"Who's Ken?" - Social class and the Scots language
ach well all livin language is sacred fuck thi lohta thim - Tom Leonard, 1984 I’ve long been intrigued by accents and the different ways people speak, particularly within Scotland, which has its own idiosyncrasies and tensions. In early primary school in Kirkcaldy, Fife, I remember at least one of my teachers telling kids off for saying “aye” instead of “yes”, “ken” rather than “know”, “dinnae” in place of “do not”, and so on (incidentally, when wee boys mentioned someone they knew who’d been beaten up, these teachers would utter tropes like “I thought only fish got battered”). This was in the mid-1990s, sixty years on from my Gran getting rows in school for referring to where she lived as her “hoose”. It’s an experience I’m sure resonates with many people who grew up in Scotland. Broughton High School, where I attended. Alumni also include Martyn Bennett and Hugh McDiarmid, two great proponents of Scots. When I was eight we moved to a middle-class area in Edinbu