Billy Kay
Mainstream Publishing, £9.99
IN EVERY generation for the past three centuries there have been those - often writers who have made excellent use of Scots in their own work - mourning its recent or imminent demise. In 1775 Henry Mackenzie complained: "Tis pity that the Language... will probably soon become so antiquated as not to be understood." Robert Louis Stevenson, introducing the Scots poems in his 1887 collection Underwoods, reckoned it "a dying language": "The day draws near when this illustrious and malleable tongue shall be quite forgotten; and Burns' Ayrshire, and Dr MacDonald's Aberdeen-awa', and Scott's brave, metropolitan utterance will all be equally the ghosts of speech." And as recently as 2002, William McIlvanney, author of the Scots-laden novel Docherty, was moved by the same sense of doom.
Commenting in this newspaper on the award of substantial lottery funding to Itchy Coo, a new Scots language imprint for schools of which - let me lay my cards on the table - I was a co-founder, he wrote: "I suppose this project... might re-introduce some Scottish words into temporary currency. But any serious rehabilitation of the Scots language? Forget it."
As anybody involved in defending an oppressed, neglected or otherwise disadvantaged language will tell you, it's easy to be pessimistic. The history of Scots since the 17th century appears to be one of steady decline, punctuated by literary revivals. But to measure a language by its literature is not necessarily an accurate gauge of its health at street-level.
A further problem lies in the common roots and features Scots shares with English - the cause of endless debate about its status. While nobody would suggest that French and English are the same because they share, but pronounce differently, words such as 'situation' and 'cascade', the socio-political relationship between English and Scots has meant that words like 'hoose' and 'faither' have usually been considered mere dialect variations.
The difference is one of political perception. Billy Kay, in a new edition of his study Scots: The Mither Tongue, quotes the German philologist Manfred Görlach, who reckons that Scots is more removed from English than Slovak is from Czech, Croatian from Serbian, or Norwegian from Swedish. Kay presents overwhelming evidence of the distinctive vocabulary, syntax and grammar of Scots.
It is 20 years since its first publication, which itself followed on from his radio and television programmes. Back then, Kay was the public face of Scots, and was roundly abused by some for pleading its cause. For others, his work transformed their thinking: never before had they been told, on the BBC no less, that what they spoke, far from being the 'language of the gutter' or debased English, had an 800-year pedigree, two multi-volume dictionaries describing it, a vast and glorious literature, and a whole set of dialects of its own.
This was a life-affirming, emotionally and intellectually liberating message, and it took courage and conviction to be the messenger. It is ironic, therefore, that as his book is re-issued, another series on Scots goes out on BBC2 to which Kay, despite his significance, was not asked to contribute. No harm to the BBC for commissioning the new series, for sadly the arguments for Scots as a fundamental element of our daily national life and historic culture still need to be made. But far more welcome would be regular programmes - dramas, documentaries, sitcoms, chat shows - not about but in Scots.
Since 1986 much has changed on the political, educational and social landscape, and Kay has had to rewrite several sections of his book. He opens with a passionate attack on the reluctance of politicians in post-devolution Scotland to take positive action on behalf of a language used, according to the government's own estimate, by some 1.6 million people. If the parliament in Edinburgh is to be about anything, he argues, surely it should be about recognising and supporting a national language - as, quite properly, has been the case with Gaelic, spoken by around 60,000 people. Quite apart from continuing prejudice against Scots, Kay suspects a financial reason for this reluctance: if Gaelic education and broadcasting cost upwards of £10m a year, how much might similar treatment for Scots cost?
Perhaps the Executive should think of the potential bill as a long-term investment in the future of the 'best wee country in the world': nurturing self-confidence, undermining the notion of the 'inarticulate Scot', and, as the Gaelic model has shown, boosting economic activity, not least in the field of cultural tourism. After all, the world's anthem of friendship, 'Auld Lang Syne', is composed in Scots.
THERE ARE, AS already noted, always grounds for pessimism. In some parts of the country vocabulary loss continues unabated, and many children struggle to pronounce the velar fricative 'ch' in 'loch' or the 'wh' in 'wheesht'. Yet elsewhere young people retain plenty of Scots vocabulary and - a vital sign in any language - are adding new words to the old.
The politics may be frustrating, but 20 years ago one would have been hard-pressed to find a politician who even acknowledged the existence of Scots. Now, government ministers publicly state their commitment to it, even if serious money to develop a sustained Scots language policy is not yet forthcoming. The Executive's Culture Report commits to the "promotion and development of the Scots language" and promises to investigate "how best to meet our obligations for [its] development in the light of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages". The European context is forcing politicians to take Scots seriously, and because of devolution, the issue will not go away.
Nor, indeed, will the language. However one defines it, its existence can no longer be denied - not, at least, by anyone with a pair of lugs on the Forfar bus, or in a hospital, supermarket, school or sports centre; nor by anyone watching Still Game or Liz Lochhead's Tartuffe, listening to traditional folk music or Off the Ball, or reading the poetry of Christine De Luca or the fiction of Irvine Welsh.
So, is Kay an optimist? He surely couldn't have republished his book if he wasn't. What will happen to Scots, he asks. "To begin with, we shall see a continuation of the process of recent decades: rapid erosion in some airts, thrawn survival in other airts." But, he goes on: "in aw the airts, the structure of the dialects of Scots survives and can thrive again if the political, cultural and financial will is there to normalise the language."
The new political set-up makes this possible, and the experience of a project like Itchy Coo (some 80,000 books sold in three-and-a-half years) proves the enthusiasm and hunger that people have for their own language and culture, if given half a chance to access them. Scots: The Mither Tongue is a timeous, informative and invigorating entry point to that process.
Read this article in Scots online at
www.scotlandonsunday.com/scotslang/