessors as makars that many of the words we use today have been preserved – in the poetry of Henryson and Dunbar, Ramsay and Fergusson, Scott and Stevenson, MacDiarmid and Jacob, Lochhead and MacCaig – but most of all in the words of Robert Burns. It is through Burns that many Scots kept Scotland in their hearts as well as on their tongues whether they were in domestic service in London, digging railroads in America, running tea plantations in India, whaling in the Davis Strait, herding sheep in the Australian outback or in the rain-sodden trenches of Flanders.

At the end of his long life my great-great-great-grandfather published a pamphlet in praise of Robert Burns. In it he wrote:

Two centuries later, Burns’ work continues to speak to people. His poems, songs and language contain an immutable Scottishness that touches my soul like no other; my wife and I had his words read at our wedding. He is quoted more than any other writer in this book.

Burns’ language grew from the Ayrshire land his family farmed but he was also well read and well travelled; in Edinburgh he moved within Enlightenment circles, and he corresponded far and wide. From all over the country he harvested words, poems and stories, ploughing them back into his verse. And he was not just a poet but a collector and re-worker of traditional songs, which had been passed down orally through generations; he contributed them to that great compendium of song The Scots Musical Museum. He showed an awareness of a unique language that was under threat and needed to be preserved.

Scots is perhaps best described as a Halbsprache – a half-language – and has been developing since the start of the second millennium. Its roots are Germanic with many similarities to Middle English but with a history all its own.

Historians and lexicographers call the language of the early period from about 1100 to 1700 ‘Older Scots’ and use ‘Modern Scots’ for the period from 1700 to the present. Sometimes the term ‘Middle Scots’ is used to describe the language from 1450 to 1700. It was during this period that Scots came under pressure as never before from a unique combination of technological advancement, religious dissent and high international politics – French and English influences at court waxed and waned as the two powerful kingdoms sought influence and control over Scotland.

The eventual Union of the Crowns of Scotland with England in 1603 saw the royal court – once the home of poet prince King James I (1394–1437), of Robert Henryson (c. 1460–1505) and William Dunbar (1459–c. 1530) – move to London, and with the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 the legislature joined it. While Scots language remained unique in law, education and religion, it lost the authority of being the language of power and governance.

Even in the surviving centres of influence, the creeping Anglicisation over Old Scots came, driven by the printing press rather than by high politics. Although Chepman and Myllar were printing in Edinburgh by 1508, the printing industry in England was more prolific and thus more affordable. Literature, especially ‘high’ literature, was more likely to be printed in English and Latin than in Scots, including bibles and tracts spreading the word of the Reformation. Even the King James Bible is in English despite being commissioned by the Scottish monarch.

Both sides of James VI’s earthly administration used English and throughout the seventeenth century it became the dominant language of government as well. In the ruling classes of both kingdoms, aristocratic intermarriage cemented English as the language of power and Scots came to be regarded as provincial, outdated and even seditious. Ever since, Scots has been seen as the language of the ‘common people’, printed in chapbook, pamphlet and ballad; spoken on the farm, the bar or the scheme. There are many examples to be found in the book.

Even before Burns, poets had been aware of this decline of the language of their forbearers and had sought to preserve it. Earlier in the eighteenth century, for example, Allan Ramsay wrote his libretto for The Gentle Shepherd, Scotland’s first opera, set in the pastoral Pentland Hills, while Robert Fergusson’s poetry portrayed urban Edinburgh life. They understood Scots held within it not just the voice of Scotland but its very character. Through the use of vernacular Scots, poets and writers captured and nurtured a language in decline, while also popularising it and spreading its readership. The Romantic sentiment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries adored the Scots of Scott and the Scottishness of Byron and while that might have led to the tartanry of King George IV and Balmorality of Queen Victoria, it certainly boosted the interest in the country’s history and the remnants of that past, including its language.

In addition, an increasingly large number of exiled Scots, whether in the ever expanding urbanised centres or in far-off imperial outposts, were nostalgic for their homeland. In its language they found an easily transportable memento of home: the song sung to the rhythm of a pickaxe’s swinging; the small quair of poems that fitted in an apron pocket; the cornkister at a tropical ceilidh.

This Scots, though, is the language of poetry chosen for the sound and texture it added to the verse and not necessarily the living language of every day. As the nineteenth century progressed, upper- and middleclass Scotland looked fondly on the traditional and contemporary rural use of Scots but with despair and contempt on the vibrant urban Scots of the poor. In the twentieth century, armed with grammars, national examinations and standardised teaching, they began a sustained assault on the remaining use of Scots, aided by growing literacy and the greater availability of newspapers, radio, gramophones, cinema and television. Growing up in Glasgow, Mrs Purvis across the road from me had a steady stream of after-school pupils each day attending her elocution lessons – having their glottal stops extracted, oxters turned into armpits.

Despite – or perhaps because of – this, there thrived a Scots language culture, vibrant, if tartanry, in the Saturday-night music-hall entertainment of ordinary working folk, with performers such as Harry Lauder able to reach out to millions not only at home but in Canada and especially Australia.

A renaissance of Scots in literature, strongly allied to a resurgence of nationalist politics and the very media that had helped standardise the language, also preserved its words, accents, stories and culture, from Para Handy to Still Game.

A key figure in the history of...