RECENT reports suggesting the imminent death of Scots may, as the saying goes, be exaggerated. The study (conducted in Germany) concluded that over the years, the language used in Oor Wullie has become more anglicised.
In other words, more English words and spellings are being used and less of the Scots forms or alternate spellings that represent Scottish pronunciations. But in fact, it may just be that Oor Wullie's keeping up with the times.
Linguists take for
granted the fact that language changes. Speakers who are not professional linguists understand this too. For example, most speakers of Edinburgh English could give you several examples of words that have changed in their lifetime.
Slang goes in and out of fashion; sometimes a word sticks around but its meaning changes. Sociolinguists make an art of studying the patterns underlying language variation in a community, and in particular they are interested in how social trends affect language use in a community. It has become clear differences in pronunciation within a community today are what become the language change of tomorrow. Changes to Oor Wullie's language, like the different pronunciations you hear on the streets of Edinburgh, may be markers of social changes taking place in the larger community. And they don't necessarily herald the loss of a distinctive dialect.
For sure, you can hear pronunciations or phrases being used in Edinburgh, especially among younger speakers, that seem to be "English". The frequency of what some linguists call "th-fronting" -- bruvver instead of brother, mouf instead of mouth, somefink instead of the traditional Scots somehin' or something probably has spread to Edinburgh from southern English.
And it's possible that the less frequent use of the distinctively Scots doon and oot is also the result of the northward spread of southern English varieties. But before we start to lay the blame for all of this at the door of Edinburgh's ten per cent English-born population (and in some parts of town it is considerably higher than that), we need to understand that it's not just the English.
North American varieties offer another source for language change. The increased use of like, especially to introduce speech - "What did your parents say about how late we got in?" "Mum was wild. She was like 'I had no idea where you were!'" - almost certainly originated in North America. And there is a significant, but highly mobile, population of Australian and New Zealand English speakers who come to work in Edinburgh.
But do these changes mean Edinburghers are sounding less Scots? Not really. The forms I have mentioned (doon and oot; somefink; she was like) are ones that are socially very significant. They are what sociolinguists call linguistic stereotypes. Like other kinds of stereotype, a linguistic stereotype is one that people trot out as a quick way of imitating or summing up the characteristics of a group of speakers.
But most of the variation in speech happens well below this level of awareness. In other words, people don't realise they are doing it and they don't have strong stereotypes about which groups of speakers use these forms more or less. Sociolinguists call these markers, and it's the markers that really define a dialect.
For instance, most of the Scots vowel system isn't changing towards southern English norms. All those fronted vowels typical of the south-east (the ones that make younger speakers sound as though they never open their mouths or are talking through their noses)? You don't hear them in Edinburgh. Even if Oor Wullie may be becoming "Our" man in the comics strips, Edinburghers don't use the fronted pronunciation of "our" (something like "ee-wa") that they use in the south.
Something distinctively local remains. That relaxed vowel at the start of "Willie" ("Wullie")? Alive and well throughout the central belt. The widespread pronunciation of words like walking, following as walkin, followin continues. And what's interesting is that some of these markers are relatively recent and some have persisted for centuries.
The Wullie vowel is probably no more than four or five generations old. But the walkin pronunciation has been the norm in Scottish English for centuries. It may be historically and socially one of the most successful local acts of resistance to southern English norms - Scots speakers of all social classes here have been using it for hundreds of years.
Oor Wullie's changing with the times, like all speakers of Scots English. But it would be a mistake to think that that necessarily means he's sounding more English. Like most speakers, it seems more likely that he's taken what's out there, ditched the old vocabulary and picked up a few new sounds, but he'll be using them with distinctive local colour.
Miriam Meyerhoff is professor of sociolinguistics at Edinburgh University
