CHARLES BANNERMAN: Leave Highlands out of campaign to promote Scots
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Last week Nicola Sturgeon announced a consultation on extending support for the Gaelic language and also for “Scots”.
Gaelic’s credentials as a distinct indigenous language are utterly impeccable and support for it is a long-standing policy. However I struggle to see how “Scots” can remotely be considered a language in its own right, and what on earth has it to do with us in the Highlands and Islands anyway?
To me, what they call Scots is simply a variant of English with some of its own quaint pronunciations, “hooogly-doogly bitties” and different words. It’s hence no different from varieties of English spoken in Yorkshire, Northern Ireland or Northumberland, and simply one of the UK’s many different regional vocabularies and departures from received pronunciation. I doubt if your average Bristolian would find it any more difficult to penetrate the Scots dialect than those common in Newcastle, Belfast or Batley.
If I hear anyone deliberately speaking (spikkin’?) what they call Scots, it just feels like some contrived, affected and painfully couthy attempt to sound “a wee bittie” different from English. Sort of like that policeman in ‘Allo ‘Allo. Indeed the Scots’ unfortunate preoccupation with caricaturing themselves sometimes rebounds and makes this feel faintly ridiculous.
So-called Scots is just a cocktail of broader accents from parts of the central belt and Grampian, whose Doric, which seems to start round about Forres, probably departs more from normal English than many other versions.
But even Doric’s archetypal “fit like” is just a very thinly disguised “what like”. These variants, however, are not reflected at all in the speech of Highland or Western Isles natives.
That’s true whether you go “up ee rodd” to “Week” or to Gairloch, Stornoway, Dingwall or Brora. Highlanders don’t speak this Scots dialect, which is an intonation really only heard from incomers.
So if some campaign to promote Scots emerges, then apart from the pointlessness of wasting scarce public resources on a regional variant of the UK’s official language, please leave us out up here. If we have a local identity with any language other than English, it’s with Gaelic and we really don’t need subjected to any more central belt cultural imperialism.
And that brings us possibly to the nub of this whole initiative. Is this promotion of Scots even a genuine attempt to do just that, or is it simply a cynical political device by a central belt-focused administration to impose some kind of pan-Scottish mentality?
We in the Highlands are not part of some one-size-fits-all, monolithic Scotland. Even less do we subscribe to the insular, myopic central belt world picture. We are different and must not be drawn into this kind of thinking.
It’s said that Invernessians speak a very pure form of English thanks to Cromwell’s troops staying here in the 1650s. That seems strange when Gaelic was still very much the main Highland language, but to decide for yourself, just cock your ears in a local supermarket, pub or laundrette.
You can then forget about Scots and simply focus on “Tha Unvarness Longwudge”.
“Howyadooeen?”
“Achyerseenitmun. How’s yersel’. Uryiz cumeen ti tha Kollee Klab ur tha Leejun furra dram?”
“Ah’m needeen ma laanch an’ ah’ve no’ gotma wollut.”
“Thurzit. In yer bock pockut.”
“Righ’eenaff”.
Give me “rabburbampursh” any day!
