"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 Edinburgh, and I noticed a clear shift in speech patterns between my old and new classmates. It wasn’t until I entered high school, with its wider catchment area, that I saw these two worlds collide. Around this time I became more self-conscious about my own accent. Occasionally my voice would be mimicked or I’d be told I was posh. I might be asked “where d’ye stey? who’d ye muck aboot wi?” and struggle to know how to respond without sounding either embarrassingly proper and mannerly, or cringingly affected in an attempt to thicken my brogue. As tends to be the case, distinctions in accent usually ran parallel with other outward traits. In early high school young people were sometimes broadly (and often pejoratively) labelled as either “chavs”/“neds”, or “baggies”/”sweatys”. As well as things like music taste and whether you wore tracksuits or skater-boy clothes, an accompanying feature was how you spoke. In other words, it tended to fall along social class lines.

Fettes College - the school literally across the road from Broughton. Edinburgh is weird like that. Illustrious alumni include, erm, Tony Blair...

I mention this to highlight the persistence of the Scots language in working class communities, and its gradual erosion to near extinction among the country’s middle class. That might not be the case with every dialect of Scots – perhaps there are different social dynamics where, say, Doric or the Shetland dialect is concerned. But in my experience it’s certainly true in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and other parts of the Lowlands. It’s worth reiterating that the generations of children who have faced the snobbish fallacy of being told to “talk properly”, were not speaking “bad English” but “good Scots”. That’s not to say there isn’t slang thrown in there as well – there’s ever-evolving slang within the different dialects of Scots, as with any language, and it doesn’t make it any less legitimate. However, it changes the way the vernacular is valued once the myth has been debunked that Scots is a corruption of English.

This misconception is the result of centuries of suppression and marginalisation of Scots (along with Gaelic, and probably regional English dialects to some degree) in a British establishment in which social advancement meant conforming to a standardised English. My Granny on my Mum’s side came from a poor family in West Pilton and spoke broad Scots growing up. As she progressed through secondary school and then teacher-training, she had to temper and modify (ie. anglicise) her speech. When she married my Grandad, a church minister from a comfortably middle-class background, this conversion was no doubt accelerated in her new role as ‘minister’s wife’. It doesn’t sit entirely comfortably with me that down the generations, as both sides of my family have entered the middle-class and become more conventionally or academically educated, our use of Scots has deteriorated. It feels like a historical aberration (admittedly a contradiction in terms) that I don’t speak in a Scots dialect, the odd word here or there aside.

A Scottish Government study in 2010 found that 64% of respondents "don't really think of Scots as a language”. Until quite recently I probably would have reluctantly agreed, and it’s perhaps true to say that the predominantly English vernacular peppered with Scots words, spoken by the majority in this country today, might not sound quite like a language in its own right. However, I was intrigued by linguist Billy Kay’s comparison that Scots and English in the early 17th century shared a similar relationship to Danish and Swedish or Spanish and Portuguese today – two distinct languages arising from the same common root. However, through the 17^th century, the Scottish aristocracy began to culturally gravitate towards London. Kevin Williamson has described the change in the 17^th and early 18^th centuries as a shift from a “fairly full Scots through an anglicised Scots to a scotticised English”. Following the union of 1707, as the Scottish upper-classes increasingly anglicised, in part because it allowed them to more fully participate in the British Empire, the downgrading of Scots accelerated. By the mid-18^th century private schools such as George Herriot’s and Edinburgh Academy began teaching “southern pronunciation”, to “remedy a defect in the education of boys in Edinburgh”. Scots became a way of communicating more ‘crude’ or ‘down-to-earth’ themes and topics, while the way it was written also became influenced by English hegemony. Apostrophes were used to suggest the ‘missing’ English letter ie. “gie” (“give” in English) becomes “gi’e”. In 1872, the Scottish Education Act signalled the first legislative, systematic attempt to teach spoken English at the expense of Scots.[1] Kay explains that at the beginning of the 20th century

the language came to be regarded as a working class patois, despised by the increasingly anglicised upper and middle classes. To them, Scots was fine as a medium for couthy novels, newspaper cartoons, and music hall comedians.[2]

The growth of mass media through the 20^th century also encouraged standardisation of speech. It wasn’t possible to work in broadcasting with a strong regional accent. Meanwhile, globalisation has stimulated the homogenisation of culture and language, and the ubiquity of American and English voices in the media has filtered through the rest of the English-speaking world. The popular belief is that along with minority languages and dialects globally, Scots is dying out. Billy Kay refutes this view, claiming that while there may have been a gradual decline with each generation, it remains remarkably widespread, particularly considering the concerted historical onslaught to banish it for good. I think this rings true, anecdotally at least, especially if this is taken as the perseverence of Scots in some form, if not as a fully autonomous language. Although in many respects the media has hastened language standardisation, there is still plenty evidence of the Scots dialects reflected in the arts. Scots is abundant in the work of writers such as James Kelman, Liz Lochead, Irvine Welsh and Jenni Fagan, while TV comedies like Still Game, Gary Tank Commander, and Limmy’s Show reflect elements of Glasgow and Edinburgh/Fife Scots respectively. The burgeoning Scottish hip-hop scene is another arena where the richness of Scottish oral culture is being explored and celebrated.

Interestingly, the advent of the internet has also provided an opportunity for the written form of local languages and dialects to be nurtured. Social media offers a platform for people to write how they speak, with all its distinctive vitality and colour, in a way which previous generations would have had neither reason nor means to do. Scots has transferred well to Twitter, as these equally hilarious and mental buzzfeed posts demonstrate (35 Reasons Scottish Twitter Is The Wildest Place On The Internet and 32 Times Scottish Twitter Was The Funniest Place On The Internet)

Of course, these posts are not self-consciously trying to uphold any official standard or version of Scots. If local languages and dialects are to be facilitated and encouraged, their promotion cannot be prescriptive or restrictive. Tom Leonard’s writing and poetry (as well as that of many other contemporary Scots writers) emphasises “the actuality of what people say”,[3] not conforming to pre-established rules that determine the shape of the language. Herein lies a challenge for the future of Scots and attempts by the establishment to facilitate it. Historically there is an elitist attitude towards what Scots is permissible and what is not. Billy Kay explains:

As long as Scots is in the past, in the country, in the literature, anywhere in fact but in the mouths of the children who speak it naturally, it is acceptable. But as soon as it has to be confronted locally, it tends to be dismissed. After all, it is spoken mainly by the working class – and their speech could never be accepted as a model.

If Scots were to be promoted only in an academic sense, modelled on the form it took in an earlier century, then it would risk falling into similar top-down traps that forced its own marginalisation. Linguist Katie Gallogly-Swan writes in The Sunday Herald that

On the one hand, if we encourage institutional enthusiasm for Scots, and so see its increasing standardisation and legitimacy, we risk reproducing the hierarchies intrinsically forged in linguistic standards. We already see it in written 'standard' Scots which diverges so drastically from that spoken in the schemes and streets of the nation - academic and inaccessible.

As a middle-ground, she proposes a “crowd-sourced dictionary of Scots” as a means of documenting and facilitating the language in a way that is “participatory, shared, and vitally accessible”. I think this is a great idea, and could perhaps be produced as a less formal counter-balance to the recent actions to promote Scots by the state. Education Scotland’s national Scots Language Policy, which is welcome as long as it avoids top-down prescription, is one such programme. This will develop resources to enable teachers to “confidently and creatively engage” with Scots, and will include ambassadors ranging from novelist James Robertson to the Singing Kettle.  Strangely, despite being delivered with no extra funds, the plans were criticised by the Scottish Tory MSP Alex Johnstone, who said: “This a predictable stunt from a Scottish Government more interested in pandering to patriots than improving education.” Among some folk there seems to persist a peculiar hostility towards the teaching of the native language and culture( the “Scots cringe?”), which in most other countries would be a prerequisite in school curricula. Moreover, I wonder if debates about the academic attainment gap ever consider the potential to alienate from education if one's own lingo is portrayed as debased, primitive or somehow illegitimate.

That said, I’m not denying that it’s a political issue, and it’s clearly in the SNP’s interests to encourage greater identification with the language as a means to enhance the perceived legitimacy of nation-statehood. Whether its detractors acknowledge it or not, however, it’s clear that a knowledge of the Scottish people is incomplete without some knowledge of Scots. Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s classic Sunset Song (1932), grapples with the new and old in Scottish society. The novel's closing passage, in which the minister eulogises the four local men who died during the First World War", hopefully does not forestall the fate of the language:

A new generation comes up that will know them not, except as a memory in a song, they pass with the things that seemed good to  them, with loves and desires that grow dim in the days to be. It was the old Scotland that perished then, and we may believe that never again will the old speech and the old songs, the curses and old benedictions, pass but with alien effort to our lips.

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[1] Billy Kay, Scots: The Mither Tongue

[2]ibid

[3]ibid