A Sociolinguistic History of Scotland 9781474448567

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A SOCIOLINGUISTIC HISTORY OF SCOTLAND

A SOCIOLINGUISTIC HISTORY OF SCOTLAND Robert McColl Millar

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Robert McColl Millar, 2020 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f ) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/15 Adobe Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4854 3 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4856 7 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4857 4 (epub) The right of Robert McColl Millar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

CONTENTS

List of Maps

vi

Acknowledgements vii Some Preliminaries

ix

1 Introduction: The Sociology of Language and the Scottish Historical Ecology 1 2 Diversity: The Early Historical Period

21

3 Incipient Linguistic Homogenisation: Medieval Scotland

42

4 Social, Political and Cultural Metamorphosis: A Country in Crisis?

71

5 Homogenisation and Survival: The Languages of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century

100

6 Expansion within Union: The Nineteenth Century

125

7 Contraction and Dissipation: Twentieth Century

156

8 Contemporary Scotland and Its Languages, 1999–

184

Notes 208 Bibliography 218 Index 241

MAPS

Map 1  Scotland

15

Map 2  Scotland: pre-1975 counties

16

Map 3  Larger-scale polities

22

Map 4  Places mentioned in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3

23

Map 5  Places mentioned in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4

43

Map 6  Places mentioned in Chapter 5 and succeeding chapters

101

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

T

his book was written during a particularly dark period in Scottish history. I hope that it will be published into a promising future. Many people have helped me, whether knowingly or not, in the writing of this book. These include Rhona Alcorn, William Barras, Lisa Bonnici, Karen Corrigan, Cairns Craig, Janet Cruickshank, Marina Dossena, Stephen Driscoll, Rob Dunbar, Mercedes Durham, Elspeth Edelstein, Michael Hance, Anna Havinga, Dauvit Horsbroch, Pavel Iosad, Charles Jones, Kerry Karam, John Kirk, Joanna Kopaczyk, Dawn Leslie, Barbara Loester, Alison Lumsden, Caroline Macafee, Derrick McClure, Warren Maguire, Tom McKean, Edoardo McKenna, Ken MacKinnon, the late Iseabail Macleod, Michelle Macleod, Wilson McLeod, Sandra McRae, Donald Meek, Gunnel Melchers, Sheena Booth Middleton, the late Michael Montgomery, the late Bill Nicolaisen, Colm Ó Baoill, the late Stanley Robertson, Jennifer Smith, Jeremy Smith, Viveka Velupillai, Moray Watson and Alex Woolf. All mis- and overstatements are, naturally, my own work. My colleagues at Aberdeen did a bit more in spring 2018, so that I could do a bit less; I am very grateful. In April 2019 I spent two weeks in China, teaching at various institutions (in particular, North Minzu University in Yinchuan). Presenting my ideas to an audience for which many of the findings were new was enlightening. I am grateful for the opportunity and to the people who made it possible. My dear parents, long since gone, helped me with some of the ideas in this book before I had any idea what I would do in my adult life. I will always be grateful.

viii  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d Sandra and Mairi have always been there for me; I may not have been there for them as much as I would have wished. Nevertheless, I love them both dearly; this book is dedicated to them both.

SOME PRELIMINARIES

0.1 Introduction

I

n the following pages I will present a number of brief discussions of points which are important to the study as a whole, but which do not naturally fit within the flow of the book proper. Some readers will not need to read any of these sections; others may find some of them useful. 0.2  Linguistic Terminology and Representation

This book is intended to be read by an audience with a wide range of interests and specialisations. With that in mind, only a limited number of linguisticscentred terms and symbols have been employed. I have not shied away from using these when necessary, however. Most of these are concerned with pronunciation and involve the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). A useful interactive version of the alphabet can be found at . Spellings are represented by

, phonemic transcription by /p/ and phonetic by [ph]. The last is hardly ever used here and represents the minute transcription of pronunciation; phonemic implies the larger-scale building blocks which native speakers perceive their language is made up of. Thus, for native English speakers, the pronunciation difference between the first /p/ in and the second is not meaningful (although it is in other languages, including Gaelic).

x  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd 0.3  Language Relationship All of the autochthonous languages of the Atlantic Archipelago are IndoEuropean in origin (as we will see this is also the case for those recorded languages no longer spoken, notwithstanding a small amount of debateable place-name evidence). Many – probably most – languages of recent immigration also derive from that family (exceptions include Chinese varieties and languages brought from Africa). All Indo-European languages are descended from an unrecorded proto-language, probably spoken by people living in the western Eurasian steppes some 6,000–7,000 years ago. We can make too much of this relationship, however. Celtic languages, such as Gaelic, are not close relatives of the Germanic languages, such as Scots. It would take a specialist, for instance, to recognise that the Gaelic word for ‘father’ (athir) and its Scots equivalent (faither or fadder, depending on the dialect) are actually, if you go back far enough, the same word. The structures of modern Celtic languages are strikingly different from those of their Germanic equivalents, involving a Verb Subject Order word order (for example, Modern Gaelic chunnaic mi Iain an dé, literally ‘saw I John yesterday’ (Gillies 1993: 208); this is with the exception of Breton), rather than an essentially Subject Verb Object order (we think, in fact, that Indo-European originally had a Subject Object Verb order, as still found in, for instance, the modern Slavonic languages). The Celtic languages also have a striking feature which is practically unknown anywhere else in Europe: the use of initial consonant mutation to mark function (so that, for instance, in Modern Gaelic, the second future form of the verb cluinn ‘hear’ (with initial /kl/) is chluinneadh, with initial /xl/ (Gillies 1993: 192). All of the languages for which we have written records in Scotland appear to have been members of one or the other of these sub-families.1 They are not all from the same part of the sub-family, however. With the Celtic languages, the ancestor of Modern Gaelic, alternatively termed Old Irish or Old Gaelic, is analysed as a Q-Celtic (or Goidelic) language, while the British (or Cumbric) dialects of southern and central Scotland, along with Pictish, were P-Celtic (or Brittonic). A central distinction in this is a phonological difference between the use of /k/ (historically /kw/) and /p/. Welsh (a P-Celtic language) calls a ‘head’ pen (an earlier reflex can be found in Penicuik in Midlothian), while in Gaelic it is ceann (an earlier reflex of which being found in Kincorth in Aberdeen). It

some preli mi na ri es | xi is not immediately obvious, but the Gaelic male patronymic marker mac(h)- is actually the same root as Welsh ap, used for the same purposes. From the Middle Ages on, a change in Welsh meant that /m/ could not precede /a/; it can still be found, however, in Lochmaben, a small town in south-west Scotland. Maben here seems to represent the name of an early Celtic god, ‘great son’, late Roman and early medieval inscriptions to whom are regularly found in northern England (Mair 1997, s.v. Maponus); he also appears to have been revered in parts of Gaul. The Germanic languages spoken in Scotland over the last 2,000 years are also sundered into different sub-families. Scots and Scottish Standard English are descended from somewhat different dialects of Old English, a West Germanic language (and therefore a close relative of Frisian, Low German and Dutch and a rather more distant relative of German, Luxembourgish and Yiddish), while Norn (and its relatives), spoken until the eighteenth century in Orkney and Shetland, was a North Germanic language (and therefore a close relative of modern Icelandic, Faeroese and western forms of Norwegian and a somewhat more distant relative of eastern varieties of Norwegian, along with Danish and Swedish). The present-day North Germanic and West Germanic languages are not as different from each other (at least not in terms of pronunciation) as the two branches of the Celtic languages are. There are some important divisions, however. The North Germanic languages possess what is sometimes termed a ‘medio-passive’ as well as a passive. The semantic distinction between the two categories is slight, but occasionally visible. Modern Norwegian vi blir sett means ‘we are being seen [by someone external]’; vi ses can mean ‘we are being seen [by each other]’ (and is a common valediction). Possibly the most striking difference between West and North Germanic languages, however, is in the use of definers. In Modern English, the is a definite article and can only be used before a noun; in Modern German, the paradigm which includes der, and which can be used both to express demonstrative and article function, can also only be used before a noun. In Norwegian, however, a demonstrative pronoun is used before a noun, but definite meanings are carried by an enclitic definite particle, which forms a definite noun paradigm. Thus, the man is equivalent to der Mann in German, but mannen (from mann + en, the particle) in Norwegian. Some of these distinctions developed earlier than others, so that the mediopassive may not have been used in Norse during the period before 1100 when

xii  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a n d Viking Norse and Old English speakers were coming into often profound contact with each other in the north of England (a contact which eventually produced the transfer of a considerable amount of vocabulary from Norse into what became Scots) or with at least the earliest Norse speakers who settled in the Northern Isles and along the coast and islands of Scotland from Caithness down to Galloway; the structure would, however, have been present in Norn, the North Germanic dialects spoken in Orkney and Shetland until the early eighteenth century. 0.4  A Few Notes on Names and Terms In general I have used the names for languages and varieties normally employed today. An exception to this is Scots, which I by preference only use as the name for the variety from the sixteenth century on; before this, I have normally used Inglis; prior to the twelfth century I have used (Northumbrian) Old English or Old Northumbrian, occasionally emphasising the Bernician nature of the Northumbrian spoken in what is now Scotland in the Early Historical period. I do not use Irish as my own term for Scottish Gaelic, but this term is employed occasionally when it is what contemporaries said or wrote. I sympathise with the use of Gàidhlig for Gaelic by some modern writers but have chosen to use the mainstream form because I believe that employing the Gaelic equivalent would itself become the debate rather than merely acting as signifier. I have inevitably been eclectic in my representation of personal and group names. I have followed the practice by historians working within that era of giving historically ‘correct’ forms for people living in Scotland during the earliest recorded period, until at least the reigns of the sons of St Margaret, so that Malcolm III is represented as Mael Coluim. I have not done this with English kings of the period, or for Saints Columba and Margaret, instead using the names by which they are generally known. Unless an early place-name has no equivalent modern form, it is the latter form that is used, unless there is a particular reason for not doing so. 0.5 Translations Unless otherwise stated, translations are my own (although I have gained a great deal from discussions with a number of people, including Sandra Weyland, and the ready resource of the Dictionary of the Scots Language).

some preli mi na ri es | xiii 0.6  And Finally This book concerns the linguistic history of Scotland, a history of which I am myself a part. Naturally I have my own views about Scotland’s past, present and future; I also have strong (I hope informed) views on present and future language planning and policy in the country. Other people have different views; I hope I have treated these fairly.

1 INTRODUCTION: THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AND THE SCOTTISH HISTORICAL ECOLOGY

1.0 Introduction

T

his book represents the first attempt to provide a sociolinguistic history of Scotland, an analysis based around what languages people have spoken and speak in this country, to whom and in what contexts. Were all linguistic varieties spoken at any one time given equal social status? Why have some varieties ceased to have native speakers, while others have thrived? Do social, economic and political forces cause or affect these circumstances? Before we engage with this set of themes and analysis, however, some introductory information is necessary in relation to the physical realities of the sociolinguistic apparatus which underlies this book. In addition, a brief description of the physical nature of Scotland will be given. 1.1  Language and Society: Some Introductory Concepts The theme of this book stands at the interchange between the study of history and the study of language in society – both well-established fields, the first rather better-known outside its scholarly heartland than the latter. Because of this relatively circumscribed knowledge base, some of the central concepts of (macro-)sociolinguistics (otherwise, the Sociology of Language) will be discussed here. Despite the distinction made here, however, I hope that it will quickly become apparent that the two fields, of history and sociolinguistics, are, in fact, connected in a range of ways; the latter in particular

2  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a n d cannot really function without at least some degree of knowledge of the former. A central caveat needs to be established before we begin our discussion, however. While human beings have not changed much since ancient times either physiologically or (we assume) psychologically, their societies and societal norms and mores have. Their access to technology (and, perhaps more importantly, what technology this was and is) and the economic structures and limitations of the societies in which they live have also changed immensely over time. In ninth-century Argyll, for instance, the ancestor of Modern Gaelic was spoken by people who were only one harvest away from dearth and two away from famine. A hierarchical social structure existed (so that, to be blunt, some would have taken longer to starve than others) with a king at its summit, but a king whose authority was normally highly localised. The Church in theory acted as a check on the potential tyranny of royal power, but in practice its more elevated members would have come from the same backgrounds as (and indeed were often relatives of ) the ruling class. The kingdoms which surrounded this little kingdom might share a strong sense of common language and culture (and often had a High King exercising a notional or sometimes real overlordship); this common culture and language did not stop regular skirmishes between and within the territories, however, often involving alliances with speakers of other languages. This is, inevitably, very different from the social, political and economic situation of the same part of contemporary Scotland, where locals can engage in the political decision-making system at a range of governmental levels based on (at least notional) equality, but personal and community wealth are used and channelled by global economic forces over which local people have at best highly limited control. It needs to be recognised, nevertheless, that, as I have demonstrated from a more general perspective in my 2010a book, the social aspect of language use is a human universal, no matter the time period. Simplifying somewhat, those with capital have linguistic (as well as economic and political) advantages over those without. Almost inevitably, a highly aspirational middle class of some sort will exist. Its linguistic behaviour will often involve the copying of the linguistic behaviour of their ‘betters’. In the following sections we will consider a range of different of different features analysts have recognised across space and time.

i ntroducti on | 3 1.1.1  Societal multilingualism In September 2018, I took part in the University of Aberdeen’s open day for potential undergraduate students and, often, their parents. While inevitably (albeit a bit depressingly) the majority of the visitors were white and middleclass residents of Scotland and other parts of the Atlantic Archipelago, a wide range of people from many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, speaking a range of languages, which included Polish, Igbo, Panjabi and at least two Chinese dialects (one of which was Putonghua, otherwise known as Mandarin), also attended. After taking part in the open day, I walked from Old Aberdeen into the city centre. Even greater linguistic diversity was evident. This everyday experience of multilingualism is the norm for many of us, even if some of us choose to ignore it because most of that particular type of diversity is caused, from our point of view, by recent immigration. Past and present experience suggests that the diversity will not survive more than two to three generations for most, if not all, of the minority communities, as these minorities are absorbed into the majority. This misses the point somewhat, however. It is actually quite difficult to think of a territory anywhere in the world which has not exhibited, or does not exhibit, a degree of multilingualism within its boundaries. Not all of this is due to recent immigration. While only rarely can elements of the linguistic diversity be analysed as aboriginal, its historical basis is regularly so deep that it can be described as autochthonous, of the soil. Even in an apparently monolingual country like Iceland, in fact, there is a Danish-speaking minority who have lived there, often for centuries. These arrangements are inevitably complex. Let us take the territory of what is now Belgium as an example (for a recent treatment of some of these issues, see Blommaert 2011). From the outside the country appears to be multilingual. The federal government, as expressed through, for instance, defence and border control, is bilingual in Dutch and French. The present state is highly regionalised, however. In fact, only the federal capital, Brussels, is officially bilingual, despite French being dominant there. The territory in the north, Flanders, is officially monolingually Dutch-speaking, while, to the south, Wallonia is monolingually French-speaking and -using. Both territories offer some degree of (sometimes rather grudging) support and recognition to speakers of the other ‘national’ variety, but only when those speakers live on the border between regions (in other

4  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d words, French speakers living just on the Flemish side of the Flanders-Wallonia border might have some linguistic rights; a French speaker in Ghent or Antwerp would not). Wallonia exhibits one exception to this rule: in some cantons in the east of the territory, the majority language is German (the result of a series of frontier changes at the end of the Great War). German speakers have significant linguistic rights in these areas; these are severely limited at either a Wallonia or federal level, however.1 Most of Belgium is therefore officially monolingual. If we go back in time, however, the situation is less clear-cut (for a discussion, see Joris 1966). Towards the end of Roman rule in the southern Low Countries, speakers of Germanic dialects that would later be classified as Dutch became dominant in the flatlands to the west and south of the River Rhine. Speakers of Romance dialects which would eventually become Wallon (the regional language of the territory, now dialectalised under French but retaining some degree of written expression; the edges of Wallonia contain speakers of other Romance varieties, including Picard and Lorrain). These boundaries were neither policed nor absolute, however. Pockets of Germanic speech would have been found in Romance territory; the same would have been true of Romance speech in the north. Latin would have survived longest in urban and ecclesiastical centres, evidence for which can be found in the fact that these centres – and those in the southern parts of today’s Netherlands – historically had Romance and Germanic names (this is particularly, but not exclusively, the case in the Germanic territory). This situation would have been perpetuated by the fact that large parts of Flanders formed a (sometimes semi-detached) part of the French kingdom in the later Middle Ages (indeed, some of Flanders is still part of France), while much of Wallonia was part of the (ostensibly German) Holy Roman Empire and was later ruled by first Spanish and then Austrian viceroys. Bilingualism was likely to have been the norm, in particular along the ‘border’. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was particularly prevalent for sociolinguistic reasons related to the status of that language at the time for the Flemish urban middle classes to use French in both their public and, to a considerable degree, private lives. Much of this diversity has now, if not disappeared, at least retreated to the boundaries of a new monolingual orthodoxy. The modern age has not been kind to the inherent multilingualism of territories. Sometimes, as I discussed in my 2005 book, the reasons for this are dramatic, whether these be (largely) natural disasters, such as the effects of the Irish potato famine of the 1840s on the number of Irish speakers in the follow-

i ntroducti on | 5 ing generations, or engineered catastrophes, such as the death of Tasmanian in the nineteenth century and the contemporary attrition of linguistic diversity in Amazonia, in both cases due to the need on the part of the expanding centre for profit-based agricultural territory at the expense of traditional territorial ecologies. These may be less obvious when played out across a considerable period. Early Modern Poland (as part of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania) was strikingly multilingual (and multicultural). Speakers of Polish rubbed shoulders with speakers of German, Ukrainian, Belarusyn, Yiddish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Czech and Romanian (this listing does not recognise the many smaller linguistic communities, including speakers of Old Prussian, Armenian and Karaite). Modern Poland is as strikingly monolingual. With the exception of essentially insignificant speaker numbers for many of the languages mentioned above, the only real diversity stems from the Slavonic varieties Kashubian and Silesian, spoken within the boundaries of the state, whose status as languages is controversial. Changes of border have played their part in this alteration. Primarily, however, the Holocaust and massive movements of population in the period after the Second World War have erased Poland’s diverse linguistic past (see Millar 2005: 22–4). As we will see, Scotland has gone through periods of considerable bilingualism (if not multilingualism). Considering the records which survive from the early Middle Ages, it soon becomes apparent that the royal families (and, indeed, the elite groups that fed their power but also derived their own power base from the elite construct) were culturally (and presumably linguistically) mixed. Given that elite marriages were often constructed as part of an alliance or a peace deal, this is unsurprising. Because of the fissiparous nature of society and the country’s polities at the time, it is unsurprising that these ‘peace weaving’ alliances should have regularly happened. Let us envisage an eighth-century Pictish prince. His father was likely to speak Pictish as his native language as well – although this does not necessarily follow. His mother might well have been a Gaelic speaker from Dál Riata; his late wife an Anglian-speaking Bernician; he was shortly to marry a British speaker from Strathclyde. He would have had relatives who spoke all of these languages (and others) fluently. None of these, moreover, would have been likely to come from a household or court where only one language was spoken. While not everyone would have been able to speak all these languages, passive comprehension at least must have been the norm. If this

6  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd sounds far-fetched, bear in mind that two centuries later the Gaelic-speaking King of Scots, Mael Coluim III, had a Norse-speaking Orcadian as his first wife and an English-speaking West Saxon princess as his second. This description does not even bring into consideration Latin, which was both omnipresent in society and unknown by almost everyone. Naturally this level of complex diversity would not have been so common among the peasantry. Monolingualism would not, however, have been the societal norm. 1.1.2  Language and dialect The great sociolinguist of Yiddish Max Weinreich (1894–1969) is said to have quipped that ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’. Behind the jest, however, lies a profound (near-) truth. Social, political and economic factors influence our perception of the status of a language variety. Scots (for instance) is, at least in an idealised form, less like English than Norwegian is like Swedish. Practically no one would claim that Norwegian was not a language, however, while that status is often contested for the Scottish vernacular. The long-term political autonomy of Norway in the modern age cannot have harmed the national language’s prestige. Other sociolinguistic – and linguistic – factors come into play in assigning status, however. There is a considerable literature on this subject, summarised in my 2005 book. The approach I wish to take here is, in my view, the most straightforward; however, it is also less well-known in the English-speaking world than it should be, largely because it is mainly available only in German. In a career lasting more than thirty years, Heinz Kloss (see, in particular, (1978); a brief restatement of his views in English can be found in his (1967) article) developed a conceptual typology by which different kinds of language varieties can be distinguished. In the first instance, he distinguishes two ways by which varieties can be considered languages. The first of these is Abstand, German for ‘distance’; the criteria underlying it are essentially linguistic. Although hardly anything was written in the variety until the nineteenth century, no one could ever have claimed before this that Basque was anything other than a language. It is in a situation of absolute distance with all the neighbouring varieties (and, being a language isolate, all other languages). Most languages do not have that level of distance from their neighbours; it is still a considerable factor in distinguishing different varieties, however. A German speaker travelling east from Berlin would eventually find her-/himself crossing the River Oder/Odra and entering Poland. The

i ntroducti on | 7 ‘language world’ would alter immediately; perhaps jarringly. German and Polish are related, but the similarities have largely been rendered opaque by thousands of years of divergence; only an historical linguist specialised in these languages would notice them. While not notionally absolute in its nature, an experience of complete linguistic distance would be the norm for speakers of either language when coming into contact with the other variety. More interesting, perhaps, would be the experience the Berliner would have if s/he travelled west into the Netherlands. German and Dutch are close relatives. Speakers of one language can, with difficulty, read straightforward texts in the other language if they know something about its orthographic conventions. With the exception of people who come from close to the mutual border or have actively learned their neighbours’ language, however, comprehension of the spoken variety would be limited to the point of near incomprehensibility. Thus, experience of distance, while less pronounced than in the Polish scenario, would be very real. Abstand need not always be a criterion for assigning language status, however. Czech and Slovak, for instance, are different from each other, but the possibility of mutual intelligibility is very high for most speakers. If the Czech lands had not spent a millennium as a part of the German-dominant Holy Roman Empire and its successor states, while what is now Slovakia was considered by most to be an integral part of the kingdom of Hungary, if the post-1918 political marriage between the two groups had not been a fundamentally unhappy one, it is difficult to imagine the two language varieties being treated as discrete entities. The desire for distance, in fact, was satisfied, in particular on the Slovak side, by the linguistic development of the written language away from its sister language. Slovak can be considered a language not through linguistic distance but rather through sociolinguistic planning and development: Ausbau, in Kloss’s terms. Most contemporary written languages are standardised. A particular dialect of a language has become the prestigious norm, its structural, phonological and lexical features considered inherently ‘better’, often more ‘genuine’, than are those of other varieties of the same language. The room for variability within the standard is normally fairly limited – the differences between written British and American English are in truth very minor. The fact that they are very striking to readers schooled in one tradition from within this English whole demonstrates how homogenous Standard English actually is: if greater distinctions existed, those which do would not have been fetishised. In a sense Abstand and Ausbau are polar states. But almost all standardised

8  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a nd languages possess aspects of both. With the exception of languages like, as we have seen, Czech and Slovak or, to a lesser extent, Swedish and Norwegian, all of these varieties are sufficiently distant from other standardised varieties to be seen as discrete (even if a dialect continuum exists between them). On the other hand, their very status as standardised varieties means that they have been developed, acculturated, whether that be in a circumstantial way, where the language of the ‘best people’, of the elite, becomes the written and spoken norm without anyone deciding to carry out this process consciously, or by engineered means, where an individual or a group take the conscious decision to develop the ‘best’ or ‘most genuine’ form of the language (these terms are derived from Joseph (1987)). Kloss also turns his analysis towards the concept of dialect, an analysis he bases primarily on how a variety is used. He explicitly rejects the concept of ‘mere dialect’ for dialects (along with the idea that dialects are linguistically subservient to the standard, even when they are according to a social analysis), while also recognising, through his term Normaldialekt, that most varieties of a language are essentially spoken; if there is any written representation of these varieties, this tends to be through the production of short comic or sentimental pieces published in local newspapers or, nowadays, online fora. An Ausbaudialekt, on the other hand, is regularly seen in contexts normally associated with a language. You may see novels written in the variety; minutes of local and regional meetings may be published in it. On the other hand, it does not possess all of a language’s functions: it would be very rare indeed to have official government material with everyday importance, such as tax forms, published in that variety. Bavarian is a good example of a variety of this type: a written dialect, possessing profound associations with regional identity, but not sharing any of the official associations of Standard High German, to which it is in a sense subservient. This is not a static state, however: in the nineteenth century the local dialects of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg were perceived by most people as highly distinctive forms of German. Due to the country’s new reality of full autonomy and the problematical recent history of the region, the dialects have developed a growing association with national identity that has increasingly been expressed through the written form, however. Luxembourgish is now one of the three official languages of the country. Nor is the language state static. It is quite possible for a language to be dialectalised under another, particularly if the two varieties are close relatives,

i ntroducti on | 9 or kin tongues, as Kloss (1984) termed them. Low German is a good example of this process. A language of considerable status across the Baltic and North Sea worlds in the late medieval and Early Modern periods, influential upon all of the languages spoken where its speakers lived and worked, it is now spoken only (with a limited number of exceptions, such as among small-scale religious minorities in north America) in territories where High German is the official variety. Low German retains a written presence (as well as some representation in other media), however, even if its speaker numbers are gradually dropping. It is possible, although not common, to reverse this process, as has happened with Catalan in relation to Castilian Spanish in the period since the end of the Franco dictatorship in the mid-1970s. It is difficult to transpose these relationships from a time of near universal literacy, mass communication and pervasive state power to one where literacy was rare, long-range communication of any sort was at best challenging and the ruler’s power, no matter how arbitrary, violent and sometimes vindictive, could not run far. But analogues remain. Issues of language-based ethnic identity have been present since our ancestors first began to record views of this type (which is, in fact, quite early in the trajectory of the development of writing; spoken norms are also apparent). Inevitably sociolinguistic as well as linguistic criteria have always been employed to define distinctions (and power relationships) between varieties and their speakers. These distinctions have always had an arbitrary element to them, an element which must have been even more prevalent in periods where the coherence of political and economic power was somewhat friable and certainly not convincing in its longevity. 1.1.3 Diglossia Speakers of any or all languages, whether written or not, have a highly developed sense of linguistic appropriateness. Certain words and phrases are, for all of us, acceptable (perhaps even necessary) for some contexts but often completely unacceptable for others. Many years ago I had a student who spoke in an almost aggressively formal way to everyone, referring to all of his contemporaries by title and last name, for instance. While, of itself, there was nothing wrong with this type of behaviour, I was aware that the other students found it deeply unsettling. Sadly, it meant that he was, if not exactly ostracised, to an extent treated with a considerable degree of distance. Students are, at least in my institution, expected to treat each other in an informal and friendly manner unless a specific

10  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a nd reason – such as profound dislike – makes formality a preferable option. In some societies, such as those in parts of Indonesia (Jenson 1988), these distinctions are highly codified linguistically, to the extent that we can talk about specific registers associated with particular social contexts, often predicated upon the social standing and gender of both speaker and listener. While the rules of these relationships change over time, transgression is still at the very least a major social faux pas and may lead to very serious consequences indeed. In many societies, relationships of this type are expressed through the near absolute expectation of the use of particular linguistic varieties under certain defined circumstances. As Ferguson (1959) points out, in German-speaking Switzerland, for instance, a complex set of linguistic relationships prevail between different varieties. Although thought of as a German-speaking area, the local dialects – which are normally quite different from each other – are highly distinctive. At most limited intelligibility is possible between them and most other German varieties. Under other historical circumstances, it would have been quite possible for Swiss to be considered, like Dutch, a close relative to, but discrete from, Standard German, to have developed as a full blown Ausbau language with strong Abstand traits. This did not happen, however, perhaps because of a tradition of common literacy shared across the German-speaking world, coupled with the high levels of literacy through the use of the German Bible, associated with the radical Protestantism many parts of the region espoused in the sixteenth century. Standard High German is the prevalent written variety (although various forms of Swiss German are employed under certain circumstances); it is also used regularly by Swiss German speakers, when speaking to people from elsewhere in the German-speaking world, as well as, under certain social circumstances, with other Swiss German speakers. Let us imagine someone from a Swiss German-speaking background who is a deputy in the Swiss federal parliament. When giving speeches in parliament, she will almost exclusively use Standard High German. Partly this is because her native dialect may not be easy for all other Swiss German speakers to understand; partly this is due to her awareness that speakers of one of the country’s other languages will, if they have learned German at all, only have learned the Standard variety; partly – perhaps particularly – her use of Standard German feels, to her, the only right and proper variety to choose. Using her native dialect under these circumstances would be inappropriate, perhaps even offensive or comic.

i ntroducti on | 11 On the other hand, if she were taking part in an election campaign in her home area, she would speak to voters and at meetings almost wholly in her native dialect. Doing otherwise would seem particularly unnatural; it might also be electoral suicide. Potential supporters would be dissuaded from voting for her because she would appear stand-offish, apparently expressing the view that she was different from, perhaps that she considered herself socially superior to, them. At home, using the local variety would be an absolute requirement, unless under highly marked circumstances. Conversely, most productions of at least the traditional media would be in Standard High German – even in a local context. Many readers would react badly to their local dialect being employed to discuss a ‘serious’ story in a newspaper. It might be used occasionally as ‘colour’ in editorials, particularly in lighter pieces, as well as in cartoons and comic pieces. The same would mostly be true on radio and television, with the same provisos. Matters might be different in various online situations, possibly because social media, for instance, may be considered considerably closer to oral practices than to written. Basing his commentary in part upon previous French scholarship, Ferguson defined relationships of this type as diglossia, considering them inherently stable and self-perpetuating. Ferguson generally considered them to be confined to one language, so that in many Arabic-speaking countries a diglossic relationship pertains between the local dialect varieties (Low or L) and Modern Standard Arabic/Qur’anic Arabic (High or H). Fishman (1967), however, suggested that relationships of this type were available across languages, so that, for instance, England after the Norman Conquest of 1066–7 witnessed a diglossic relationship between French as the High variety and English as the Low, particularly since, from an early period, most Norman settlers would have had to speak at least some English in order to maintain themselves in their new country (and also form meaningful and useful relationships). This relationship existed even though a large part of the native population never learned much French. They would essentially never have had access to the High contexts in any event. The same could be said of the elite use of French in pre-Revolutionary Russia. At least in the modern world, diglossia need not be permanent. In its purest sense, in fact, it need not exist. Until around the middle of the twentieth century, a diglossic relationship existed for many Scots speakers: Scots, as the Low variety, and Scottish Standard English, as the High, were kept separate, being used in different linguistic domains based upon ideas of appropriateness. In

12  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d contemporary Scotland, however, this distinction has broken down, with usages competing, particularly in oral contexts, and the influence of colloquial forms of English becoming increasingly dominant (Millar 2005: chapter 2). Can we extrapolate ideas of this type further back in time? The answer, inevitably, is that this is possible to some extent, depending on the records we have; moreover, the lower levels of literacy must also have affected the developments involved. In large parts of medieval western and central Europe, for instance, Latin was undoubtedly the High variety, with various vernaculars performing the role of Low variety, even if, as we might expect, very few of the people who lived in those regions could read, write or speak Latin. Relationships between these varieties inevitably differed from place to place and time to time. French, for instance, remained the Low variety more obviously and for longer in France than English did in England (although the latter is complicated by the fact that French was, as we have seen, also a High variety in the latter kingdom). In early Scotland, Latin certainly held the High position, but, at least in certain areas north of the Forth and Clyde, Gaelic also appears to have been in a higher position socially than Pictish; this relationship is complicated by the fact that, over time, this last relationship also represents one of language shift. 1.1.4  Language maintenance and language shift From very early times we must assume that language varieties have, whether suddenly or gradually, ceased to have native speakers. When, as most of us assume, speakers of Indo-European dialects began to move away from where the language was originally spoken, their influence was sufficient for the local languages to come under threat, because their original native speakers were switching over to the new, possibly prestigious, variety. In Europe, some languages, such as Basque, survived (albeit in a rather more circumscribed area); others, such as Etruscan, succumbed. Still others can now only be traced in possible substratal influences on surviving languages, such as, perhaps, in the historically rigid Germanic word stress pattern, not normal in Indo-European varieties. Some ‘dead’ languages recorded in early history, such as Sumerian, were once highly prestigious but still ceased, over time, to have native speakers. Language shift is often particularly concentrated on varieties with limited social prestige, however. Speakers of the less prestigious variety may be compelled to speak a more prestigious one, although some speakers will persevere in their use of ‘their’ language. This does happen, but the social and economic advantages

i ntroducti on | 13 associated with the prestigious variety inevitably attract aspirational members of the less prestigious language to it. This will mean that the declining variety will become even less prestigious because it is now associated with ‘lower-class’ people. Even if it is not, however, and the variety is an admired identity symbol, it may still be abandoned because its speakers cannot see its economic value (or even functional point). A particularly good example of this can be found in the ‘death’ of Norn in eighteenth-century Shetland, a point to which we will return in Chapter 5. While language shift (the movement by speakers away from one language in favour of another) and language death (where a variety, due to language shift or other often more traumatic processes, ceases to have any native speakers) have always happened, the modern age has, it appears, witnessed a considerable increase in the level to which the phenomena are occurring and recurring. A primary reason for this shift in gear is the increasing economic and communicative connectivity of the modern world, along with growing levels of literacy, primarily in the state language, and the increasing dominance at a world level of the speakers of a number of major languages, including, but not only, English. In 1500 it was quite possible for language communities in the heart of Europe to be essentially overlooked by larger-scale authority (the speakers of Sorbian, a West Slavonic language spoken in what is now eastern Germany, are a good surviving example of this former reality). The state, such as it was, generally ignored the language and its speakers unless they were a political and social threat. It is now necessary to go deep into Amazonia to find that type of sociolinguistic relationship. Even there, the reach of Portuguese – the language of globalisation in those territories – has expanded considerably, largely due to its association with a cash-based regional (indeed, world) economy. While many languages survive – sometimes thrive – in these environments, most do not. Even here, however, the linguistic ecologies surrounding successful lesser-used languages, such as Guaraní, spoken in Paraguay and the surrounding regions, have themselves encouraged shift away from languages with lower prestige or fewer, more economically marginalised, speakers. As we will see in Chapter 8, the future is not bright for all but a small number of languages with a large number of speakers. Another tendency exists and has always existed: language maintenance. Some lesser-used languages have, despite everything, managed not only to survive but to gain sufficient prestige of whatever sort to maintain speaker

14  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd numbers across the generations and often to increase these numbers. Fishman (1991) makes the point that language maintenance of any type at any time is predicated upon parents (or guardians of whatever sort) passing their language on to their children in a natural manner. If, for whatever social, economic or political reason, this does not take place, a breakdown in generational transfer is inevitable. Everything flows from this relationship. In the modern age, however, more than this needs to be done, not least in relation to mass communication and education, largely due to the dominance of hegemonic languages, including English, in these domains. That it is achievable – if relatively uncommon – is incontestable. While the ‘rebirth’ of Modern Hebrew is probably not a particularly representative example of these processes, the reinstatement of Catalan as a major language or the survival of conventionally transmitted community varieties of Ladin and Friulian in Italy demonstrate that it can be achieved. 1.1.5 Conclusion Language use is at the centre of our lives as social animals. The social relationships between speakers of different languages make the use of language complex, exhibiting tendencies both to celebrate local identity and ‘authenticity’ and to wish to demonstrate connection with sources of power of a variety of types. This book describes and analyses the apparent triumph of an originally external linguistic variety – Scottish Standard English – over the autochthonous languages – Gaelic and Scots – which were themselves the ‘victors’ in earlier linguistic struggles. It also describes and analyses the survival of the native languages down to the present day. While these outcomes are incontestable, the processes by which they came to these destinations, along with a growing awareness of counter-flow back into the past and now, are not: the ‘victory’ of Scottish Standard English is contingent, partial and always open to reinterpretation. 1.2  The Scottish Environment 1.2.1  Physical environment Scotland lies, in global terms, in the far north. In the period of the Ice Ages, the country was sometimes under a 1,000 metres and more of ice. If it were not for the North Atlantic Drift, bringing warm water up from the Caribbean Sea, Scotland would be largely tundra, with a climate not dissimilar to contemporary north-east Siberia. The presence of the warm water current means, however,

i ntroducti on | 15

Map 1  Scotland

16  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d

Map 2  Scotland: pre-1975 counties

i ntroducti on | 17 that the country largely enjoys a mild, damp and often windy climate; winters are not generally severe. The eastern parts of Scotland – particularly the regions to the east of the mountains – have a drier climate with colder winters; these distinctions are essentially relative, however. Every decade or so, nonetheless, the wind wheels to the north and north-east for an extended period in the winter; the weather can then become brutal. The present country is made up primarily of two forms of topography: a series of upland and highland regions consisting of ‘hard’ igneous and metamorphic rock, which produce relatively thin and poor soils, as well as areas of low-lying topography, often associated with river valleys, based upon sedimentary rocks which generally produce soils of considerable depth and fertility. While southern parts of the country are often upland in nature (with the hills of the south-west being essentially mountains) and it is difficult to find any place in central Scotland where higher land is not present within a radius of ten kilometres, the Highlands proper represent a major region of mountainous terrain, the most elevated parts of which evince Alpine or even Arctic climates and environments. At least since the Neolithic period, modes of cultivation – plant and animal – have inevitably differed between Highland and Lowland regions; at times the environmental boundary has also been a cultural and linguistic one. The sea is no great distance from anywhere in Scotland. For many residents its presence is an everyday reality. On the west coast it enters far into the country up long firths and sea lochs (essentially, fjords); scenery on the east coast is not as dramatic, perhaps, but long firths, often river estuaries, also permit tidal water deep into landward regions. The seas off the whole of the Scottish coastline were historically rich with sea life; this was particularly the case with the east coast, since the North Sea is relatively cold and attracts species like haddock and cod, perhaps pre-eminently herring, with a high nutrient to weight relationship and, more recently, considerable monetary value, close into shore. While fishing as an industry only really began in the Early Modern period, coastal populations have always treated their local seas as part of their seasonal larder; their importance intensified during periods of dearth and famine. While there are only a small number of generally small islands lying off the east coast, the west coast contains a wealth of islands of different sizes, most organised in a series of archipelagos – such as the Outer Hebrides. Each island has, since ancient times, exhibited its own environmental character. Islay, for instance, is much more fertile than its near neighbour Jura. These environmental

18  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd differences may well have affected the language use, as well as the social and political strength, of their inhabitants. While it is common nowadays to think of the islands off the west coast as being in some ways cut off and distant, there have been times in the country’s history when the islands have been at the centre of North Atlantic and Irish Sea trade and power politics. Along with the southernmost parts of mainland Argyll, the islands’ proximity to Ireland must always be borne in mind. As well as the sea, Scotland south of the Great Glen, the long narrow valley which runs from Inverness on the North Sea south west to Fort William on the Atlantic, in particular possesses a range of water courses whose sources lie far into the interior. The Tay is a particularly good example of this. The Tay proper and many of its tributaries rise considerably further west or north than the place it becomes tidal. While not all of these waters are navigable, they have provided useful transits since ancient times, still often used for major or minor roads. In the south, the Earn rises near to a number of tributaries of the Forth, thus making communication into that river’s valley straightforward; further north, the River Dochart (which flows into Loch Tay at Killin (Perthshire), leaving it at the other end as the Tay) rises in a pass within walking distance of streams that flow into Loch Lomond (and thus, via the short River Leven, into the Firth of Clyde) and, with a rather longer walk, waters that flow directly into the Atlantic. The northernmost of the tributaries of the Tay, the Garry, rises only a few kilometres away from streams that flow into the Spey, the watershed acting as a relatively easy transit that takes travellers down to the Moray Firth. Rivers also contain stocks of much needed protein which become particularly abundant during, for instance, the annual salmon run. To the north of mainland Scotland lie two sizeable archipelagos, Orkney and Shetland. Discussion of these islands must always be approached in the knowledge that politically they are relatively recent additions to the kingdom (in 1469–70). The people of Shetland in particular still look towards Norway to a degree, albeit in a somewhat stylised and sentimentalised manner. Nonetheless, the linguistic development of the two archipelagos’ inhabitants connects to – in many ways is a part of – the general Scottish scene, or to parts thereof. The two island chains possess some environmental similarities – not least the dominance of the sea which is the norm in insular communities. In other ways, however, they are strikingly different. Orkney is generally fertile, for instance; its southern islands are visible from the Scottish mainland. Shetland

i ntroducti on | 19 is considerably less fertile and is situated far out in the North Atlantic, closer to Scotland than to Norway or the Faeroes, but still far from close. The inhabitants of the northern archipelago have of necessity been long accustomed to fishing in deeper and more distant waters than have their southern neighbours. 1.2.2  Natural resources The economic history of Scotland has been in some ways written by its geology. Easy transit across central Scotland – particularly along the ‘great valley’ of Strathmore – has undoubtedly encouraged trade (and population movement); the softer rocks and deeper soils have also encouraged intensive arable agriculture different from the sheep and cow herding based around transhumance which dominated elsewhere. In the modern age in particular, however, other natural resources also became of great importance. Coal, for instance, was found in considerable quantities across the Central Belt (the heavily populated area stretching from the Firth of Clyde to the Firth of Forth), as well as in southern Ayrshire and parts of Dumfriesshire; less significant deposits are also found in eastern Sutherland. Iron was also found in many of these areas, as was shale. This wealth was harnessed systematically from the eighteenth century on, making central Scotland a player in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. Small oil reserves are found in the same areas; these have been exploited on occasion, not least during the Second World War. They are dwarfed, however, by the oil deposits found around the country’s coasts. These are mostly associated with the North Sea, but considerable quantities are to be found under the Atlantic. These reserves began to be exploited in the 1970s. The economies of the north-east and the Northern Isles in particular have become connected to the rise and fall of the price for this commodity. Other minerals, especially lead and silver, were also present in locations across the country; small amounts of gold and uranium are also found. 1.2.3  Reasons for settlement Many of the settlements in Scotland are of great age; geographical reasons underlie their initial settlement and longevity. Aberdeen was originally a settlement raised above marshy land, less than a kilometre inland from the natural harbour at the mouth of the River Don. Fishing, whaling and sealing were possible, excellent paths into the Grampians and beyond were available up both the Don and the nearby Dee. Glasgow stands on a bank of dry ground above a

20  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd ford over the Clyde where fresh and salt water meet. Edinburgh Castle Rock is a near-perfect defensive site. Dundee lies at the narrow ‘neck’ of the Firth of Tay. 1.3  A Brief Conclusion In the following chapters I will attempt to describe and analyse the social, political and economic forces which drove the course of language use over the last 15,000 years. Many of the ideas and patterns discussed in this chapter will inform what follows.

2 DIVERSITY: THE EARLY HISTORICAL PERIOD

2.1 Prehistory

H

uman settlement in Scotland began early for so northerly a territory. But although we may be able to say a great deal about the ecology and material conditions these prehistoric people encountered (including even domestic culture in sites such as Skara Brae in Orkney), we have little sense of what languages these early settlers spoke. No written documents (with the exception, perhaps, of some Pictish symbol stones (for a recent treatment, see Noble et al. 2019); these may not be fully linguistic, however) emanated from Scotland until the Early Historical period, beginning somewhat after the end of Roman rule in southern Britain. We are therefore to a considerable extent reliant up to that point on sources external to Scotland (indeed, Britain) to exemplify and analyse the country’s earliest linguistic history. But the whole of the Atlantic Archipelago was only briefly and occasionally mentioned by the literate observers of the Mediterranean world; even then discussion was normally fragmentary and second-hand. Given its greater distance from major ‘civilised’ population centres, this was even more so with what became Scotland. All too often we are faced, therefore, with conjecture, regularly based upon evidence from placenames recorded now or in historical documents, sometimes triangulated with these contemporary external discussions. Although some scholars make a case for non-Celtic (or even pre-IndoEuropean) place-names, such as, perhaps, Tay,1 being among those recorded

22  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a nd

Map 3  Larger-scale polities

before the Christianisation of northern Britain, the overwhelming majority are undoubtedly Celtic in origin, running from the orc- in what is now Orkney, possibly referring to the boar, a sacred animal in ‘Celtic’ Europe, through the Dee, found at least twice in Scotland as a river name, the river in the north-east originally recorded as deva ‘goddess’.2 Similar distribution patterns can still be

di versi ty | 23

Map 4  Places mentioned in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3

observed across Scotland, albeit overlaid to a considerable extent by Gaelic and Germanic (both West and North) place-names, most of which date from the historical period. We therefore have some limited evidence, albeit contentious, for the prehistoric linguistic ecology of the country.

24  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd 2.2  The Linguistic Impact of Roman Britannia An argument could be made that the incipient coalescence of Scotland as a discrete and independent unit (or units) upon the Island of Britain was essentially a product of external forces. The introduction and consolidation of Roman rule in southern and central parts of Britain led eventually to the formal inclusion in the Empire of all territory south of the narrow isthmus lying between Carlisle and the mouth of the Tyne, from the first to at least the beginning of the fifth centuries CE (enforced by the construction of Hadrian’s Wall during the second century). The land to the north was, with the exception of relatively brief formal incorporations of its more southern parts into the Empire in the second century, not directly ruled by Rome, although the people who lived there were undoubtedly deeply affected by the systems of rule and cultural homogenisation, and the technologies, of their powerful neighbours. They were also often in everyday communication with the inhabitants of Roman forward stations, sometimes situated as far north as the Gask Ridge in central Perthshire. Many tribal groups were confederates of Rome. This meant both considerable improvements in the economic status of at least the ruling classes of those groupings and the solidification of their status as consumers of products derived from across the globalised Empire. Naturally, the further away from the frontier people lived, the less direct influence from Rome would be felt (although finds of Roman products, including coinage, are found throughout most of Scotland).3 Latin must have been heard regularly in some places. Knowledge of at least some Latin words and phrases would have been widespread (Welsh, for instance, displays many Latin borrowings, although speakers of its ancestor were incorporated within the Roman military frontier and would have had more direct communication with Latin speakers than their northern cousins). This knowledge would have been encouraged by the growing influence of the Christian Church in the post-imperial era. Charles-Edwards (2012: 137–9) demonstrates that, while limited in numbers, the Latin inscriptions of postimperial southern Scotland are comparable in language use (including accurate representation of the language) to those found in formerly Roman Britannia. Naturally, the cultural influence of Roman models of artistic expression would have lessened beyond the official frontier; the native poetic traditions, for instance, are most likely to have continued evolving there, using (a stylised version of ) the vernacular as the primary medium. This would have been ­essentially

di versi ty | 25 oral, probably involving both learning a compositional tradition (or traditions) and considerable memory training. The reality of Roman-style l­iteracy would, however, continue to demonstrate its centrality, primarily through the spread and embedding of Christianity. 2.3 Caledonians Although there is considerable archaeological evidence for cultural continuity and growth in northern and central Scotland from at least the end of the preChristian era on, linguistic evidence almost inevitably stems from the contact and conflict between the inhabitants’ traditional governance and land tenure and Roman desires for both security and territory (Moffat 2003). According to the author and public man Tacitus (active in the final decades of the first century CE and the first decades of the following century), in his account of his fatherin-law Gnaeus Julius Agricola’s governorship of Britannia (77–85 CE), Roman forces engaged with native forces – termed by him Caledoni – in northern Scotland during the campaigning season of 83 or 84. At a place named, according to Tacitus, Mons Graupius, which many scholars believe to be the highly distinctive mountain of Bennachie in Aberdeenshire, although other scholars find good reasons to place it considerably further south (or, indeed, north), the two forces met in battle (Marren (1990: 4–19) and Fraser (2009) discuss the campaign, battle and its aftermath). According to the Roman author, the greater discipline and more advanced military technology of the Roman army led to unbelievable slaughter, the north being essentially denuded of inhabitants. This last claim in particular might be questioned, not least because the Romans do not appear to have followed up their overwhelming victory by incorporating the territory of the defeated, although this lack of follow-through might be due to the unattractiveness – from a Mediterranean perspective – of the land now available to Roman forces. While his primary purpose was hymning his father-in-law’s bravery and intelligence, for political and domestic reasons, Tacitus remains a subtle thinker. As shown also in his Germania, a purported description and analysis of the Germanic peoples living outside the Roman frontiers, he expressed considerable sympathy for the small-scale Barbarian cultures found there in the face of overwhelming (but corrupt) Roman force. A ‘noble savage’ stereotype is undoubtedly constructed, a mirror to hold up to supposed Roman virtue and its underlying vices; nevertheless, it allows the first apparent Scottish voice to be

26  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d heard – albeit in Latin (Hanson 1991). In chapter 30 of his Agricola, Tacitus has a Caledonian warrior, Calgacus, make the following speech to the tribesmen (and women) gathered before Mons Graupius: We, the most distant dwellers upon earth, the last of the free, have been shielded till today by our very remoteness and by the obscurity in which it has shrouded our name . . . Pillagers of the world, they [the Romans] have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea. A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them. They are the only people on earth to whose covetousness both riches and poverty are equally tempting. To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of ‘government’; they create a desolation and call it peace. (Tacitus 1970: 80–1)

Of course, it is very likely that this speech was wholly invented by Tacitus (although some of the sentiments may be genuine); it reads like a set piece rhetorical exercise, taught in a homogenous way across the Empire (see, for instance, Kennedy 1972). The name of the speaker, however, is Celtic: ‘swordsman’. Even if most historians, including Fraser (2009), question whether such a figure as Calgacus ever existed, the language used in his name helps establish what languages were spoken in the north at that time. This is also true for another Caledonian warrior named in the book, Argentocoxos, who also has a reconstructible Celtic name. Tacitus must have derived these names from somewhere (Rhys 2015: 38, 71, 117, and elsewhere). While these northern peoples are never discussed by later writers in such detail (even when, described as the Picts, they became involved, along with the Scots (then associated primarily with Ireland) and the Saxons (the West Germanic peoples then living on the North Sea coast of the Continent) in the ‘Great Barbarian Conspiracy’ of 367), nevertheless external sources portray an essentially stable environment among the tribal groups to the north of ‘official’ imperial territory of the Roman Empire until at least the end of direct Roman rule in the early fifth century. 2.4 Picts4 The other evidence we have for the nature of the languages of northern Scotland is connected to place-names – existent or historical. While, as discussed, a small amount of evidence may exist for a pre-Celtic stratum in the geographical

di versi ty | 27 description of the country,5 the earliest level of evidence of this type is P-Celtic, representing relatives of the ancestors of modern Welsh, Cornish and Breton. In relation to northern and north-central Scotland, as with Aberdeen, probably ‘mouth of the River Don’, these names are generally analysed as Pictish. A few Celtic names precede the idea of a single Pictish cultural unit. Near Stirling in the valley of the Forth in central Scotland, for instance, is Dumyat hill, an ancient fortification which arguably commemorates a people (or tribal grouping) referred to as the Maiatai by classical authors; a few other tribal groupings of the Roman period may also be remembered in northern placenames (Fraser 2009: 16–19; these include the Caledoni, probably remembered in the names of the town Dunkeld and the nearby mountain Schiehallion (both in Perthshire; Rhys 2015: 17, 148 and 179)). Whether the language these people spoke was a near ancestor of Pictish or closer to the developing British languages (if a distinction can be made at the time) is, of course, impossible to say from such a limited knowledge base. Bruford (2000) provides a fascinating (although speculative) discussion of the post-history of the Caledonians, demonstrating how their cultural construction (and, indeed, personal and linguistic set-up) was embedded in the ‘DNA’ of later Pictish peoples, particularly in the region of Atholl in Perthshire and neighbouring territories, both to the north and south of the main Grampian massif. Some historians have suggested that in the post-Roman era the temporary tribal confederations (such as, perhaps, that established at Mons Graupius) were replaced by moves towards a Pictish nation, even if the realisation of this ambition was rarely straightforward over the following centuries Fraser (2009: 66–7) presents a critical view of this analysis.) There has long been a historiographical tradition suggesting that the Picts were a people apart in terms of the Atlantic Archipelago, a people not entirely autochthonous, of the soil. In chapter 1 of the first book of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Northumbrian monk and scholar Bede (active around 700) observes that At first the only inhabitants of the island were the Britons, from whom it takes its name, and who, according to tradition, crossed into Britain from Armorica, and occupied the southern parts. When they had spread northwards and possessed the greater part of the island, it is said that some Picts from Scythia put to sea in a few longships, and were driven by storms around the coasts of Britain, arriving at length on the north coast of Ireland. Here they found

28  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd the nation of the Irish, from whom they asked permission to settle; but their request was refused . . . These Pictish seafarers, as I have said, asked for a grant of land so that they too could make a settlement. The Irish replied that there was not room for them both, but said: ‘We can give you good advice. We know that there is another island not far to the east, which we often see in the distance on clear days. If you choose to go there, you can make it fit to live in; should you meet resistance, we will come to your help.’ So the Picts crossed into Britain and began to settle in the north of the island, since the Britons were in possession of the south. Having no women with them, these Picts asked wives of the Irish, who consented on condition that, when any dispute arose, they should choose a king from the female royal line rather than the male. This custom continues among the Picts to this day. (Bede 1990: 45–6)

Bede is not, of course, a disinterested observer. He lived in a time when (as we will see) the Northumbrian kingdom(s) were expanding into what is now central and south-western Scotland, coming into contact – and conflict – with the Pictish hegemony over the north. As well as attributing ‘otherness’ to the Picts, Bede may have wished to stress that, while the English were relatively recent immigrants to Britain, the Picts also had an external origin.6 Nevertheless, the tradition of perceived Pictish exceptionalism from which Bede derives his commentary and interpretation has continued, possibly because there are material indications which suggest that the people of northern Scotland (taken in its broadest sense) may have been culturally distinct from more southerly residents. Why should these not have had linguistic analogues? In his monumental book of 1953 and in particular his 1955 essay, Jackson suggested, in fact, that two languages were used, presumably spoken, by the Picts. One of these, which he termed Pictish, was, he claimed, a pre-Celtic (possibly pre-IndoEuropean) language; it may have had, broadly speaking, a ‘liturgical’ purpose rather than being used in everyday interaction (analogous, perhaps, to Coptic for Egyptian Christians since the sixteenth century or Hebrew for most Jews from at least the beginning of the Common Era to the end of the nineteenth century). The other, which he termed Celtic Pictish, was a P-Celtic language with, perhaps, some pre-Celtic substratal influence. While, for a time, Jackson’s views came close to achieving orthodox status, other scholars have, with little evidence but much ingenuity, claimed that Pictish was a form of Old Norse (Cox (1999); to be fair, Cox is only interested in the language of the ogham

di versi ty | 29 inscriptions) or even Basque.7 These discrepancies can only derive from the difficulties in achieving a generally agreed transcription and translation of the relatively limited number of Pictish ogham inscriptions. The idea of a non-Celtic origin for Pictish was ended convincingly by Forsyth (1997), however, who definitively demonstrated that all Pictish is a P-Celtic language with close connections to the better-documented British languages to the south. This identification is further enforced by the fact that, as we will see, Gaelic-speakers consistently referred to the people we would call Picts as ‘Britons’. Jackson and a number of other scholars suggested, however, that a distinction should be maintained between (Celtic) Pictish and other P-Celtic varieties spoken on Britain. He designates all of the latter varieties, along with (Celtic) Pictish, Pritenic, but would not include (Celtic) Pictish within the British dialect continuum, whose descendants are Modern Welsh, Cornish and Breton. This suggested distinction has been ruled out through a thorough sifting of the evidence by Rhys (2015). What place-name evidence exists for this discrete linguistic identity which we can now confidently term Pictish? Nicolaisen (2001), while not claiming an absolute distinction between northern and southern P-Celtic languages, does suggest that elements of the place-name evidence represent a linguistic boundary at the Forth at the most southerly and often placed further north. This (2001: 195–204) is particularly the case with the name element pet-, ‘place’ or ‘piece’, as found in place-names such as Pitskelly (Kincardineshire). Pet-, he suggests, is rarely used in place-names created by speakers living in more southerly regions, but was found in Gaulish (as in Poitou). As Taylor (2010: 78–80 and elsewhere) remarks, however, rather more pet- names exist south of the Forth than originally suggested. Moreover, most of these names, no matter where they are found, do not appear to date from the zenith of Pictish power but rather from a period when the power of Gaelic speakers and their language was expanding in the north-east (of which more in the next chapter). While pet- is definitely P-Celtic in origin, it appears to have been borrowed into Gaelic, a point supported by the specific in the name compound normally being Gaelic, as with the farm name Pittencrieff, found in the parish of Cupar in east-central Fife. First recorded in 1223, the name appears formed from pet- plus Gaelic an, the definite article, and Gaelic craobh, meaning ‘farm of the tree’ (Taylor 2004–12: IV, 306–8). Indeed Taylor (2010) suggests on a number of occasions that the alleged dividing line between northern and southern P-Celtic varieties falls in

30  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd the northern parts of Cumberland (now in England) rather than on the Forth. Even this association may be artificial, as Rhys (2015: 334–40) points out. It is tempting at times to see the proposed Pictish against British split being, beyond a few dialectal distinctions, essentially political (possibly cultural) rather than linguistic. Equally, we cannot absolutely state that one Pictish language, rather than a series of related but not fully mutually intelligible varieties, was spoken from the Antonine Wall to Shetland at the time (Rhys 2015: 36); a further suggested twist, that at least some forms of Pictish and Gaelic may have been on the edge of mutual intelligibility, will be discussed in the next chapter. From an early period, the central parts at least of what we can now start to describe as Alba (although Pictavia and Pictland are also used regularly) began to coalesce as a governmental unit, often exerting considerable power throughout northern Britain (Broun 1994). This unification had unexpected linguistic repercussions, discussed in the next chapter. 2.5 Britons Several scholars (including Fraser (2009) and Woolf (2007)) have suggested that the Celtic-speaking tribes of southern Scotland should be treated as part of a ‘greater Brigantian’ cultural unit. The Brigantes, a tribal confederation, dominated what is now northern England (and some of Dumfriesshire) during the period of the Roman conquest; while its political and military power was curtailed by the Romans, the model by which it was governed (in concert with the occupying powers) and its cultural impact, with elements of Roman models blending with native traditions, was felt throughout the areas south of the Antonine Wall. This influence is also likely to have been felt, to a lesser extent, for some distance to the north – as we have seen, whether an area was then ‘British’ or ‘Pictish’ is unanswerable.8 The northern tribal groupings were obliged to cooperate – indeed, collaborate – with the Roman power to the south, providing ‘protection’ for themselves and imperial forces from northern threats, as well as auxiliary soldiers, in return receiving payment for their services. Inevitably, Roman cultural (and probably linguistic) influence grew (indeed the perceived split between Pictish and British languages9 may have more to do with the level of influence than any true cultural or linguistic difference). Inevitably the ethnopolitical map of southern Scotland and northern England would have altered significantly during the Roman period. Roman policy would probably have vacillated between encouraging a ‘Balkanisation’

di versi ty | 31 of the territory (discouraging the development of power blocs which might threaten the Roman position) and the development of large-scale ‘national’ units (which would make planning and negotiation easier; see Breeze 1994 for further discussion). For a considerable period, the Damnonii (see Clarkson 2014: loc. 501–47),10 their successors in the kingdom of Clyde Rock (Alt Clud, modern Dumbarton) and, later, Strathclyde (focused on Govan on the south bank of the Clyde and Partick on the north: see, for instance, Driscoll 2013) dominated much of south-western Scotland and Cumbria, even when not exercising direct rule. They appear also to have possessed hegemony over the territory known to later Welsh writers as Manau (southern Strathmore and the Forth valley particularly, commemorated in Clackmannan (in the county of that name) and Slamannan (in Stirlingshire)). We know little about Strathclyde’s linguistic culture (evidence for a striking artistic culture is present, as discussed in Driscoll 2016) and, until quite late in its trajectory, its history, beyond legends about King Roderick (in later Welsh tradition Rhydderch Hael ‘the generous’). He is commemorated in the name of a large rock, Clochodderick, in Renfrewshire, as well as in tales connected to his relationship with St Kentigern, who is said to have founded Glasgow towards the end of the sixth century.11 In an interpolation of the Gododdin – described below – a passage celebrates the victory at Strathcarron of Strathclyde forces over Domnall Brecc of Dál Riata in the early 640s. This may represent evidence for literature composed in the kingdom at that time (Rowland 2007: 75). Strikingly, a number of the kingdom’s later rulers had Gaelic names (perhaps representative of the intermarriage between ethnic groups among the elite classes in northern Britain);12 nevertheless, the inhabitants of south-western Scotland are likely to have overwhelmingly spoken British dialects in the earliest period of local literacy. How this situation changed strikingly at the end of the first millennium will be dealt with in the next chapter. To their east the major power, called the Votadini by Romans, was apparently centred in the Lothian region (with a fortress at Eidyn, likely to have been situated on either Edinburgh Castle Rock or Arthur’s Seat – a large volcanic outcrop on the outskirts of premodern Edinburgh; for a recent discussion, see Dunshea 2018). Their influence was felt considerably beyond this, including, perhaps, parts of the north-east of England. As the historical/literary record demonstrates, elite elements of the unit fell in battle at Catraeth, probably in

32  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd North Yorkshire, as part of a major and deep raid into the evolving Englishspeaking territory of Northumbria (although the defenders probably included speakers of British dialects and the attackers people who were not Britons). Despite the fact that Votadinian power did not survive the seventh century, they are the most celebrated of the Gwyr y Gogledd, ‘the men of the north’, in particular through the poem (or collection of related elegies) the Gododdin (the Welsh equivalent to Votadini), traditionally ascribed to the poet Aneirin. Commemorating the dead of the bloody encounter mentioned above, the poem possibly dates from the sixth or seventh centuries (although only attested in one high medieval witness). The prominence of the Votadini in later legend cannot have been harmed by the tradition that Gwynedd in North Wales was established by a prince of the Gododdin (see Koch 1997; Rowland 2007 presents a brief but clear discussion of the piece in its context). Despite these kingdoms’ importance over a long period, however, the British place-names we assume were once prevalent across the territory have been largely replaced by Gaelic or Germanic names. This implies a radical erasure, most likely unintentional, of the linguistic reality of the end of the first millennium in the early second millennium. Some British place-names remain, however, as with Abercorn and Bathgate in West Lothian; interestingly these may have been situated on the frontier between polities (and languages).13 Beyond what we perceive as their heartland, there is also some evidence from an early period, largely derived from recorded tribal names, for P-Celtic speakers being resident in the areas to the west of the Firth of Clyde in Argyll which were eventually associated with the evolving Gaelic presence. Bruford (2000) argues forcefully for these distinctions being highly fluid north and west of the Forth in any event, with ruling and ruled speaking different but related Celtic varieties with some possibility of comprehension between them. It is quite possible that many later Gaelic speakers were descended from these ‘Britons’ (or from, at least in the north, ‘Picts’, not necessarily an ethnic or linguistic distinction), a shift which is likely to have been replicated a few centuries later across a large part of the Irish Sea world and the Hebrides, from Man to Lewis. We will return to a number of these issues in the next chapter. 2.6 Gaels In traditional historiography (for critical discussion, see Clancy (2010a: 352–5) and Broun (1999b)), the Gaelic language is said to have been brought

di versi ty | 33 from Ireland into Scotland around the fifth century, part of a movement of Q-Celtic-speakers associated with a recentring of the Ulster kingdom of Dál Riata on Britain. This movement is interpreted as, eventually, leading to the Christianisation of northern Scotland and the country’s unification, carried out by the ruling house. Before this date, Scotland was inhabited solely by speakers of Pictish or more southerly P-Celtic varieties. This neat analysis has been challenged in the last quarter-century, however. In the first instance there is an archaeological issue. According to Campbell (2001; this view is, with significant modifications, supported by Clancy 2010a: 357–8), for instance, little or no material evidence exists for the postulated migration. In Dál Riata there appears to be cultural and material continuity through this period of (assumed) change and turmoil. As Woolf (n.d.) points out, however, not only is archaeological evidence problematical in establishing the language or languages used by inhabitants of a particular territory (as the endless debate on Indo-European origins demonstrates: Pereltsvaig and Lewis (2015: part III)) but there is some archaeological evidence for the transfer of material culture and practice from Ireland to Scotland in the period. Nor does language use necessarily map onto ethnic or even cultural associations. Campbell’s geographical argument is that, for an ancient seagoing people, the Grampian Mountains between Dál Riata and the eastern ‘Pictish’ territories were more formidable obstacles to the movement of people (and, indeed, languages) than was true with the North Channel, thus implying long-standing connections between Argyll and Ulster, rather than relatively sudden change in settlement patterns. This carries more weight than his archaeological argument, however, even if the easy transits possible to eastern Argyll from Ayrshire and Renfrewshire, much exploited by many people across the subsequent centuries, are ignored. But Campbell’s view that Argyll was geographically discrete from the rest of Scotland argues against his thesis. Irish (and Scottish) settlement migration across the North Channel was easy and commonplace; it is therefore unsurprising if the centre of power could switch from one coast to the other (and, indeed, back) at any time, including the post-Roman era, no matter how long people on either side had spoken the same language. Woolf (n.d.) makes a convincing argument for the ethnic and linguistic connections established at the time between western Scotland and Ulster. Early Irish historians speak of a people – the Cruithin or Cruithni – living in the north-eastern corner of their island. In some senses these people are perceived

34  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d as being at least culturally distinct from their neighbours. Cruithni is etymologically the same word as the P-Celtic Pretani, (indirectly) the ancestor of Britons; indeed, Cruithni was used by Scottish and Irish Gaels to describe the (Scottish) Picts. What is interesting, however, is that these ancient ‘British’ inhabitants of Ulster have Irish names in the records and appear to be Irish speakers. The connection between name and language use is obviously complex. The modern French, named for the Germanic people who established rule over northern and central Gaul after the Roman collapse in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, nevertheless speak a descendant of the language of the Romans. People have been moving between Scotland and Ireland throughout recorded history and before (they continue to do so, albeit at a lesser and slower rate), bringing languages with them, but also assuming the languages of the local people. It is not a one-way street, however. A long-standing Gaelic-speaking presence in Argyll does not rule out the development of a new concentration of power in Scotland in the fifth century with close connections to Ireland, a point supported by the later ecclesiastical bonds established across the North Channel. As will be discussed briefly in section 2.8 below and further in Chapter 4, the Gaels in both countries developed a precocious and interrelated literary tradition. 2.7 Angles From at least the fourth century on, speakers of Germanic languages began to arrive on Britain, whether as invaders, mercenary troops or infiltrators, ‘illegal immigrants’ who settled on the coasts and up river valleys, often in marginal territory. Most (although possibly not all: Nielsen 1989) used North Sea Germanic dialects, spoken at the time in Jutland, northern Germany, the Frisian islands and the north coast of Belgium and France at least as far west as Calais. The migrants were associated by historians like Bede with pre-existent continental groupings, such as the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, although they referred to themselves as Angles and Saxons (and, soon, as Englisc; interestingly, the Celtic-speaking peoples of Britain and Ireland have always called them Saxons). It is very unlikely, in fact, that, despite the correspondence between ethnonyms on both sides of the North Sea, there was a mass migration of pristinely discrete ethnocultural groups. In what became northern England, however, most of the new Germanic-speaking population appear to have self-identified as Angles, speaking an Anglian dialect.

di versi ty | 35 The further up the British east coast Anglian settlers advanced, the greater the opportunities for hegemony on their part became, primarily because the island narrows north of the Mersey and the Humber. Although hills divide east from west, there are frequent passes and gaps: armed groups could gain and maintain control of territory from coast to coast with limited expenditure of time and lives. Moreover, in York the Anglian raiders and settlers inherited a major city of the Roman Empire: a military, governmental and eventually ecclesiastical centre with an extant defensive wall. Further north no such major centre existed, although excellent defensive sites and centres for government and trade were present. The land was not virgin, however. At the time of the Anglian movement into the territory, several Celtic polities existed. Some of these were minor in terms of number of inhabitants and military threat. These were easily swallowed up by the newcomers. Others, such as the lands around Carlisle (sometimes termed Rheged and often associated with Strathclyde), were sizeable territories, possessing considerable legitimacy and potential for both defence and offence. Although we know very little about its development and end, the land of the Votadini already mentioned would have been another example of a territory capable of posing a very real threat to the continued independence – perhaps existence – of the northern Anglian territories and people in the early days of their settlement. That such a fate came close to completion on a number of occasions cannot be doubted. Eventually, however, the British territories of north-eastern England and south-eastern Scotland all succumbed to the overlordship and, in the end, direct rule of their Anglian conquerors. After the initial coalescence of Anglian speakers north of the Humber (whom we can now term Northumbrians), two polities developed (although these often combined – eventually permanently – into a united kingdom of Northumbria). The first, Deira, was centred on York and its vale and will not concern us to any extent here, although its English dialects are likely later, after themselves being heavily influenced by Norse, to have had considerable impact in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on what became Scots, in particular in relation to the first settlers of the burghs. The other, Bernicia,14 was centred around Bamburgh in northern Northumberland (with a cult centre on Lindisfarne nearby). This kingdom had a profound effect on early Scottish history, not least because it was Bernician Old English that formed the primary basis for Scots. From early on Bernician power was felt in at least the lower parts of the Tweed valley, in

36  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd present-day Scotland; indeed one of the kingdom’s greatest saints – St Cuthbert – was probably born in Melrose in Selkirkshire. Encroachment on the lands of the Votadini in Lothian began early in the kingdom’s development. Within a century, Bernician power had spread west through that territory as well as through the south-west of Scotland and, at least in military terms, as far north as, if not further than, central Angus, where the invading forces were routed in 685 at Nechtansmere, according to most scholars’ analyses in the environs of Dunnichen, near the carved stones of Aberlemno, which may celebrate the Pictish victory (although see Woolf (2006), where a Speyside location is strongly favoured for the battle site).15 Peaceful coexistence and, indeed, coalescence, was the norm, nevertheless. As discussed in Chapter 1, intermarriage was very common among the elites of all of the ethnolinguistic groups in Scotland, as was knowledge of languages other than the mother tongue. The Bernician royal house was also tied to the Gaelic-speaking west, in particular via their kingdom’s connection to the Mission Church of Iona, through the origins of Lindisfarne; in the maelstrom of early Northumbrian politics, the west was a place to live in relatively comfortable exile. Marriages with the local elite took place; we can assume the exiles learned Gaelic (indeed one member of the Bernician royal house wrote poetry in that language; another became a Pictish king). This did not, of course, stop Bernician forces from harrying Gaelic-speaking territory, when political and economic circumstances and dictates demanded. Because Scots place-names later spread widely across the Lowlands, it is often difficult to distinguish actual early English evidence. Nonetheless, onomasticians do recognise elements which suggest naming processes going back into the early Middle Ages. Naturally, these are most prevalent in the Borders (although the upper Tweed valley, as noted, appears resolutely British at the time) and Lothian, as Athelstaneford, the name of a village in the eastern part of this territory, demonstrates. The Bernician push to the west and southwest during the period, although largely temporary in governmental terms, has had some effects on the linguistic landscape. Eaglesham in Renfrewshire, Nicolaisen (2001: 103) suggests, might well date from a period of ‘Anglian overlordship over Strathclyde’ (although, while -ham is undoubtedly English, eagles- appears to be British in origin: Nicolaisen 2001: 99). More indicative of Bernician settlement are the several Anglian place-names of some antiquity, such as Maybole, in central and, in particular, southern Ayrshire (Nicolaisen

di versi ty | 37 2001: 172). Their number and lengthy recorded history suggest something like a permanent ­presence – alongside first British and then Gaelic – for Anglian dialects in the area. Indeed Johnston (1997a: 58) goes so far as to suggest that patterns in the usage of the contemporary Scots dialects of west-central and south-west Scotland have been partly formed by the nature of this early settlement. Similar points can be made about the south-west (in particular its eastern parts). This is unsurprising, perhaps: the see of Whithorn (Casa Candida) in Wigtownshire was a Northumbrian foundation (or re-foundation; Lambert 2010); Kirkcudbright, although apparently Celtic in the manner in which the name is formed, commemorates a Bernician saint. Most strikingly, at Ruthwell in Dumfriesshire stands a cross with part of the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Dream of the Rood’ carved on it in runes. The language used represents a (slightly archaistic) form of early Old Northumbrian (Lass (1991) provides a summary of views on the issue). I have seen this inscription described, largely in work produced by students, as the first recorded example of Scots. This is anachronistic and inaccurate, since Bernician dialects were not the only ‘English’ sources forming the basis of Modern Scots, as we will see. The inscription does stand as an example of the perpetual linguistic diversity of the country, however, from the very earliest recorded times. With the advent of a Danish kingdom in the heart of Deira in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, the English-speaking settlements of southwest Scotland were ‘cast adrift’ (Clarkson 2014: loc. 1336). He does suggest (although there is no immediate evidence for this) that ‘[a]fter the collapse of the old kingdom, the Northumbrian aristocracy remained in situ as lords of a population that was predominantly English-speaking’. There is considerably more evidence, as Clarkson (2014: chapter 4) demonstrates, for the spread of British speakers, some of high rank, into the south-west and also, perhaps particularly, into the county of Cumberland in the north-west of England, where many place-names are British versions of originally English or Norse forms. The name Cospatric, used by Northumbrian grandees in the eleventh century, suggests connections to the use of British language even in the assumed Anglian heartland of what was to become Scotland. 2.8  Christianity and Language While it might seem that the central issues of this period culturally and linguistically relate to settlement and displacement, this is only partly true. The spread

38  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d of Christianity – particularly, although not exclusively, from the west – had profound, albeit slow-acting, effects upon the reality of language use in the country. To some extent this was due to the literate nature of the faith and its relationship to the recording of the vernacular in written form. While this is patchy and concentrated in particular in the Anglian and Gaelic areas, the Gaelic willingness to record literature composed in the mother tongue and its spread to speakers of other languages marks off the region from, for instance, contemporary western and central continental Europe (Millar 2010a: 123–7). Although there was some literacy in the ogham and runic scripts (as well as, possibly, the Pictish symbol stones) prior to this spread of alphabetic writing in book format, the transportability of the new book-based technology made it particularly conducive to the development of what we would now perceive as administrative centres. On all occasions, however, while the written use of the vernacular was emphasised by the Church both as a whole as well as by its members, Latin remained the literate language before all others, a position that inevitably influenced the use and development of the vernaculars (Lambert 2010). As has occasionally been remarked in the past, however (see, for instance, Millar 2010a: 123–7), literacy in the learned tongue carried with it a largely ancillary impulse towards vernacular literacy (indeed Latin poems of different levels of ability from the sixth century, recorded in Whithorn and Iona, are among the earliest recorded examples of literature from Scotland: Márkus 2007: 91–2, 94–6). Inevitably this would have been felt most in polities like Dál Riata and Bernicia which were heavily influenced by Irish patterns of use but, as Forsyth (1998) points out, this was also true, albeit to a lesser extent, in Pictland. 2.8.1  Brief summary: the autochthonous languages of Scotland before the Norse incursion At the beginning of the ninth century, Scotland was made up of a range of inherently unstable polities, some of which were associated with a particular language and culture. It would not have been immediately obvious that this rather chaotic situation would result in the creation of an increasingly unified state in northern Britain, particularly since a further ethnolinguistic group would soon be added to the Scottish mix.

di versi ty | 39 2.9  Scandinavian Settlement and its Linguistic Repercussions The movement of Scandinavians outward from their home territories began seriously in the seventh century (indeed in a sense it is merely a final episode in an ongoing series of migrations – whether permanent or temporary – from less fertile, cash-poor or overpopulated places; the Anglo-Saxon movement onto Britain is in many ways its model). It is only really in the ninth century, however, that this movement became apparent in more populous areas, such as northern England. The coming of the Norse had profound effects on the economic and political development of all parts of the Atlantic Archipelago. They also brought their language for a lengthy period to their coastal reaches at least. In many places their language continued to be spoken for a considerable period, leaving traces in the surrounding languages. These influences were sometimes profound. In the Northern Isles of Scotland, Norn, as the variety came to be known there, survived until at least the beginning of the eighteenth century, as discussed in Chapter 6; variants of western varieties of Viking Norse were also carried into the northern mainland of Scotland (in Caithness the language probably did not die out until the fifteenth century (Thorsen 1954); Waugh (2009) discusses the origins of a number of that county’s place-names), the Western Isles and beyond. While the survival of Norn in the Hebrides was not as late as elsewhere, perhaps, place-name evidence in Lewis in particular might be taken to mean that, at one point, Scandinavian speakers outweighed speakers of any other languages, if only in terms of naming places.16 The extent to which cultural groupings other than Scandinavian inhabited these territories at the time of the former grouping’s first settlement is very difficult to say. Smith (2001) argued that, in Shetland at least, something like genocide against the local ‘Pictish’ population was perpetrated. The striking lack of evidence of Celtic place-names in that archipelago supports this view, although the Norse origin for many of the place-names in the Gaelic-speaking Western Isles should also be borne in mind (the precise relationship between speakers of the two languages in that region is problematical and will be returned to shortly).17 More promising, perhaps, is the argument presented by Goodacre et al. (2005) that the genetic background of today’s Shetlanders (coupled with as much earlier evidence as possible) suggests a rather different migration and settlement history than was the case with, for instance, Iceland, where evidence demonstrates that the Norse population was largely male (with the female

40  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a n d ancestors of the local population deriving from the Atlantic Archipelago). In Shetland, male and female Scandinavians appear to have arrived in equal proportions. But a large minority of the ancestors of local people, whether male or female, were not genetically Scandinavian. It is quite likely that many of these ancestors migrated in the period of growing Scottish hegemony from the later Middle Ages on, but this argument cannot be used as the sole explanation for the evidence. Barrett (2012) argues for a less controversialist position than Smith’s, apparently recognising that violent seizure of power in one place does not necessarily rule out peaceful coexistence of migrant and autochthonous populations nearby in a period where travel was slow and often difficult (Glørstad (2014) discusses Norse-Gaelic hybridity in the greater Irish Sea world). The Scandinavian settlement was unlikely to have been centralised and planned. As we have seen already, Norn probably survived for a considerable period in Caithness (and indeed along the north coast, although this would be much more difficult to prove). On the east coast of northern Scotland considerable evidence for settlement and suzerainty exists, not least in the place-name Dingwall (Ross and Cromarty), which, with a name practically identical to the place where the ancient parliament of Iceland was held (Þingvellir) as well as to the Tynwald of the Isle of Man, suggests the establishment of Norse governmental and legal structures. But it is generally accepted that the language itself did not last long in the region. This geographical pattern is, in fact, in line with the later zone of power of the Earldom of Orkney, whose leaders regularly controlled large parts of northern Scotland, even if the cultural, linguistic, demographic and political situation in these areas during the period when Scandinavians were migrating into the regions was inevitably more chaotic than later analyses, such as that found in the Orkneyinga saga, represent it (Barrett 2012). Which languages were spoken in the Western Isles before the arrival of the Norse, and during the period in which an actively Norse linguistic and material culture existed, is a more vexed question than might be expected. Given the area’s modern identification as a profoundly Gaelic relic area, this question might seem superfluous, except that it is always dangerous to extrapolate linguistic information from the present into the past. It is difficult, in fact, to find evidence for, for instance, Lewis being Gaelic-speaking in the early Middle Ages. The islands of Argyllshire certainly were so at the time, but it is almost impossible to tell how far north speakers of the language lived (Ardnamurchan is often suggested as the northernmost limit of the pre-Norse Gàidhealtachd). It

di versi ty | 41 is quite possible that, as in the Northern Isles, Pictish was the local language in the Outer Hebrides until the arrival of the Norse and that the former language, again as in the Northern Isles, was gradually (at times perhaps suddenly) forced out by political and economic force.18 Gaelic, according to this argument, was brought in to the islands either by the identification of some of the ‘Norse’ inhabitants with a ‘greater Irish Sea’ world where bilingualism was common (and where, indeed, some might have been native Gaelic speakers),19 or as part of a general linguistic homogenisation of the islands through trade and, to some extent, common government. While plausible, however, this argument would be difficult to prove. We will return to these points in the next chapter. In a less tangible way, finally, Norse helped alter the long-term linguistic history of Scotland. In bringing the Western Isles, western Highlands and the north coast into the orbit of Scandinavian ruled units, often causing considerable disruption, particularly in ‘rich’ islands like Islay (Jennings and Kruse 2009: particularly p. 83), the focus of the governmental unit which would soon be considered Scotland inevitably shifted even more eastward, as demonstrated, for instance, in the transfer of the Iona community to Dunkeld in the Tay Valley and the growing importance of settlements like Scone and St Andrews as governmental, political and ecclesiastical centres (for a discussion, see Broun 1999a). We would expect this movement to have enhanced the importance of Pictish to the kingdom. Paradoxically, the geographical and political changes coincided with the increasing spread of Gaelic as the ‘national’ language, however; the argument, as made by Broun (1994), that large-scale Viking raids against the rich Pictish kingdom might have strengthened Gaelic speakers infiltrating from the west, will be addressed in the next chapter. 2.10 Conclusion At the end of this period, therefore, the ancestors of the two modern Scottish vernaculars were already present in what would become Scotland. The other languages would eventually vanish from the Scottish scene. How these relationships between languages and speakers play out linguistically and socially will be a primary theme of this book. What happened socially, politically and economically in the evolving kingdom in the last century of the first – and the first centuries of the second – Christian millennia is central to our understanding of its later linguistic ecology. It is to these issues that we will now turn.

3 INCIPIENT LINGUISTIC HOMOGENISATION: MEDIEVAL SCOTLAND

3.1 Introduction

A

t the end of the first millennium, Scotland remained a patchwork of different ethnic and cultural groups, often speaking different languages. Scandinavian dialects were spoken in Orkney and Shetland and in a broad swathe along the northern and western coasts; in particular in the Western Isles. Pictish was spoken in the north and east of the country; its near relative British in the south-west. Gaelic was used in the west and was actively spreading in the south-west; Northumbrian Old English in the south-east and in pockets of the south-west. Yet this apparent stasis, with a linguistic environment similar to that of 200 years before, is illusory: change was quickening. Gaelic was spreading among people in the north, east and south who had not previously used the language. This was particularly the case in the north, where Pictish was the ancestral language, associated with the ruling class and a culture which, while perhaps not as distinctive as earlier scholars suggested, certainly possessed distinctive localised traits. In the south-west, British was also in decline, residents switching to Gaelic and, eventually, the ancestor of Scots. An explanation for these changes is necessary. 3.2  The ‘Unification’ of Alba To a large extent these processes can be ascribed to changes in the ways in which the territories we now know as Scotland interacted with each other. The

inc ipient li ng ui sti c homog en is a tio n  | 43

Map 5  Places mentioned Chapter 3 and Chapter 4

unification of land north of the Forth under a single leadership was already quite advanced by 1000, although Moray, to the north and west of the Spey, was often treated separately from Alba (otherwise Scotia), regularly at least autonomous; this situation remained problematical (for the Scottish royal house) into the thirteenth century (Woolf 2007: chapter 4). While the situation can be

44  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d i­nterpreted in different ways, it was certainly the case that, for most of what had been Pictavia, locally significant figures, whose ancestors had held power through their own rights and ancestry (although not necessarily primogeniture), were now, in law, subordinate officers of the king’s will, no matter how autonomous they were in practice (Taylor 2016: chapter 1). South of the Forth the authority of the King of Alba continued to grow, as northern Bernicia fell increasingly among the regions over which he claimed control. Nevertheless, the territory was still perceived as English and, on occasion, part of England (perceived culturally and linguistically; see, for instance, Broun 2018). In the south-west, the kingdom of Strathclyde retained at least a sketchy autonomy but was certainly becoming increasingly dominated by Alba to the north. The linguistic repercussions of this halting centralisation will be discussed in this chapter (and the following); the outcomes may not be as expected, however. The northern and western coasts, along with the Western Isles, lay largely outside central government control (if that term is not an anachronism), with stronger connections to Norway, Orkney and the kingdom of Man (involving the whole Irish Sea region). By the end of the period discussed here (roughly, the middle of the fourteenth century), Scotland was advancing towards becoming a united kingdom. With the exception of the Northern Isles, a semi-autonomous part of Norway and, later, Denmark-Norway until the later fifteenth century, all territories which now comprise Scotland acknowledged one king as ruler. How direct this rule was and how it differed from place to place would eventually have linguistic repercussions. In central and southern Scotland, in particular, the ways in which the power of the royal centre and that of local magnates interacted had changed practically beyond recognition by the end of the period. These changes would also have a linguistic side. 3.3  Death of Pictish The disappearance of Pictish as a living language in northern and north-central Scotland is a striking turning point in the country’s linguistic history. The shift to Gaelic (and, in many places, eventually Scots) created a rather less complex linguistic ecology for the territories involved, inevitably tied to the growth of an increasingly unitary state. Nevertheless, it is practically impossible to say when, why and in what manner the language ceased to be spoken in its focal area. This may be due to the scarcity of material actually written in the language; there is

inc ipient li ng ui sti c homog e n is a tio n  | 45 little more written Gaelic in Scotland at the time, although with that language support from Irish documents is available, something naturally not possible for Pictish, for both geographical and linguistic reasons. We also understand less than we would like about what was happening in the Pictish heartlands, particularly south of the mountains, during the crucial period when it evolved into Alba, a term which eventually refers to a kingdom of Scots and Picts.1 How did the balance of power shift so strikingly that the new ‘united kingdom’ of Picts and Scots, while having a majority of Pictish speakers, ended up with Gaelic as, apparently, the sole language? In this section we will consider in depth these themes and issues. What do we know about the political and economic ecology of the region in the period when the shift is assumed to have happened? This is, of course, incomplete and largely derived from Irish sources, whose information may often be second-hand at best and is inevitably partial (in both senses). Later accounts appear sometimes to base their narrative and analysis of the period upon at best faulty or fragmentary understanding of earlier sources (for a discussion, see Broun 2007). The danger of perceiving the past through the experience of the present is unavoidable at times; it is natural that later analysts perceive the ‘disappearance’ of Pictish as inevitable. The loss of the language, some would later claim, might even form part of a sweeping away of Pictish culture, perhaps even a process which could be interpreted as genocide, an anachronistic concept which has a long history in material produced by, among others, John Buchan (see Ritchie 1994). This analysis does not even approach the possibility that some material included in works contemporary to the shift represents rationalisation of often confused source material and indirect accounts. At times explanations of this type can move close to fiction (perhaps wish-fulfilment fiction). Nevertheless, it is possible to agree on a number of influences on the tenthand early eleventh-century development of Pictavia. In the first instance, Dál Riata and Pictavia were becoming increasingly connected. There had always been intermarriage between the ruling elites; this may have become more complex as the various powers in the region both became more able to trade with, but also more able to do serious damage to, each other; at the same time both were endangered by outside forces. Peace need not have broken out between the two regions (or their ruling classes). Rather, tension, indeed violence, increased at times. Pictish kings occasionally ruled Dál Riata; similar violent unifications were attempted by Gaelic-speaking kings and magnates. These moves towards

46  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a nd unification cannot be assumed to be the primary reason for the language shift, however, since they primarily involve only the ruling classes. Another feature of the experience of Pictavia and Dál Riata during this period is the effect of the Norse incursions from both west and east. The western incursions have the most obvious and lasting effects, at least linguistically. Even if, as expressed in the last chapter, the history of Gaelic in its present Western Isles heartland does not reach back before the Viking period, the southern Hebridean islands and, indeed, the Argyll mainland and the islands of the Firth of Clyde (Dál Riata, essentially), also demonstrate Norse influence (for instance, Jura, from the Old Norse for ‘animal island’, appropriate when we compare that island with the fertile Isle of Islay across the narrow straits), and testify to the settlement of a significant number of Norse speakers during the period. The ancestry of these territories’ rulers in the eleventh and twelfth centuries was strikingly different from their earlier equivalents (although naturally with some overlap) – Norse names are common, perhaps dominant, in some kindreds. Equally, the descent of a number of lords of post-Viking Alba (as well as Moray and Ross) was, at least in the male line, derived from pre-Viking noble Dál Riata kindreds (Woolf 2007: 226–30). The new royal family of Alba shared many of these associations, although appearing at least to descend through largely Pictish antecedents in the male line; indeed, the assumption that Cinaed mac Ailpín and his descendants identified themselves as Gaels (a highly suspect conceptualisation in itself in this historical context) has been questioned by Dumville (1997: 35–6). He suggests that the assumption of Alba by Cinaed’s grandchildren as a name for their lands involved assuming Gaelic identity: linguistic loyalties and associations had shifted (see also Broun 2005, 2007: 74–6). Broun (2007: 74–6) questions the extent to which the adoption of Alba as a name for the territory ruled actually implies an abnegation of Pictish identity and past, although he remarks (2007: 87) that, after taking the name, Alba as a unit was rapidly connected with a shift to Gaelic. As seen in Chapter 2, moreover, elements of the western Church moved their power bases east of the mountains, to sites including Dunkeld and St Andrews. As with the changes in lay structures, it is likely that Norse raiding and settlement had some influence on these movements (some areas of ‘Pictish’ Scotland, such as Atholl, may be ‘little Irelands’, although this view is strongly contested: Clancy 2010b). Broun (2007: 61) proposes that the descendants of

inc ipient li ng ui sti c homog en is a tio n  | 47 St Margaret and Mael Coluim (Malcolm) III ceased to take an interest in their Pictish heritage, instead celebrating their ‘Irish’ and English backgrounds, the latter a more prestigious ‘British’ identity. Elements of this amnesia are likely to have been commonplace earlier for the later divorce to be successful (to the extent it was hardly marked, except in the rebellious behaviour of Mael Coluim’s brother Domnall mac Donnchada (Donalbane) and of the descendants of Mael Coluim’s son Donnchad mac Mael Coluim (Duncan II), assumed to be the son of Ingibiorg of Orkney, Mael Coluim’s first wife). The Scandinavian incursions from the east into Pictavia, mentioned in the last chapter, did not involve permanent Norse settlement in those territories; they were probably highly destructive. What governmental and administrative infrastructure existed in Pictavia – at least in more southerly parts, such as Strathearn – would have been compromised, perhaps permanently. In some regions, the elite, both lay and ecclesiastical, would have been severely depleted. While Norse incursion may have been a push factor in the eastward migration of economically and politically endowed individuals and groups, incursions from the east and their political repercussions would have acted as a pull factor for the same people, since opportunities, albeit with considerable risk attached, would have become available through this disruption in the east. 3.3.1  Adoption of a minority elite language Can the economic and political power of a small but highly influential grouping within a society, who speak a different language from the majority, act as the primary spur towards a shift for that majority to the prestigious but minority language? Looking beyond Scotland, the evidence is both confusing and confused. A rather better-understood shift by the linguistic majority towards the language of the minority occurred in post-Roman Britannia. If you do not subscribe to the outmoded view that mass emigration of, and genocide acted out upon, the native Romano-Celtic inhabitants of this territory at the hands of the Anglo-Saxon invaders and settlers led to an ethnoculturally and linguistically ‘pure’ England, the majority of people living in England around 700 must have been descended from Romano-Celts. Most inhabitants would nevertheless have been monolingual English speakers. The great majority assumed the language of a small but powerful minority, eventually jettisoning their own language(s) in the process (Millar 2016: 144–6). But similar circumstances are found elsewhere, such as the seizure of power

48  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a n d by the Franks in Gaul (for a discussion, see Millar (2010a: 112–30) and Goetz (2002)) and the Normans in England (see, for instance, Loyn 1991), where the opposite was successful. On these occasions, the language of the ruled rather than of the rulers was eventually victorious, with the conquerors eventually using the majority’s language as their dominant tongue. We cannot say, therefore, that the language of the rulers inevitably triumphs over that of the ruled. It does happen, however. How the territories over which invaders eventually ruled were organised may present an explanation for some of these features. Post-Roman Britannia appears to have fallen apart into a range of successor states, often at war with each other; certainly unable to unite against the invaders. Territories, particularly along the frontier between ‘Roman’ and English territory, likely became an extensive ‘no man’s land’, where the societal dislocation caused by ongoing confused identity (akin to Durkheim’s anomie) encouraged the switch to the language and culture of the invaders. The AngloSaxons, whose ancestors had had a rather more distant relationship with Rome than had their Frankish cousins, possibly had limited respect for (or even understanding of ) the cultures and traditions of the territory they were taking over, a point supported by the mutation and semantic pejoration of Welsh from, essentially. ‘Latin speaker’ to ‘foreigner’ in Old English, as described in Woolf (2002). Certainly Bede did not perceive the Britons as Romans, while his continental equivalents made such an equation between indigenous people in Gaul and Iberia and the former (and surviving) imperial structures. The language of the elite may triumph over that of the majority, therefore, when the cultural achievements of the latter are not appreciated by the former and when larger governmental (and also local) structures have broken down. There is a considerable possibility that this breakdown was true in places on the southern margins of Pictavia, affected by the Norse incursions mentioned above. While considerable political tensions did often exist between west and east, however, no evidence exists to support the claim that Gaelic speakers at the time had an aversion to Pictish culture and the Picts themselves, although the association between Gaelic and the spread of Christianity may have given that language cultural cachet among Pictish speakers. These sociocultural points cannot explain the shift away from Pictish fully. What further explanations are available?

inc ipient li ng ui sti c homog en is a tio n  | 49 3.3.2  How linguistically distant were Gaelic and Pictish at the time? Woolf (2007: 322–42) makes an intriguing linguistic suggestion: what if Pictish and Gaelic were sufficiently like each other that this kinship could be readily perceived by native speakers of one when exposed to the other? This would be unlikely to represent full mutual comprehension – St Columba, for instance, needed an interpreter when speaking with a potential convert on Skye (at the time probably populated by Pictish speakers). Nevertheless, bare or partial understanding between related languages is not unusual. Speakers of one Slavonic language cannot understand most other Slavonic languages (although they might understand closely related varieties: Czech and Slovak, for instance). Nevertheless, with a degree of knowledge of the differences between the languages, some limited comprehension is possible for a speaker of many, probably most, of the languages involved. Was this type of mutual recognition between languages from ostensibly different branches of a sub-family possible in Scotland between 800 and 1100? The two branches of Insular Celtic are now sundered, to the extent that only a trained (historical) linguist would be able to map out the resemblances. This difference therefore is far greater than that between the Slavonic languages just discussed. In fact, this could have been as little as 1,500 years ago. Returning to our initial questions, therefore, were the two branches of Celtic mutually comprehensible dialects?2 A number of scholars have suggested that, at the earliest, the split between the Goidelic and Brittonic branches of the Celtic languages took place at the beginning of the Christian era; some would put it as late as around 300 or 400 CE (Schrijver (2014) would go even later, although most specialists would at least be sceptical). For some time after this mutual recognition appears still to have been possible, as shown in bilingual inscriptions, such as that of VOTEPORIGIS (sixth century), commemorating an Irish ruler in south Wales, with the P-Celtic form of the name being given in the Roman alphabet, but the Q-Celtic (VOTECORIGAS) in Ogham (Jackson 1951: 139). For how long would this mutual recognition have been possible? The early records we have of Irish and British (in particular for the latter, somewhat patchy until at least the eleventh century) seem to attest that this is impossible. How likely would it have been for a Welsh speaker in 1000 to recognise that Cothriche is an early Irish phonological equivalent to Patrick,

50  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a nd Latin Patricius (Jackson 1953: 127; Modern Gaelic now permits Pádraig3)? Woolf (2007) presents a novel explanation which provides a way through this issue, however: in those areas where Roman influence was least prevalent, the P-Celtic varieties would have evolved less radically away from their Q-Celtic equivalents than was the case in southern parts (where the P-Celtic languages would have been corralled, in a sense). Areas where there is population movement, urbanisation and regular contact between speakers of different dialects or languages do encourage certain types of change, particularly koineisation, the development and/or choice of a common variety from a range of discrete but closely related varieties. Their product, koines, demonstrates some ‘simplification’ and homogenisation of the source varieties’ linguistic systems, discussed further in later chapters. Inhabitants of areas of this sort are often part of loose social networks (Milroy 1987), but there are many of them, spread across a wide area and a large population, thereby encouraging change. But living in less populous and more remote areas encourages linguistic marginality, the propensity for linguistic conservatism and unexpected innovation in dialects at the edge of a linguistic continuum or in other ways isolated. Given the geography of the places where they were spoken, Pictish dialects may have been quite divergent in a largely non-literate era. It is also possible (but impossible to prove) that Gaelic on its geographical margins was moving structurally towards Pictish at the same time, in something like a ‘macro-koine’ or Sprachbund process.4 Let us accept, for the moment, Woolf’s hypothesis that some varieties of Pictish had not diverged as far from Common Insular Celtic as more southerly Brittonic varieties had. Common recognition of the relationship between Pictish and Gaelic would therefore have been possible, meaning that speakers of either could apply simple rules of divergence leading to difference to the variety not native to them, therefore readily crossing from one language to the other. Some evidence for this kind of relationship is extant. A number of recorded Pictish place-names, for instance, appear at around the same time with cognate Gaelic forms, implying that Gaelic speakers understood the names and transferred the meaning to the equivalent form in their own language. The original name of St Andrews in Fife, for instance, was Gaelic Cennrígmonaid (now largely confined to the antiquarian use of Kilrymont in street and development names), but it has been suggested (as in the Fife Place-name Database ) that ‘[t]he earliest form from the mid-eighth century, which occurs in a source produced in a Gaelic-speaking milieu, is likely

inc ipient li ng ui sti c homog en is a tio n  | 51 to be a Gaelicisation of a Pictish *Penrimonid or the like’. The use of pet- generics with Gaelic specifics in place-names, mentioned in the last chapter, while not of itself describing transfer from one language to the other, certainly represents evidence for intimate and complementary language use. There are also a few occasions where a native Gaelic form has been affected by the meaning of the equivalent Pictish form. On occasion (as discussed by Taylor 2010), originally Pictish (or British) place-name elements became so embedded in the minds of Gaelic speakers that they affected the meaning of a cognate form, a conjecture probably demonstrated with srath (Scots and English strath), which means ‘broad valley’ in both Gaelic and Scots but ‘grass(land); meadow by river, haugh’ in Old Irish; strikingly, in Modern Welsh, a relative, of course, of the P-Celtic languages of ancient Scotland, ystrad means ‘valley’ (Taylor 2010: 108). This type of transfer – particularly between languages which have some vestigial evidence for relationship – is so common as to be commonplace. As Sasse (1992) points out, however, residual features of the abandoned language often remain in the speech of the community that formerly spoke it, sometimes as an identity marker (and therefore suggesting at least a semi-conscious use), in their version of the overtly prestigious language they have chosen to use, so Pictish features in Gaelic may only represent evidence of a lengthy language shift. Moreover, on a number of occasions mention has been made in this book to the multilingualism through marriage and kinship found in the elite classes at the time. Many elite Picts could speak Gaelic; many elite Gaels could speak Pictish. Even when someone did not have active ability in another language, it is likely that he or she would have had some passive comprehension. As already stated, while these tendencies would have been particularly strong among members of the elite, it would have been prevalent to a lesser or greater degree at all levels of society.5 Shift from one language to another would be straightforward under these circumstances. If enough people began to use Gaelic instead of Pictish, other bilinguals would be likely to follow the trend, possibly due to sociolinguistic forces for which we have only fragmentary evidence. They may not even have been aware that they had ceased speaking their language, because its use had decreased over their lifetimes. As with Gaelic today, however, some people, although bilingual, may choose to remain speakers of the now demographically lesser language. Pictish may have continued to be spoken for some time after 1000, particularly, perhaps, in remote places where traditional lifestyles continued. We have little or no evidence for this, however.

52  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d 3.3.3  To what extent did the Picts associate their language with their cultural identity? Finally, and returning to our discussion above of elite and popular language practices, we have to recognise a truth which often becomes forgotten when we talk about language shift: some people do not really care what language they speak. It is true that some people will voluntarily ‘go to the wall’ for their culture and language, but some others will happily move to using another language if they feel it is more useful functionally, or is prestigious. Sometimes, as we will see in Chapter 5 in connection to Norn in the Northern Isles in the eighteenth century, people may choose to move to another language for economic or other reasons, even while they regret the process. It is entirely possible that at least some Picts acted in a similar way as their autonomy, cultural and political, dissolved. 3.4  Death of British The other P-Celtic language of Scotland which survived into the early Middle Ages was the British of Strathclyde. As we discussed in the last chapter, we know surprisingly little about this kingdom and its cultural identity, even at its height. We do not know whether, by the beginning of the eleventh century (and even before this), British was the only, or even the dominant, language of Strathclyde (in particular at its most extensive). Gaelic was spoken widely (particular mention should be given to Strathgryffe, no more than fifteen kilometres from the heartland of the ostensibly British polity, but often allied to ‘breakaway’ Galloway);6 Northumbrian dialects would also have been found in pockets. Scandinavian dialects might also have been present, although this could well have proved more temporary. What territory Strathclyde occupied becomes increasingly difficult to define. Cumbria (in the modern sense) was often part of the kingdom but, as will become apparent in later sections of this chapter, south-western Scotland was increasingly detached and Gaelic-dominant. As Broun (2004) points out (see also Broun 2018), what evidence we have for the ‘decline and fall’ of Strathclyde as a separate political entity is limited. The last time a king of Strathclyde was mentioned in surviving contemporary materials is in an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry related to the Scottish victory at Carham on the River Tyne (around 1018; the battle and its context are discussed in the papers collected in McGuigan and Woolf (2018)). Even before this, many

inc ipient li ng ui sti c homog e nis a tio n | 53 of the territory’s kings are recorded as having Gaelic names, at least in the regnal lists, suggesting that Gaelic was becoming dominant within Strathclyde even while it maintained its autonomy. As we saw in the last chapter, the lists were largely compiled by native Gaelic speakers; it is very difficult to say how accurate the names reported are in relation to what the individuals called themselves. At the very least, however, both British and Gaelic must have been used, depending on the linguistic and social context. Despite the apparent end of political independence, reference to the Britons or Welsh of Strathclyde (and also to their legal codes) continues fitfully until the twelfth century, many later comments being concerned with which ecclesiastical authority acted as superior to the diocese of Glasgow (Broun 2004, 2018). A continuing sense of distinctiveness does not, however, imply the continuing use of a language. Most Irish people do not have sufficient command of Irish to hold a conversation; only a small proportion have Irish as first language. That does not mean they are not Irish, defined by themselves and outsiders, even if, as Fishman (1991: 143–4) suggested, what this ‘Irishness’ consists of is inevitably different because of the loss of the indigenous language. As Broun (2004: 118) suggests, the British language ‘was vanishing, if not already extinct’ by the mid-twelfth century, although I suspect it had become essentially moribund a generation earlier, except in enclaves. The process by which this happened is utterly obscure, although it is likely that it would have followed the same process as postulated for Pictish. Unlike Pictish, while Gaelic made medium-term inroads in Pictavia, it was Inglis – Scots – that eventually became the dominant language of the Clyde basin. 3.5  Conclusion: Pictish and British The causes of shift away from Pictish and British are, in particular with the former, difficult to quantify (or even explain). Whereas altered power relationships between Strathclyde and other parts of the evolving Scotland may explain the gradual loss of British dialects within the former territory, this cannot fully explain the shift towards Gaelic in the Pictish territories. What can be said is that these processes are in a number of senses harbingers for the greater homogenisations of language and culture to follow. What societal phenomena initiated these changes?

54  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a nd 3.6 Homogenisation Until at least the last thirty years, mainstream historiography analysed the cultural, political and economic development of western and central European society during the high Middle Ages as representing essentially the rise and fall of feudalism. According to this analysis, a rigidly hierarchical social structure pertained, power emanating from the ruler to different levels of the ruled (the ruler himself owing his position to his overlord, God). Magnates dispensed land and property to lesser landholders in return for service; this pattern was maintained all the way down to the unfree peasantry, who paid through service for right of residence on, and cultivation of, land. In return, in theory, ‘lessers’ were protected by their ‘betters’. Everyone was in his or her place and all were protected by the levels superior to her or him, while at the same time providing maintenance upwards. Even within this paradigm, reality often struck home, in terms not only of rapacious exploitation by ‘betters’, but also through the regular absentmindedness among the upper echelons in relation to the royal origin of all property (sometimes no doubt encouraged in Scotland and elsewhere by the fact that great liegemen were often descended from rulers whose possession of the same land had been absolute). The hold a king had on his throne was rarely entirely secure.7 Even though conservatives at the time sang the praises, and regretted the decline, of an idealised feudal system, our present historiography is dubious about the existence of a flourishing and coherent feudal system in the Middle Ages. While the language of the system existed, a mercantile caste or class, with commercial connections beyond their immediate vicinity, was always present. Their importance might be belittled by their social superiors, but their presence was necessary. Indeed the economic and social system which developed in countries like Scotland across the period might have been designed to produce and maintain a market-based economy rather than one based on feudal notions of land tenure (the seminal introduction to this revised interpretation is Reynolds 1996). Another factor which encouraged these developments was the growth in international trade. Rising populations and increasing development of previously underutilised lands meant both an expansion in urban settlement and a gradual increase in the geographical extent of Christendom. While universal peace was nowhere near achieved, the casual raiding (and sometimes rapa-

inc ipient li ng ui sti c homog e n is a tio n  | 55 cious settlement) by sea – as with the Scandinavians – and land – as with the Magyars – had been at least temporarily halted. If you were a merchant, it was possible to envisage moving into markets previously seen as dauntingly distant, if not expressly threatening. Similar extension in travel possibilities, along with regularly occurring surpluses, also meant that the wealthy at least could take part in activities organised in a supranational centralised way, such as the Crusades. Similar types of homogenisation were taking place in the Church. Earlier divergences of ecclesiastical usage (taken very seriously at the time, although generally not concerned with central dogma) between churches in the Atlantic Archipelago and Iberia and those of Rome were ironed out early in this period, with Roman practices becoming the norm for all Latin Christendom. By the twelfth century the papacy had become so powerful that papal monarchy over those regions which followed the Roman tradition was expounded by elements within the Church, although these claims were never realistically proven and the ‘civil power’ generally emerged triumphant from conflicts concerned with them. Nevertheless, centralised monastic (and later mendicant) orders gradually superseded more localised orders. Much that was specifically local – Irish monks writing in Irish as well as Latin, for instance – was no longer normal in any region. Latin literacy became the primary goal; the Church become central to government in an increasingly complex environment. All of these homogenisation processes had profound effects on the development of language use in Scotland. During this period, moreover, the people of Scotland passed through a brutal occupation and attempted subjugation by English forces, a conflict which could also be treated as civil war. From a sociolinguistic point of view, as we will see, this series of events also encouraged the homogenisation of language within Scotland, since greater levels of societal and geographical connection were encouraged and more mobility was made possible or necessary. Moreover, the country emerged from the crisis with greater political autonomy and a stronger sense of itself, both of which are likely to have triggered changes in language use in the Lowlands in particular. In the following sections, therefore, we will consider how these changes affected what was becoming the kingdom of Scotland, with particular reference to the spread and retreat of Gaelic in the Lowlands and the rise of Inglis as a potential language of identity – whether first or second language – for a considerable part of the kingdom, well beyond where Old English was spoken in 1000.

56  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d 3.6.1  The ‘Frankish’ revolution As already stated, from the late eleventh until the end of the twelfth centuries the territorial extent in which the writ of the King of Scots ran became increasingly similar to that of the present country (although the means by which he exercised this authority and his status in doing so differed geographically; in particular in relation to the territories north and south of the Firth of Forth). At the same time the governmental structures by which the country ran, along with its ecclesiastical settlement (if the two can be kept separate), began to change, becoming, as Bartlett (1993) described it (see also Millar 2010a: chapter 6), a part of the Frankish culture of the European centre; we can see this in the names of the Scottish royal family and the noble elite, where English names (such as Edgar) or, more often, general Christian/Frankish names (such as John or Robert) became increasingly widespread, while names of Gaelic origin became increasingly rare, although in some areas where a native Gaelic-speaking aristocracy continued to wield real power, such as Lennox or Strathearn, Gaelic names survive well into the thirteenth century: Neville (2000) and (2005) (see also Oram (2003) for a discussion of continuity and change in the earldom of Mar in Aberdeenshire). Too much can be made of these transfers and changes, of course: native traditions and usages remained for a considerable period; level of change and its speed varied geographically. Moreover, the language used to form a name does not imply that the person using the name necessarily spoke that language (at least not as first or only language): people called John do not normally speak Hebrew. But cultural evolution inevitably had linguistic consequences; these consequences were, as far as we can tell, more complex than conventional wisdom would have it. It was not a simple matter of one language replacing another according to a rigid timetable. 3.6.2  Mael Coluim III and Margaret: the beginnings of harmonisation It is wrong to think of early medieval Scotland as insular. The kingdom was already connected intimately to Ireland, northern England and the Norse world. Connections to the European continent were not as well developed as was the case in later centuries (although trade was certainly not only possible but regular). Other ties were evident from at least the middle of the eleventh century on, as seen with the Norman ‘knights’ whom Mac Bethad mac Findlaích (Macbeth;

inc ipient li ng ui sti c homog e nis a tio n | 57 reigned 1040–57) inherited from the court of Edward the Confessor when a nativist purge took place in England (Oram 2011: loc. 5015). Connections existed across large parts of northern and western Europe. But for most of the period Scotland remained the end of the chain for the exchange of cultural innovation. From the middle of the eleventh century on, however, forces within, and being brought into, Scotland were beginning to pull the country into the western and central European mainstream. While the reasons for these changes are complex and, indeed, are shared by other peripheral territories of Latin Europe, the ‘Europeanisation’ of the Scottish kingdom, beginning in the later eleventh century, also had highly specific causes, which marked off that polity from similar territories in Ireland, left open to manipulation and conquest through political atomisation and an unwillingness to integrate with the European cultural mainstream. While basing our interpretation of historical change on the behaviour of individuals and on relations between small numbers of prominent people is normally not recommended, on this occasion connections of this type present a telling way of explaining a change in direction in Scotland’s relationships with its neighbours, along with radical shifts in the kingdom’s governmental structure and economic system. All of these changes inevitably had linguistic repercussions through alterations in the sociolinguistic ecology of the territory ruled by the king. In a sense these changes are to a considerable extent due to the marriage between Mael Coluim III, King of Scots (reigned 1058–93) and St Margaret (reigned 1070–93), sister of the rightful King of England, Edgar Atheling, along with the actions, connections and alliances of their descendants. We cannot be certain of Mael Coluim’s linguistic repertoire. An old tradition, tapped into by Shakespeare, has it that, after the seizure of power by Mac Bethad, Mael Coluim spent several years of exile at the English Court of Edward the Confessor. If this is true, then it would be surprising if he had not learned English. More recent historians, however, have generally rejected this version of Mael Coluim’s exile, instead suggesting that he found sanctuary in Orkney (for a discussion of the often-conflicting evidence, see Woolf 2007: 267–9). Given the length of exile he endured, it would be very surprising if he did not have command of the Old Norse dialects of those islands. Supporting the northern interpretation (and the assumed linguistic repertoire derived from this) is the fact that his first wife, Ingibiorg, was a Norse princess. These different scenarios for Mael Coluim’s early life are of some importance. We can assume with some

58  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd confidence that Margaret did not speak Gaelic before she came to Scotland. If Mael Coluim had indeed achieved command of English during his exile, communication with his second wife would have been straightforward; if he had lived in Orkney communication would not have been quite so easy.8 In a further complication, while Margaret was a member of the West Saxon ruling house of England, the bloody politics of that country in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries meant she spent her early years in the newly Christianised kingdom of Hungary. The linguistic repercussions of this residence can never be reconstructed; nevertheless, they must at the very least force us to question the extent to which speaking English was an innate part of Margaret’s personal identity, particularly since her mother was a native German speaker, a member of the Empire’s highest aristocracy. By the age of ten Margaret was, however, living in the increasingly ‘Frankish’ environment – for the nobility – of the England of Edward the Confessor (Edward himself may have been a French speaker by choice; he spent a considerable part of his formative years in Norman exile (Barlow 1997)). It is likely, therefore, that she had considerable command of English, even if it was not truly her native language (for a discussion of these issues, see Dunlop (2005); a more scholarly analysis can be found in Keene (2013)); her French (and Latin) were also likely to have been advanced. Despite all these caveats, it is striking that during this period the association of Perth and the Breadalbane region with the centre of the monarchy (in particular, perhaps, with Mael Coluim’s immediate family) was replaced by more south-easterly associations with Stirling, Dunfermline and (eventually predominantly) Edinburgh (as well as St Andrews rather than Dunkeld in ecclesiastical terms).9 In Edinburgh, Old English would, even before Margaret’s arrival, have been dominant and therefore attractive to a royal house rapidly shedding its Gaelic associations (having already done so with its Pictish background). It is not solely the personal associations of the royal family which caused this reorientation, however. Their political actions, designed to alter Scotland’s economic nature, also contributed to the changes that were beginning to be applied.10 3.6.3  The Norman infiltration Scotland did not have a Norman conquest. Although, with the accession to the throne of John Balliol in 1292, the country received a king whose male (and to a considerable degree female) ancestry was French,11 generally a ‘Norman infiltration’ took place prior to this, with marriage being the favoured means of gaining

inc ipient li ng ui sti c homog e nis a tio n | 59 lands not actually presented to them by the king. Indeed it was through these means that Balliol’s ancestors, as was also the case for his rivals for the kingship, the Bruces, gained a foothold in Scotland, while maintaining an English base; extreme, but controlled, violence was never ruled out as a strategy, however. This infiltration was not random. The kings of Scots were acknowledging the need to bring Scotland into line economically and politically with England and continental Europe. At the same time, they were heavily involved in what has been termed (Bates 2013) the ‘Norman Empire’ through land tenure, kinship and bonds of hierarchy (see Bates 2013: 121, 123, 125, 130, 153, 155). At times the King of Scots held Northumberland as the ‘man’ of the King of England; close relatives were given the Earldom of Huntingdon by the latter and became members of the Anglo-Norman nobility (although their descendants also became claimants to the Scottish throne in 1290). The other linguistic repercussion of the French elite presence in Scotland is rather less tangible. The ‘tool-kit’ the Normans brought with them to Scotland, tried and tested in England, was attractive not only to the royal house but also to almost all landholders. Despite regularly being in a small minority, their peers must often have been drawn to them, perhaps despite themselves. South of the Forth in particular the incomers possessed an almost uncanny ability to marry well. North of the Forth the incomers were proportionately fewer in number than to the south, possibly due to the different ethnocultural histories of the two zones. Incomers were also faced with the situation that the local gentry and aristocracy were very much of the soil and less influenced by the currents of change that affected southern parts of the kingdom during the period. While ‘Gaelic aristocracy’ may be a cliché when referring to the latter group, it is very likely that this remained the language of choice of all levels of society across the period in that region.12 French speakers, particularly culturally attractive ones, must have had a considerable effect upon the nature of society in the north during the period, from weapons technology to the terms used for different members of ‘polite society’. At the very least their sociolinguistic presence broke down the linguistic homogeneity of the region. Younger members of the existing elite would have been likely to pick up French as part of the new ‘package’. Connected to this set of changes may be the incorporation into Scotland of new, reformed monastic orders, involving a move away from native traditions. Such replacements likely encouraged the loss of Gaelic in certain registers (and social

60  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a nd groups). Although the working language of the new monasteries was Latin, the fact that most of the orders were centred in France and also connected with the new ‘Norman’ pioneers among the Scottish aristocracy, would have given French cachet among those who did not have French as their mother tongue, but were associated with the new reformed Church. French did not survive as a native local language anywhere in Scotland, of course, as it did not in England, where the language’s roots were much deeper. But it is entirely possible that the temporary diversification of local language use caused by the presence of speakers of French, along with their association with the economic life of the burghs, led to the spread of Inglis (of which more below), acting like a Trojan horse, as the secondary ‘new’ language. This variety developed and spread into elite circles, just as it did through trade with merchants, as discussed in the next section.13 Some degree of longevity may, however, have been given to French in the upper levels of the nobility by their multinational connections as landholders and their bonds of kinship in England, Wales, Ireland and in western parts of the continent. These changes appear only really to have taken place south of the Mounth. Although elite French immigrants did enter the north, many became Gaelicised, as with families such as the Frasers, Grants and Gordons. This was not the case in the burghs along the northern, fertile coastal strip. Northern, Inglis-using, Moray (in its broadest sense) produced the linguistic and cultural behaviour of what became the Sutherland family, when they later settled on the other side of the Moray Firth. In terms of the historiography of these events, the pendulum has swung from the viewpoint that there was a takeover of the elite by French speakers (with the former elite being ‘bred out’ in the new aristocracy, as supported by Ritchie 1954) and one where French speakers were a relatively circumscribed group, with their cultural and political innovations being carried into the ‘native’ mainstream along with (at times) their language, a view generally supported by specialists today (see Davies (1990), Grant (2013) and Stringer (2013)). The ancestry of the Bailliols and Bruces, already mentioned, as well as that of many other powerful and notable houses, appears to support the first viewpoint; the ancestry and origins of members of the gentry and nobility, particularly north of the Forth, demonstrates that actual French immigration was relatively insignificant. That does not mean, however, that its influence was minimal; evidence suggests the opposite. Interestingly, with the possible exception of words like

inc ipient li ng ui sti c homog enis a tio n | 61 Hogmanay, the name given to the great Scottish festival of New Year’s Eve, most Norman French words borrowed into Scots are identical to those borrowed into English, suggesting, perhaps, that the ‘Normans’ who entered Scotland were already using English, laced with words from their own increasingly moribund variety. This is in marked contrast to some of the Central French borrowings found in Scots. 3.6.4  The burghs A central contribution of these newcomers was connected to the foundation of the burghs. The descendants of Mael Coluim III and Margaret embraced an economy based on monetary transactions eagerly and with reason. Early medieval Scotland was almost abjectly poor. Assimilating market-based trade within a money-driven economy meant the country was more likely to maintain political and economic independence. Setting up fortified markets – burghs – throughout the Lowlands (and, indeed, beyond) was part of this change, allied to the invitation to ‘Norman’ nobles and gentry to take up residence in the kingdom, discussed above. The foundation of the burghs can be analysed as a central feature of an overarching and ongoing centralisation. People with skills associated with the market in general, along with the various new technologies of the period, were recruited to settle in the new centres (which were, naturally, often based on and in earlier settlements, when these were particularly well suited to trade, such as St Andrews, with its bay and river). Many of the settlers were connected in some way to the new magnates, already tied by bonds of obligation before leaving their former homes. Many came from northern England (in particular, at least following the fragmentary historical record, Yorkshire (Barrow 1980: 107)) or, to a lesser extent, the Welsh marches (the techniques of warfare and social control learned in those areas would have been particularly useful in the new environment); their English dialects must have contributed to the development of what became Scots. Others were ‘headhunted’ from elsewhere; not only from northern and western England (see, for instance, Davies 1990: 14). According to their names and other evidence, some citizens came from central and southeast England, where the ‘new economy’ was at a particularly advanced level. Other residents came from what is now northern Germany and the Netherlands, speaking dialects of Low German and Dutch, an ongoing presence through the Middle Ages and beyond, probably through further migration; it is

62  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d difficult to imagine how descendants of Low German speakers could maintain it as their first language if their family had been settled in a Scottish burgh for generations (see Whyte 1995: chapter 3, in particular pp. 59–60; see also Dennison and Simpson 2000: 720–1). On the other hand, the fact that trade continued on a regular basis with the ‘home’ territories would have encouraged ongoing survival of the ancestral language (Brown 2004: 136). This suggests that at least some knowledge of the ancestral variety would be a helpful encouragement to trade.14 Murison (1971) provides an analysis of borrowings from these languages into Scots, such as crag ‘neck’ and gowf ‘golf’ (see Macafee 2002 for further discussion). What can be said about this largely immigrant citizenry is that the burghs were in many ways internal and initially alien colonies within a still Gaelic Scotland.15 Dennison (1998: 116–17) comments that: Other burgesses might come from further afield, drawn by the incentive of ‘kirseth’. This was normally a period of a year and a day, although it might be longer in less desirable areas such as Dingwall (ten years) and Dumbarton (five years), when an immigrant was granted a period of grace to build or ‘big’ his burgage plot without payment of burgh dues. Significant also in the early burghal populations were incomers from Flanders, the Rhineland, England, and France, encouraged by the crown for the skills they could offer. How far such a disparate group of people could function as a ‘community’ at least in the first generation of burgh life, must be questioned.

Given the limited sources of information we have for language use in medieval Scotland and the considerable linguistic distance between the two competing vernaculars, it is almost inevitable that plotting the shift between the majority use of Gaelic and what would become Scots in the South is rather more difficult to analyse. Nevertheless, we can at least postulate a plausible pattern for the process, deriving from the first stirrings of a capitalist exploitation of marketplaces within protected spaces, which rapidly developed into the first truly urban spaces Scotland possessed. 3.6.5  Gaelic in the south: Galloway Gaelic poetry continued to be written in the South into the twelfth century, although the tradition (and the language) falls silent after this (Oram 2011: loc. 1337). In the south-west matters were different. ‘Wild Galloway’, the mountain

inc ipient li ng ui sti c homog en is a tio n | 63 portion of the province, has long been considered – alongside neighbouring Carrick – as likely to be the last place south of the Highland line where Gaelic continued to be spoken in Scotland. This is, of course, reasonable. Unlike central Scotland (and, to a lesser extent, the Borders), the ease of transit along valleys like Strathmore, which doubtless encouraged the spread of what became Scots, was practically non-existent there. Connections with Gaelic-dominant Arran, Argyll and Ulster, as well as the Isle of Man, were straightforward and commonplace, however. Indeed, as we have seen, Gaelic, possibly deriving from Galloway, was apparently spreading in Renfrewshire in the last days of a discrete Strathclyde. The survival of Gaelic in the south-west has, from tradition and some written evidence, often been dated to around 1750 (if not later). Lorimer (1949–53) suggests, however, that the language was probably current only to the end of the seventeenth century, with the middle of that century being a much more probable end date. Dating later than this, he claims, is based upon a mixture of misunderstanding and wishful thinking. Whatever the date at which the final native speaker died, the region was linguistically diverse long after much of the rest of southern Scotland. Further evidence, in relation to the literary record, will be addressed in the next chapter. 3.6.6  Inception of Inglis In low-lying southern and eastern parts of the country in particular the dominant spoken English (from a variety of geographical and social backgrounds) of the new urban centres came into contact with the Anglian dialects spoken in the area for centuries, already empowered somewhat by the (probably unconscious) patronage of the royal family. Interplay between the mutually intelligible imported and autochthonous varieties (a contact which would, naturally, have varied in source, process and result in different places) would have eventually produced a new variety – similar to, but not the same as, either of the inputs, in ways not dissimilar to the creation of ‘colonial’ varieties in other parts of the world (as we will discuss below, New Zealand English is largely a south-east of England variety, but includes features such as /h/ not associated with those varieties). It is generally agreed that this double parentage is represented in words like yett ‘gate’, derived from Old English, rather than Standard English gate, where the original English word (Old English geat) was replaced with the Old Norse cognate, but gate ‘street’, also from Old Norse, borrowed in northern English and Scots varieties, made ambiguity possible. Northern Bernician

64  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a nd dialects did not experience the primary Scandinavian influence which more southerly Northumbrian, essentially ‘greater Yorkshire’, did. Since so many of the new burgh inhabitants came from the north of England and spoke dialects that had gone through intense and often primary Norse influence, inhabitants of a particular area must have developed a koine, blending features of both varieties while also developing new and distinctive features itself. That the influence of northern English varieties spoken in Scotland by the new burgh-dwellers upon the pre-existing variety was an ongoing process in some places can be seen in charter records from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of place-names presented with variants of church, which later were reformulated with kirk (see Macafee 2002 for some exemplification; the classic discussion of the Norse influence on Scots is Kries 2003). How this new, mixed, variety was spread into the burghs outside the south-east where, in the hinterland, Gaelic was the primary language, rather than the different, more English, variety spoken there during the original formation of the new communities, cannot be fully answered, although transmission along weak network ties, such as between places as well as producers and consumers in a market must have played a part in the new variety’s transmission. In more modern times, as the work of the Milroys (see, for instance, Milroy 1987) demonstrates, change develops in places where the population has strong and manifold ties with each other, but is spread by looser but more geographically, socially, ethnically and linguistically diverse connections. We will have cause to discuss new dialect formation on a number of occasions in this book. In terms of proportion and geographical position of speakers before the spread of Scots across the rural part of central and southern Scotland, it is nevertheless unlikely that most speakers of what we can, perhaps, begin to call Inglis, did not live in the south-east. Some of the burgh and country immigrants did live in that area: the largest and most prosperous Scottish burgh was Berwick-upon-Tweed. But many burghs began as islands in a Gaelic-speaking sea. The same reality was probably present for most nobles and members of the gentry, if, as seems likely, they had already switched from French to English.16 While considerable evidence does exist for ‘Norman’ landholders becoming Gaelicised, as we have seen, this appears less the case with the citizens of the burghs. As bearers of a new economic system designed to encourage and broadcast the monetary exchange of surpluses and the specialisation of skills, the inhabitants of the burghs and their lifestyles must have been both attractive to, as well as challenging for, the

inc ipient li ng ui sti c homog enis a tio n | 65 inhabitants of their hinterlands. Bilingualism between Inglis and Gaelic would have been common – probably the norm – but probably unequal. As is the case in many places where money and capital are not shared equally, Gaelic speakers would have been expected to speak the language of the ‘new world’ in a rather different way from the burgh-dwellers, who may have only known the other language as ‘kitchen Gaelic’. This lack of full reciprocity may explain why most mainstream Scots varieties do not demonstrate profound influence from Gaelic, even though the two languages are likely to have been spoken in close proximity for centuries. It is likely, therefore, that the burgh varieties – often dominated by speakers who themselves, or whose ancestors, were not born in Scotland, and where small-scale koineisation was highly likely – acted somewhat like founder varieties.17 In addition, each burgh mix would have been slightly different from the others, depending on the local koines which developed in each settlement, encouraging some dialectal diversity.18 Inglis would have spread into the Gaelic Lowlands from this source. But the Bernician varieties must also have been spreading at the time, as the axis of the Scottish kingdom reconfigured and shifted to the south and east. This was also a founder variety. To some extent the language of court and governance, this variety combined with the forward station varieties to produce a single variety with local variants. Much of this spread and coalescence would have been prompted and encouraged by the social destabilisation and individual and alienation (as previously suggested, something like Durkheim’s anomie) caused by social and economic dislocation and change during the period. 3.6.7  The north North of the central Lowlands, burghs were also planted, as part of what is likely to have been an aggressive strategy to ‘tame’ the north and enforce new forms of centralised government upon a population which until recently had possessed traditions of strong local autonomy. Buchan and the area surrounding appears to be the heartland of eastern Gaelic well into the twelfth century, as the Gaelic glosses in the Book of Deer demonstrate (for several discussions, see Forsyth 2008). As we will see in the next chapter, these burghs were not always as successful as their more southerly equivalents. This seems to be particularly the case with inland burghs like Inverurie, in Aberdeenshire. Burghs situated on or near the coast, such as Aberdeen or Elgin, were rather more successful, probably because of the possibility of sea trade (Ditchburn 1988; see also Booton 1988,

66  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d however). Inglis is likely to have thrived in the latter situation, along with the other languages we associate with the new trading urban experiment (although there is likely to have been ongoing movement of Gaelic speakers into the burghs), while Gaelic was more likely to survive in the immediate hinterland of the inland burghs than would have been the case further south or on the coast. Nevertheless, some knowledge of Inglis must have spread into the rural population from an early period, even if they remained Gaelic-dominant. In Caithness and the other small pockets of Scots speech further north, it is probable that Inglis spread through the communities at a rather later historical point. Although, as discussed above, Gaelic was in retreat in the centre and Lowland east of Scotland, this change was not necessarily as catastrophic in terms of population numbers for the language as in the nineteenth and particularly twentieth centuries. It is quite possible that Gaelic speakers remained the majority of the country’s population until the late Middle Ages. It is not impossible that during the period under discussion the language continued to spread through the Western Isles, where the Lordship of the Isles was beginning to form from the remnants of Gall-Gàidheal polities like the kingdom of Man (McDonald 1997, 2019) as a polity with only limited connection to Alba. Powerful leaders, of mixed Norse and Gaelic heritage, eventually primarily employing the latter language, secured and maintained control. Gaelic also spread in the far north of the mainland (on both occasions at the expense of Norse and perhaps Pictish).19 The Gàidhealtachd was on the edge of a Gaelic artistic renaissance centred on Ireland, an issue we will return to in the next chapter, along with the ongoing and unique uses of Gaelic in the eastern parts of the Highlands and beyond. The elite of the Highlands and Islands would also, from an early period, have acquired some knowledge of the developing Inglis in order to deal with speakers of what was becoming the socially dominant language in the main centres of power to the east and south. On the fringes of the Gàidhealtachd this knowledge would have extended to all parts of the community. While geographical, cultural and political factors meant that this tendency towards bilingualism did not spread into the inland heartland of the Gàidhealtachd, it would be fair to say that, if any of these social, political and economic factors altered its nature or ceased to have importance, the growing demographic and political capital associated with Inglis would change the balance of the relationship in the latter variety’s favour.

inc ipient li ng ui sti c homog en is a tio n  | 67 3.7  Wars of Independence: Social Disruption and its Sociolinguistic Results Many of the same social processes of centralisation and homogenisation (often spread incrementally by trade and settlement), largely carried out peacefully in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, were at work during the period of the Wars of Independence, running roughly from 1296 until the 1320s, although later conflicts between England and Scotland (and within the latter country) might also be included. Inevitably, disruption, both political and social, became the norm in a considerable part of the Lowlands. Long-term social stability had not, of course, been general before this anywhere in Scotland, whether in pre-feudal or feudal times (if either typological state is anything more than a historiographical convenience). Both nobility and gentry were removed from their power centres, whether by violent or peaceful means, whether to their advantage or not; kings regularly found their position threatened by usurpers from their own families. But the sheer violence and speed of change in the late thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth centuries were unprecedented in what was becoming a unitary state. Moreover, although Scotland (particularly Lowland Scotland and the coastal north-east), as we have seen, was in theory highly ­hierarchical – feudal – in nature, the Wars of Independence represented a catalyst for change and structural breakdown. Without overstressing this argument, it was the minor gentry and the ‘people’ who were the bedrock of resistance, in particular, perhaps, in the early phases of the wars under Wallace, but later as well, while the nobility were, to put it diplomatically, somewhat variable in their adherence to the national cause. This point is demonstrated strikingly in the reactions and actions of the Bruce family during the period, even if a member of that family became a symbol of the independence struggle. The armies which fought for Scotland were often feudal levies; their members were also often volunteers, however. In either respect, the social and geographical particularities of regions and districts were disrupted, if not broken down, by movement of people and resources as part of what was often a bitter and closely fought conflict (Brown 2004 presents an in-depth discussion of what was often a chaotic time). What happens linguistically during periods of often quite extreme flux? While the (socio)linguistics of warfare (particularly on this occasion civil warfare, as it was to a considerable extent) are not well covered, often for very good reasons,20 we know something about the linguistic effects of dislocating change,

68  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd where rapid movement and change has affected a whole population and where the end result appears to be a somewhat homogenised variety that exhibits its primary roots in one particular mainstream variety. A striking example of this can be found with New Zealand English. It could be (and has been) argued that New Zealand English, just like Australian and to a degree South African English, is essentially colloquial urban South-East of England English transported to the Southern Hemisphere in the nineteenth century. There are, indeed, features of the variety, such as the ‘low’ diphthongs in words like Spain, which do bring New Zealand English into line with ‘Cockney’ and related varieties. There are other situations, however, where the two varieties are divergent from each other. This is most noticeable, perhaps, in their treatments of /h/. Colloquial London English and its close rural cousins do not naturally employ /h/ in its historical contexts (or at least not consistently). New Zealand English is, however, /h/-ful. There are also features of the latter variety, such as the raising of short vowels, which are at best latent in the ‘mother’ variety. Some degree of dialect mixing can be postulated as an explanation for these discrepancies. In brilliant but flawed work published in the first decade of this century, Trudgill (2004; see Gordon et al. 2004 for a critical discussion) made the claim that the results of the mixing between different varieties of English and Scots spoken in the Atlantic Archipelago now transported to New Zealand had ‘inevitable’ results. The fact that more than half of the population in the crucial first two generations of Pakeha settlement in the islands used /h/ in its historical positions – people from East Anglia, the northernmost parts of England, Scotland and Ireland – led to /h/ retention. While most specialists in the subject would baulk at the idea of a fully deterministic interpretation of this type of evidence (there seems no place in such a model for individual or group human agency and ideas of identity), at a general level Trudgill’s point appears to be upheld: to a degree, the linguistic inputs into a new and increasingly discrete system are sorted by native speakers in ways which, while not entirely predictable, are inherently logical in their outcome. How do these nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments relate to thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Scotland? Considerable (although doubtless temporary) mixing of populations is an inevitability of (civil) war, whenever and wherever this takes place. People from different linguistic backgrounds would by the very nature of the social, economic and political realities of the times have

inc ipient li ng ui sti c homog en is a tio n  | 69 come into more regular and more intense levels of contact than would otherwise have been true. This would have been particularly the case in the Lowlands (running up, perhaps, to the northern end of Strathmore at Stonehaven in Kincardineshire), where the new cash-based economy was at its most developed and the topography lent itself to the (relatively) rapid transit of combatants and provisions. The linguistic results of this dislocation (or dislocations: we are speaking here of several interconnected processes over at least a generation) would have been twofold. In the first instance, contact between the English-using burghs outside the original Bernician heartland would have grown considerably over the period. We have little evidence for this (unsurprising, given literacy levels and the general stresses of the period), but it would not be unreasonable that the original ‘mix’ within these colonies would have differed from each other (and possibly within). Necessary connections between the burghs would have increased during the period; more homogenous varieties developed because of it, with the varieties of the larger and more prestigious burghs being given greater prominence in the ‘mix’. Out of this came Inglis in its developed form. This ‘chaos’ might well have been exacerbated by the presence of Dutch and Low German speakers (and speakers of other languages) in many of the new urbanising centres, adding their own unique linguistic and sociolinguistic features to the ‘mix’. Residual Gaelic speakers would also have contributed in some areas at least. These influences might also have included the manner in which they produced the majority variety, a point to which we will return in the next chapter in relation to North-East Scots. Secondly, the disruption involved would likely have had a deleterious effect on Gaelic speaker numbers in rural parts of the Lowlands. Greater mobility necessitated by war and the presence of linguistically ‘different’ people who shared a political cause with you would have led to higher levels of bilingualism, with this bilingualism likely to be weighted sociolinguistically (as it was already in the burghs) towards the use of Inglis by Gaelic speakers, rather than vice versa. While Gaelic survived for a considerable period after this in the Lowlands, particularly in those areas where the accelerated economic flow of the society which followed the crisis period was least felt, such as in the rural uplands of Fife, the spread of unequal bilingualism among the speakers of Gaelic almost inevitably led to the ongoing shrinkage of speaker numbers. By the end of the Middle Ages any Gaelic speakers in at least the central Lowlands of Scotland

70  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d were likely to have been either visitors or immigrants, a situation which has largely pertained until today. 3.8 Conclusion It is always tempting to read historical development in reverse: because things turned out in a particular way, this must mean that there was a ‘genetic’ and inevitable predisposition for that outcome to be reached. While the roots of the decline of Pictish and British as spoken languages may have been present before our period began, there is nothing inevitable about the replacement in a large part of Scotland of Gaelic by Inglis. By the end of the Wars of Independence, however, the homogenisation of language use, part of a dislocation and identityforming process through dramatic, often traumatic, change, spreading through loose network ties, was well underway in the Lowlands. In the next chapter we will consider the rise of Inglis as a national language of prestige, along with the growing antipathy of Lowlanders towards speakers of Gaelic in the late medieval and Early Modern periods; from the outset it should again be noted that this antipathy was (and is) not a foregone conclusion, however.

4 SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND CULTURAL METAMORPHOSIS: A COUNTRY IN CRISIS?

4.1  The Late Medieval ‘Crisis’

T

he fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed serial crises and metamorphoses across Europe and beyond. For a brief period, the steppe corridor between east Asia and Europe – the ‘Silk Route’ – became fully open, with no intermediate power halting or diverting trade and diplomacy. Even when this ‘corridor’ closed, the momentum caused by the Mongol eruption from their homelands created perpetual instability in Asia, leading, eventually, to the Mogul seizure of power in South Asia, as well as maintaining the ‘Mongol yoke’ over the East Slav lands, thus instigating the rise of PolandLithuania as the major power of central and eastern Europe. While these principalities and lordships were consolidated, imperial power collapsed in Italy. France practically disappeared as an independent state but was reborn as the power-broker of western Europe by the end of the period. Scandinavia almost coalesced as a single state. Muslim power was entirely extinguished in the Iberian Peninsula, replaced by an intolerant and often paranoid homogeneity. In south-eastern Europe, on the other hand, Muslim rule – and Islam – spread at the expense of Christianity. In the second half of the period, in particular, changes in society, power differentials, politics and technology led to an expansion of European – particularly Iberian – knowledge of the lands bordering on the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, in the end producing the irruption of Portuguese trade and military power onto the coasts of India in

72  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d 1497–9 and the first tentative Spanish contacts with the Americas from 1492 on. At the same time, the fourteenth century in particular witnessed considerable trauma for both societies and individuals. Dearth, and occasionally famine, was commonplace, perhaps due to outmoded agricultural practice, perhaps due to changes in the weather that involved a drop in average annual temperature, a shortening of the growing season, shifts in climatic zone and the abandonment as marginal of what had once been thoroughly cultivable land. More dramatically, Eurasia became subject to epidemics, often pandemics, after centuries where plague was practically unknown. The most notorious of these was the Black Death of 1347–51, although bubonic outbreaks continued for centuries, generally every generation; but other diseases made regular visitations.1 War between (often within) countries became commonplace, if not the norm. Very few places escaped the destabilisation and destruction. Europe recovered slowly from these changes and catastrophes. Some (for instance, Nicholas 1992) have claimed, however, that the development of complex systems of exchange in the Low Countries and Italy, along with the growth of trading ‘empires’, such as Venice and the Hanseatic League, came about because the breakdown of classical feudalism due to a catastrophic fall in population caused shift towards a wage-based economy and unrestrained movement by individuals and groups into urban areas. A newly extended and to a degree enfranchised middle class was a by-product of these changes in a context where social mixing and personal and group ‘rising’ and ‘falling’ within society was becoming the norm. Given its geographical and economic position within the continent, some of these tendencies took somewhat longer to affect Scotland than the ‘Frankish’ centre of France, the Rhineland and northern Italy. The centre’s influence was in the end considerable, however; many symptoms were exaggerated by what was both an independence struggle and a series of civil wars. While Scotland regained (or gained) full independence during this period, its development was perpetually changed by passing through (and participating in) this mutating world. Much of which followed – including language use in the country – was at the very least strengthened by these profound societal changes. It would be surprising if there had been no influence from the times’ social and economic tendencies upon the ways language was used in Scotland. The process of homogenisation through koineisation would have been intensified for Inglis by the loosening of societal ties. Changes in the level to which urbanisa-

so c ial , pol iti cal and cultural me ta mo r p h o s is  | 73 tion quickened and attracted the rural population fed into ongoing change for both surviving Scottish vernaculars; it may also represent the tipping point when the separation between Gaelic and Scots speakers became largely complete, associated with cultural – perhaps racial – characteristics, coinciding with geographical separation. These issues were exacerbated by social and cultural changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 4.2  The Rise of Inglis By the sixteenth century, Inglis was the primary language of Scotland. Gaelic had many speakers but was, as we saw in the last chapter, increasingly divorced from the government and central economic system of the country. We have seen in the last chapter that this spread was connected to the spread of a new economic system through the development of the burghs, and that linguistic contact of various sorts created a number of similar koines from which the language’s dialects developed. In the late medieval period, Inglis moved both towards becoming a major literary vehicle and, more importantly, a language of administration and trade. Indeed, I suspect that it is in non-literary and everyday prose that Scots chiefly increased in status during the period. As an instrument of government, the law and trade, it was inevitable that written Scots would move towards standardisation (see, for instance, Kopaczyk 2013). In this it ran in parallel with processes occurring simultaneously across western and central Europe. Merchants’ bills and records followed a similar linguistic path. 4.2.1  Standardisation in late medieval Europe In the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries vernacular languages increased in social, cultural and, eventually, in some places, religious prestige across western and central Europe. With the spread of movable type printing in the period, moreover, the written word not only became readily available; it also became cheaper. The mass production of the vernacular, associated almost wholly with urban areas, helped spread particular varieties of a language while other varieties were ignored by writers as inherently aberrant. This focusing was present in the age of manuscript culture (settlements with large populations inevitably produce more manuscripts than regions with sparser settlement), but printing altered the scale of both production and influence. The spread of standardisation was patchy, however. Possibly because of its rural heartland, Slovak was not able to achieve this type of literate identity, even

74  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a nd as written Czech established and broadened its use and user population. Closer to home, Irish and Gaelic did not share greatly in these changes (although, as we will see, something like literary standardisation was present, with ‘classical’ Irish being the preferred code for most poets and other writers in both Ireland and Scotland). On many occasions, standardisation involved a combination of concerns – the increase in ease of trade and the desire for social cohesion and progress – and the more intangible desire for national (or group) cohesion (Millar 2005). In England this was straightforward: barring a number of small linguistic minorities, often, as with the speakers of Cornish and Welsh, on the English side of the border, everyone spoke English, even if a true sense of national identity did not yet exist. France faced a greater struggle for Parisian French to be accepted as the norm, partly because of the prestige of its ancestor Latin (more pronounced because of their linguistic relationship than was the case with, for instance, German in Germany) but primarily because of the kingdom’s linguistic diversity. Nevertheless, French did become the primary language of literacy in that polity, eventually even in the south. 4.2.2  The (near) standardisation of Inglis What does this all mean for Inglis? After all, the first permanent printing press in Scotland was not established until 1507, long after 1476 when the technology arrived in England. This gap eventually may have hampered the independence and growth of the Scottish vernacular; at the time, however, other political and cultural forces generally acted in favour of the vernacular’s growth as a language. Although late medieval and Early Modern Scotland was riven with political (and ideological) strife, the country was still moving towards centralisation, based around Edinburgh (and Stirling), with a developing official class dominated by the clergy. Official documents – writs, property claims, royal commands, and so on – had been produced in Scotland; these were mostly written in Latin (to a lesser extent French). When Scots was used, it was primarily in place-names for the purpose of an accurate description of property boundaries or following the terminology of local legal practice (such as ingfangtheif, the right of a landholder to take and try someone for theft on his property; Gaelic terms, such as kane, essentially rent given in kind, also occurred in this context). From late in the fourteenth century, however, Inglis began to be used – and eventually became dominant and default – in official contexts (with Latin being used primarily to

soc ial , pol iti ca l a nd cultura l meta mo r p h o s is  | 75 give the Inglis body text status and – sometimes – the requisite solemnity), in the law and when carrying out trade. These documents not only originated in Edinburgh or other royal centres; burgh records survive from across Scotland. Most of these records, no matter their origin, appear to have been written in an approximation to Edinburgh norms, with local features being incidental (and, it is very likely, occasionally accidental). This official and public use cannot be the whole story, however. Millar (2010a) proposes that written languages are only likely to prosper as a norm if they assume both official and literary roles, thus involving a large part of the population who employ literacy in their use. Inglis combined both features, albeit briefly. 4.2.2.1  Inglis literature: language norms and language attitudes Much is, often correctly, made of the literary achievements of the Older Scots period. Scotland, despite its size, has always ‘punched above its weight’ in literary terms (in writing in Scots, Gaelic and English, but also in Latin and a number of other languages). From the second half of the fourteenth century to the second half of the sixteenth, imaginative writing in Inglis in poetry in particular (but also drama) became a major vehicle for the language. Even with the earliest examples of this literary efflorescence, the use of the language (and indeed of literary models) is generally assured. Partly this is due to the availability and influence of well-known Latin (and French) models; the texts which have survived probably survived because readers considered them worth preserving (although chance must also occasionally have played a part). A folk tradition of ballad and song existed, even if little direct evidence for its nature survives. The influence of this popular tradition must underlie the surviving selfconsciously ‘artistic’ materials. In his Brus, John Barbour (died 1395; resident in Aberdeen but probably born significantly to the south) undoubtedly followed contemporary fashion in his use of continental Romance models. His subject matter – the national liberation struggle – inevitably meant he also tapped into the folk tradition (particularly since he was born when the events he describes were beyond living memory but the country itself had passed through a period of considerable instability that would have made the recording of formal history more problematical; ballads may have been as important as chronicles to his research). More markedly, to ‘reimagine’ Virgil’s Aeneid (as Gavin Douglas (1474–1522) did in the early sixteenth century), a mingling of native and

76  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a n d Roman (and behind them Greek) models were necessarily the combination produced. Another element in the literate development of Inglis involved the models for style and subject matter functioning in England. Generations of specialists in Scottish medieval literature have objected, sometimes vociferously, to the term ‘Scottish Chaucerians’, previously commonplace, for writers such as Dunbar (1459–1520), Henryson (1425–1500) and Douglas (for a discussion of this and other aspects of Chaucer’s ‘afterlife’, see the essays in Pinti 1998). It is unjust to suggest that these writers are somehow subsidiary (even ancillary) to Chaucer and his contemporaries, addenda to a great English tradition. But English literature from late medieval England did influence Scottish writing significantly, at least by demonstrating what was possible in the presentation of literature in a vernacular readily comprehensible (in written form) to Inglis speakers. This is not solely an outsider’s view: Dunbar describes with confidence the succession from Chaucer to himself and his Scottish contemporaries; Henryson, in the Testament of Cressid, provides a brilliant interconnected series of incidents in the decline and fall of the central character situated within the broader and less detailed narrative framework of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Some of the greatest Scottish writers of this period probably did not believe that an entirely separate ‘Scottish literary tradition in Scots’ existed. We would be foolish to ignore this ‘English’ element in the ‘DNA’ of the burgeoning literary development in Scotland; this had linguistic repercussions. A trait of early literary Scots is that it contains features (largely orthographic) normally associated with (southern) English conventions rather than the practices at the heart of the representation of Inglis later in the period. Sometimes this is primarily a matter of spelling (so that, for instance, /ʍ/ – possibly /xw/ at the time – is sometimes represented by , when later manuscript usage would have ); others, however, represent pronunciations alien to Scotland (and, often, the north of England). With some works biographical explanations may help to explain these apparent anomalies. In The Kingis Quair, ascribed to King James I, the use of apparently ‘English’ features may have a personal explanation. James spent most of his early adult life as a (comfortably housed) prisoner in England. He married a close relative of the English king; this represents the poem’s subject matter. Inevitably, during this formative period English models in writing and speech were more tangible for James than were Scottish. But this biographical

so c ial , pol iti cal and cultural me ta mo r p h o s is  | 77 connection cannot be made for most works which exhibited southern features. It is likely, therefore, that English influence was an ongoing feature of the written form of Inglis. As the fifteenth century progressed, a Scots spelling system developed, albeit with a great deal of systemic variation at all levels (see Bann and Corbett 2015). Elements were derived in part from, or encouraged by, northern English systems. Yet the work of the Makars of the sixteenth century still exhibits features (particularly phonological features) which appear to be southern English, even when represented orthographically by local norms. Even more strikingly, the use of these forms appears not to be random. Southern features are more likely in a poem written in a high register in relation to an elevated subject than in a low register discussion of earthly, if not bawdy, matters. Without being glib, southern dialect features were associated with overtly prestigious sociolinguistic contexts (indeed the quotation below from Dunbar’s ‘When he wes seik’ uses Southern so (rather than Scots swa or sae) in its final line). On the other hand, it is much less common to find this kind of variation in the more common and everyday usage of non-literary materials. Despite these ambiguities, the word Scottis, previously used in reference to Gaelic, now began to be used for the Scottish Germanic vernacular, with Gaelic coming to be termed Erse ‘Irish’. As far as we can see, this change was first enunciated in literary terms by Gavin Douglas in his Eneados (a highly nuanced discussion of Douglas’s translation process can be found in Corbett (1999: 145–6); Macafee (2013) discusses his processes of translation and transformation within a short passage): And ʒit forsuyth I set my bissy pane, As that I couth to mak it braid and plane, Kepand na sudroun bot our awyn langage, And speikis as I lernyt quhen I was page. Nor ʒit sa cleyn all sudron I refuses, Bot sum word I pronounce as nyghtbouris doys: Lyke as in Latyn beyn grew termys sum, So me behufyt quhilum or than be dum Sum bastard Latyn, French or Inglyss oyss Quhar scant was – I had nane other choys. Nocht for our tong is in the selwyn skant

78  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d But for that I the fowth of langage want (As quoted in Jack 1997: 244) ‘And yet in truth I set my busy pen as I could to make it broad and plain, permitting no Southron [i.e., English] but instead our own language, and speak as I learned when I was a boy servant. Nor yet so completely do I refuse all Southron, but some words I pronounce as our neighbours do: just as in Latin some terms have been developed, so I had to use some bastard Latin, French or English where Scots was wanting or then be silent – I had no other choice. Not because our tongue is wanting in itself, but rather because I myself do not possess the full fruitfulness of language.’

From this point of view, a new national variety has come into being, explicitly portrayed as discrete from suddroun (although one of the ironies of this discussion is that Douglas was a prominent supporter of closer ties, possibly union, with England (Blakeway 2015: 33)). The perception of a discrete identity for what we can now perhaps term Scots is more complex and ambiguous than this, however. Part of this literary efflorescence honed the growing antipathy between Gaelic and Scots speakers, to which we will return. Let us briefly consider William Dunbar’s treatment of Gaelic in his Flyting, ‘poetic duel’, with Walter Kennedy (ca.1455–ca.1508). While sailing very close to the wind, this battle is not, I think, intended to be taken seriously (Kennedy is, after all, named sympathetically in Dunbar’s masterly ‘When he wes seik’, in the following way: Gud Maister Walter Kennedy In poynt of dede lyis veraly, Gret reuth it wer that so suld be; Timor mortis conturbat me. ‘Good Master Walter Kennedy at point of death lies verily, great sadness it would be that so it should be; the fear of death distresses me.’

Kennedy was a member of the elite, related to the ruling house and with close ties to both ecclesiastical and secular power-brokers. He also came from Carrick in southern Ayrshire, an area where Gaelic continued to be spoken at the time (and which, we assume, Kennedy could speak). Dunbar seizes upon this fact and upbraids him:

so c ial , pol iti cal and cultural me ta mo r p h o s is  | 79 Iersche brybour baird, vyle beggar with thy brattis, Cuntbittin crawdoun Kennedy, coward of kynd; . . . Thy trechour tung hes tane ane heland strynd— Ane lawland ers wald mak a bettir noyis. ‘Irish [alternatively ‘Highland’] vagabond bard, vile beggar with your ragged children [alternatively ‘with your children’], cunt-bitten craven Kennedy, coward by nature; . . . your treacherous tongue has taken on a Highland strain – a Lowland arse would make a better noise.’

This is strong meat served up in jest, but there is a double reality to it. In the first instance it supplies further contemporary evidence for the ongoing divorce – linguistic and cultural – between Highlands and Lowlands, of which more below, with Gaelic being seen as ‘Irish’ (indeed Dunbar puns on erse, both ‘arse’ and ‘Irish’). More importantly, perhaps, Dunbar does not explicitly present a division between Lowland usage and English. Having made this point about English influence on Scots, a striking example of lack of literacy in what was becoming Standard English preceding the Protestant Reformation is presented by the fact that King James V (reigned 1513–42) could not, according to the English ambassador at the time, ‘rede an Einglisshe letter’, an observation apparently backed up by the commentary of Sir David Lindsay, courtier, poet and dramatist (Edington 1994). It is unlikely that James could not read and write (he was, in fact, an accomplished poet). He would have command over his own mother tongue, French (given the political orientations of the time and the fact that he was married to a Frenchwoman who is unlikely to have had much Scots when she arrived in her new home) and Latin (and, unusually for the time, Gaelic). A distinction is therefore being made being made between literacy in different Germanic varieties, although it cannot be ruled out that this was, in fact, a diplomatic lack of understanding (particularly since his mother was an Englishwoman, although she did not have an everyday presence in his life from early childhood on). In any event, even the claim of lack of understanding would not have been credited in relation to language understanding and knowledge by men of James’s background even a generation later.

80  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a n d 4.2.3  Scots perceived externally: language status During this period when Scotland became a plaything in international power politics, a number of external commentators – usually diplomats – commented on Scots and its relationship to English. Most famously, Pedro de Ayala, Spanish ambassador to Scotland, observed that ‘His [King James IV’s] own Scottish language is as different from English as Aragonese from Castilian’ (Brown 1978 [1891]: 39–40). It is often assumed that, by Aragonese, Catalan is intended. This may well be the case – the primary language of the kingdom of Aragon was Catalan, associated with its rich mercantile port cities; in particular, Barcelona. Catalan was (and is) perceived as an entirely discrete relative of Castilian (‘Spanish’). But de Ayala may have meant Aragonese, a set of dialects spoken in the Ebro Valley, a member of the dialect continuum of which Castilian is the most socially prestigious member (the ‘umbrella dialect’ in written terms); Aragonese and Castilian are far more mutually intelligible than either is with Catalan. This comment is therefore more ambiguous than is normally represented. That Scots and English were perceived as separate by some users can nevertheless be seen in the linguistic behaviour of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister and wife of James IV. As Williams (2016) points out, Margaret regularly switched between English and Scots, depending not only on the recipient of her letter but also her political and diplomatic goals. 4.2.4  Latin and French borrowings into Scots as part of an ‘acculturation’ process The world which Scotland inhabited in the early sixteenth century remained dominated by Latin. While many literate people would have had only limited exposure to that language, particularly if they were engaged in trade, the dominant written material would have been heavily influenced by people with considerable Latin ability (particularly during a period when Scotland was developing its own higher educational tradition). Remnants of this learned tradition persist in legal and ecclesiastical language in particular. The equivalent to English propose is, for instance, propone. These words derive from different parts of the same Latin verb. When a Church of Scotland minister wishes to leave her/his present charge, s/he demits.2 Not all Latin borrowings are learned (or formal), however. The common word stravaig ‘to wander without purpose, but in an enjoyable way’, derives from Latin extravagare ‘to walk out or away’. The

so c ial , pol iti cal and cultural me ta mo r ph o s is  | 81 new French borrowings of this period, generally not found in English, almost inevitably, express rather more intimate and domestic ideas, such as ashet, a large (serving) plate. Sometimes these borrowings can be analysed as being of Central French origin. The part of the High Street of Old Aberdeen leading up to St Machar’s Cathedral is called The Chanonry, after the cathedral canons who lived there before the Protestant Reformation. The Norman French equivalent would be The Canonry. This may be an expression of the close ties between Paris and Scotland in the period, but it is necessary to exercise caution when making such an assumption. Whether consciously or unconsciously, this borrowing process practically always represents an attempt, whether conscious or unconscious, to acculturate (Joseph 1987) Scots as a developing language. Scots was therefore on the edge of becoming an Ausbau variety. Factors – largely political, social and economic, rather than linguistic – led to the dialectalisation of the language even as its literary ‘golden age’ passed through its course. 4.3  Gaelic and Literacy In the north and west of Scotland, Gaelic remained demographically dominant. At least to begin with, that language Gaelic was by far the most literate of the two national vernaculars. As McLeod (2004) has noted, in fact, a large part of this literary tradition, shared with Ireland, was continued into the seventeenth century, if not beyond, by some kindreds; in some senses Scottish Gaelic writing was peripheral and subsidiary to its more prestigious and populous cousin. Nevertheless, accomplished Irish poets came to Scotland either temporarily (‘on tour’, perhaps) or for considerable periods. Some established long-standing poetic lines of descent. The compensation they received and the cultural milieu they inhabited must have been sufficiently attractive for them to make the move. Orthographically, and in relation to the linguistic evidence underlying that, the language used is generally similar to, if not actually the same as, equivalent Irish productions. Since considerable spoken linguistic diversity must have been present not only between the two countries but also within them, we must instead turn to a sociocultural explanation for this pan-Gaelic written representation. The Irish (if that is the correct term for the multinational code) produced in elite writing cannot represent any spoken variety accurately (or directly), although it did represent an ideological commitment to maintaining linguistic

82  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd unity transnationally (Ó Cuív 1980). Undoubtedly folk literature did represent local usage; inevitably, little if anything of this survives. A partial reaction against this unificatory elite cultural representation of Gaelic can perhaps be found in the Book of the Dean of Lismore, a sixteenthcentury collection of poetry and other literary work reaching back into the Middle Ages (see, for instance, Meek 1989a, 1989b; for a broader discussion, see Meek 2002: 86–7). Its orthographic system is not descended from traditional pan-Gaelic practice; instead, its primary source is contemporary Scots orthography, a choice not dissimilar to that made for Manx at around the same time in relation to English orthographic practice. It is likely that the audience for which it was intended was one more used to reading Scots than Gaelic. This may well have been particularly the case among literate Gaelic speakers in the eastern parts of the Gàidhealtachd – in Perthshire, perhaps. Interestingly, despite its name (associated with an island off the west coast of Argyll), the Dean’s roots were in Perthshire, in the upper Tay Valley, where infiltration of the Campbell interest was taking place (Campbell of Airds 2000–4). Although not plentiful, independent evidence for these practices are recorded elsewhere in the region (Barrow 1989). A more nativist approach to essentially the same material must have existed. Neither literary-linguistic school had much access to the new printing technology, which rendered mass broadcasting of material more likely. The lack of a major urban centre within the Gaelic-speaking parts of Scotland may underlie this. Nevertheless, the gradual incorporation of originally Gaelic-speaking elite groups, most notably the Campbells, into the greater Scots-speaking (later, English-speaking), Lowland elite culture meant that fewer patrons were available for the traditional poetic practice and the Hiberno-Scottish written language unity.3 Nevertheless, elements of this tradition survived the Protestant Reformation in the use of an Irish translation of the Bible in the Gàidhealtachd. This was self-defeating by this point, however: vernacularisation for the purpose of evangelising the ‘common people’ could not be served by the use of a variety whose comprehension was confined to an elite. 4.3.1  Gaelic and its speakers as perceived by a centralising state and its inhabitants Hegemonic force was increasingly in the hands of Scots speakers in this period. While monarchs did visit the eastern Highlands regularly, the cultural, linguistic

so c ial , pol iti cal and cultural me ta mo r p h o s is  | 83 and physical nature of the western Highlands and Islands is likely to have made them appear foreign, only partly controlled by the centre through subordinates whose own rather than royal interests were often given precedence. Knowledge of the culture and language of the west and north was limited; as we will see, the adversarial spirit of Lowlanders in particular towards their Highland neighbours meant that interest in the culture and language of the Gaelic half was low, viewed through a clichéd and prejudiced series of viewpoints. The fact that King James V learned Gaelic was considered both impressive and eccentric; the king demonstrated no pro-Gàidhealtachd sentiment, despite this knowledge (in-depth discussion of these and related issues can be found in MacGregor 2009). On the boundaries of the Gàidhealtachd, inhabitants of the burghs and the landed interest would have known some Gaelic to carry out their business efficiently and to their benefit; it is likely that this knowledge constituted something like ‘kitchen Gaelic’, a feature of language use not dissimilar to ‘kitchen Spanish’ in the south-western United States and other places where linguistic inequality combines with imperialism. The divergent developments in the north-east are dealt with later in this chapter. 4.3.1.1  Anti-Gaelic prejudice in the Lowlands There is likely to have been prejudice against Gaelic and Gaelic speakers among the Lowland elite from early in the Middle Ages, a phenomenon played out in the relatively rapid sloughing-off of that language and the spread of Inglis in the region. From the fifteenth century on, however, something like a racial element began to be expressed in relation to what were now perceived as cultural as well as geographical regions. Famously, John of Fordun, writing in the 1380s, commented that The manners and customs of the Scots vary with the diversity of their speech. For two languages are spoken amongst them, the Scottish and the Teutonic; the latter of which is the language of those who occupy the seaboard and plains, while the race of Scottish speech inhabits the Highlands and out-lying islands. The people of the coast are of domestic and civilised habits, trusty, patient, and urbane, decent in their attire, affable and peaceful, devout in Divine worship . . . the Highlanders and people on the Islands, on the other hand, are a savage and untamed nation, rude and independent, given to rapine, ease-loving, of a docile and warm disposition, comely in person, but unsightly in dress, hostile

84  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a n d to the English people and language, and owing to diversity of speech, even to their own nation, and exceedingly cruel. (As cited in Withers 1984: 22)4

Thus, the Gaelic speaker is represented as half-noble savage and half-demon child (a combination of the views of Rousseau and Kipling, perhaps). Of course, John of Fordun’s words are open to interpretation (and, indeed, have been raked over regularly since he first wrote them); nevertheless, they do seem to represent a dichotomy in Scottish life which is repeatedly touched upon from this point on by commentators stemming from either ‘side’, even if we accept that his views are over-schematised and lack nuance. The ideological stance, in other words, has become self-fulfilling, even if the evidence represents a much more varied pattern of socioeconomic relationships both between speakers of the two indigenous languages and, more importantly, within the two speech communities. Moreover, if John came from Fordoun in Kincardineshire, as many believe, the division between Lowlands and Highlands is particularly and visually pronounced, with the Grampians forming a solid wall some five or six kilometres to the west, while the village is situated in the fertile Howe o the Mearns at the northern end of Strathmore, with easy communication possible into the population centres to the south. Ironically, Fordoun was a major military and governmental centre in Pictavia and, later, of northern resistance to the centralising monarchy, but the area’s place names (such as Laurencekirk) appear to demonstrate the presence of an Inglis-speaking community of long standing in these marchlands.5 4.3.2  Economic bifurcation and ‘lawlessness’ The economic relationship between Highlands and Lowlands had changed during the period. While it would be an overstatement to say that the latter had become prosperous, annual surplus had become far more normal, with commerce reaching out from the towns into a countryside where capital investment and consolidation of land ownership led in most years to growing returns. Although elements of feudalism were maintained in places until the nineteenth century, its social basis was becoming essentially moribund. While elements of this change were played out in more fertile parts of the Highlands, that region was left behind in material terms, its peasantry remaining in something of a feudal relationship (although with hangovers from an earlier ‘tribal’ period) with the leader and landowner of their territory (see Withers 1988: chapter 1).

soc ial , pol iti ca l a nd cultura l meta mo r p h o s is  | 85 These inequalities led to disturbance in the parts of the Highlands bordering on Lowland territory. Raiding became commonplace; violence endemic. While Highland groupings distant from this border zone were rather more peaceful, the Lowland perception of Highland behaviour was formed by their experience of economically backward and culturally violent neighbours. Rob Roy MacGregor (1671–1734) was both admired and feared; he was not the only ‘outlaw’ of the border zone, merely the most famous. In this hostile environment, coupled eventually with radical Protestant zeal, Scottish central government began formulating means of ‘pacifying’ the Highlands, striking at the leaders of the ruling families. The threat of violence underlay much of the government’s policy. Taking hostages from these families to guarantee good behaviour was common. Chieftains’ sons were to be ‘deGaelicised’, with Scots (or English) becoming their primary language, as summed up in a 1616 supplementary act appended to the Statutes of Iona, notable in their being formulated at the heart of the Gàidhealtachd (here quoted from MacGregor 2006: 145): Forsamekle as the Lordis of Secrete Counsell understanding that the cheif and principall caus quhilk hes procurit and procuris the continewance of barbaritie, impietie, and incivilitie within the Yllis of this kingdome hes proceidit from the small cair that the chiftanes and principall clannit [men] of the Yllis hes haid of the educatioun and upbringing of thair childrene in vertew and learning, – who being cairles of thair dewteis in that point, and keeping thair childrene still at home with thame, whair thay sie nothing in thair tendar yeiris bot the barbarous and incivile formes of the countrie, thay ar thereby maid to apprehend that thair is no uther formes and dewteis of civilitie keept in ony uther pairt of the countrie, sua that quhen thay come to the yeiris of majoritie hardlie can thay be reclamed from these barbarous and incivile formes quhilkis for laik of instructioun wer bred and satled in thame in thair youth, whereas, yf thay had bene send to the Inland in thair youthe and traynit up in vertew, learning, and the Inglis tung, thay wald haif bene the better preparit to reforme thair countreis and to reduce the same to godlines, obedience, and civilitie.

None of these actions of themselves caused a decline in prestige for the Gaelic language. The polarisation caused by the changes in perception was the harbinger of major changes in the language’s power and population base in following centuries, however. That there was nevertheless linguistic contact between

86  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd Gaelic and Scots, with transparent influence of the former upon the latter, will be demonstrated in section 4.7. 4.4  External Politics in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries While the general disturbance through which Scotland passed in the last century and a half of full independence can be explained as the result of the machinations of great magnates, often closely related to the royal house, scrambling for power during repeated minorities, a large part of this violence and the poisonous politics underlying it was based upon allegiance to and funding from either France or England. These tensions were heightened considerably by the Protestant Reformation (as were issues of difference between Highlands and Lowlands economics and politics), leading to further connections with England for the majority of the elite class, while an important minority intensified their connection to France. Linguistically, this long-term crisis emphasised and heightened tensions within the Scots-speaking community in relation to linguistic authority and allegiance. Ideological associations also split the Gaelic-speaking world. But while the leaders of the Clan Campbell led their adherents into alliance with the radical Protestants of the Lowlands, most other Gaelic speakers remained, for a time, adherents to Catholicism or embraced forms of Episcopalian compromise, which inevitably increased the distance and difference between the cultural zones. 4.4.1  Protestantism as a linguistic force 6 The roots of the Protestant Reformation run deep into the medieval past, as well as into the humanist experiments unfolding across western and central Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (represented in Scotland by the foundation of five universities in the period). All educated Latin Christians agreed that many of the practices which had built up around folk religion in particular were not helpful for personal salvation; some, such as the sale of papal indulgences for remission of time in Purgatory, were, most agreed, immoral or even spiritually dangerous. When contacts with, and memories of, the earlier Alpine, Bohemian and English proto-Protestant movements (cells of the last had developed in Ayrshire in the fifteenth century; Sanderson 1997) of the eleventh to fifteenth centuries helped stoke a genuine movement for radical change in central Germany, many of the demands made by those reformers who had chosen to

so c ial , pol iti ca l a nd cultura l meta mo r ph o s is  | 87 form new organisations and develop practices, including innovations, outside the Church, demanded a re-analysis of the relationships between knowledge of scripture, understanding of liturgy and the participation of laypeople. This was not only a concern for those who became Protestants: many who remained within the Church, such as Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536), were sympathetic to the same ideals, if not to the methods employed. A central feature shared by both groups was a desire to turn away from textual corruption – inevitable in a manuscript-based literate environment where apposite quotation (often taken in isolation) was preferred to large-scale textual accuracy (Goering 2003 is a particularly helpful introduction) – in a return to the ancient roots of texts. The Greek original of the New Testament, for instance, was to be preferred to the revered Latin Vulgate version of St Jerome. Part of the same process was the production of learned and accurate translations of the Bible texts. From an Orthodox perspective there was certainly no issue with the production of these translations, although many believed they should remain in the hands of the learned; Protestant reformers believed instead that at least the (male) head of a household should have access to the Bible in the vernacular, as (in effect) interpreter and priest. Naturally, the mechanisation of literacy through printing meant that what had previously involved limited access to the Bible and other religious texts could become regular to the point of being commonplace. Scotland went through Protestant Reformation relatively late (from the mid- to late 1550s), but in a radical manner. Possibly because of its geography (and linguistic division), however, not all parts of the country, as we have seen, embraced Protestantism, in the radical, Calvinist Presbyterian form which became normal in the south and centre of the country. Nevertheless, Edington (1994) suggests that evangelical humanism, strong in Scottish elite circles and vibrant in the new University of Aberdeen, concerned with a return to Biblical roots, both informed and sometimes involved the same people as both scholars and reformers, although anti-intellectualism lay at the heart of some influential early Protestant ideologies as well. What we are concerned primarily with here, however, is provision of the vernacular Bible and the eradication of preReformation folk religious practice.

88  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d 4.4.2  Protestantism and literacy As Todd (2002) makes clear, Scottish Presbyterianism achieved quick and thorough control over the personal and public lives of most Lowlanders through an ability both to demand adherence to, and police knowledge and recognition of, a relatively small number of texts considered vital to the ‘correct’ understanding of the faith, including the Lord’s Prayer and the catechism. The need for at least adult male passive understanding of the text, leading to a personal relationship to the Bible, was inherent in this; impressively rising literacy rates followed. Practically all of this was presented in text through the use of Standard English. 4.4.2.1  Vernacularisation: the Lowlands It is very easy to be in favour of vernacularisation. Bringing understanding to as many people as possible is obviously a good thing, cutting through elite interpretatory privileges. There is considerable debate over what vernacularisation actually means, however. The first issue is one faced by anyone attempting to standardise or plan a language: which variety of the language is the language? What variety does God speak as native language? For most Muslims this is straightforward: God speaks Qur’anic Arabic; the Qur’an is literally the recitation by Mohammad of the actual word of God. For many Orthodox Jews this is also straightforward: God speaks Biblical Hebrew. For Christians the issue is more complex. The texts written in the three original Biblical languages – Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek – are given respect as the authentic and unmediated Word of God, but this in itself is not unproblematical, since much of the text was explicitly composed by humans. In the western Church, St Jerome’s Latin translation – the Vulgate – long attracted respect and authority, whether the local language was a descendant of Latin or not. Yet, no matter the impression occasionally given by the Church and its perception by an often unlettered populace, none of the ‘original’ languages of the Bible or the authorised translations into Latin and Old Church Slavonic would have been perceived as essentially God’s language, in the sense of being the language God spoke as his own language. Because of this lack of absolute linguistic authority, vernacularisation has always been a possibility therefore (indeed the very fact that Latin and Old Church Slavonic versions of the Bible and Liturgy exist demonstrates this point). Nevertheless, even vernacular versions can become ossified as classical varieties, as the Old Church Slavonic version of the Bible demonstrates: originally translated into the

so c ial , pol iti ca l a nd cultura l meta mo r ph o s is  | 89 vernacular using a bespoke writing system as a means of spreading Christianity among Slavonic migrants into central and southern Europe, it has long been the preserve of the priesthood, delivered to an uncomprehending congregation, whose perception may be that what is presented is somehow ‘magical’. But no matter how often educated Christians recognise that what language is employed for the scriptures is not central to the faith (and often only important to those engaged in philological analysis of the text), for most, if not all, Christians, the language used for scripture carries by its nature the patina of holiness. Let us now consider the language used in non-Gaelic Scotland by Protestants to represent their new interpretation, with particular reference to the language of scripture. Preaching was likely to be in Scots in the early Reformation, given that that was the language both of the congregations and preachers. Some of the reformers may have been able to speak ‘southern’, however. John Knox, the prime mover within Scotland towards a specifically Calvinist reformation, for instance, spent a large part of early adulthood either in England or in the company of English exiles in Geneva. It would be surprising if this had not affected his speech; it certainly affected his writing, which veers from wholly English to something which falls somewhere in between the two varieties (Farrow 2004: 14–23). As a controversialist, as he and many of his supporters were, writing in English meant reaching not only literate Scottish (particularly when importation of the English Bible made the presence of Standard English commonplace across a considerable part of the population) but also England; printers would have been more likely to print work when it was guaranteed a larger (and richer) audience. Catholic controversialists seized upon this un-Scottish usage and focus as a marker of the Protestants’ lack of support for Scotland and its institutions. Some were aggressively Scots in their usage, Ninian Winʒet (1518–92) specifically criticising Knox’s lack of linguistic patriotism.7 Near relatives of a variety spoken by people possessing economic and political power did sometimes receive a Bible translation – Low German is a good example of this (although Low German itself had strong ties to sources of power in the Baltic Basin and beyond). More often, however, this process did not take place. In Norway, for instance, the only Bible available was in Danish, the language of king and kingdom. Lack of political autonomy, low levels of literacy in any variety and the absence of a modern form for the local language are likely to explain this. With Scotland, however, the political and social stability normally necessary for the production of a translation did not exist. It may be that, unlike

90  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d so many national reformations across Europe at the time, the fact that Scottish Protestants acted against the royal will meant that the particular viewpoint of part of the educated middle classes, in particular Anglophilia, pushed towards the ‘natural’ acceptance of the freely available and relatively cheap southern version, perhaps initially as a stopgap measure (see Robinson 1983 for a discussion of the language of liturgy and catechism at the time). The effects of an English Bible upon the attitudes held by Scots speakers in relation to their native variety is unquantifiable, but must have been considerable. Certainly, it bore fruit in the generations to come. 4.4.2.2  Vernacularisation: the Gàidhealtachd Matters were less straightforward in the Highlands and Islands; particularly when, as Todd (2002: 44) points out, the Synods associated with Highland parishes were incapable of providing Gaelic-speaking ministers or, even more pressing, materials in Gaelic (or ‘Irish’, a term employed regularly for both locally produced and Irish texts). Nevertheless, while Catholicism and Episcopalianism retained a strong hold at the time on the religious practices of the inhabitants of the Highlands and Islands, a point often emphasised by modern commentators, Calvinism was increasingly dominant in those areas where local power-brokers sided with the Scottish mainstream, such as Argyll. Meek (2002: 88–92) underlines the dependence on Irish materials: scriptural, catechetical and liturgical. This meant that much had to be interpreted (almost translated) for a Gaelicspeaking audience. Moreover, as Meek (2002: 89) observes, the low levels of literacy in any variety led to a barrier being placed on individual language use in relation to faith. It may also have encouraged the use of English in the church and general religious experience of many bilinguals. 4.5  The Union of the Crowns and the Seventeenth Century In the later sixteenth century it became increasingly likely that the King of Scots would become King of England as well. The two royal families were closely related by this point (Elizabeth Tudor’s grandfather – Henry VII of England – was James VI’s great-great-grandfather). Because none of the children of Henry VIII had children themselves, the Stewart claim to the throne became greater, particularly since neither Mary I nor James VI shared the problems of challenged legitimacy, which both Mary and Elizabeth Tudor had lived through as a result of their father’s marriage history. From a linguistic point of view, none of

soc ial , pol iti ca l a nd cultura l meta mo r p h o s is  | 91 this would have been of much importance if the king and his higher nobility had not been attracted to the wealth of the southern kingdom. Within a very brief period, this group moved south to sample and exploit these riches. The Scotland they left behind, while in theory an independent kingdom which merely shared a king with England, quickly became subsidiary to the latter country’s interests, in a sense a colony, even if national interests contrary to the agenda of England were expressed on occasion both diplomatically and through armed intervention. Throughout the period and beyond, moreover, the country continued to suffer from low-grade civil war, often related to the religious settlement. It is traditional to see the events of 1603 – the death of Elizabeth Tudor and the accession of James VI to the English throne – as a central episode in the ‘decline and fall’ of Scots as an independent language. This change did have profound and lasting effects upon the linguistic ecology of Scotland. The king himself altered his writing practice in the direction of Standard English; even translating/transcribing earlier works into his new working language (although he continued to speak something approximating Scots throughout his life; his son, Charles I, spoke with at least a Scottish accent). Poets who wrote Scots were deprived of their patrons and began to trim their linguistic sails to the new reality. Printers felt increasing pressure to produce new material in a variety readily comprehensible to a broad audience. Several scholars (seminally, Meurman-Solin (1993) and Devitt (1996)) have pointed out that it is in the seventeenth century that we see the abandonment of Scots practice in both orthography and linguistic usage, generally by ongoing piecemeal attrition, rather than by sudden substitution (although this did happen). Some kinds of writing – such as personal letters – were more likely to maintain Scots features for longer than official documents; Anglicisation was inevitable and inexorable, however, in all genres. Nonetheless, the ambiguous linguistic status of Scots throughout the late medieval and Early Modern periods, combined with the foregrounding of Standard English by the Presbyterian victors in the strife that convulsed the country in the second half of the seventeenth century, whose adherence to the English Bible involved memorisation – and replication – of large amounts of text, meant that switching preferred written (and, for some, spoken) variety, was advanced. On the other hand, practically everyone who did not speak Gaelic (and many who did) continued to use Scots as their spoken medium. This would only change, as we will see, in the eighteenth century.

92  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d 4.6  A ‘Colonial Variety’: Ulster Scots8 With James VI’s accession to the English throne in 1603, Scots could take part semi-overtly in that country’s imperial expansion (until 1707, Scots were treated regularly as unwanted foreigners in England and Ireland, and particularly in the colonies; this did not stop Scots continuing to infiltrate, however). The first – and most permanently visible – example of this connection is associated with English attempts to pacify Ireland and, particularly, that island’s most Gaelic (and rebellious) province, Ulster. Scottish connections to this region were ancient, given how close south-western Scotland is to north-east Ulster. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the hegemony of Scottish lords was acknowledged in parts of Co. Antrim in particular. Most of these new settlers were Gaelic in language and culture; this meant that they were likely to assimilate to the surrounding culture and language unproblematically. Moreover, in this pre-Reformation era, no religious issues separated incomers from the original inhabitants of the region. Scottish immigration and infiltration after 1603 was of an altogether different kind. Both Elizabeth Tudor and her Scottish successor had followed a process of plantation across Ireland, in particular Ulster, the intention being to replace potentially rebellious Catholic Irish speakers as the dominant population with loyal English-speaking Protestants. The Scottish settlers who came in considerable numbers to eastern and northern Ulster in the early seventeenth century were part of this plantation process, although they generally did not take part in the official plantations (primarily concentrated on the western and central parts of the province). Instead they arrived ‘on spec’ or were invited across by large-scale planters, often from the same part of Scotland. The highest concentration of settlers came from Renfrewshire and Ayrshire and, to a lesser extent, Galloway. This (south) western origin is still audible in the dialects of Ulster Scots (a connection encouraged by long-term and ongoing transfers of population from Ulster and Scotland and back). The influence of Scots in Ulster (indeed, Ireland) can be readily heard well beyond the Ulster Scots area, both in phonology and lexis. 4.7  Dialect Birth 1: North-East Scots In the last chapter we discussed the incipient homogenisation of Scots between the burghs and between the various burghs and their respective hinterlands.

so c ial , pol iti cal and cultural me ta mo r p h o s is  | 93 The Wars of Independence and the various crises which affected the country societally in the late medieval and Early Modern periods are likely to have exacerbated, if not actually caused, these phenomena. Scots appears essentially to derive from one variety (albeit one which, given the difficulties in long-distance travel, preserved and developed some degree of regional marking), from which the present and historical diverse varieties grew. This is inevitable in language, of course; particularly before the Railway Age, perhaps, when long-distance travel was daunting. Uniformity brings forth diversity; diversity homogeneity. Nevertheless, some Scots dialects have diverged further from the initial koine than others. This is particularly the case with the Northern and Insular Scots dialects. In this chapter we will consider North-East Scots; in Chapter 5 the ancestor of Shetland Scots (we will also consider the origins of both Scottish Standard English in Chapter 4 and Glaswegian Scots in Chapter 6, although these will be approached in somewhat different ways). The discussion will inevitably cover a wider historical landscape than is the case with other elements of these chapters. 4.7.1  The formation of North-East Scots Northern Scotland, as we saw in the last chapter, was included rather less successfully into the new burgh-based proto-capitalist world of the late Middle Ages than was true to the south. Apart from Aberdeen, Elgin and possibly a few other somewhat smaller sites, the burghs did not prosper, although most continued to exist, in what remained essentially a subsistence-level economy. The new urban centres did not always act as a pull factor; sometimes burghdwellers chose, or were obliged, to move into the countryside. Even literacy, strongly associated with burgh life and trade, at least among its affluent citizens, was not so prominent, if the signing methods of many of the bailies of Inverurie are taken into consideration (Milne 1947). Scots is likely to have spread more slowly in the region than further south. The last speaker of North-East Gaelic died in 1982; at the beginning of the twentieth century large parts of the west of the region retained many Gaelicspeaking inhabitants. Evidence from the nineteenth century (and earlier) of this split between Scots in the lower and more fertile east and north (in the Laigh of Moray in particular) and Gaelic in the western mountainous territory, associated the distinction with transhumance and stock rearing. It has been inferred that this geographical linguistic split can, like areas to the south, be dated to the late

94  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a nd Middle Ages. Some evidence for this is available, not least in the Moray saying, ‘Speak nae ill o the heich, bit bide i the Laigh’ ‘speak no ill of the high lands [and their inhabitants], but live in the low-lying parts’, suggesting something like symbiosis between the conventionally ordered inhabitants of the agrarian north and the kinship-centred traditions of the marginal south, associated with transhumance. There are, in fact, features of the Scots dialects of the North-East which suggest Gaelic influence. In terms of phonology, for instance, the change of /ʍ/ to /f/, as in faal ‘whale’ and fit ‘what’ suggests a Gaelic origin, particularly since similar phenomena occur in a number of Irish English varieties. Gaelic (and Irish) have neither /w/ or /ʍ/. For the former, a vowel-based pronunciation is often favoured; for the latter, the use of Gaelic /ɸ/, a voiceless bilabial fricative, is common; indeed, it can still be heard in the English of some Gaelic and Irish speakers today. This pronunciation is not the one heard in North-East Scots today, however, where the Germanic /f/, close to, but not the same as, the Gaelic phoneme, is the norm in these contexts. The change is of considerable age. The language used in local government proceedings in Aberdeen is generally mainstream Middle Scots; it would normally be difficult to localise the texts. Just occasionally, however, /f/ and /ʍ/ are confused. This is particularly marked in those situations where , the Middle Scots equivalent to English , is used where native /f/ is historical. This suggests that the two pronunciations were merged in Aberdeen and that the distinction was orthographic. What has happened in this context? There may also be morphosyntactic features present in the dialect which have been influenced by Gaelic. All Northern (and, indeed, Insular) dialects of Scots do not distinguish between the singular and the plural in either the distal pronoun that or the proximal this. In Standard English this distinction is compulsory (that/those and this/these), while in Central and Southern Scots the same distinction is maintained, albeit with different forms (that/thae and this/ thir, the latter form admittedly recessive). There is no absolute reason, of course, for this singular/plural distinction: the closely related the makes no formal distinction between the two catgories. But Gaelic does not express a difference between the two numbers, albeit in a different manner from Scots. Given that this phenomenon occurs (at least to begin with: the use of the same pattern in Orkney and Shetland dialects is likely to have developed under the influence of the Northern dialects) near where considerable numbers of Gaelic speakers lived

soc ial , pol iti ca l a nd cultura l meta mo r p h o s is  | 95 and ongoing bilingualism and shift was happening, it would be perverse at the very least not to consider Gaelic influence on this construction possible.9 There are inevitably a number of lexical features which are borrowed from Gaelic and are not found in other varieties of Scots, such as spleuchan ‘tobacco pouch’ or clyack ‘harvest corn dolly’. The proportion of Gaelic lexis incorporated into the Northern Scots dialects – those of Caithness and the North-East are the best covered – at least appears significantly higher than that of the other varieties and represents a markedly broader set of concepts, things and topics. But despite this evidence, North-East Scots appears at best to have a patina of Gaelic features. Indeed, the fact that it is /f/ rather than /ɸ/ which is found with the words suggests a native Scots-speaking representation of the Gaelic phoneme used by a Gaelic speaker to speak Scots, rather than a direct transfer from Gaelic to the mainstream Scots varieties of the North-East. What kind of environment caused this relationship to develop?10 Inevitably, the evidence for these changes is limited. It is unusual for the usage of the lowest-ranking members of a society to be discussed much beyond occasional mocking references. Nevertheless, a few examples do exist, including a purported letter, found in a number of versions, in books and broadsheets, from the first half of the eighteenth century (punctuation and emphasis as in the original). A taste of the linguistic evidence given in the letter can be found here in its first and last two paragraphs (the full text and translation can be found at ):             Portobago in Marilante, 2 June 17— Teer Lofen Kynt Fater: Dis is te lat ye ken, dat I am in quid healt, plessed be Got for dat, houpin te here de lyk frae yu, as I am yer nane Sin. I wad a bine ill, leart gin I had na latten yu ken tis, be kaptein Rogirs skep dat geangs te Innernes, per cunnan I dinna ket anither apertuniti dis Towmen agen. De skep dat I kam in was a lang tym o de see cumin oure heir, but plissit pi Got for a’ting wi a’ kepit our Heels unco weel, pat Shonie Magwilivray dat hat ay sair heet. Dere was saxty o’s a’ kame inte te Quintry hel a lit an lim an nane o’s a’ dyit pat Shonie Magwillivray an an otter Ross lad dat kam oure we’s an mai pe dem twa wad a dyit gin tey hed bitten at hame. Pi mi fait I kanna komplin for kumin te dis quintry, for mestir Nicols, Lort pliss hem, pat mi till a pra mestir, dey ca him Shon Bayne an hi lifes in

96  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a n d Marylant in te rifer Potomak, he nifer gart mi wark ony ting pat fat I lykit mi sel: de meast o a’ my Wark is waterin a pra stennt hors, and pringin wyn an Pread ut o de Seller te mi Mestir’s Tebil. . . . Got Almichtie pliss yu Fater an a de leve o de hous, for I hana forkoten nane o yu, nor dinna yu forket mi, for plise Got I sal kum hem wi geir eneuch te di yu a’ an mi nane Sel Guid. I weit yu will be veri vokie, fan yu sii yur nane Sins Fesh agen, for I heive leirt a hantle hevens sin I sau yu an I am unco buick leirt. A tis is fe yur lofen an Opetient Sin, Tonal Mackaferson Directed—For Shames Mackaferson neir te Lairt o Collottin’s hous, neir Innerness en de Nort o Skotlan. (Literal translation:             Port Tobacco in Maryland             2 June 17– Dear loving, kind father, This is to let you know that I am in good health, blessed be God for that, hoping to hear the same from you, as I am your own son, I would have been badly taught [i.e. brought up] if I had not let you know this, by Captain Roger’s ship which goes to Inverness, in case I do not get another opportunity like this this twelvemonth again. The ship that I came in was a long time on the sea coming over here, but pleased be God we all kept our healths very well, except for Johnnie Macguillviray who always has a sore head. There were sixty of us all came into the country hale of lith and limb and none of us all died except for Johnnie Macguillviray and another Ross lad and maybe those two would have died if they had stayed at home. By my faith I cannot complain for coming to this country, for Master Nicholls, Lord please him, put me [to work] for a good master, they call him John Bayne, and he lives in Maryland by the River Potomac, he never made me do anything but what I liked to do myself, the greatest part of all my work is watering a good, proud horse, and bringing wine and bread out of the cellar to my master’s table. . . .

so c ial , pol iti cal and cultural me ta mo r p h o s is  | 97 God Almighty please you father and all the rest of the house, for I have not forgotten any of you, nor do you not forget me, for please God I will come home with enough goods to do you all and my own self good. I know you will be very proud, when you see your own son’s face again, for I have learned a great deal since I saw you and I am very book-learned. All this is from your loving and obedient son Donald McPherson Directed – For James McPherson near the Laird of Culloden’s house, near Inverness in the North of Scotland) This letter, ostensibly written by a Donald McPherson, from Culloden in Invernessshire, but using one James Macheyne, from Petty in Aberdeenshire as amanuensis, is questionable as an entirely straightforward document; at some level it must have been used to attract potential indentured servants (particularly since McPherson’s more expansive claims about benefits on liberty were entirely false at the time). Nevertheless, the language used is so eccentric (and often impenetrable) as to make it seem unlikely that such a code would be created from first principles by an advertiser. The language portrayed is therefore likely to be genuine, even if this letter is at some level a fabrication. A discussion of the authenticity of this letter can be found in Millar (1996). Macheyne’s speech patterns must lie behind the unexpected nature of the language used (unless he was a truly gifted amanuensis and was representing McPherson’s speech, which is decidedly unlikely). The language therefore becomes something of an issue, since many of the features found there – the ‘stopping’ of TH, the occasional representation of both mainstream /dʒ/ and /tʃ/ by , and so on – are undoubtedly evidence of Gaelic influence. This is problematical, since, following conventional analyses of the status of Gaelic in the early eighteenth century, Petty would have been at least thirty kilometres distant from the contemporary Gàidhealtachd. In Millar (1996, 2004b, 2009a) I have argued that, given the economic and social reality of the north-east in the Early Modern period, it is perfectly possible that Gaelic speakers, inhabiting rather lowly social roles, were present well into the more fertile areas at the time, with the language divide being as much social as it was geographical. This might also explain why this letter realises Gaelicised phonology beside mainstream

98  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d Scots morphosyntax: long-term unequal bilingualism has led to a complete transfer of the dominant language’s structure while the ongoing presence of Gaelic within circumscribed contexts has maintained Gaelic phonological features in the group dialect. But although the idiolect and dialect represented here share many features with modern North-East Scots, nothing entirely like it (or its plausible direct descendant) survives in that region. The local dialects are all significantly more like Central Scots than in the document presented here. With this issue in mind, Millar (2009a) suggested that, inspired by the conventional description of the post-creole continuum, where the colonial lexifier language lies above the acrolect of the middle classes, essentially the Standard with local pronunciation, opposed at the other end by the basilect, essentially the original creole, with a halfway house mesolect, sharing features of both, in between (most speakers vary their language along the continuum according to context), something like the following explanation might be posited: in rural districts of the Early Modern north-east a basilect (the least like Standard English or ‘mainstream’ Scots) existed which was of this heavily Gaelic-influenced type. In urban centres, such as Aberdeen, a mainstream variety pertained, not greatly distinguishable from more southern urban varieties, particularly in middle-class speech. In between was a largely rural variant of the mainstream Scots variety, but with some of the features of the basilect, whether through transition between the generations within families, as they irrevocably crossed the linguistic divide (as all must have done) or as a marker of local loyalties. Some Gaelic influence features, which appear then to have been subsequently substituted by nearer Scots equivalents, such as /f/ for /ɸ/ substitution, are likely to have come into being in their transfer to people who had no or limited Gaelic. This variety would eventually pass into Aberdeen through immigration and the same identity connections mentioned for the rural districts. In this way it might be claimed that North-East Scots is a compromise variety, neither formed through direct contact interference nor a ‘pristine’ descendant of burgh Inglis, but rather a halfway house which eventually assumed strong and abiding local identity associations, its first literary uses attempted in the course of the eighteenth century.

so c ial , pol iti cal and cultural me ta mo r p h o s is  | 99 4.8 Conclusion By the end of the seventeenth century (indeed, by 1650 on most occasions), therefore, the sociolinguistic positions of both Scottish vernaculars (three, if Norn is counted, whose history will be dealt with in the next chapter) had altered greatly. Scots was becoming dialectalised under Standard English. Its time as the default language of non-literary prose had finished; during the final parts of this period, its literary use had also become severely limited. Although most Scots in the Lowlands and in the north-east and Caithness still spoke the variety (in several dialectal forms), the upper levels of society had already begun to switch over to the southern language. Their influence upon the usage of the middle classes would be instrumental in relation to the status and use of Scots in the following periods. The Gaelic speaker base was not as yet threatened, except in the sense that the ruling caste was actively being suborned (including in language use) by the central authorities. The antipathy between Highlands and Lowlands was leading to a social, political, economic and religious divide which fell between most speakers of either vernacular, an issue which will become increasingly apparent when we consider the eighteenth century in sociolinguistic terms; its results contributed to the eventual steep decline in Gaelic speaker numbers.

5 HOMOGENISATION AND SURVIVAL: THE LANGUAGES OF SCOTLAND IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

5.1  The Centripetal Nature of Language in an Age of Homogenisation1

B

y the end of the seventeenth century, Scots had been largely thrust sociolinguistically underground in written domains. To some degree the extent of this change was affected by genre – whether writing was intended for a nonintimate audience or not, for instance – or by gender and level of education. Cruickshank (2006) demonstrates that, in the private correspondence of young upper-middle-class Aberdonians in the mid-eighteenth century, it was women rather than men who continued using local features in their writing, possibly because their education was curtailed and domestic in comparison with their brothers. Distance from the metropolitan centre may also have affected usage, not necessarily in predictable ways: Meurman-Solin (1993) has demonstrated that at least some northern noblewomen continued to follow metropolitan Edinburgh written norms long after their Edinburgh peers had come into line with London usage. Even if the Union of 1707 had not taken place, with practically all higher-level decision-making processes beyond the Church and law being removed south, the Anglicisation of written usage would probably have been completed in similar (although probably slower) ways. Nevertheless, as discussed in the previous chapter, this shift in written domains need not have affected spoken use. In Early Modern Norway, practically anyone who could write wrote solely in Danish (and languages of trade, most notably German and French) except for the occasional use of local dialect,

h omog eni sati on a nd surviva l  | 101

Map 6  Places mentioned Chapter 5 and succeeding chapters

regularly displaced to the language of lower-class figures, represented in dialogue or in folk verse (a point to which we will return in the next chapter in relation to Scots). While there is some Danish influence upon spoken contemporary Norwegian, it was these dialects, not the ‘national language’ which continued for most (although some people were able to speak a Norwegian form of

102  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d Danish, either as sole code or when with Danes; in part this formed the source for Bokmål, one of the two standard forms of Norwegian). What happened to the Scots-speaking communities of eighteenth-century Scotland could not have been predicted from the patterns formed in the previous 100 years: a large part of the middle classes, particularly but not exclusively in Edinburgh, shifted away entirely from the local vernacular in their speech, as part of an aspirational choice of the metropolitan norm as sole code. Throughout the modern era middle class abandoning of a Low code for a High one has not been uncommon in Europe. While highly discrete varieties with different societal connections were in conflict and competition (the acquisition of French by middle-class Dutch speakers in Belgium during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a striking example: Blommaert 2011: 245), it was with kin-tongues (see Chapter 1) that the issue was most acute, since a degree of mutual comprehension foregrounded the idea that one was merely a ‘corrupt’ version of the other. Occitan, for instance, was the domestic language of all but the highest aristocracy in southern France in 1700. From what we can surmise, most ‘good’ speakers today are likely to be older rural-dwellers who have not passed on the language to their children. This second generation will therefore possess largely passive competence; within a few generations, hardly any knowledge will remain (Schlieben-Lange 1993). In northern Germany, Low German, previously hegemonic across the Baltic Basin, has contracted to rural districts where, again, it is often associated with an ageing population. Standard High German is now dominant in almost all domains: you could live in these districts without any knowledge of the local varieties beyond passive comprehension of accent (Spencer 2000). What sets off non-Gaelic Scotland, however, is that the process is well documented and historically early in terms of its likely transit away from the vernacular. This chapter will discuss how the first steps towards the decline of Scots as a spoken national tongue were carried through. The same period saw the beginnings of the true decline of numbers in its heartland for the other Scottish vernacular, Gaelic. Practically simultaneously, Norn, the North Germanic variety of the Northern Isles, ceased to have native speakers. Which ideologies of sociopolitical development underlie these changes?

h omog eni sati on a nd surviva l  | 103 5.2  ‘Enlightenment’ and the ‘British’ Project Given the political crises through which it passed in the seventeenth century, expecting Scotland to be ‘pacified’ from the absolute beginning of the following century would have been naive. Most of the tensions of the first half of the eighteenth century are intrinsically connected to the political, cultural and economic issues between the inhabitants of the Lowlands and the Highlands; these issues will be dealt with in greater depth in our discussion of Gaelic during the same period. Fear of the Highlands, in particular Jacobite ‘absolutism’ being imposed by an ‘uncivilised’ Gaelic-speaking mob (or at least that ‘civil society’ be disrupted by such incursions), drove many educated men, in Edinburgh and elsewhere, even closer to English cultural models, social organisation and, indeed, language. This is especially noteworthy since, as will be discussed below, some Lowlands sympathisers with the Legitimist Jacobite cause were often, surprisingly, also associated with radical causes, favouring greater use of Scots in a written/literary context along with greater Scottish autonomy if not resumed independence.2 For conventional Scottish Whigs (supporters of a Protestant constitutional monarchy), therefore, the age of ‘North Britain’ had begun, a – doomed – project concerned with downplaying Scottish culture and identity leading, they hoped, to a similar set of changes in ‘South Britain’ and the creation of a new British identity.3 Strikingly, the most regarded work of David Hume (1711–76), a central figure in the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, at the time was a multi-volume history of England. Colours had been nailed to the mast. 5.2.1 ‘Enlightenment’ It is scholarly sleight of hand to assume that an individual’s ideological stance is unitary and lacking in contradiction, even when, as in the case of Hume and many of his contemporaries, this individual is highly self-aware and capable of expressing consistent ideas. Almost anybody can hold coexisting but contradictory views on the worth and propriety of language use, in particular in relation to the perceived ‘worth’ of Scots. But even if we disregard the power differentials which existed on the Island of Britain during the period, the intellectual mainstream of mid-eighteenth century western and central Europe was not well disposed to cultures and languages which were ‘peripheral’, non-elite and rural (in brutal reality, rather than through long-standing idealised pastoral bucolic models, as enshrined in Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’).

104  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d To some, both then and later, the European Enlightenment was perceived as a liberation of humanity from superstitious beliefs and illogical conclusions. In 1697 a University of Edinburgh student, Thomas Aikenhead, was hanged for atheism (and the presumed social effects such a view might provoke); within two generations at most this would have come to be perceived as a ridiculous (and shameful) event by many, if not most, Scots. Most people in the eighteenth century remained religious; nevertheless, faith was increasingly perceived as personal, with few, if any, social consequences (an issue closely tied to the idea that a new civic religion based on a sense of common birth and shared ideals was becoming the primary adhesive of the nation state (Anderson 1991)). In addition, Enlightenment principles could be analysed as being founded on uniformitarian principles that encouraged the authoritarian beliefs of an elite, divorced from its social and historical background, wielding power over the majority, whose own views were either ignored or disparaged. Many of the excesses – Red and White – of the French Revolution might derive from Enlightenment ideas; the European ‘republic of letters’, conceptually central to the Enlightenment project, no matter the warfare that bedevilled the continent, encouraged patterns of thought that discouraged diversity – ethnic, cultural and linguistic – while welcoming apparently uniformitarian and ‘encyclopedic’ conceptualisations, inevitably promoting the norms of the political centre at the expense of the ‘abnormalities’ of the ‘provincial’ and dispossessed. The actual effects of Enlightenment on Europe – and Scotland in p ­ articular – are, naturally, situated somewhere between these poles of liberation and authoritarianism. The consequences of the era, still very much felt today, are mixed. What cannot be denied, however, is that the ways we live and even think have been irrevocably changed by the processes through which Europe passed at the time. For our purposes this is particularly the case with language use and how it is perceived. 5.2.2  Scottish Enlightenment 4 No matter how we interpret the period, Scotland – or, rather, a few Scottish thinkers – lay at its heart. Thomas Reid (1710–96), Professor of Philosophy at first Aberdeen and then Glasgow, developed philosophical precepts which combined mathematics and what we now consider linguistics;5 Adam Smith (1723–90; a true polymath: he made his name as a student of rhetoric and literature) pushed forward our understanding of how both large- and small-scale

h omog eni sa ti on and surv iva l  | 105 economic processes work; David Hume developed a stance which at the very least permitted lack of belief in the conventional interpretation of the Christian revelation (although few openly followed him down this road: many, if not most, Scottish illuminati were Church of Scotland ministers). Most instigators and proponents of these new intellectual currents and topics are likely to have had little or no time for Scots (even if, as is likely, they themselves at least grew up Scots speakers, although they wrote wholly in English). Hume himself was probably one of the compilers of lists of Scotticisms to be avoided (for a discussion, see Bailey 1991), a practice discussed below in greater depth; despite (perhaps even as a result of ) having an almost aggressively Scots-speaking father, James Boswell (1740–95), diarist and self-appointed disciple to Samuel Johnson, appears to have despised his native tongue, even while espousing the cause of Corsican nationalism (McLoughlin 2002). The ideological climate created by these views inevitably had repercussions for the ongoing position of Scots in Scottish society. 5.2.3 Improvement 6 Inherent in many of these ideas, when applied to Scotland (and elsewhere, naturally), is the concept of improvement, of a move away from medieval practices now portrayed as obfusticating superstition.7 Also tied to the concept, although likely to affect rather more people than was the case with more abstract discussions, was agricultural improvement, a process which had effects in both Highland and Lowland Scotland. In the Lowlands, agriculture was dominated by relationships between larger-scale landowners and their tenants (on long leases; both would also have had workers associated with their establishments). A great deal of land was held in common and often used for herding livestock. These relationships were not feudal, but certainly mutual ties of obligation and even relationship were woven through the social fabric. Agricultural practice was not primitive, although it did continue techniques which did not guarantee the most productive use of soil and workforce. Improvement was envisaged as a form of both rationalisation and of ‘liberation’ of economy and people alike from historical restrictive practices. Smaller tenants were often cleared off the land or obliged to take on shorter leases. Common ground was curtailed in size and use, if not actually disposed of. Many tenant farmers felt themselves squeezed out, descending to the status of the farm servants (with whom they were immediately in competition and

106  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd conflict) or forced off the land entirely, along with many servants. New social relationships developed, with servants and workers being employed for relatively short periods, from a quarter to a full year, often moving from one place to another over the years, normally within a circumscribed area. As the process was spread across Lowland Scotland in the course of the eighteenth century, its results were hymned by those who held power, no matter how localised. This is most visible in the views expressed in the first Statistical Accounts of Scotland, a compendium, instigated and edited by Sir John Sinclair (1754–1835) of the replies to a set of questions sent out to (and generally filled in by) Church of Scotland ministers across the country in the 1790s (Sinclair 1975–83), where restrictive practices and medieval obligations are held up as hindrances to progress or, when they have been abandoned, a new improved world is celebrated, as in With these advantages, it is hoped that many of the feuers and farmers, who persist in the old fashioned system of agriculture, may be induced, from the example of others, and a regard for their own interest, to use better implements of husbandry, to follow a proper rotation of crops, and to attempt the culture of turnips, which are particularly adapted to the soil of the parish. (Renfrewshire, Lochwinnoch, VII: 791)

Interestingly, similar views on the Scots tongue and its place in society can also be found, as in The English language has made considerable progress here among the better sort of people, since the Union of the Scottish and English crowns; but the vulgar still continue to speak the Scotch, a dialect of the Dano-Saxon, which was brought from the other side of the German Ocean, by the Danish invaders of the ninth and eleventh centuries. Some of the people who border on the Highlands, have a smattering of, and retain a predilection for the Gaelic or Celtic, which seems to have been the original language of the whole island. (Perthshire, Clunie, XII: 217)

(For further discussion, see Millar 2000, 2003.) Returning to the urban sphere, improvement had more personal and intimate effects, effects with a bearing on language use. Because political and economic power had apparently irrevocably moved south to London, many more people became used to spending at least some time in the new capital. In particular,

h omog eni sa ti on and surv iva l  | 107 after 1707, members of the Scottish upper classes and upper middle classes were far more likely to come into regular contact with native (often monodialectal) speakers of Standard English than previously. Given there was already a disconnect between the written use of Standard English (itself implying the development in Scotland of a spoken written English register used whenever necessary, although probably in a stilted manner) and the spoken Scots vernacular, it is unsurprising that, in a society obsessed with status, a desire to move towards the use of spoken Standard English – only Standard English – would have developed in a milieu that perceived linguistic variation and difference as corruption.8 Removing most traces of Scottish pronunciation (at least in its most ‘dense’ forms) and general usage – Scotticisms – in these social groups developed into a growth industry, first in Edinburgh and then in the other cities, with knock-on effects for the language of rural power-brokers and opinion-formers, regularly spending the ‘season’ in urban contexts. Lists of Scotticisms to be avoided were published at this time; celebrity language ‘improvers’ from a range of places, including Ireland, gave lectures on similar subjects (a curiously inappropriate way to teach subjects of this sort). These issues are dealt with in considerable detail by other scholars (most notably Dossena 2005), but it should be noted that changes of this sort almost inevitably led to there being a linguistic wedge placed between more elevated members of society and their ‘lessers’. By the end of the eighteenth century, therefore, we can assume the presence of a class of people native to non-Gaelic Scotland who no longer spoke Scots, albeit, as Jones (1995) points out, producing a more markedly Scottish accent when using Standard English than would presently be normal for upper-middle-class Scots today), surrounded by a rather larger class of people who desired to inhabit this happy state. This social conglomeration was the primary, although not sole, impetus for the formation of Scottish Standard English, as we will see. 5.3  Dialect Creation 2: Scottish Standard English Scottish Standard English is something of a rare bird. Its body is primarily identical to all other forms of Standard English; thoroughly southern English in the phonology underlies its spelling system in particular. Yet other elements of Scottish Standard English – especially lexis – are obviously derived from Scots. This becomes apparent to all users of Scottish Standard English when they leave Scotland. Words and phrases (such as sore head for ‘headache’) turn out not to be English at all, but rather represent Anglicisations of Scots words

108  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a nd and phrases (on this occasion, sair heid). This type of carry-over is striking in the usage of people who do not have active competence in Scots. While, as Aitken (1979) pointed out (and Dossena 2005 presents in a more nuanced way), some Scotticisms, such as dreich ‘drab, dull, endlessly repeated’, are overt in their use, employed knowingly as markers of Scottishness (among other things), others are covert, such as popeseye for a specific cut of meat. Use of the latter in peculiarly English contexts implies some degree of crossover (indeed, interweaving) of Scots into an essentially Standard English framework. Without going into as in-depth a discussion of the system, as in Millar (2016), the seeds of this double origin lie in the middle to late eighteenth century, when non-elite Scots began to move towards the spoken use of English. The elite, as we have seen, already had some direct contact with native and monodialectal speakers of the southern English elite variety. While the first Scottish users of English as their dominant code evinced pronunciation patterns that were normally markedly different from this norm, the ‘heart’ of their new usage was Standard English.9 The nobility and gentry also competed for parliamentary seats in the new Union parliament at Westminster. Politics and business demanded periods of residence in London, therefore (which itself encouraged marriage, the development of party ties and friendship). The more elevated nobility had initiated these social changes and associations in the period after 1603; they were likely to have been joined from an early period by traders and craftsmen looking for a wider world in which to buy and sell. The political shifts of the eighteenth century are likely to have encouraged this. Given how humans react sociolinguistically, Scottish people of the time, exposed to different norms, were likely to interpret spoken usage of the economically and socially elevated groups as ‘correct’ (especially since the prestige variety many Scottish people aspired to was also the source variety for the standard as it stood – and stands); inevitably, linguistic behaviour would be altered by this set of associations. But what about the rest of the emerging middle classes, those without much direct contact with English people but who nevertheless still aspired to moving towards the Standard in the way their ‘betters’ had? These must, after all, have been highly likely, due to their numbers and their influence (in reaction to contact with English speakers), to be central to the development of Scottish Standard English. This desire for the prestige variety, passed down to them from the local elite and, never to be underestimated, the written word, was tempered

h omog eni sa ti on and surv iva l  | 109 by the desired variety’s being acquired largely second-hand through the specifically Scottish elite varieties developed through regular direct contact. Moreover, the lower-middle-class agents of change described here also remained Scots speakers for far longer than their models (and, indeed, in ‘provincial’ contexts, this bidialectal/bilingual state continues). What would these complex relationships produce as a final product? Standard English, prestigious and associated with written ‘correctness’ (an association research has shown to be particularly central to lower-middle-class aspirations, linguistic and otherwise), would inevitably have dominated in this new mixture, albeit in a context where various social and geographical Scottish pronunciations would be the norm. Scots elements – vocabulary primarily, but also morphosyntax, since structures of that type generally occur below the level of consciousness – would inevitably move from that variety to the burgeoning Scottish Standard English.10 Most of these would be covert: speakers (and writers) would not necessarily recognise the ultimate origin of many elements of the new variety. Given that the late eighteenth century also saw a resurgence in Scottish particularism,11 the glass ceiling many middle-class Scots speakers began (and continue) to feel also contributed led to increased associations with Scottishness by some who had ceased to use Scots, a point made most readily through the couthie employment of consciously triggered Scots words and phrases within a largely Scottish Standard English framework. Naturally, then as now, one person’s covert usage may be overt for another, depending on someone’s personal and social background. 5.4  The ‘Vernacular Revival’ and Romanticism This is not the whole story, however. The eighteenth century also saw the development of a largely new literature in Scots (although the ‘founding fathers’ of the tendency were aware of, and interacted with, Scots literature from the Renaissance, as well as being connected to the living ballad and songs traditions). The Vernacular Revival led to the development of a niche for written Scots in both elite and everyday contexts. Because primary literacy was in English for all Scots speakers, however, the beginnings of what could be described as language planning spread in these pioneers’ orthographical practices. Particularly striking was the use of the apostrophe where Scots pronunciations ‘lacked’ a sound which English had, a feature most notable with /l/ loss, with the equivalent of English all being represented as . While this innovation aided readers who

110  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d were not Scots speakers to understand what was written, thereby increasing the number of consumers for a work, it had the unexpected side effect of making Scots appear like ‘deformed’ or ‘deficient’ English. Nevertheless, it is the pattern still employed for most written Scots – particularly in popular use, displaced from (if not actually unaware of ) activist planning or self-consciously ‘literary’ work. To discuss this trend, we need to consider another trait of the mid- to late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the cultivation of sentiment, which regularly descended into sentimentality (and may appear even more so to our postmodern sensibilities), and the cult of the natural, the ‘real’, reacting against artifice. Naturally, few of these goals were actually achieved, but many people began to think about the world in ways not previously prevalent. Both at the time and after its initial effulgence, these traits were considered as Romanticism.12 Romanticism hit different parts of the world at different times and, despite similarities of outlook, could affect artists with strikingly different views, from conservatives such as Sir Walter Scott to supporters of what we would now consider far-left causes, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley. In many places – most notably Scandinavia – Romanticism became particularly associated with nationalism and national identity; in others, with specific places and regions, as with William Wordsworth, in relation to his native English Lake District; for many, however, the concentration on the individual and his or her life and will became paramount. In Scottish terms, we can see early eighteenth-century writers who used Scots as being harbingers, or proponents, of Romanticism. The employment of Scots in these contexts could therefore be interpreted as desire to express genuine emotion and behaviour within the context of the lives of the ‘ordinary’ people. That does not mean that – unlike a number of rather later literary users of Scots – these experimenters were not native speakers of the vernacular; it does mean, however, that their choice to use Scots was constructed, perhaps even contrived. In other words, the use of Scots in their poetry was a secondary product of their written English. Robert Burns (1759–96) is, of course, the most famous of these writers. Born in a period when the ‘Jacobite threat’ was in effect obliterated, he lived to support, and later (partly) retract his support for, the French Revolution (McIlvanney 2002). Burns was a native speaker of Scots and did come from an agricultural background and had had limited schooling; he also had a tangled,

h o mog eni sati on a nd surviva l  | 111 intensely emotional and sexual adult life, filled with material setbacks. This made him the ideal Romantic ‘natural man’, imbued with native wit and talent but struggling within a universe of raw fate. His backers, along with Burns himself, were happy to make this arguably correct (but incomplete) portrait the centre of what we would now consider a public image; this was employed to push Burns towards fame and (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) fortune. For instance, what was rarely mentioned in this portrayal was that Burns, although poorly schooled, was extremely well-read and used this knowledge regularly in his poetry. Burns could be sentimental (a trait of his times, perhaps), but he could also produce quite disturbing verse, as with ‘Nou westlin winds / an slaugherin’ guns / bring autumn’s pleasant weather’. We must always remember, of course, that these Romantic concepts and forms of behaviour were created, performed and encouraged in exactly the same places that were producing and consuming Enlightenment ideas. It may even be that, in cultivating artists like Burns, upper-middle-class patrons and audiences were placing ever greater distance between that artist’s views and, in particular, language use and their own (no matter how self-contradictory these views). Indeed, it may even have been the case that many both loved the ‘natural’ expression of feeling embedded in the language used and felt a degree of contempt for the rustic and ‘vulgar’ nature of the speech which underlay the ‘art’ (in its most extreme form, this strange disconnect has been termed the Pinkerton Syndrome (McClure 1995b)).13 Despite all these issues and nuances, however, it would be difficult to argue that the stature of Burns, both nationally and internationally, did not positively affect the standing of Scots in many people’s minds. At the same time, however, his writing developed the idea that the use of Scots identified the speaker as a purveyor of the truth, not an entirely helpful association, given every human being’s complex relationship with that quality. Nevertheless, these connotations would, it can be argued, lead to further retention of the proportion of Scots lexis within Scottish Standard English, in particular in relation to the overt Scotticisms and the processes of partial nativisation discussed above. 5.5  Non-Gaelic Scotland at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century At the beginning of the nineteenth century, therefore, a specifically Scottish form of Standard English came into being. This was Scottish not only in its pronunciation (although this was one of its most identifiable characteristics).

112  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a nd Instead, the complex sociolinguistic relationship between the different vernaculars and the written form in Lowland Scotland led to the creation of a Standard English imbued with many Scots features, covert and overt, at the same time maintaining practically all the southern English features of its primary written source. For many Scots, this variety would become their sole native dialect in the succeeding centuries; for the majority, however, this outcome was delayed. Conversely, while Scots was downplayed (indeed, often denigrated) in many contexts, it remained the native speech of many (probably most) people in nonGaelic Scotland, it was also becoming a major vehicle for poetry in particular, often admired by many far beyond Scotland, a central part of the Romantic experience. 5.6 Gaelic 5.6.1  Ossian and Gaelic Through a series of political, social and economic blows, Gaelic had, by the second half of the eighteenth century, begun its decline in number of speakers. But at the same time, the cultural products of the language were given a considerable boost by, of all things, the production of an epic cycle in (arguably poorly written) English, focused on heroic deeds set in pre-Christian Scotland and Ireland, claimed to date from the third century CE, a large part of which had been invented by its ‘editor’, James Macpherson (1736–96). Born on Speyside, he spent a large part of his adult life in London. Although from a strongly Jacobite background, he became a convinced Whig, believing that the passing of Gaelic tradition, while regrettable, was inevitable. He is likely to have been a native speaker of Gaelic (biographical details and analysis can be found in Stafford 1988). The debate over the ‘authenticity’ of the Ossian cycle, published in the 1760s and 1770s, is too complex to go into here; by the end of the eighteenth century most critics agreed that the ‘ancient’ origin of Ossian was humbug and that most of its (to be honest, rather turgid) contents were the invention of Macpherson.14 This in no way affected the influence of the material, however, particularly elsewhere in Europe (Gaskill 2004). A striking example of this can be found in the poetry of the Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov (1814–42). Lermontov was aware that he was descended through the male line from a Scottish immigrant to the Russian Empire. On army duty in the Caucasus, he

h o mog eni sati on a nd surviva l  | 113 writes (in ‘The Grave of Ossian’ of 1834) of an ecstatic vision of flying from the mountains in which he was stationed to the misty and mountainous Ossianic homeland of his forefathers. A poignant irony is that Lermontov’s Scottish ancestor was a hard-nosed merchant from Fife (Ascherson 1996: 83–8). A number of critics since the Second World War (such as Thomson (1952) or, later, Meek (1991, 2004), as well as Thomson (1993)), many of whom, interestingly, have considerable facility in Gaelic, have demonstrated that a sizeable part of the Ossian materials was based upon genuine Gaelic folk poetry, sometimes of some antiquity and with Irish analogues (although not, naturally, dating from the third century). These materials were very likely to have been collected during the fieldwork Macpherson claimed to have undertaken. This does not, of course, question the fictional nature of much of the work; it is certainly not in line with the views of the small remaining number of Ossianic ‘believers’. Ossian might, in fact, only be a rather extreme form of the ‘editorial’ actions carried out in the early nineteenth century on Kalevala, before it became the ‘Finnish national epic’.15 The primary difference between these examples is, however, that Ossian is presented in the language of the imperial centre, while Kalevala and its equivalents were produced in a language generally lacking in contemporary social status. Nevertheless, the presence of this cultural product with all its associations cannot but have provided greater status to the outside perception of Gaelic culture. On the other hand, this inevitably meant that the language for many people became consigned to the ‘Celtic twilight’ (Stewart 2019), associated with a romantic warrior past. Modern Gaels were, to many observers, rather disappointing in their involvement with the same everyday concerns as their observers. Thus begins a further and particularly insidious double bind, since the same period saw the first developments which actively threatened Gaelic as a living language in its native habitat. 5.6.2  Gaelic beyond Ossian: real-world change As we have seen, tensions between the inhabitants of the Highlands and the Lowlands had been considerable since at least the later middle ages. This was exacerbated considerably by changes in European society in the Early Modern period which did not affect the Gàidhealtachd in the same way as the Lowlands; many of the outcomes of these changes began to be apparent in the eighteenth century and later. In the first instance, as we have seen, the repercussions of the Protestant Reformation led to polarisation between the territories. The

114  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a n d Restoration (as it was portrayed) of Presbyterianism in the last two decades of the seventeenth century was primarily a Lowlands reality (and even then was not entirely popular or even hegemonic in the Scots-speaking parts of the north); in Gaelic-speaking regions Episcopalian (and often Catholic) interests remained threatening (to Presbyterian interests), if not omnipresent, with the exception of a large part of Argyll. These allegiances had an ideological dimension, not least in the level of support which the ousted James VII and his heirs attracted. It is difficult to tell the extent to which genuine loyalty to the legitimate monarch lay behind the risings of 1715 and, in particular, 1745–6, rather than the expression of local anxieties and tensions, political and economic; in any event, the second rebellion provoked near panic in the Lowlands and England and led to brutal revenge and legislation after it was crushed, including attacks on local culture and, more importantly for our purposes, the Gaelic language. Tied to these issues was the nature of the economic system normal in a large part of the Highlands and Islands, based upon subsistence-level agriculture eked out by the raising, herding and droving of cattle into the Lowlands. Land management did not remain static. Chieftains, for instance, developed new land tenure and ownership ideas in the modern period which moved away from collective ownership; this was not dissimilar to what was happening in the Lowlands around the same time. But most inhabitants of these territories existed in abject poverty. Improvement, ongoing in the Lowlands, could (and should), it was argued, be fully activated in the Gaelic-speaking regions. Colonies of sober, skilled English-speaking workers were founded, thus educating the ‘feckless’ Highlanders, their language use in particular being copied by the locals. Bilingualism had long been common on the edge of the Highlands; it now began to spread even in the Gaelic heartland among elite and non-elite. A large part of the population of the Gaelic-speaking regions had to be displaced, however: clearance – a process not confined to the Highlands, as Aitchison and Cassell (2003) point out (see also Devine 2018). Naturally, people had to go somewhere, although those who carried out dispersals did not always ensure provision existed for the dispersed. Some, particularly in Sutherland, became, under their superior’s direction, fishermen (of which communities, more in Chapter 8); others moved to the Scottish Lowlands, England and the ‘colonies’, in particular, Canada, where vestigial ‘colonial’ Gaelic is still present in places like Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. Gaelic speakers were

h o mog eni sa ti on and surv iva l  | 115 therefore thrust into a Scots- or English-speaking environment; their language was unlikely to survive long in a sociolinguistic environment where their culture and language were considered alien and not conducive to ‘progress’. In my own family the distance from Gaelic-dominant speakers (my great-grandparents) to me (with only limited knowledge of words and phrases) is three generations. Even this represents a longer period than other families have experienced. This unease with Gaelic – or Erse or Irish as it was often termed – and its associations with ‘dangerous’ religious and governmental practises, was, as we have seen, present since the sixteenth century, maturing from the eighteenth century on. From this point of view, the replacement of Gaelic by English was often perceived as a gift to the inhabitants of the Highlands and Islands. Nonetheless, the obligation to bring scripture to people in a language they understood (preferably their mother tongue) was, as we saw in the last chapter, a central tenet (no matter how often it was ignored) of the Protestant project from its inception. Using Gaelic as a means of evangelising the Highlands and Islands was therefore a constant theme within the Church of Scotland and its plans (and dissenting Presbyterian congregations, even before the creation of the Free Kirk in 1843), even if Gaelic speakers had to accept, as we saw in the last chapter, using a Bible in Irish, already distant from its Scottish sister varieties (as Meek (2002: 94–6) points out, the first specifically Scottish Gaelic translation of the New Testament was only completed in 1767, the Old Testament in 1801), along with a severe crisis in terms of finding ministers, catechisers and schoolteachers (these roles were often combined) who were both orthodox in Presbyterian terms and able to speak enough Gaelic that they could declaim a coherent (and lengthy) sermon in the language, based (as is the Presbyterian tradition) on notes rather than a full script.16 A compromise position also existed, eventually becoming predominant. Gaelic was perceived as something of a stalking horse, literacy in which a means to attract adherents to a particular Lowland-dominated view of society, resting within the principles of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9, the Union of the Parliaments, the ecclesiastical settlement underlying it, and the Hanoverian succession of 1714; Gaelic was used as a means not only to teach English but also for replacing the former by the latter language in everyday use. These tensions were found in most organisations founded to improve the Gaelic-speaking territories, the most effective of which being the Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK).

116  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a nd In addition to these forces was the perception by many Gaelic-speaking parents, in particular after 1746 and the beginnings of the clearances, that learning how to read and write, possibly even speak, Gaelic, was at best pointless and at worst a hindrance to their children’s future economic prospects (views no doubt encouraged at least occasionally by school and pulpit, thus encouraging the development of something like Gramscian hegemony (for a discussion, see Thomas 2009) or Bourdieuan habitus (for a discussion, see the essays in Costa 2015), an apparent ‘common sense’ truth embedded in society in order to maintain the rule of those possessing political or social power). This meant that, even when the opportunity to learn in Gaelic existed, it was not fully exploited by native speakers. This is commonplace with lesser-used languages; it is presently an issue for Scots. But Scots, like Low German and Occitan, is a close relative of the hegemonic language. It is straightforward to shift between varieties no matter what language was used primarily in your home or studied at school. For obvious reasons, this cannot be true with Gaelic. As is often the case, in fact, an either/or situation was created when both languages could easily have flourished together in a state of equal (or near-equal) bilingualism. Language shift will be a central topic of much of what follows in this book. It is a complex process which has been less well-covered than it might have been. Nevertheless, the following attempts a brief attempt at just such a discussion, based on Sasse (1992 in particular). Speakers of one language begin to switch over to another, often because of the greater opportunities open to speakers of the target language. Middle-class parents might choose not even to speak their native language before their children. These children will probably have some ability in the ancestral language, acquired indirectly, however, through overhearing their parents and other family members speak it, as well as directly from their age mates. The form of the language they produce is most unlikely to be ‘correct’ morphosyntactically; it is likely to have a circumscribed lexis. This ‘corrupt’ variety will make even more people switch. Inevitably, increasingly lower numbers will speak the language until, eventually, no native speakers will be left. While these processes were not presently dominant for Gaelic, as the following section demonstrates, they were all too central to the contemporary history of the third surviving native vernacular spoken in Scotland.

h o mog eni sa ti on and surv iva l  | 117 5.7  The ‘Death’ of Norn As noted in Chapter 3, only one language other than Gaelic and Scots spoken in what is now Scotland survived the first century of the second millennium in anything approaching a healthy state: Norn. This variety was a North Germanic language imported primarily by settlers from western and south-west Norway; as far as we can tell, its dialects bore similarities to modern Faeroese and Icelandic. In 1000 it was probably spoken across a broad arc along the western edge of Scotland, from the Isle of Man to Shetland. Sutherland and Caithness on the Scottish mainland had a large Norn-speaking population which, at least in the case of the latter county, were politically, and perhaps demographically, dominant. By the later Middle Ages, however, Gaelic had ‘reconquered’ (or, as we have suggested, ‘conquered’) almost all of this territory, with the exception of Caithness, where Scots became dominant, probably sometime in the fifteenth century (Thorsen 1954), in the north-east ‘triangle’ of the county, where many of the place-names are Norse rather than Gaelic. Given that Norn and Scots are both Germanic languages (albeit from different branches of that family), a direct and relatively straightforward transfer between these two varieties, rather than via Gaelic, appears quite likely; no reference to this can be found in the records which survive, however. Matters were different in the Northern Isles. Norn survived into the Early Modern period, when transfer from Norn to Scots as the dominant native language began, without any potential interceding period where Gaelic might have been dominant. Part of the reason for this difference stems from Orkney’s remaining a fief of Norway and its successors until 1469–70, when the territory was mortgaged to Scotland. Orkney in particular had not been ‘pristinely’ Norse for around two centuries before this, however. As we have seen, from an early period, the Earl of Orkney took considerable interest in Caithness. At times, holders of the first title were also Earls of Caithness, holding the former from Norway, the latter from Scotland. More importantly, perhaps, they were obliged to become embroiled not only in Norway’s fractious politics but also in the southern kingdom. Strategic marriage alliances were commonplace, in particular with great houses in northern and eastern Scotland. It was almost inevitable that, when the direct Norse line of the earldom died out, the female line descended through families that were essentially Scottish and that, apart from perhaps the earliest successors, would have been Inglis speakers. In

118  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a n d Orkney, as the surviving records from the era demonstrate (Barnes 1998), the move from Norn to Scots began long before the formal handover of power to Scotland, at least among the elite. For geographical reasons, it makes sense to see this process as progressing rather more quickly in Orkney than Shetland; the southern archipelago was also the administrative and ecclesiastical centre. Other forces led to language shift in both island communities, however, even if the completion of the process was considerably slower than might have been anticipated. Economically, in particular, both Orkney and Shetland became attractive to Scottish merchants and, eventually, settlers. Partly this was due to the natural bounty of the sea around the archipelagos; from the sixteenth century on, moreover, the islands became useful as staging posts for the enterprises – fishing and whaling, but also fur trapping – developed as knowledge of the ecological nature of the North Atlantic and northern parts of North America grew. During the same period Shetland passed through a lengthy boom through its connection with north German and Dutch fishing enterprises. Shetlanders claim that Amsterdam wes biggit oot o da back o Bressay soond ‘Amsterdam was built from the back of Bressay sound’ (the natural harbour at Lerwick, the only true urban centre in the islands). Much of the trade created, however, was encouraged by the inability of the Scottish state to impose and police its salt tax. In the early eighteenth century, when this was achieved, the boom almost immediately collapsed. Inevitably, stagnation, emigration and decline became the norm, although many people from mainland Scotland – some undoubtedly ­carpetbaggers – continued to settle in the islands. Although, as suggested in Millar (2016), we know less about the actual shift from Norn than we would wish, the last written traces of the actual language, versions of the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ found in Orkney and Shetland from the beginning of the eighteenth century, appear to demonstrate that, despite external influences (such as the use of Scots/English-derived delivra, in delivra wus fro adlu idlu ‘deliver us from all evil’ from the Shetland version of the prayer), Norn was in a healthy state, guaranteeing further transmission down the generations. This was not the case, however. A minority of scholars working on this subject (for instance, Rendboe 1984, 1987) have attempted to endorse the idea that some Shetlanders, in particular perhaps in more cut-off territories, continued to speak Norn until well into the nineteenth century. They marshal their material well; they are probably guilty of finding ways in which evidence

h o mog eni sa ti on and surv iva l  | 119 can support their views rather than forming their views from the evidence. Like most scholars who concentrate on this apparently final period of the language’s history, I believe that Norn ceased to be a first language for anyone in either archipelago by around 1750 (and probably a generation earlier). The language may have died out in Orkney first, given its closer connections to the Scottish mainstream, but this would be impossible to prove; even so, the inland parishes of the Orkney mainland may have acted as the final redoubts of Norn, along with the northern islands of Shetland and more isolated islands such as Foula. Shift away from Norn during these stages was, I imagine, caused in the main both by ongoing settlement by natives of mainland Scotland and the economic changes that acted as a spur to movement away from the islands by natives along with an underlying conceptualisation of the necessity to switch over to Scots (essentially, English) under the new dispensation. That does not mean, however, that native Shetlanders necessarily welcomed this change. In the summer of 1774, the Reverend George Low, a native of Kincardineshire but then Church of Scotland minister of a parish in the west of the mainland of Orkney, hired a boat to take him round the islands of Orkney and Shetland. His journal (Low 1978 [1879]) is a priceless discussion of the economy, culture and language use of the Northern Isles at the time. In Shetland in particular he commented regularly on the use of Norn words in the local Scots dialects; especially interesting are those occasions where he comments on what appears to be taboo avoidance strategies onboard ship where Scots-speaking sailors shifted to Norn (see Knooihuizen 2006, 2007). Over the course of a day on Foula, the westernmost island of Shetland, however, the ongoing influence of Norn was still tangible. An elderly local, William Henry, recited a lengthy poem, the ‘Hildina Ballad’, in convincingly genuine Norn, with Low transcribing phrase by phrase. Of itself, this demonstrates impressive memory skills on the part of Henry. There is far more to say, however, because Henry could not translate what he was saying. He could only give a summary of the story. We must assume that he grew up not fully knowing Norn, but caring enough to learn (and use, we assume – there is no evidence that he was reaching far into his deepest memories to produce) the poem from a native speaker, sometime in the first or second quarter of the eighteenth century. Norn was dead, it appears, but was having an unexpected afterlife. This new state of use continued for at least a century after this evidence was recorded. While carrying out research into the survival of Norn words in Shetland

120  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d Scots in the late nineteenth century, the Faeroese scholar Jakob Jakobsen (see Jakobsen 1932) began to take note of something unexpected: Shetlanders could use Norn words, phrases and even clauses. These were generally connected to local folk culture, but also represented phrases that at least appeared concerned with real-life situations. Similar, although smaller-scale, tendencies were found for Orkney by Hugh Marwick (1995 [1929]) in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, we are still obliged to ask why someone (indeed, by implication, a whole community) would retain this amount of ‘dead’ material. From what we can tell, two inherent reactions are possible to the gradual loss of status (and speakers) for a language. Some ethnic groups will hold tight to their language until the bitter end, sometimes even refusing to learn the language of the people whose economic and political activities are driving their language towards extinction. More common, however, are those circumstances where speakers of a language accept the reality of the situation and pass over to the majority language. Some groups do this willingly, as seems to have been the case with speakers of Pictish, discussed in Chapter 3. Others do it with regret, but nevertheless accept what probably appears a fait accompli, as seems to be the case, as we will see in the following chapters, for many Gaelic speakers. The last is likely to have happened in Shetland in a particularly forceful way. Given the archipelago’s geographical and cultural distance from the Scottish mainland and mainstream, it is probably inevitable that this was the case; socioeconomic forces in the first half of the eighteenth century nevertheless led to the inevitable transition to Scots for the whole population, even if elements of the passing culture – including Norn – were treasured and perpetuated. Something of this regret can be found in the following verse, again recorded by Jakobsen: De vaar e (vera) gooa tee, “when” sona min “guid to” Kaadanes: haayn kaayn ca’ russa “mare,” haayn kaayn ca’ bigg “bere” haayn kaayn ca’ eld “fire” haayn kaayn ca’ klovandi “taings” ‘That was a good time, when my son went to Caithness: he can call russa “mare”, he can call bigg “bere” [a form of barley], he can call eld “fire”, he can call klovandi “taings” [tongs]’ [My translation; Jakobsen’s orthographic practice here is to place Scots words

h omog eni sa ti on and surv iva l  | 121 in double quotation marks – strangely, he does not represent Scots caw , ‘call’, as Scots]

At first glance this appears to be a celebration of the upwardly mobile acquisition of Scots during the period when shift away from Norn was taking place. If we consider the subject matter of the verse, however, it quickly becomes apparent that the activities described present no true personal or societal progression; instead, there has been an essentially banal repudiation of lexis in one language through the acquisition of lexis from the other, this lexis relating to exactly the same being or item no matter the variety used. In modern Shetland Scots, the word skyimp refers to the teasing (or outright mockery) of someone who is considered to be taking on airs of superiority in relation to other Shetlanders – something which is severely frowned upon within a community which is almost volcanically egalitarian. I suspect that exactly such a purpose underlies this verse. This Norn ‘half-life’ will be considered further when we discuss the development of the Modern Scots dialects of the Northern Isles in the next chapter. 5.6 Conclusion As with much of Europe, the beginning of the modern world in Scotland, for better and worse, can be placed in the eighteenth century. Although industrialisation was only really beginning (and will be dealt with in greater detail in the following chapters), improvement had already made its mark on both the Scottish landscape and its people. While the results were different from place to place, greater homogenisation was regularly encouraged, both in culture and language, a homogenisation also promoted by many of the intellectual currents at work in the country (along with all of Europe) at the time. At the same time, Romantic ideas and their proponents were already developing, encouraging a re-analysis of rural behaviour in particular, previously considered normal, as something worthy of study and, less positively, categorisation as noble (or comic) survivals from another age. Urbanisation and industrialisation would encourage and perpetuate analyses of these types, in particular in relation to language use. At the end of the eighteenth century, most Scottish people who did not come from the Highlands and Islands were Scots speakers; Scottish Standard English, developed during this period, was increasingly hegemonic and ­associated with urban middle-class practice, however. While Gaelic had suffered far greater

122  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd vicissitudes in that century, the results were not always obvious; often overt antipathy by civil and religious power holders to the way of life of most Gaelic speakers put heavy strains upon the long-term survival of the language. This apparent health would be gravely threatened in the following century, in part as a result of industrialisation, along with agricultural improvement, as discussed in this chapter. * * * * * * The modern era: a brief personal vignette I come from a range of different backgrounds, from across Scotland, but also with roots elsewhere: Ireland in particular. My Millar ancestry is the best traced, largely through the interest and industry of distant cousins in the United States and Canada. Unusually for a family with strong working-class ties and an association with religious dissent, we can trace the direct Millar line back to the middle of the seventeenth century in Dumbarton, on the north bank of the Clyde, on the edge of the Highlands (Alt Clud in ancient times). From the beginning, we were connected with the ‘sharp end’ of the mining trade. Over the next 200 years we moved slowly closer to Glasgow, passing from pit to pit through the eastern part of West Dunbartonshire. As industrial technology developed, production and the size of the pits also grew, often prodigiously. Many members of the family emigrated to the new coalfields of Pennsylvania, their skills in advanced mining techniques, along with a reputation for hard work, no doubt being prized. In my branch of the family, marriage to ‘outsiders’, including several women with Irish names, was common. We can assume, I think, that the family as a whole was Scotsspeaking, although it is highly probable that Gaelic or Irish were spoken as mother tongues by some members. In the 1880s, my great-grandfather, Allan Millar (also spelled Miller) married and moved from a coal mining job in Hardgate, just on the edge of what is now considered Glasgow, to a position as a miner of ironstone in Barrhead, some twenty kilometres away on the other side of the Clyde in Renfrewshire. My grandfather, Walter (Wattie) Millar (1886–1973), was born not long afterwards, the eldest of nine children to survive to adulthood. He was a lorry driver. He married Cecilia McColl (1898–1965), a Gaelic speaker, although born in what is now the ‘far east’ of Glasgow. She was an agricultural servant. Parts of this mixed linguistic heritage descended to my father, Allan Millar

h o mog eni sati on a nd surviva l  | 123 (1926–2011), along with the local Scots dialect of Barrhead. In 1959 my father married my mother, Marion (Myra) Jamieson (1932–2007), who came from an artisan (originally handloom-weaving, eventually furniture-making) background in the south-west Renfrewshire town of Lochwinnoch, but with connections with Greenock (a large shipbuilding town, twenty kilometres to the north-west) and Co. Antrim in Ireland. Her family were highly literate Scots speakers, proud of their dissenting background, fiercely committed to radicalism. Both Allan and Myra were the first members of their families to attend university; they ‘ascended’ to the middle classes as schoolteachers (the ultimate goal for many aspirational working-class parents). My father spoke Scottish Standard English as his primary code, although his complex linguistic background revealed itself in periods of high stress or, at the very end of his life, through cancerinduced confusion. My mother remained far closer to her linguistic and cultural roots, albeit perceived through the prism of the ‘purity’ of the Scots spoken in her family and community in her childhood and youth. My brother adheres relatively closely to my father’s linguistic model; I am far closer to my mother’s, although exhibiting a considerable linguistic continuum dependent on my daily activities and a personal history which included living outside Scotland throughout my twenties. My brother is married to a speaker of Glaswegian dialect who is partly of Irish descent; I am married to a Luxembourger with native speaker command of English (and considerable ability with the local Scots dialects). My brother’s children and my daughter largely speak locally accented forms of Scottish Standard English, much to my sadness. To a considerable extent, this family microcosm represents a fair portrait of the linguistic, cultural and social development of Scotland in the modern age. Let us consider the social and historical forces involved in greater detail. The modern age, as is likely to be the case with any age, is complex and difficult to define and delineate. In the following two chapters, therefore, I have treated two themes – expansion within union and contraction and dissipation – as being equivalent to nineteenth century and twentieth century respectively. This connection largely holds. There will be occasions, however, where tendencies which first appeared in Scottish life in the nineteenth century, but were most notable in the twentieth, will be discussed in the twentieth-century chapter. There will also be occasions where events in the twentieth century will be treated as being the end point of tendencies primarily connected to the nineteenth. This

124  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d is potentially confusing; it marks an attempt at intellectual honesty, however, of not accepting the necessity of placing everything in an essentially randomly time-based pigeonhole.

6 EXPANSION WITHIN UNION: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

6.1 Introduction1

S

cotland was at the centre of the first stages of the development of the modern industrialised world; curiously, it was eventually peripheralised by the same forces that created its centrality. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the country was practically bankrupt, its currency little more than worthless; the danger of civil war was always present. Most external markets were essentially closed due to an English trade embargo, despite Scotland being in all but name England’s semi-autonomous colony, rather than an independent nation state. As we saw in the previous chapter, the post-1707 order created considerable opportunities for at least some Scottish people, albeit opportunities which often included the assumption of a new British identity that inevitably involved a downplaying (if not abnegation and abdication) of Scottish identity and culture (including language). These changes also engendered considerable resistance among some creative artists and other thinkers who perceived a virtue in the homegrown and local, again often associated with language. We can make too much of these changes: in 1750 Scotland remained a country of small towns whose economy was based principally upon the ebb and flow of agricultural production, even if the nature and practice of agriculture had begun to move towards capitalist models in some places; differences with the Scotland of 1650 in this respect were incremental rather than revolutionary. The Scotland of 1850 had, however, been altered irrevocably, becoming a country which was

126  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd i­ncreasingly industrialised and urbanised. In the following section we will consider the processes at work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which created the modern country and its linguistic ecology. 6.2 Industrialisation Scotland – specifically central Scotland, perhaps – possessed vast latent mineral wealth in the eighteenth century. This was particularly the case with coal and iron. New technologies during the period – both in the processing of raw materials and their employment – meant that these could be exploited at something approaching maximum capacity. Many of these innovations were instigated in Scotland. Steam trains and steamboats – many built in the Glasgow area – began to shrink space and standardise the calculation and appreciation of time. Central to these developments was not only steam-based technology, intrinsically tied to large-scale resources of coal; improvements in iron founding and the development of economically viable steel production gave the newly enhanced trades the means for mass production (and wide distribution). Linguistic mixture and linguistic awareness were largely unintended results of these changes. In this new form of capitalism, originally lower-middle-class (or even working-class) men, often with profound technical insight, became industrial magnates – iron masters – whose navigation of previously uncharted production and economic waters was regularly predicated upon the savage exploitation of their workforces. Many – probably most – of these magnates were Scots speakers (as would be their companies’ boards of directors and the men at higher levels of management); their children, normally educated at local, but exclusive, schools, would have been far more likely to use Scottish Standard English alone. Industrialisation implied urbanisation. With the triumph of improvement across a large part of Scotland, a ‘free’ workforce, previously employed in agriculture, was forced by circumstances into positions of service within the new industries (alternatively, industrialisation, with the promise of a regular pay packet, was the seminal pull factor; these explanations are probably not oppositional to, or even discrete from, each other). A large part of the Scottish ‘lower orders’ became proletarianised. Glasgow, for instance, mutated from being a relatively small merchant city to being an exponentially growing urban centre where, at least for a time, many – probably most – of the inhabitants had been born elsewhere. While most Glaswegians under this new order would have been native speakers of a range of rural or small-town Scots dialects, speakers

expansi on wi thi n uni o n | 127 of Gaelic (and to a degree Irish) made up a large minority, particularly (but not wholly) among the working classes. Speakers of many other languages – Italian and Polish are particularly striking in a twentieth-century context (although both languages were certainly present in the nineteenth) – were also present in what had truly become a multicultural and multilingual metropolis. Yiddish, brought by migrants and refugees from the Tsarist Empire, was spoken by small but socially and economically important groups in the main cities. Chinese and African languages were also heard in the urban context, a product of imperialism (and before that the slave trade and its ancillary occupations, such as the importation, packaging and sale of tobacco and sugar). These profound changes inevitably had considerable linguistic repercussions, as we will see below. The new cities therefore suffered from personal and social dislocation, the breakdown of past social cohesion and loyalties without the immediate construction of new ties, across the whole community. New connections were made within social classes – the establishment and extension of the middle classes in the nineteenth century in particular and the political organisation of the increasingly enfranchised working classes are striking examples of these. The social and political structures of the ‘Auld Kirk’, the Church of Scotland, were tried to the point of collapse by the new social realities, often unable to respond to rapid urban growth and increasing social deprivation among a large part of the mushrooming population (Brown 1997: chapter 5). The 1843 schism in the national church – the ‘Great Disruption’ – and the willingness of the Free Kirk (along with already existing dissenting congregations) to carry out home mission work (including the establishment of new churches) led to further expansion and devolution of power of various sorts among the lower middle classes, dominant in the new mass dissent. Large-scale immigration from Ireland – both Protestant and Catholic (the latter numerically dominant) – led both to the importation of social attitudes about faith communities which exacerbated latent Scottish prejudices – in particular in relation to Roman Catholicism – and helped create new forms of ‘English’ in the cities (of which more in the next chapter). These new immigrants were regularly exploited by those holding economic power, through their use as strike breakers and sweated labour, as a discouragement to the development of working-class solidarity in a range of industries. The former sense of mutual aid and responsibility inherent (although often not honoured) in rural districts practically disappeared in the face of exploitation but also, as the other side of

128  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d the same coin, the possibility of social mobility offered by the new world grew. In the end, these tendencies also affected language use profoundly. 6.3  Rural Areas and Scots As a result of these changes, rural agricultural Scotland became a place where a minority of the populace lived. In the Lowlands, new capitalist landholding and land exploitation patterns led, as we saw in the last chapter, to the development of a new social system that encouraged local ties of occupation and culture through the quarterly or annual feein of agricultural workers. Local forms of Scots were central to these changes, often treated as identity symbols, eventually strongly distinguished from the newly established urban patterns (although it is easy to overstress this point, particularly for the Lowlands). The political and social conservatism of many people in these areas is likely to have been attractive to many members of the middle classes – in particular those living in cities – as the realities of urban society took hold as the nineteenth century proceeded. This is emphasised in the returns to the second Statistical Accounts, the research for which was carried out in the 1830s and 1840s, largely compiled by local Church of Scotland ministers (although the task proved problematical in some regions, because of mass dissent) and others of middle-class background. Whereas the original Statistical Accounts move away from Scots towards Standard English was welcomed as a symbol of progress, in the second Statistical Accounts (rural) Scots was celebrated, its speakers represented as possessing ‘natural’ intelligence, ‘worthies’ of the lower classes whose couthie and pawkie humour gave them licence to speak directly to their ‘betters’. A striking example of this is the following observation from North Berwick (East Lothian), where anti-Catholicism is displaced from the middle-class writer (from whom it might have sounded ‘vulgar’) to the voice of a lower-class ‘worthy’: A few years ago an incident occurred on the Bass [a rocky island off North Berwick, used as a prison for radical Protestants in the seventeenth century], expressive of a strong lingering desire to retain the chapel, occasionally at least, for its original destination. A young lady, in the presence of her father, was here solemnly confirmed in her Romish faith and profession, and the due ritual services were gone through in the presence of the keeper of the Bass and his boat assistant. On the conclusion of the solemnities, the priest turned to the keeper, and asked him, with due decorum, if he would not now also kneel

expansi on wi thi n uni o n | 129 down before the altar, and follow them in similar dedication and worship. ‘Me?’ said the Protestant Presbyterian James, ‘Me? Na, na, am thankfu’ there’s mair sense gi’en me. – I wad just as soon, Sir, fa’ doon and worship ane o’ thae puir solan geese aboot us,’ (pointing to the myriads around him) ‘than e’er gang on wi’ ony sic mockery.’ My friend and parishioner James remains an invincible adherent of the Reformation and also, as well may be conjectured, the Bass being ever before him, a stern abhorrent of prelatic tyranny and regal despotism. (SA2, North Berwick, East Lothian, p. 331)

These stereotypes were a product of Romanticism and the work of Burns (with his radical politics ignored), but a social conservatism has been embraced, consciously or not, which led eventually to the kailyard (as discussed below). That these associations would eventually lead to problems of identification as Scots speakers for many speakers of modern dialects will be dealt with in the next chapter in relation to urban varieties. 6.4  Gaelic in the Nineteenth Century In many ways Gaelic, while being exposed to similar forces, developed in markedly different directions, primarily because of its status as an Abstand language, but largely because of pressures applied by inequalities in the possession and exploitation of capital (of a variety of sorts). 6.4.1  Highlands and Islands It would be wrong to think of the Highlands and Islands as being particularly ‘backward’ in relation to the overall socioeconomic development of Scotland at the beginning of this period. Industrial enterprises had developed widely in the Highlands during the eighteenth century, with particular emphasis on the production of iodine and other regularly economically viable chemicals present on the shores of these territories. Water power was also readily available and often harnessed, as can still be seen vividly in the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury industrial workings beside the Falls of Dochart in Killin (Perthshire). Nevertheless, the lack of coal deposits in the region (with the exception of poorquality deposits in east Sutherland) meant that these hopeful developments could only progress so far. Even after (perhaps because of ) the clearances, large parts of the Highlands and Islands remained severely cash poor, lacking a means to alter this situation internally.

130  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d On the other hand, the period witnessed a deeply evangelical spiritual awakening in many parts of the Gàidhealtachd, led by lay preachers in the main, rather than ordained ministers. This, as Meek (2002) observes, represented the porous relationship between oral and written preaching and catechising in the Gaelic-speaking community particularly well. Gaelic was, for the first time, at the heart of the new movement, as the process of vernacularisation (and literacy in the mother tongue) gradually passed through the community as something central both to their identity and the evangelical project. This tendency was developed further by the spread of the Free Church throughout a large part of these territories from the 1840s on (Brown 1997: 84–94). Many inhabitants of the region left during the period, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. Sometimes this was a ‘once for all’ movement. As common, however, particularly in those regions which were close to more prosperous areas, migration was initially seasonal, with Highlanders and Islanders moving from, for instance, Argyll to Renfrewshire and Ayrshire for the harvest, returning home for the winter, carrying back much needed cash along with a developed knowledge of English (and Scots). While many perpetuated this migratory lifestyle, others were inevitably channelled towards long-term and eventually permanent residence in the industrial areas. This was a process played out in my father’s mother’s family, and in many other immigrant Gaelic-speaking families. Bonds of worship – the islands in particular were associated with dissenting vernacular evangelical Presbyterianism by the end of the nineteenth century – held elements of these communities together (and this had important knock-on effects for the maintenance of Gaelic in the Clydeside conurbation in particular), but the communities left behind became increasingly unsustainable because of the population movement. In the long run, the loss of population from the Highlands and Islands in the nineteenth century was as catastrophic as the clearances that preceded it. Indeed the two bled into each other, since forced evictions and considerable public opposition were evident in the ‘Crofters’ War’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Devine 2018 provides a highly nuanced discussion), where crofters eventually, often at great personal and community cost, won from the landowners the right to long-term residence on their land.

expansi on wi thi n uni o n  | 131 6.5  Literacy and Education The modern age witnessed the mass roll-out of state-run compulsory elementary education in western and central Europe, north America, and their ‘colonial’ offshoots. How did compulsory state education alter the balance of languages in Scotland? 6.5.1  Scottish education 1800–1914 2 It is a central element of the historiography (or mythology) of Scotland that the country had (and, indeed, has) a more democratic (and better) educational tradition than England. According to this argument, from the Protestant Reformation on, at least boys, no matter their social background, were able to ascend the social ladder through an excellent education designed to be open to all through the support of the Church and the local gentry. Partakers of this largesse were expected to ‘pay’ by entering ‘useful’ professions; in particular, perhaps, teaching and the ministry. So pervasive did this analysis become that a whole literary school – the kailyard – had this social ascent at the centre of many of its narratives (we will return to this in section 6.6.1). I was brought up with this view: my parents saw themselves, in a modest way, as being products of this meritocratic system (which also demanded smeddum ‘application, cleverly considered hard work’ from the ‘lad’ (or, indeed, ‘lass’) ‘o pairts’). The historical record does contain many stories of this sort, of ploughboys being able to parse ancient Greek sentences or of the sons of tenant farmers becoming nabobs in India and elsewhere in the Empire, a feature of rural life, most marked in the north-east because of generous legacies left by several people to fund scholarships. It would, however, be dangerous to see this type of example as being representative of ‘Scottish exceptionalism’, the belief that Scotland is, and always has been, different from and, implicitly, better than any other country, through its long-standing democratic traditions. Benighted and class-ridden England also produced ‘lads o pairts’, including, as Anderson (1983: 7) notes, Joseph Wright (1855–1930), Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford, who came from a working-class and non-literate background.3 Moreover, the Scottish system of education, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was far less universal and egalitarian than Scots are still encouraged to believe. At the beginning of this era, each Church of Scotland parish was expected to have one parish school, funded by the heritors, the major landholders, of

132  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a n d the parish. Generally, although not universally, this was the case. Entrance to this school was either free or involved a very small fee. Until 1872, however, education was not compulsory. Some families kept their children away from school, whether because of a distrust of education in general and the curriculum offered in church schools in particular or, more likely, penury: the money earned by children was more likely to keep a family afloat in the short term than basic literacy and numeracy would. More common was seasonal attendance: children in agricultural districts in particular – the norm until well into the nineteenth century – were needed in the fields at a number of times in the year; this service was, again, necessary for the ongoing survival of their families, as well as the ongoing productivity of what remained a highly labour-intensive industry. This seasonal attendance was often tacitly accepted by school authorities, as a means of ensuring that children attended at other times. This was still the case when I started school in the early 1970s: children from poorer backgrounds disappeared for one or two weeks in October to take part in the tawttie howkin. Moreover, the Church of Scotland did not represent all the Scottish people. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in fact, in a considerable number of places, many, if not most, Presbyterians were not members of the ‘Auld Kirk’. Although the Free Church in particular attempted with some success to mirror the Established Church’s provision (with the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland doing the same when and where it was capable), this also led to atomisation and over-proliferation, using up a limited ‘pot’ of available teachers and thus inevitably leading to the employment of less able practitioners. Areas with large populations adherent to Episcopalianism or Catholicism were even patchier in terms of basic educational provision, whether the locals were Scots-speakers or spoke Gaelic. Large-scale urbanisation destabilised the parish system of education. The connection between person, place and church was attenuated if not broken for many. There were not enough churches – or, indeed, schools – to cope with the new cities. The industrial proletariat, moreover, did not inhabit a space where children’s labour was essentially seasonal. Speaking in general terms, unskilled workers carried out the same (or at least similar) tasks throughout the year. The income from children’s work, no matter the laws on child labour, were, as was the case in the countryside, often vital for many families at the ‘bottom’. Compulsory education, introduced in 1872, funded by the state and initially administered by School Boards, affiliated to the religious denominations as well

expansi on wi thi n uni o n | 133 as local government, was generally enforced on this occasion, but opposition from families over what was seen as peripheral to their livelihoods was commonplace, with attendance being perceived as a chore which was to be dispensed with at as early a point in a child’s life as was possible and legal. Moreover, while access to primary education was possible for most people in at least Lowland Scotland, access to secondary and higher education was less prevalent. Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847), one of the founding fathers of the Free Church, created through the ‘Great Disruption’ of 1843, was a social conservative who, as discussed by Anderson (1983: 13), claimed that helping a few working-class boys to achieve an advanced education was not designed or intended to encourage the ‘diseased ambition’ of the working class as a whole to change their social standing through education beyond a basic level. Children could leave school as early as eleven, although a degree of connection to education was expected for some time after this. This was, of course, not a lengthy period to learn reading, writing and reckoning (particularly since the last year of schooling could be taken part time and other subjects – dominantly scripture – took up a large part of the school day). Almost into living memory something like this system was maintained in parts of Scotland, where children from various backgrounds stayed on at their first school until compulsory leaving age while others were able though their abilities or their social backgrounds to attend academic forms of secondary education and to enter the professions or higher education (or both). In addition, several schools across the country remained independent of council and board control (although they were inspected to ensure that they provided the same level of education as public schools); the fees charged inevitably made what was often high-quality education unavailable to children from less affluent backgrounds (except through the provision of scholarships and bursaries). 6.5.1.1  Scots in education Would, therefore, the relative lack of lengthy exposure to literacy in Standard English in the new compulsory system have affected language use for workingclass children? My father’s father attended school only for the mandated years. I knew him quite well – he lived with us until his death, when I was six. I can remember seeing him reading once or twice (his eyesight was poor by this point, so this might not be an accurate representation of his behaviour earlier in life);

134  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d I do not remember his ever writing. Like many people from his background, he both despised ‘book learning’ and saw it as a ladder for his children to escape from manual labour. My grandfather, as I remember it, largely spoke Scots on practically all occasions, although I do remember his producing something like Scottish Standard English, in a rather stilted form, when he felt the necessity to be ‘proper’ or ‘polite’. As Williamson (1982a, 1982b) points out, in its spoken form Scots had a considerable presence in at least country schools. This state was probably similar to that found elsewhere in Europe and beyond. My wife’s experience at school in Luxembourg in the 1970s and 1980s was that, although almost all classes were in theory taught in either German or French, most teachers explained the tasks given (and indeed often carried out some of the teaching) in Luxembourgish, no doubt to make sure that all the students understood what was happening. In Scotland, while it is probable that, given that, unlike Luxembourgish, Scots is not a state-recognised language, English was more prevalent, Scots was used not only when describing or discussing particularly local concerns. In urban or secondary schools it is likely that Standard English was used more. But Scots was never used: it definitely would have been of considerable importance in the playground. Yet this sunny view of dialect tolerance was matched by considerable prejudice against the local vernacular by teachers and the educational authorities. As is often the case with Scots, how it was treated in schools appears to have been related to what individuals thought and did. Certainly the prejudice against urban varieties began early and was perpetuated officially in the policies developed by the School Boards and their successors after 1872. It would be perpetuated, and worsen, in the twentieth century. 6.5.1.2  Gaelic in compulsory education As we saw in the last chapter, the authorities – lay and ecclesiastical – displayed considerable variation in relation to whether and how Gaelic should be taught to children who were native speakers of the language. One school of thought had it that the language should not be taught at all; there should be enforced language shift at school entry level. The opposite view – that Gaelic should be the primary teaching language, with the goal being mother tongue literacy – was also present, although less common among those with immediate connection with power of whatever sort. Most common, perhaps, was the view that Gaelic

expansi on wi thi n uni o n  | 135 should be employed as a language through which English could be learned to an advanced (native speaker, essentially) level. Gaelic literacy was, essentially, ancillary. Compulsory education in the Gàidhealtachd followed this final pattern rigidly, with decisions generally being made centrally by people with little or no interest in the use of Gaelic in schools. The ‘transfer immersion’ method, similar to those often adopted for speakers of immigrant languages, made sense within a situation where it was expected that many members of a community would have to live eventually in places where English was dominant (indeed similar measures were occasionally carried out in the Lowlands where schools had a large intake of Gaelic speakers); many parents doubtless welcomed their children’s English literacy. It also reflected the imperial ambitions and pretensions of the British state at the time. While it is unlikely that, in most Gaelic-speaking households in the Gàidhealtachd, English was much spoken except in particular contexts, it could nonetheless be seen as a Trojan Horse, which would become active in later generations. This may be too dark a view, however, at least in some places. Knowledge of English allowed access to a great deal of information which would have been closed to a monolingual reader of Gaelic (for a discussion of many of these processes, see Withers 1988: chapter 3). 6.6  Written Scots Throughout this period, as Standard English became a written and increasingly spoken reality in Scotland, Scots was, apparently conversely, increasingly used in writing (although, as we will see, only under certain circumstances and in certain contexts). This section will analyse these contexts. 6.6.1  Scots in literature In the course of the nineteenth century Scots retained, and in some senses extended, its use in written media, in particular in relation to the increasing popularity of the novel, to the extent that it became the popular literary vehicle of the time, read by a socially diverse set of people, including many members of the expanding middle classes. Scotland was at the forefront of this expansion in market and change in taste, and Scots was often a central feature of literary endeavour and entertainment. Extravagant claims have often been made of the ‘democratic’ nature of the novel as an art form, of its liberating power to unleash the speech of those other

136  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d than the members of the upper middle classes, who were the primary consumers (and producers) of written poetry (for a discussion, see Millar 2013). This view was espoused with great enthusiasm and developed further by the Soviet critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), reacting, Crowley (1996: chapter 2) suggests, to the increasingly totalitarian nature of Soviet society and culture under Stalin, envisaging (in some ways creating) a ‘golden age’ of socio-literary dialogism in the ‘English’ novel of the nineteenth century (with particular focus on the works of Dickens, perhaps).4 This view, while intriguing, cannot be left unquestioned. While local dialects do appear in nineteenthcentury novels and these are often accurately portrayed, particularly in the work of those with a good ‘ear’, such as Scott or Dickens, the person who is writing the work is not himself (or, increasingly, herself ) writing unselfconsciously in his or her preferred written code, even if that writer is genuinely a speaker of a nonstandard dialect.5 In any event, the use of dialect in novels is not a product of the nineteenth century, as demonstrated by, for instance, the use and contrast of various kinds of English in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749). This analysis also ignores completely the presence of non-standard (or, earlier, non-metropolitan) varieties in some of, for instance, Shakespeare’s plays and Chaucer’s tales, never mind the dialectal diversity and complexity recognised and employed in ancient Greek literature (for a recent discussion of these issues, see Hodson 2014). Moreover, a particular issue with the idea of the egalitarian nature of the use of language in nineteenth-century novels is that it is in dialogue, not narrative, that non-standard varieties are generally (although not solely) represented. Even in those contexts, dialect is largely confined to older or comic characters from ‘lower-class’ backgrounds, often seen as representing honest, rather conservative (‘common sense’), ‘salt of the earth’ viewpoints (a point already discussed in relation to the concept of rural identity, to which we will return in our discussion of non-literary materials). These fictional characters (and the ‘real’ characters we assume underlie them) are not therefore truly ‘liberated’ by their use of language; choice is, instead, made by the middle-class author, whose ideas they express. Despite (or perhaps because of ) these issues and caveats, however, novels still provided an opportunity to bring Scots (and other largely oral) varieties into the mainstream, to enregister, in a sense empower them. This dark view of reasons why the overwhelming majority of novelists chose not to employ dialect in narrative portions of their texts must be set beside an economic reality: in order to sell novels, an author had to be readable to people

expa nsi on wi thi n uni on  | 137 in a number of places where people speak the same language. If a reader cannot follow more than a few words in a paragraph, s/he will turn off and probably choose not to continue reading the work. An intelligent writer like Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) will gloss any word or idea which would be difficult to follow by a global audience (his editors are likely to have contributed to this interpretative process). Words associated with particular traditions celebrated in the past will be explained. There is only so often that a person can be expected to process even this type of information, however, particularly in narrative. Dialogue, on the other hand, can be interpreted through context, dialect use adding to the local colour of the piece; it can on occasion even be skimmed or ignored without losing the thread (something many readers may have regularly done with texts of the time, with their mottoes and often quite lengthy poetic excerpts (even whole poems) dispersed throughout the main text, no matter the language). With these points in mind, let us consider an example of the language use of one of the greatest novels of the early nineteenth century, The Heart of Midlothian (1818) by Sir Walter Scott: ‘But, goodman,’ interrupted Mr. Middleburgh, ‘you must think of your own household first, or else you are worse even than the infidels.’ ‘I tell ye, Bailie Middleburgh,’ retorted David Deans, ‘if ye be a bailie, as there is little honour in being ane in these evil days—I tell ye, I heard the gracious Saunders Peden—I wotna whan it was; but it was in killing time, when the plowers were drawing alang their furrows on the back of the Kirk of Scotland—I heard him tell his hearers, gude and waled Christians they were too, that some o’ them wad greet mair for a bit drowned calf or stirk than for a’ the defections and oppressions of the day; and that they were some o’ them thinking o’ ae thing, some o’ anither, and there was Lady Hundleslope thinking o’ greeting Jock at the fireside! And the lady confessed in my hearing that a drow of anxiety had come ower her for her son that she had left at hame weak of a decay —And what wad he hae said of me if I had ceased to think of the gude cause for a castaway—a—It kills me to think of what she is!’ ‘But the life of your child, goodman—think of that—if her life could be saved,’ said Middleburgh. ‘Her life!’ exclaimed David—‘I wadna gie ane o’ my grey hairs for her life, if her gude name be gane—And yet,’ said he, relenting and retracting as he spoke, ‘I wad make the niffer, Mr. Middleburgh—I wad gie a’ these grey

138  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a nd hairs that she has brought to shame and sorrow—I wad gie the auld head they grow on for her life, and that she might hae time to amend and return, for what hae the wicked beyond the breath of their nosthrils?—but I’ll never see her mair—No!—that—that I am determined in—I’ll never see her mair!’ His lips continued to move for a minute after his voice ceased to be heard, as if he were repeating the same vow internally. ‘Well, sir,’ said Mr. Middleburgh, ‘I speak to you as a man of sense; if you would save your daughter’s life, you must use human means.’ ‘I understand what you mean; but Mr. Novit, who is the procurator and doer of an honourable person, the Laird of Dumbiedikes, is to do what carnal wisdom can do for her in the circumstances. Mysell am not clear to trinquet and traffic wi’ courts o’ justice as they are now constituted; I have a tenderness and scruple in my mind anent them.’ ‘That is to say,’ said Middleburgh, ‘that you are a Cameronian, and do not acknowledge the authority of our courts of judicature, or present government?’ ‘Sir, under your favour,’ replied David, who was too proud of his own polemical knowledge to call himself the follower of any one, ‘ye take me up before I fall down. I canna see why I suld be termed a Cameronian, especially now that ye hae given the name of that famous and savoury sufferer, not only until a regimental band of souldiers, whereof I am told many can now curse, swear, and use profane language, as fast as ever Richard Cameron could preach or pray, but also because ye have, in as far as it is in your power, rendered that martyr’s name vain and contemptible, by pipes, drums, and fifes, playing the vain carnal spring called the Cameronian Rant, which too many professors of religion dance to—a practice maist unbecoming a professor to dance to any tune whatsoever, more especially promiscuously, that is, with the female sex. A brutish fashion it is, whilk is the beginning of defection with many, as I may hae as muckle cause as maist folk to testify.’ ‘Well, but, Mr. Deans,’ replied Mr. Middleburgh, ‘I only meant to say that you were a Cameronian, or MacMillanite, one of the society people, in short, who think it inconsistent to take oaths under a government where the Covenant is not ratified.’ ‘Sir,’ replied the controversialist, who forgot even his present distress in such discussions as these, ‘you cannot fickle me sae easily as you do opine. I am not a MacMillanite, or a Russelite, or a Hamiltonian, or a Harleyite, or a Howdenite—I will be led by the nose by none—I take my name as a Christian

expa nsi on wi thi n uni on  | 139 from no vessel of clay. I have my own principles and practice to answer for, and am an humble pleader for the gude auld cause in a legal way.’ (Scott 2004 [1818]:174–6)

Scott was a master of dialogue and the means by which it can inform and enhance our understanding of the narrative, so it is unsurprising that direct speech dominates in this passage. The novel is set in the 1710s and 1720s, when the Union between Scotland and England was new and memories of the political and doctrinal tensions (and occasionally bloodshed) of the late seventeenth century were fresh for many.6 David Deans, the father of the primary protagonist of the novel, is speaking with a magistrate and bailie (city councillor) of the City of Edinburgh. Although ostensibly connected to the fate of Deans’s second daughter, who is at this point imprisoned before trial for infanticide, a crime warranting the death penalty at the time, Deans quickly turns the conversation to his non-recognition of a court associated with the 1689 and 1707 church settlements, which he considers to be a betrayal of the Covenanting movements of the seventeenth century. His visitor attempts to tie these views to the infighting of the radical remnants of this movement, a point rejected by Deans. Scott was, to put it mildly, not well disposed to what he would have considered the extremism of the radical Presbyterians of the past and present time but, to his credit, Deans is essentially portrayed as a sympathetic character. Nevertheless, his visitor, Mr Middleburgh, while a native of Edinburgh of around the same age as Deans (who comes from a nearby rural background), speaks Standard English throughout (except, perhaps, in the use of the honorific goodman). This distribution does not in any way downplay Deans’s rhetorical skill, but it does suggest that authority and moderation – modernity, perhaps – lie in the use of Standard English (although Deans’s speech does appear to become more standardised when discussing doctrine – possibly under the influence of the Bible and the tracts he would have read).7 Scott would have known that this linguistic distribution was not accurate for the period he was describing; it would have chimed with his contemporary audience, however, or perhaps their wishful thinking, since the pattern of linguistic separation presented would not have been fully achieved by the early nineteenth century. Interestingly, the Laird of Dumbiedikes, mentioned in the excerpt, Deans’s former landlord and therefore a person of some social authority, speaks Scots throughout, despite

140  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d being a relatively young man. He is, however, portrayed as a buffoon, an obsessive of limited intelligence; essentially a comic character. Similar patterns of use can be found in The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (published anonymously in 1824) by James Hogg (1770– 1835) within a rather more complex narrative frame. Arguably the most disturbing novel ever written in Scotland, the book deals with the religious and political tensions of the late seventeenth century as played out in what, at the very least, could be described as a dysfunctional family. In the following example the disastrous marriage of the daughter of Baillie Orde to George Colwan, the Laird of Dalcastle, is played out: Though Baillie Orde had acquiesced in his wife’s asseveration regarding the likeness of their only daughter to her father, he never loved or admired her greatly; therefore this behaviour nothing astounded him. He questioned her strictly as to the grievous offence committed against her, and could discover nothing that warranted a procedure so fraught with disagreeable consequences. So, after mature deliberation, the baillie addressed her as follows: ‘Aye, aye, Raby! An’ sae I find that Dalcastle has actually refused to say prayers with you when you ordered him; an’ has guidit you in a rude indelicate manner, outstepping the respect due to my daughter—as my daughter. But, wi’ regard to what is due to his own wife, of that he’s a better judge nor me. However, since he has behaved in that manner to my daughter, I shall be revenged on him for aince; for I shall return the obligation to ane nearer to him: that is, I shall take pennyworths of his wife—an’ let him lick at that.’ ‘What do you mean, Sir?’ said the astonished damsel. ‘I mean to be revenged on that villain Dalcastle,’ said he, ‘for what he has done to my daughter. Come hither, Mrs. Colwan, you shall pay for this.’ So saying, the baillie began to inflict corporal punishment on the runaway wife. His strokes were not indeed very deadly, but he made a mighty flourish in the infliction, pretending to be in a great rage only at the Laird of Dalcastle. ‘Villain that he is!’ exclaimed he, ‘I shall teach him to behave in such a manner to a child of mine, be she as she may; since I cannot get at himself, I shall lounder her that is nearest to him in life. Take you that, and that, Mrs. Colwan, for your husband’s impertinence!’ (Hogg 2002 [1824]: 8–9)

It is unsurprising, if we follow Scott’s model of language use, that Baillie Orde speaks Scots (as he does at the beginning of the passage), while his daughter

expansi on wi thi n uni o n  | 141 speaks Standard English. Since the novel is set in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this distinction is, as we have seen, inaccurate; nevertheless, it serves a number of ideological functions of the period in which the novel was published. Hogg is more subtle than this, however. A careful reading of the passage above demonstrates that Orde’s speech becomes much more standardised as he increases formality in a state of anger. The opposite would be expected, perhaps. But the shift to a more formal register may be due to his desire to remain in control through slowing down his thoughts; playing out distance between the speaker and listener would also be a possible analysis. Again, this is ahistorical; it gives us a sense of linguistic behaviour (or aspirations) in Hogg’s time, however (and, in my experience, of the linguistic behaviour of Scots speakers today). This style of usage, employed by Scott and Hogg, became the norm in Scottish writing, naturally with some variation depending on topic and personal choice. This book does not purport to be a history of the literature(s) of Scotland, but it does need to discuss how this style was employed in works from the period that had more populist tendencies. A striking example of this is what has been termed the kailyard school (with the proviso, as pointed out by Nash (2007), that this term was coined by outsiders, has since become an insult and presumes a sense of collegiality between authors that appears not to have existed at any point). Kailyard fiction portrays an idealised rural present (very similar to that reported by some respondents to the second Statistical Accounts earlier in the century, as discussed above) where a hierarchical social model of an ‘organic’ type exists, ameliorated by the willingness of ‘betters’ to accept couthie commentary and (muted) criticism from worthies and where the education system, such as it is, is designed to allow ‘lads o pairts’, talented boys from the ‘lower orders’, to rise on the social ladder to fulfil societally useful roles such as schoolmaster (dominie) and, before all, minister. While the characters are often Presbyterian dissenters, sectarian tensions are downplayed. While the use of Scots is common in the writings of many of the members of this School (J. M. Barrie’s Auld Licht Idylls (1888) being a well-written example, albeit with a narrative voice which mocks, gently, the residents of ‘Thrums’ in a way not found in the work of other less talented and more straightforward authors), it is Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush (1894) by ‘Ian Maclaren’ (the Rev. John Watson; 1850–1907), which is arguably the most representative. This novel (or series of vignettes) is centred on a (Lowland) Perthshire

142  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d parish at an unstipulated (but recent) time. A central figure is Domsie, the elderly dominie ‘schoolmaster’. Like all the older people, Domsie primarily speaks Scots, although occasionally moving towards an educated (relatively) Standard English. His primary mission, as he sees it, is to identify promising boys and find ways that they can go to university, thus ‘bettering’ themselves. The most brilliant of these is George Howe, who achieves great things at the University of Edinburgh, only to be struck down with tuberculosis. The following excerpt comes from the description of his funeral, where his particular friends in Edinburgh are being given presents from George by Marget, his mother: George’s friends were characteristic men, each of his own type, and could only have met in the commonwealth of letters. One was of an ancient Scottish house which had fought for Mary against the Lords of the Congregation, followed Prince Charlie to Culloden, and were High Church and Tory to the last drop of their blood. Ludovic Gordon left Harrow with the reputation of a classic, and had expected to be first at Edinboro’. It was Gordon, in fact, that Domsie feared in the great war, but he proved second to Marget’s son, and being of the breed of Prince Jonathan, which is the same the world over, he came to love our David as his own soul. The other, a dark little man, with a quick, fiery eye, was a Western Celt, who had worried his way from a fishing croft in Barra to be an easy first in Philosophy at Edinboro’, and George and Ronald Maclean were as brothers because there is nothing so different as Scottish and Highland blood. ‘Maister Gordon,’ said Marget, ‘this is George’s Homer, and he bade me tell you that he coonted yir freendship ain o’ the gifts o’ God.’ For a brief space Gordon was silent, and, when he spoke, his voice sounded strange in that room. ‘Your son was the finest scholar of my time, and a very perfect gentleman. He was also my true friend, and I pray God to console his mother.’ And Ludovic Gordon bowed low over Marget’s worn hand as if she had been a queen. Marget lifted Plato, and it seemed to me that day as if the dignity of our Lady of Sorrows had fallen upon her. ‘This is the buik George chose for you, Maister Maclean, for he aye said to me ye hed been a prophet and shown him mony deep things.’

expansi on wi thi n uni o n | 143 The tears sprang to the Celt’s eyes. ‘It wass like him to make all other men better than himself,’ with the soft, sad Highland accent; ‘and a proud woman you are to hef been his mother.’ The third man waited at the window till the scholars left, and then I saw he was none of that kind, but one who had been a slave of sin and now was free. ‘Andra Chaumers, George wished ye tae hev his Bible, and he expecks ye tae keep the tryst.’ ‘God helping me, I will,’ said Chalmers, hoarsely; and from the garden ascended a voice, ‘O God, who art a very present help in trouble.’ (Maclaren 1895: 44–6)

This is a fascinating linguistic display (even ignoring the distinction made between Scottish and Highland, so foreign to our twenty-first century views of the all-inclusive nature of Scottish identity), with Gordon’s Standard English (probably RP-accented), ‘strange’ to the farmhouse in which he stands, as much as the Gaelic-influenced English of Maclean. Nevertheless, with the exception of the authoritative narrator, Marget’s Scots is given prime position and bows to no one in the room. A variant of this method of representing local speech was also present from an early period: an essentially Standard English narrative would contain within it Scots phrases and words which the author probably felt better illustrated his or her purposes; another interpretation might be that the character is being portrayed as occasionally unable to reach for (or perhaps even know) the English equivalent. Perhaps the first successful practitioner of this technique is John Galt (1779–1839). This can be readily seen in his Annals of the Parish (1821), the fictional memoirs of the Rev. Mr Micah Balwhidder, a Church of Scotland minister in a rural district of western Scotland in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The following extract refers to Mr Balwhidder’s arrival in the parish of Dalmailing, where his ‘intrusion’ as the choice of the heritors of the parish was greatly opposed by most of his parishioners. Here he describes his travails, in relation to the church politics of the time, when he makes his first parish visits: But, although my people received me in this unruly manner, I was resolved to cultivate civility among them, and therefore, the very next morning I began a round of visitations; but, oh! it was a steep brae that I had to climb, and it

144  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d needed a stout heart. For I found the doors in some places barred against me; in others, the bairns, when they saw me coming, ran crying to their mothers, ‘Here’s the feckless Mess-John!’ and then, when I went into the houses, their parents wouldna ask me to sit down, but with a scornful way, said, ‘Honest man, what’s your pleasure here?’ Nevertheless, I walked about from door to door like a dejected beggar, till I got the almous deed of a civil reception—and who would have thought it?— from no less a person than the same Thomas Thorl that was so bitter against me in the kirk on the foregoing day. (Galt 1980 [1821]: 7)

This is essentially Standard English – to be expected of a man who, as he reminds us on a number of occasions, was a graduate of Glasgow University. Nevertheless, the text is peppered with Scots words, including brae, bairn and the rather less well known almous (although I suspect that most speakers of English would recognise that the meanings of alms and this word are interconnected). The use of wouldna in ‘their parents wouldna ask me to sit down’ is nevertheless striking, since this word controls both meaning and syntax of the phrase. This second phenomenon – the use of Scots grammatical features – is rather less common than the former. It might be suggested in fact that Galt, in including features of this type, is attempting to get over to us how upsetting Mr Balwhidder found these incidents, even fifty years later: his native code breaks through his assumed one. In The Provost (1821), set in the same alternative universe as Annals of the Parish, Galt employs similar linguistic techniques but with a quite different kind of character employing them, in a novel which purports to be the memoirs of the shifty Mr Pawkie, three times Provost of Gudetown. In the following excerpt, we see the same tendencies at work as in Annals of the Parish, although Scots in a grammatical sense probably intrudes rather more into Mr Pawkie’s writing. I suspect this is not due to chance: does this happen because Mr Pawkie would have received considerably less formal education than Mr Balwhidder? Being thus settled in a shop and in life, I soon found that I had a part to perform in the public world; but I looked warily about me before casting my nets, and therefore I laid myself out rather to be entreated than to ask; for I had often heard Mr Remnant observe, that the nature of man could not abide to see a neighbour taking place and preferment of his own accord. I therefore assumed a coothy and obliging demeanour towards my customers and the community in general; and sometimes even with the very beggars I found a

expansi on wi thi n uni o n  | 145 jocose saying as well received as a bawbee, although naturally I dinna think I was ever what could be called a funny man, but only just as ye would say a thought ajee in that way. Howsever, I soon became, both by habit and repute, a man of popularity in the town, in so much that it was a shrewd saying of old James Alpha, the bookseller, that ‘mair gude jokes were cracked ilka day in James Pawkie’s shop, than in Thomas Curl, the barber’s, on a Saturday night.’ (Galt 1896 [1821]: 7–8)

This ‘double’ use of Scots – in reported speech and as ‘flavour’ in narrative – had considerable influence on later writers, although perhaps to a lesser extent than was the case with the Scott model. A striking variant can be found in The House with the Green Shutters (1901) by another Ayrshireman, George Douglas Brown (1869–1902). Brown’s work is intended to debunk the kailyard, presenting a small rural town and its inhabitants in all their tawdry unpleasantness. In the following excerpt, John Gourlay, the main character of what is essentially a Greek tragedy stripped of its nobility, is being discussed by a group of rather less than benevolent worthies: ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ said Sandy Toddle at last—’I wouldn’t mind if he weren’t such a demned ess!’ ‘Ess?’ said the Deacon unpleasantly. He puckered his brow and blinked, pretending not to understand. ‘Oh, a cuddy, ye know,’ said Toddle, colouring. ‘Gourlay’th stupid enough,’ lisped the Deacon; ‘we all know that. But there’th one thing to be said on hith behalf. He’s not such a “demned ess” as to try and thpeak fancy English!’ When the Deacon was not afraid of a man he stabbed him straight; when he was afraid of him he stabbed him on the sly. He was annoyed by the passing of Gourlay’s carts, and he took it out of Sandy Toddle. ‘It’s extr’ornar!’ blurted the Provost (who was a man of brosy speech, large-mouthed and fat of utterance). ‘It’s extr’ornar. Yass, it’s extr’ornar! I mean the luck of that man—for gumption he has noan, noan whatever! But if the railway came hereaway I wager Gourlay would go down,’ he added, less in certainty of knowledge than as prophet of the thing desired. ‘I wager he’d go down, sirs.’ ‘Likely enough,’ said Sandy Toddle; ‘he wouldn’t be quick enough to jump at the new way of doing.’

146  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d ‘Moar than that!’ cried the Provost, spite sharpening his insight, ‘moar than that—he’d be owre dour to abandon the auld way. I’m talling ye. He would just be left entirely! It’s only those, like myself, who approach him on the town’s affairs that know the full extent of his stupeedity.’ ‘Oh, he’s a “demned ess,”’ said the Deacon, rubbing it into Toddle and Gourlay at the same time. ‘A-ah, but then, ye see, he has the abeelity that comes from character,’ said Johnny Coe, who was a sage philosopher. ‘For there are two kinds of abeelity, don’t ye understa-and? There’s a scattered abeelity that’s of no use! Auld Randie Donaldson was good at fifty different things, and he died in the poorhouse! There’s a dour kind of abeelity, though, that has no cleverness, but just gangs tramping on; and that’s——’ ‘The easiest beaten by a flank attack,’ said the Deacon, snubbing him. (Brown 1974 [1901]: 9–10)

Although only one markedly Scots word – brosy – is used in the narrative, its singularity somehow renders it more marked (interestingly, Brown chooses sometimes to provide a gloss for a Scots usage; not, for whatever reason, on this occasion). Brown also supplies what might be taken to be a more realistic approach than other authors to the nature of the spoken vernacular, allowing English forms such as mo-ar (‘more’ rather than mair) to ‘intrude’ into the Scots, with a local pronunciation being emphasised. This is much closer to the twentieth- and twenty-first-century nature of spoken Scots than to the apparent idealisation and ‘purity’ represented in work from the earlier parts of the nineteenth century. 6.6.2  Scots in popular literature The spread of literacy, along with the lowering of the price of newspapers after government taxes, designed to discourage potential working-class readers from being exposed to ‘dangerous’ content, were removed, meant that Scots became voracious readers of daily, weekly, monthly and occasional journals, involving everything from quite sober newspapers through to the fantastic and comic (some sense of this diversity can be gained in Donaldson 1989a, 1989b). We will deal with Scots in the newspapers later in the section; here, however, we will concentrate briefly upon the episodic printing of works of novel length in these journals. This was a respectable way to present fiction to an audience who

expa nsi on wi thi n uni on  | 147 might not always have had the available resources to buy a novel in its bound form, employed by Dickens and many others. The actual nature of how this periodic fiction was distributed and used (whether, for instance, it was unique to one publication or syndicated) differed according to title, place and time (Harris 2007). What can be said, however, is that, both in Scotland and beyond, fiction with a strongly Scottish flavour was welcomed by many people, from a wide range of backgrounds. In the following we will consider two examples of what might be considered non-literary fiction initially published in the press, set in Scotland and with aspects of Scottish language use represented (with the important caveat that both the subject matter and the literary ability of the authors are strikingly different). The first work we will consider is Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk (serialised in the Aberdeen Free Press in 1869–70; published in book form in 1871) by William Alexander (1826–76), a respected northern Scottish journalist and commentator. Use of North-East Scots (‘Doric’) is often very dense, as the following excerpt demonstrates: The compromise made was to send along with Mrs Birse’s parcel of herrings a goodly bundle of dulse; and the lassie went off to Clinkstyle freighted accordingly, ‘An’ that’s my herrin’ is’t. Mary?’ said Mrs Birse, on seeing the basket. ‘An’ dilse, nae less? Na, sirs, but ye’ll be a far-traivell’t ‘oman noo. Did the wifie Wull come hame wi’ yer aunt an’ you, no?’ ‘Ay.’ ‘An’ Jock, nae doot – Is his sair chafts better noo?’ ‘I think they are,’ said the lassie. ‘An’ ye’ve bidden a’ thegither at Macduff, I’se warran’?’ ‘Na; auntie an’ me bidet or lanes in ae hoose, an’ Widow Wull at another.’ ‘Ou yea, I thocht ye wud ’a maetit a throu’ ither – ’t wud ’a made it chaeper for Jock an’ ’s mither, maybe. They cam’ in files to see you, an’ bade throu’ the aifterneen?’ ‘Ay, files.’ ‘An’ fa did yer aunt an’ you bide wi’, syne?’ ‘A muckle house [sic], I wauger, an’ braw fowk? – brawer nor the fowk that Jock Wull an’ ’s midder bade wi’?’ ‘Ay, it was middlin’ muckle.’

148  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a nd ‘It wusna neen o’ the fisher tribe ‘t ye bade wi’, than?’ ‘Na, the man was an aul’ sojer.’ ‘An aul’ sojer! He’s keepit ye in, no?’ ‘But he was blin’.’ ‘An’ ’s wife made a livn’ by keepin’ lodgers – she wud hae mair nor you?’ ‘Na; she keepit a skweel for little littleanes.’ ‘An’ lodg’t you i’ the room en’? – jist that. She wud mak’ a gweed penny i’ the coorse o’ the sizzon that wye, I’se warran’.’ As the goodwife of Clinkstyle leisurely undid the basket, she plied the girl with these and sundry other queries, marked by the like laudable intention of finding out the inner history of the journey to the Wells; and in particular, whether Widow Will had not only been conveyed to and fro by the Gushetneuk folks, but had also shared in their bounty while at Macduff. At last the basket was emptied and its contents scrutinised. (Alexander 1995 [1871]: 40–1)

Alexander’s work, as shown here, is likely to be an accurate representation of rural varieties of North-East Scots in the second half of the nineteenth century; undoubtedly it is informed by native speaker intuition, easily trumping the rather laboured attempts at humour. It could, in fact, be argued that the admirable amount of dialogue found in the novel, combined with the apostrophe-rich (if not overwhelming) ‘conventions’ for spelling Scots, are two of the reasons why it is rarely, if ever, read today, even by people from the north-east. Even when it is read, this is rarely done with pleasure. With all good will, moreover, it is not the most scintillating of reads. What shines through, however, is Alexander’s loyalty to the Scott model. These conventions were even reflected in ‘yellow’ fiction, written rapidly by writers who, if we are being uncharitable, might be described as hacks. A particularly ‘good’ example of this is Lucy the Factory Girl; or the Secrets of the Tontine Close, written by the journalist David Pae (1828–84) and published in instalments in the Dundee Advertiser in the course of 1863 (and by a range of periodicals, not all Scottish, during this period). In its day it was very popular, continuing to be read well into the twentieth century, probably reaching many more people than some of the ‘art’ novels discussed here. As Donaldson (1989a: 88–95) observes, the novel is something of a conundrum in linguistic terms. Despite being set largely in Glasgow, most of the characters speak something

expa nsi on wi thi n uni on  | 149 like Standard English, no matter their social background. Transgressors of this norm are a gang of violent robbers and abductors. These all speak in a kind of ‘stage Cockney’, demonstrating some understanding of the argot of people from that kind of background, largely derived, I suspect, from the works of Dickens and his English contemporaries. It is very likely that many readers of the novel would also have been aware of these conventions and happily applied them in their reading. The only true Scots in the novel is spoken by Hugh the knife-grinder. Interaction between him and Lucy, the abducted child heroine of the book, can be illustrated thus: ‘Isn’t this nice, Hugh?’ asked the girl, looking with sparkling eyes into the beaming face which overhung hers; ‘and I did it all myself. Mother kindled the fire and brought in the kettle, but I put the cloth on the table, and brought the dishes out of the press, and toasted the bread at our own fire!’ ‘Did ye, though?’ cried the gratified Hugh, giving her another kiss. ‘You and mother, Lucy, are just twa angels, and ye hae turned ma hoose into a paradise. Ay are ye!’ he added. ‘Ye are just a wee fairy, Lucy, dae ye ken that!’ ‘A fairy! What is a fairy?’ asked the child, looking puzzled. ‘A fairy,’ replied Hugh, ‘is a little busy bein’ that gangs skippin’ and lauchin’ aboot, and daen a’body guid and makin’ a’ things richt.’ ‘Oh, then you are a fairy, Hugh!’ said the girl in a tone of earnest admiration. ‘Me!’ cried Hugh with a loud laugh. ‘Yes; for you do good to everybody and make everybody happy.’ ‘I dearly love to see a’body happy, at ony rate,’ rejoined the knife-grinder; ‘but I’m no just a fairy, Lucy. A fairy isna a black man like me, but a little glancing sunbeam like you, wi’ blue een, and licht curly, silken hair, and plump red cheeks.’ ‘Then, what are you, Hugh!’ asked Lucy, quite seriously. ‘Oh, I’m just a knife-grinder,’ he answered; ‘just a puir, but I hope an honest, man, wantin’ tae dae as muckle good in the world as he can, and love and be loved by a’body he kens.’ ‘I love you, Hugh,’ said the child artlessly. ‘I believe that, my pet; and if a’ the folk in Glasgo’ was like your mother and you, it waud be a happy, happy toon . . . .’ (Pae 2001 [1863]: 43–4)

150  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd The dialogue is saccharine, to put it mildly. It is very likely, in fact, that Hugh’s character, as well as his language use, is influenced by the topos of saintly, simple worker heroes (and their language) in the writing of, again, Dickens and his contemporaries, such as Joe Gargery in Great Expectations. The Scots employed, however, is fairly genuine, even if it is not particularly Glasgow (Pae was a Fife man). All these novels demonstrate a knowledge of Scots on the part of the authors, no matter their social or geographical origin, as well as assuming at least a passive understanding of the language by the presumed readership. As we will see in the next chapter, this cannot always be assumed. But the language used, and the contexts in which it was employed, may have helped paint Scots into an increasingly sentimental (and sentimentalised) corner. Over time, many Scots speakers are likely to have had increasing difficulties with envisaging themselves in the contexts discussed. 6.6.3  Scots in the press Related to less artistically intended and informed fiction writing in Scots is the language’s use in the press. Although its employment was most prevalent in the democratised press of the second half of the nineteenth century, it is a tradition that continues in a rather attenuated form up until the present time. During its foundation period, Scots was often placed in the mouth (or through the pen) of correspondents of a relatively lowly but intelligent background (couthie or pawkie, as already described in this chapter) by the actual author, generally a journalist (in a sense this is a variant of the methods employed by Alexander and Pae, as described above; those writers produced prose of the present type as well). Social and political attitudes could therefore be displaced from their creator onto a fictionalised ‘type’. This tradition is well covered in Donaldson (1989a, 1989b), so one example must suffice. A working-class native of Aberdeen, James Leatham (1865–1945) was both a contributor to newspapers and someone connected with the technology of newspaper manufacture; he was a convinced socialist, although the views he espoused under the name Airchie Tait were rather closer to the more socially acceptable Liberal Radical tradition which was particularly strong in Scotland at the time. A newspaper published in Peterhead (a major fishing centre in northern Aberdeenshire) carried the following letter (here given in excerpt form; see also Donaldson 1989a, 1989b) on 5 November 1904:

expa nsi on wi thi n uni on  | 151 Dear Editir:–The workin man’s comin in for a heap o’ attrishin ayenoo. Yon man Cawml, the Londin minnyister, gies ’ims kail throu the rikk . . . in a half croon magazeen ’at the workin man dizna see . . . Wael-aff fowk’s rael wullin ti believe ’at the workin man’s a bleck ony wye, an’ fin they wid read Cawml’s harangue they wid say: ‘There ye are. We aye thocht ’at the workin man wiz a lazy, drucken, orra, fool-moo’t, skyte-for-sawdust, an noo here’s a meenyister sayin’t in print, so it maun be true . . .’ An’ noo comes Lord Roseberry upon a different pairt o’ the same job, like, ti tell the workin man sic a dandy time as he hiz. Roseberry, openin a Warkman’s Club at Reidhull on Tiesdy, objeckit ti the han’ workers bein regairdit as the only workin men. He thocht ’at a Minnyster o’ the Croon or a Bishop vrocht far harder than the workin man. I dinna ken for sure: I hae nae bishops upo’ mi veesitin list. I min’ ’at Gladstone ees’t ti gyang linkin awa in Donal Currie’s ships ti Denmark an’ up the Rhine, an’ got into the hat for’t eence wi’ the aul’ Queen. Bit the wark didna seem ti fa’ ahin, fin his back wiz turn’t. An’ I notice’t ’at in the verra heid-heicht o’ the bather wi’ Rooshia Arthur Balfour took his gowff-sticks awa ti Soothamptin wi’ ’im for the Setterday-ti-Monday sport; an’ noo he’s laid up wi’ a sair leg, an’ twa doctirs aten’ ’im. Bit his pey’s rinnin on a’ the same—he hizna hid ti ‘declare on sick’ wi’ his Oddfellows lodge. Gin he wiz a workin man, ilky quarter he tint wid be keepit aff o’ him. An’ I see ’at the Archbishop o’ Kunterberry’s awa linkin tull Amerika wi’ Peerpoint Morgin. So ye may say ’at here’s Cawml ringin doon Lazarus at hame, an’ Kunterbery chumming wi’ Dives abroad. An’ Kunterberry’s toll’s rinnin on tee.

This is, of course, a powerful piece of argumentative (but also comic) prose, the Scots (of a definite north-east cast which is nonetheless readily comprehensible to other Scots speakers) contributing strongly to the strength of the argument. Nevertheless, many of the words used which appear unusual to those reading from a purely English viewpoint, such as minnister or attrishin, are actually eyedialect and cannot of themselves truly be said to represent a local pronunciation (this is also the case with the personal and place-names). What they do do, however, is lend a humorous, perhaps even mocking, experience for readers, who may be able to assume their superiority over the writer (or, alternatively, a sense of fellow feeling in being placed in a situation in which you are perpetually the outsider).

152  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi st o r y o f s co tl a nd 6.7  Gaelic Writing in the Nineteenth Century Given the active evangelisation of the Gàidhealtachd in the period, inevitably a considerable amount of religious materials of various sorts appeared in Gaelic. Other forms of writing were less common, perhaps due to economies of scale, although, as Meek (2007) points out, ‘moral literature’ was often included in a growing number of journals, often associated with particular denominations. Connected in part to this was a growing tradition of using at least some Gaelic in the local press, as literacy in general and the language in particular developed. At the same time, song collection by both outsiders and locals, along with an ongoing tradition of writing verse, often of considerable ability, meant that a public literature could be developed further in the following century. 6.8  Dialect Birth 3: Insular Scots In Chapter 4 we discussed the distinctive nature of North-East Scots in relation to the sociolinguistic forces that brought it into being in the late medieval and Early Modern periods. In the following section we will consider the creation of Insular Scots in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particular attention being paid to the dialects of Shetland. As we discussed in the preceding chapter, Scots speakers have lived in the Northern Isles from a period well before the formal transfer of these territories to Scotland in 1469/1470. The Earl himself had for a lengthy period been a Scots speaker (although we can probably assume, at least until the Stewart takeover, that he would also have had some facility in Norn). This elite Scots would have spread through the upper echelons of society in the islands, with particularly close ties to Orkney (and indeed Kirkwall) as a centre of power). Because of these connections (and the proximity of Orkney to the Scottish mainland, from which its southern islands are readily visible on clear days), trading links were also established throughout both archipelagos; with the formal transfer of power at the end of the fifteenth century, these trading links inevitably increased substantially, with settlement becoming commonplace. Although settlers would likely have come from points across Scotland (and, indeed, beyond), evidence suggests that the east-central dialect area was particularly well represented to begin with, with particular connections to the ports of Dundee in Angus and Kirkcaldy in Fife. From the eighteenth century on, settlement of speakers from the north-east dialect area was also common (inevi-

expansi on wi thi n uni o n  | 153 tably there were also connections, probably of a more intimate nature, between Caithness and Orkney in particular, a relationship supported by the prevalence of the family name Sinclair, associated with the ruling house of Caithness, in the islands). Elements of all of these dialects are to be found in the Shetland dialects, as I have demonstrated in Millar (2016); Knooihuizen (2009) makes similar claims, but perhaps overplays his hand in finding every coincidence in usage evidence of contact and transference, at all levels of language. Other features appear to come from other sources, however. It is something of a cottage industry in the Northern Isles and beyond to stress the influence Norn has had on the modern dialects (for this in its most atheoretical form, see Heddle (2010); Melchers (2012) dissects ‘Nornomania’ in a sympathetic but forensic manner). I have even heard the argument that the modern dialects are descended from Norn, not Scots, despite all evidence to the contrary. Earlier scholars, most notably Marwick (1995 [1929]), argued that Norn ‘became’ Scots gradually, with no radical shift from one variety to the other taking place. It is true that Norn and Scots were quite close relatives and that this undoubtedly affected the levels of, for instance, Norn vocabulary carried into Scots during the period of shift; there are not many linguists today who would claim that such a blending could take place across such a linguistic distance.8 What I wish to propose, following on from our discussion of the ‘death’ of Norn in the last chapter, is that, until the beginning of the eighteenth century, the varieties of Scots spoken in Shetland were essentially mainstream (indeed, they may actually have been quite homogenised and unlocal, probably as a result of the koineisation between similar but distinct dialects during the period when migration and settlement by Scots speakers into Shetland was happening). A considerable number of Norn speakers would have had some command over this variety, naturally with some features at all levels being transferred from their native language. It is likely that the native speaker dialects would have had considerable prestige, surrounded, as sociolinguists term it, by the founder effect (Mufwene 2001; Millar 2016): although native speaker numbers were likely to have been much lower than those who spoke Scots in Shetland as a second language, a claim was being made that theirs was the most accurate form. In the two to three generations following the ‘death’ of Norn, however, a new population of Scots speakers developed – who previously had limited

154  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d contact with, and knowledge of, the local Scots, whether through their social status or their living in remote or isolated places. Their variety would have been much more heavily influenced by Norn than the Scots spoken by the descendants of Scots-speaking immigrants and that of aspirant Norn speakers who had already shifted, probably gradually, to the prestige variety. Some evidence of this heavily Norn influenced Scots is available. For instance, in 1820, Christopher Thomson, a young shipwright, on his first voyage to the Arctic in the Hull whaler Dunscombe, described a ‘whiskey shop’ in Lerwick thus: Around the glimmer, in the ingle, were seated a troop of crones, attired in course grey Woolsey petticoats; over their heads was thrown a dark plaid, just shewing their brown profiles; some of them were knitting; each had a short black pipe, blowing away their ‘’bacca’ and chattering in broad Gaelic. (Flinn 1989: 77)

It is possible, of course, that Thomson was particularly linguistically inept and therefore incapable of recognising that what he was hearing was a close relative of his own speech. I believe, however, that this level of incomprehension was due primarily to the variety being spoken being more distant from English than is contemporary Shetland Scots. This begs the question, however: why do modern Shetlanders not speak this heavily contact-influenced variety? As with the origins of North-East Scots, discussed in Chapter 4, it is likely, in fact, that a mesolectal variety containing considerable amounts of Norn vocabulary, along with some phonological features, was formed through contact between the mainstream Scots already spoken in Shetland and this new basilectal variety. The mesolect contained elements of local identity marking but was less socially marked than the basilect, to the extent that many Shetlanders whose background was primarily Scotsspeaking were willing to pass over to the new, explicitly Shetland, Scots variety. 6.9 Conclusion At the end of the nineteenth century, a large part of the population of nonGaelic Scotland (with the exception of many members of the urban middle classes) spoke Scots and Scottish Standard English in what could be analysed as a state of diglossia (as discussed in Chapter 1). As is witnessed elsewhere, such a state can be inherently stable. Whether this was the case for Scots is largely a matter for the next chapter. The fundamental distinction between rural tradi-

expa nsi on wi thi n uni on  | 155 tional dialects and modernising urban dialects must be recognised, however. The differing attitudes developed towards rural and urban varieties by the middle classes in the course of the century, would bear fruit in the years that followed. Many Scottish people also spoke Gaelic, in the Gàidhealtachd as well as in enclaves in urban centres (in particular, the Clydeside conurbation). While it is easy to be wise after the event, the forces which created the catastrophic decline in speakers experienced by the language in the twentieth century were very likely already present in the haemorrhaging of native speakers from ‘core’ areas, the vacillating views taken to the language by the government and educational authorities and the fact that aspirational Gaelic speakers of childbearing age appear to have chosen not to use the language in front of their children.

7 CONTRACTION AND DISSIPATION: TWENTIETH CENTURY 1

7.1 Introduction

T

he Scottish twentieth century can be analysed as representing a catalogue of decline, at least in relation to the country’s world position as a manufacturing nation. Evident from the end of the preceding century, this decline became increasingly apparent in the wake of the Great War. Poor management, rising costs and ageing hardware encouraged potential customers to take their custom elsewhere. By the end of the century, shipbuilding had practically disappeared from the Clyde (although shipbreaking continued, the skills for one trade being reversed and exploited for the other); shipyards in Japan and, in particular, Korea took up the strain. The production of iron and steel continued, but became increasingly small-scale. As long as the railways used steam as the primary means of propulsion (something which continued until the end of the 1950s in Scotland, in marked contrast to other European countries, where steam was sidelined by electricity and diesel at the very latest in the period following the Second World War) and most homes were heated by coal or coke (with cookers fuelled by coal-derived gas), coal mining remained an important industry. Economies of scale and the introduction of new technologies meant that fewer miners were needed to produce more coal in the new larger pits. Steam was replaced by ‘clean’ propulsion on the railways (which, as I write, primarily involves the exploitation of another non-renewable power source, diesel) and the passing of Clean Air Acts meant that the industry went into steep

c o ntracti on a nd di ssi pa tio n  | 157 decline from the 1960s on. By the end of the century practically no deep mines existed, although some open-cast mining continued. The cloth and thread mills of towns like Paisley were moribund by the 1970s (although some weaving continued in the Borders and, using high-end (and -priced) traditional methods, in the Western and Northern Isles). Other traditional occupations mutated and declined. By the end of the century, only Peterhead in Aberdeenshire remained as a major fishing port. Overfishing and pollution in the southern North Sea, along with Icelandic restrictive practices related to their perception of the size of their national waters, had rendered the North Sea no longer viable as a resource for fish (at least in the short term). While agriculture continued, changing technology and altered work practices meant that far fewer people were needed to make individual businesses profitable. Ancillary trades which were once so commonplace, such as blacksmithing, became the preserve of a very small number of highly dedicated people, committed to the use of their skills in self-consciously artistic production. There is a danger that embracing heritage technology can help suggest that Scotland’s culture, including its languages, are a matter for the past. Governments attempted to replace old industries with new, in particular in the 1960s and 1970s (the development of a number of New Towns in strategic positions across the Central Belt took place at the same time). The manufacture of cars and other vehicles was attempted in a number of places but, through a combination of the high cost of raw materials, poor management decisions and even poorer labour relations, these experiments were abandoned within thirty years of their inception. More successful was the establishment of factories and other places of employment related to the growing computer industry. Sites like Greenock in Renfrewshire were attractive to new technology firms because of their particularly clean air, although the presence of a cheap, largely female and non-unionised, workforce may also, in an economically distressed region, have been a pull factor. The discovery of considerable petroleum reserves under the North Sea in the 1960s, and their exploitation from the 1970s on, represented a new industry which called on skills no longer needed elsewhere, not least in engineering-based trades. Many people from the Central Belt migrated to the Aberdeen area because of this. Scotland as a whole did not directly profit from this bounty, with the considerable oil revenues being handled directly by the Westminster government. The Northern Isles were permitted to make their own deals with

158  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d the oil companies. This was largely because both archipelagos contained refineries within what had previously been a practically pristine environment, coupled with an inevitable influx of outsiders who might alter the islands’ cultural heritage); Aberdeen, where most of the oil companies were based and transport out to the rigs was provided, became something of a boom town in the 1980s. The ways in which the money was used – such as helping to fund tax cuts for the most prosperous members of society (not many of whom lived in Scotland) – may not have been planned with long-term goals in mind. This is strikingly different to the Norwegian use of their oil revenues to fund long-term infrastructure plans. As a result of practically all of these changes, out-migration became particularly prevalent in the twentieth century. There had been large-scale emigration from Scotland from the beginning of the nineteenth century at the very least. At times, as we have seen, this was a result of clearance and rural economic change, both in the Gàidhealtachd and elsewhere. Migration in order to achieve a better life was also a factor in the leaving of Scotland in the last two centuries. Growth in Scotland’s population, through natural fertility and immigration, in particular from Ireland, across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, meant that this emigration did not have a noticeable effect upon the number of residents. During the inter-war period in particular, but also after 1945 to a lesser extent, emigration began to outweigh national population growth. Movement to Commonwealth countries, in particular to Canada, New Zealand and Australia, increased, with highly skilled workers leaving for what at least promised to be better prospects. This was certainly the case with members of my family of that generation. In many ways Scotland has never recovered from this haemorrhage of people and skills. Many migrants from Scotland carried on (and their descendants continue to carry on) a sense of their Scottish identity. With a few exceptions, such as Gaelic in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, however, Scottish languages of whatever sort did not survive the first generation of people born in the new settlements. Thus, as well as losing population, the number of Gaelic and Scots speakers fell globally (the classic study of these developments is Devine 2011). 7.2  Political Allegiance and Cultural Identity While Scottish cultural life identified as specifically Scottish in its nature had become nationally prominent from the nineteenth century on, political expression of nationhood was not strong. As a number of commentators on the period

c o ntracti on a nd di ssi pa tio n  | 159 have said, Scottish particularism went down an unusual route in the nineteenth century, developing from similar sources to those found in Norway, Bohemia and Finland at the time but demonstrating itself not through the expression of a desire to secede from the dynastic state of which it formed a part but rather the desire to be recognised as an equal partner in the Union (rather than a colony of England); England should recognise the many important contributions Scots had made and continued to make to the British imperial project. In the heart of (New) Aberdeen there is a monumental statue of William Wallace, apparently inviting passers-by to enter His Majesty’s Theatre (opened in 1906). On the statue are quotations from Wallace’s statements at his trial, including his famous assertion that he could not be guilty of treason to Edward of England as he was not Edward’s subject. The people who commissioned the statue were not nationalists as we would understand the term. They wished instead to point out the democratic nature of the Scottish contribution to British life (perhaps with a subtext referring to the supposedly subservient and obsequious nature of English society). This has been termed Unionist Nationalism (Morton 1999). While there was occasional talk of Scottish Home Rule in the late nineteenth century, as part of reforms intended to deliver the Irish equivalent, actual Scottish political nationalism, often envisaging a fully independent state, was essentially the preserve of a small number of figures who at least by those outside the bubble were considered cranks; sometimes dangerous cranks. Politically, Scotland was represented by members of British parties: Liberals, Unionists (the Scottish name for the Conservative and Unionist Party) and, later, Labour (the Scottish National Party began to win parliamentary seats after the Second World War but did not become much more than marginal in national political life until the 1970s). The cities and towns generally voted Liberal; after the Great War, many of these constituencies turned Labour. The country interest was generally Unionist, although, by the end of the twentieth century the Liberal Democrats (the successor to the Liberals through merger in 1987 with the short-lived Social Democratic Party) and the Scottish National Party had made inroads into this territory. Dundee and the new town of Cumbernauld bucked the trend for urban Labour support by exhibiting a strong tendency of voting Nationalist in both local and national politics from the 1960s on. The SNP also regularly gained seats in by-elections for ostensibly ‘safe’ Labour seats; while this was often interpreted as a protest vote by habitual Labour supporters who felt that the party hierarchy expected their electoral loyalty without much in the

160  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd way of return (a point supported by the fact that these seats often returned to their Labour allegiance at general elections), there can be little doubt that this tendency was a harbinger for the SNP essentially ousting Labour as the primary party of Scotland in the early twenty-first century. It might be assumed that it would be left-leaning parties which favoured greater Scottish autonomy. But while some Labour politicians supported such a position, many, such as the (aristocratic) radical Tam Dalyell, were dismissive of (if not actively antagonistic towards) Scottish political autonomy. Some Labour politicians, while having a genuinely deep and abiding interest in Scottish culture, including its languages, did not equate this with a specifically Scottish politics. Indeed the failure to set up a Scottish Assembly, with some legislative powers, following a referendum in 1979, was due to the insertion of a clause in the legislation by Labour MPs, designed to thwart the process. Many Unionists and Liberals, while refusing all but the most anodyne expressions of Scottish political distinctiveness, were strongly committed to the culture and languages of Scotland. The actual results of this tendency are not always easy to see; talk can sometimes be dirt cheap. Nevertheless, it is necessary to recognise that the permission (later, obligation) to include discussion of Scottish literary (and musical) culture in schools at the very least maintained a toehold for Scotland’s languages within a (semi-) official context. 7.3  The Languages of Scotland 7.3.1 Gaelic Despite the great cultural achievements mentioned below, Gaelic continued to contract, sometimes precipitately, in terms of native speakers. Although the process was well under way by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the retreat of Gaelic both geographically and in relation to the community which spoke it was at its most drastic and definite in the course of the twentieth century. Ongoing outflow of Gaelic speakers beyond the Gàidhealtachd for employment or educational opportunities inevitably led to many of them staying in their new homes and not passing on their languages (although this is a complex phenomenon, since Gaelic has survived for a number of generations in some families through connections with Gaelic-using churches and other community associations). What is more striking, however, is that the depleted Gaelic-speaking popu-

c ontra cti on and di ssi pat io n | 161 lation remaining in the Gàidhealtachd also began to switch over to English as the language of the home. Sometimes this was due to intermarriage: a gender imbalance existed, with young women being more likely to leave the home area permanently than were young men. Many people from outside the Gàidhealtachd were attracted by (what they perceived as) the culture and lifestyle of the area; many young women from that background married local-born men; while some ‘incomer’ mothers did learn Gaelic, most children born from these unions were (at most) English-dominant bilinguals. The issue runs deeper than this, however. Many native Gaelic speakers (who by this point often possessed native or near-native standard in their English) chose not to pass on the family language to their children. It could be argued that actions like these represent the fruition of years of state-sponsored (but largely oblique) loss of status, in particular following the introduction of compulsory schooling from 1872 on, as detailed on numerous occasions in this book. Something more is present, however. A sense of hopelessness appears to have pervaded large parts of the community, as well as an awareness among aspirant parents and others that many children would have to go elsewhere to gain work and that English was by far the more useful language to have (as often happens, the fact that having native speaker-level English does not necessarily demand lack of in-depth knowledge of other languages does not seem to have been factored into the equation; it would be interesting to see where this type of argument came from). A part of the community associated Gaelic with the bad times now (they hoped) passed; Gaelic buttered no bread. A similar situation elsewhere in Europe been analysed in greater depth by Gal (1979), in relation to Hungarian speakers in small formerly agricultural settlements in the easternmost province of Austria, Burgenland. Culturally these Hungarian speakers were highly distinctive in relation to the local German speaking majority, not least in terms of doctrinal background: the Germanspeaking majority were Catholic or Lutheran, while the Magyars were Calvinist. This also distinguished them from the Hungarians who lived immediately over the border in Hungary, who were overwhelmingly Catholic in background (the Burgenland Magyars had been brought by the Habsburgs from Transylvania to help police the military frontier between their territories and those of the Ottomans). The Burgenland Hungarians remained a people apart essentially until the post-war period, when the Austrian government decided to bring

162  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd i­ndustrial development to what was a rather backward and poor region. This increased the number of German speakers in the immediate area. It became increasingly apparent that some younger Hungarian-speaking women were choosing to marry German-speaking men, possibly because they were wage earners. Gal observed Hungarian-speaking men marrying German-speaking women, probably because of this gender imbalance. Over time, as the Hungarian speakers become fully bilingual, as religious affiliations became increasingly unimportant to many, the distinctiveness of the minority population began to fade. Gal caught the process in an advanced but not final stage. Most of the Magyar population could still speak their ancestral language. Many used it only in a small number of domains: in prayer, in interacting with older people from the community, and when discussing matters that they did not want the authorities to know about. For most, however, almost all other activities were carried out increasingly, or solely, in German. Some Hungarians still remain in these territories, forty years after Gal carried out her fieldwork. For most members of the community, the language subsists in a few words and phrases, and in their names. It is difficult not to see analogues with Gaelic in urban Scotland, even if the language going through shift is the immigrant rather than native language. As the century progressed, therefore, Gaelic as a living (and viable) language became increasingly rare on the mainland, with only pockets remaining. On the islands – particularly the Western Isles – Gaelic was maintained rather more convincingly. It has to be recognised, however, that, in the last few decades, Stornoway and other northern parts of the archipelago have become increasingly Anglophone (we will discuss this further in the next chapter). Gaelic-centred communities are most prevalent to the south, in the Uists and Barra. This apparently inexorable retreat is particularly marked since the twentieth century was, at least on the surface, rather kinder to Gaelic than the preceding four centuries had been. Education in Gaelic became increasingly available in the Gàidhealtachd, as we will see, at primary, secondary and, eventually, tertiary levels. Broadcasting (both radio and television) in Gaelic gradually increased across the century, although it only moved beyond tokenism in the 1990s, following considerable government investment. These processes were accelerated with the advent of devolution for Scotland in 1999. The repercussions of this development will be considered in the next chapter.

c ontra cti on and di ssi pat io n  | 163 7.3.2 Scots Throughout the twentieth century Scots can be seen, in official terms, as, at best, an addendum to the limited protections provided for Gaelic. Spoken rural Scots was encouraged in certain contexts within schools; the Burns Club Federation, an international body whose leading lights were often middle-class power-brokers in local communities, maintained a public presence for particular types of Scots, canonised by them, across the country, at certain times of year (other concerned organisations will be discussed in the next chapter). Some encouragement for local cultural endeavours, such as the recording of song and story, was available from central or local government, even if monetary input was limited. On the other hand, urban varieties, as we will discuss further later in this chapter, were officially to be trodden upon within schools and elsewhere. Urban dialects were, according to the authorities, and many speakers, ugly and corrupt forms of English. What views of this type have done to the dialects and their speakers will be discussed at greater length below. Recently, my daughter told me that two boys in her year at primary school had been publicly criticised by a member of staff for using have went in the playground. I suspect that the boys will remember the attitudes expressed and learn from them. Beyond education, however, Scots had no public presence in Scotland beyond a few fossilised slogans used by various towns, such as Touch ane Touch A’, Better Meddle wi’ the Deil than the Bairns o’ Falkirk (granted, along with arms, in 1906). 7.3.3  Urban Scots Given the increasing urbanisation of Scotland from the early nineteenth century on, we can assume that increasing numbers of Scots speakers lived in an urban, indeed often conurbation, environment. People from a range of geographical (and linguistic) backgrounds lived cheek by jowl; inevitably these contacts would affect both their language and, in particular, that of the first urban generation. Equally inevitably, the living and working conditions of the new proletariat, combined with their latent political power, led to the development of the expression of social discomfort by the politically dominant middle classes, coupled with an impression, rightly or wrongly, of personal and group insecurity. Much of this tension was played out in an ongoing criticism of urban speech as ‘corrupt’ and ‘slovenly’. MacDiarmid was also scathing about

164  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d the speech of urban centres, in particular Glasgow, a view that was also present in the writings of several academics of the period working on Scottish speech (see McClure 2000: 167). In order to understand this, we must investigate the origins of Glasgow Scots and the migratory patterns underlying it. 7.3.2.1  Irish immigration Irish migration, as we have seen, was a major demographic factor in Scotland from the 1840s on. This had a considerable effect on Scottish society and, indeed, language use. As far as we can tell, there have been transfers of population between Ireland and Scotland (and vice versa) throughout recorded history. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century migration of Irish people to Scotland arguably represents the most intense example of this migration, however. The Potato Blight in the 1840s, while causing considerable distress in Scotland and other places, was brutal in Ireland, particularly since its results largely fell upon a Catholic peasantry; what charity there was was dispensed by a Protestant church whose ministers were not always willing to overlook doctrinal disagreement when distributing urgently needed aid. These structural issues were not aided by the laissez-faire views of the Westminster government, a set of beliefs which held that interference in the natural rise and decline of human economies and production might result in a population who were not willing to maintain themselves by their own labour. Inevitably, those who could get out did so, increasing greatly the Irish populations of the United States and the British Empire, as well as founding major colonies across England and the Scottish Central Belt. Many of the Irish arrived dirt poor, literally selling the shirts off their backs. The poorest were almost universally Catholic. A moral panic among some Scots about the threats to ‘decent’ Scottish Presbyterian society by the ‘invasion’ of indigent papists was probably inevitable (a moral panic to which the Church of Scotland and other Protestant organisations contributed, as discussed in Paterson 2000). Despite the rhetoric of the time, there were a number of Scottish Catholics. Some members of the gentry and nobility were recusant; there were pockets of popular Catholic faith in the north-east, the western Highlands and the southern islands of the Outer Hebrides. The number of people involved was small, however. Most Scots, I suspect, would never have met a Scottish recusant Catholic; many might not have known that such groups existed. Catholicism was therefore perceived by many as alien, and by some as a threat. With the influx of large numbers of Irish Catholics, the tension felt between leaders and

c ontracti on a nd di ssi pa tio n  | 165 adherents of both traditions could be quite intense – even violent – at times (although see Bruce 2014, where he suggests that too much has been, and is, made of this); elements of the hatreds which underlay the conflict subsist among a minority today. The temperature of the ongoing controversy was heightened significantly by the presence of Irish Protestant immigrants, largely, like most of the Catholics, from the nine counties of Ulster, since they carried the bitter tensions of their homeland with them, along with their sense of superiority through being highly sought-after skilled men in contrast to the unskilled poverty and desperation of their Catholic compatriots in a novel urban environment. The bigotry which at least until recently blighted community life in large parts of the Central Belt stems from these tensions, even if it rapidly took on a life of its own. The separation between Catholics and Protestants in Scotland was never total, even if most Catholics in the Central Belt at least were educated in separate institutions. Indeed, the strength of Scottish Labour and related parties and the Trades Union movement in Scotland lay in a combination of both populations. The linguistic results are rather more difficult to comment on, except in relation to the development of some urban varieties of Scots. Speakers of Irish certainly lived in Scotland throughout the period; unlike Gaelic speakers, however, their religious associations with a Latin-using Church inevitably made them less visible than the Gaelic-using churches in the Lowlands made the speakers of that language. It would be very surprising if the language lasted more than two generations after settlement, particularly since Irish in Ireland was going into a precipitate decline in any event. Ulster Scots and vernacular Ulster English are likely, it could be postulated, to have merged with local varieties of Scots and English in the same ways as their speakers did, although that does not mean that these varieties did not have some influence upon the successor varieties. 7.3.2.2  Dialect birth: development of Glasgow Scots The dialects of Glasgow and its surrounding satellite towns have long been a matter both of middle-class opprobrium and scholarly interest (which has often also been negative about the dialects’ merits). Urban West-Central Scots, as mentioned above, has for long been seen by educational authorities and others as ‘slovenly’, ‘corrupt’ and evidence for both limited and dangerous, societythreatening, intelligence. Several scholars, and many others who have learned from them, have stressed that these varieties are not truly Scots, instead being a combination of the original local traditional Scots dialect, colloquial English, in

166  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd particular Irish English, along with influence from Gaelic and, potentially, Irish. The last influence was considered problematical because of perceived cultural differences (indeed, assumed inequalities, long held in relation to Irish Catholic immigrants, as discussed above). In a field like dialectology, whose origins lie in the nineteenth-century Romantic quest for the ‘genuine’ or ‘pure’, apparently mixed varieties were, until quite recently, seldom welcomed. We have to ask ourselves, however, what truly distinguishes Clydeside dialects from the traditional dialects that surround them? As discussed in Millar (2016), some phonological innovations, such as the vowel in rare and similar contexts (normally /er/ in the surrounding dialects, but often /ɛr/ in working class Glaswegian speech) and discourse features (such as I lived there twenty year, so) are arguably Irish in origin, or at least are a product of the tensions between speakers of Irish English and West Central Scots in a constrained space. It is perhaps in vocabulary use that the urban variety most distinguishes itself from its rural equivalents, however. Partly this is due to situation. Much rural vocabulary has no place in the town. Ties to agriculture or other traditional occupations are at best attenuated. The connection between product and producer ceases to be straightforward. It would be unreasonable to expect much transfer and, although there is in fact some, this is limited. What is striking, however, is that, as Macafee (1994) points out, traditional dialect lexis retained in Glasgow speech is apparently going through a process of attrition, with her younger informants demonstrating significantly less knowledge of traditional variety; they are also more likely to use the term slang for their dialects than older informants (we will return to some of these points in the next chapter). From personal observation we can be practically certain that this lack of knowledge or recognition has not been reversed in the decades which followed this seminal survey.2 It could be argued that a combination of the mixing of people from different backgrounds, linguistic and cultural, the dislocation urbanisation causes, the end of industrial society in the region and the subsequent breakdown of traditional working-class communities, never mind the years of middle-class criticism of the dialect (and fear of its speakers) has led to the gradual loss of the dialect’s heart. Essentially the same points can be said of the urban varieties of Edinburgh, Dundee and, most recently developed, the toonser spikk of Aberdeen. Many of the ‘unScots’ features of Glaswegian dialect might, therefore, actually necessarily represent evidence of the loss of Scots material at the centre of a

c o ntra cti on and di ssi pat io n  | 167 speaker’s usage, rather than forced loss of native features to be replaced by the usage of an undesired ‘other’. These phenomena are not confined to urban dialects, as we will see in the next chapter. 7.3.4  The ‘death’ of Latin Until at least the end of the seventeenth century, Latin remained the lingua franca of the small but significant educated elite of Europe. With the rise of France as a major cultural and intellectual centre during that period, vernacular languages began to challenge Latin’s status as the preferred language of international interchange. Des Cartes, for instance, published largely in his native French. Writers in English, German and other languages followed suit. Nevertheless, a knowledge of Latin remained a prerequisite of a life of scholarship. Moreover, from being the key to understanding writings on a particular topic, the knowledge of Latin came to be seen as a marker of intelligence and, eventually, a sign of middle-class status. For centuries, Scottish education had a proud Classicist tendency; this meant both that the tendency for learning Latin was more widespread and also more prized. These prestige associations meant that the learning of Latin continued for long after its actual communicative purpose had disappeared. I am likely to be among the last who benefited from this tradition (at least within the state educational system). As a linguist, being introduced to the language, so strikingly different in morphosyntax from English, has been immensely helpful. I am not sure if my contemporaries who went on to other callings would agree with this. McLean (2014) provides a recent discussion of some of these matters. 7.4  Scottish Culture and the Languages of Scotland Throughout the modern era the primary place in Scottish life where autochthonous varieties maintained a visible role was cultural. Because Gaelic gained some official protection in the twentieth century, but also had a limited number of people who could speak the language (never mind read and write it), it was Scots whose non-official cultural presence was particularly marked, especially before the 1960s.

168  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d 7.4.1  Scots and literature In the third decade of the twentieth century, the distinguished poet and critic Edwin Muir (1887–1959), originally of Orcadian origin, wrote Scott and Scotland, a short book – a long essay in many ways – which would have profound effects upon how Scots as a literary vehicle could (and should) be used (Muir 1982 [1936]). While celebrating the Scots literary heritage of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Muir traces the ‘downfall’ of Scots as a literary language until it became a vehicle only for sentimental expression by the time of Burns. It had become, as he termed it, ‘dialect Scots’, incapable of expressing theoretical or other elevated notions (in a sense, the kailyard). This incapability meant, Muir claimed, that a ‘national’ Scottish literature could only really be expressed using either English or Gaelic. Even then, he suggests, the idea of Scotland presently possessing a truly national culture, as it had in the Early Modern period, was questionable. For such a brief document, Muir’s book had, and has, considerable impact. To say that his views were unwelcome to many is something of an understatement. Possibly the most outraged, and probably most personally hurt, was C. M. Grieve (1892–1978), who wrote largely under the name (and in many ways alter ego) of Hugh MacDiarmid (for a discussion by a younger contemporary, see Bruce 1980). Over the previous decade Grieve had become a major figure in what was often termed the Scottish Renaissance, an attempt to revivify Scottish Literature in a contemporary, Modernist, context. He and Muir had been close collaborators and, it would appear, friends. Muir’s book ended this collaboration and friendship in an open quarrel which continued until their deaths, even though Muir noted, explicitly and on a number of occasions, that MacDiarmid’s poetry should be singled out as a partial exception to his thesis. Ironically, MacDiarmid/Grieve himself was often disparaging of Burns, preferring to preach a ‘back to Dunbar’ ideology (McClure 2000: 100), equating what he was doing to the achievements of the first Scottish Renaissance in an independent Scotland (whether his own work actually matched and produced this renunciation and reconnection is another matter). The quarrels of poets are rarely bread and butter issues for most speakers of any language poets use (and abuse), of course. It is worth giving the contradictions (and achievements) of the Scottish Renaissance some space in relation to the use and development of Scotland’s vernaculars during this period, however.

c o ntra cti on and di ssi pat io n  | 169 If there was an abiding ideology related to the native vernaculars inherent in the 1920s Renaissance, it was that Scots and Gaelic should not be reserved for folk poetry, but instead be employed, without debate, in the same way as English in an artistically contemporary and, on occasion, demanding way. The late nineteenth-century achievement of ‘Frédéric Mistral’, the first French Nobel Laureate for Literature, in forging his native Occitan (which he termed Provençal) into a credible vehicle for high literary ambition even as the language itself came under increasing pressure from the centripetal linguistic policies of the French state, undoubtedly acted as a spur in Scotland, although the two contexts were probably not as similar as observers at the time are likely to have thought. 7.4.1.1  Scots as a literary language: synthesis? An ambition, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, to raise Scots to the Ausbau status Gaelic possessed was inherent in the Scots elements of the Scottish Renaissance project. Scots had to achieve such a status, certainly in competition with Gaelic, but more vitally with (Scottish) Standard English. An argument could have been made in the early to mid-twentieth century that this would have been a particularly good time for writers in Scots to close ranks, if nothing else as a reaction against the views espoused (or channelled) by Muir. It was at this point, however, that MacDiarmid opened a second front in his ‘campaign’: an attack on poetry in the Scottish dialects rather than in a Standard Scots which did not, of course, exist at the time. Most poetry in any language at any time is unlikely to be wonderfully good, even when we work our way beyond the ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ principle. The use of dialect in verse in a society where mass literacy in the state language is the norm inevitably means that dialect poetry will be represented by occasional poems, as the perusal of local papers across Scotland demonstrates; quality will inevitably be variable. Weddings are marked, loved ones are commemorated, well-known locals are celebrated; the occasional nature of the verse is more important than its artistic ‘quality’. Nonetheless, there has been, and remains, a tradition of written verse in local Scots dialects intended to have a longer appreciation than a brief perusal in the local weekly newspaper and possessing something other than an ephemeral quality. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a particularly striking example of this tendency could be found in the verse of Charles Murray (1864–1941). Murray grew up in

170  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a nd north-east Scotland but spent most of his working life in South Africa (although by the time MacDiarmid’s criticism began, he had retired to Banchory, no more than thirty kilometres from where he was born). No matter where he lived, he chose to write poetry demonstrating some ability in his native ‘Doric’, largely connected to subjects related to his home territory, occasionally in a rather kailyard manner (although, at his best, his work, while sentimental, is of considerable applicability to contexts other than that of his childhood). His work has been consistently anthologised and has achieved a popularity far beyond his cauf kintra. In work published in the 1920s and 1930s, MacDiarmid was scathing of the verse of Murray in particular and dialect writers in general, accusing them of a conservative representation of a Scotland not in tune with the vibrant forward-looking country he had embraced (see McClure 2000, which deals with this issue in some depth). For our purposes, it is important to note he had also begun to formulate his own view of what written Scots should be: a variety which represented all users without being tied to any one place (in a similar way to how Aasen designed what became Nynorsk in Norway). He termed this new envisaged variety synthetic Scots, by which he meant one which had been created from a variety of different sources through synthesis; the unfortunate association with artificiality was, as far as we can tell, not considered (although it was an association played with by some of MacDiarmid’s disciples in later years). Insofar as we can actually see MacDiarmid carrying out this proposal systematically, synthetic Scots appears to be the use of dictionaries and other resources to create a form of language which he found appropriate to his ambition as well as aesthetically pleasing (a particularly astute analysis of these processes can be found in McClure (2000: 89–94), which presents a striking number of examples of his work processes; Murison (1980) is a seminal analysis of the material). It was quite acceptable to employ material from more than one dialect, a point made manifest in his ‘Eemis stane’, where the first word of the title appears to be representative of North East Scots phonology, but the latter represents a pronunciation common in most other dialects. These practices are markedly different from those carried out by language planners, however, where ease of use and acquisition, along with rather more numinous associations, such as ‘appropriateness’, are paramount. Although McClure makes a good case for seeing MacDiarmid’s innovations as representing a genuine attempt to create a national language, it is difficult to see how this could have been achieved with

c ontracti on a nd di ssi pa tio n  | 171 the materials he employed. Like a great many artists, MacDiarmid overestimated his importance in the scheme of things; in this matter as in many others, moreover, Grieve may not have been entirely serious. MacDiarmid’s language planning initiative (again, with the proviso that calling his ideas ‘planning’ is problematical at a variety of levels) was never truly attempted, perhaps centrally because he generally eschewed Scots as a dominant medium in his poetry from the 1930s on. Something of the same spirit can be seen nearer to actual completion in the work of the next generation of poets dedicated to the employment of Scots (or Lallans, as they often termed it) who would have considered themselves to be MacDiarmid’s disciplines (or at least were strongly influenced by his principles). A particular striking case is Alexander Scott (1920–89), a poet from the north-east of Scotland who rarely, if ever, used the dialects of his home region in his verse. Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915–75) took this tendency to its logical extreme by using often highly experimental Scots (which some might see as essentially artificial) in his poetry while not actually being a Scots speaker himself (he was a New Zealander of Scottish heritage). Robert Garioch (1909–81), an Edinburgh writer, less renowned than Smith although (in my opinion) exhibiting more depth and ability, was able to combine Modernist experimentation with a ‘folk’ idiom that brought him closer to Burns than many of his peers; the same was true for the earlier poet, William Soutar (1898–1943), whose verse (and life) was intimately and, in the end, involuntarily, associated with his native Perth. Part of this renewed activity in representing and ‘pushing’ Scots as an independent language can be associated with the foundation of the Makars’ Club in the immediate post-war years, an association strongly identified with its journal Lallans, which published (and, indeed, publishes) poetry and prose in Scots, along with reviews and other news, all written in Scots. Its successor organisation, the Scots Language Society, provided revisions in 1985. We will discuss these features further in the next chapter. This society was the first of its kind to establish a style sheet for Scots for its contributors, arguably the first attempt at language planning for the language. We will discuss these issues further in the next chapter. 7.4.1.2  Scots in narrative and drama Until relatively late in the twentieth century the models for using Scots in creative prose were essentially those of the nineteenth century. With a few exceptions,

172  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d Scots was used as ancillary colour, primarily in dialogue and from the mouths of the elderly and the ‘lowly’. In the wake of the Renaissance some attempts at using Scots in narrative became available. These were generally shorter works of fiction, possibly both because writers were experimenting with what was, by its nature, an essentially novel process in an unstandardised language (and therefore much more time-consuming than using a well-established variety such as Standard English) and that the primary publishing outlet, Lallans, would (and does) only normally publish brief pieces of prose. A striking example of this process is ‘The Mennans’ by Robert McClellan (1907–85), demonstrating considerable ability (indeed, dexterity) in his usage of a ‘natural’ rather than ‘literary’ Scots, particularly appropriate because the adult narrator is focused upon memories of himself as a young boy, as demonstrated in this excerpt: The Lowp was waur. It was doun a wee frae the otter hole, across a muckle rock, whaur the hail braid water o Clyde, sae gentle faurer up, shot through awteen [sic] twa straucht black banks like shinie dark-green gless; and the space atween was sae nerra that a man could lowp across. It wasna an easy lowp, faur abune the pouer o a laddie, yet ye fand yersell staunin starin at it, fair itchin to hae a try. A halflin frae Nemphlar had tried it ance, in a spate when the rocks were aa spume, and he had landit short and tummlet in backwards, and it was nae mair nor a meenit afore his daith-skrech was heard frae Stanebyres Linn itsell, risin abune the thunner o the spate like a stab o lichtnin. (McLellan 1990: 20–1)

McLellan was primarily known as a dramatist who, in plays such as Jamie the Saxt (first performed 1937), used Scots as a vehicle for all his Scottish characters, no matter their social origin. Nevertheless, drama, by its nature, is dialogue; ‘The Mennans’ is, at heart, a spoken piece (even if it is probably an internal monologue: it was originally written for radio broadcast). It is also set in the relatively distant past in McClellan’s rural home of early childhood, before his family moved to what was developing into a rather leafy suburb of Glasgow. It was, in fact, only in the late twentieth century that extended prose in Scots began to be published, a topic to which we will return in the next chapter. An exception to this is the translation of the New Testament into a supple and highly literary Scots (with its own rather elaborate spelling system) by W. L. Lorimer (1885–1967), edited by his son, R. L. C. Lorimer (1918–96) and published in 1983. The translation’s popularity, it could be argued, was and is

c ontracti on a nd di ssi pa tio n | 173 due both to its attraction to a middle-class audience (something of a Christmas favourite, perhaps, for a bookish uncle or aunt, it might be suggested) and in particular to the ministry.3 How often Lorimer’s translation is actually used from the pulpit is difficult to say, although I suspect that any such use depends on the characters and origins of both minister and congregation. I have heard of its being used in some pulpits across the north-east (although this tends to depend on the interests of the minister). At my own wedding, one reading derived from this source, given, in part, below: 1 Corinthians 13:1 Gin I speak wi the tungs o men an angels, but have nae luve i my hairt, I am no nane better nor dunnerin bress or a rínging cymbal. Gin I have the gift o prophecie, an am acquent wi the saicret mind o God, an ken athing ither at man may ken, an gin I have aa that, but hae nae luve i my hairt, I am nocht. Gin I skail aa my guids an graith in awmous, an gin I gíe up my bodie take be brunt in aiss – gin I even dae that, but have nae luve i my hairt, I am nane the better o it.

Glaswegian and ‘Doric’ Gospels, designers for a more popular audience, have also appeared over the last thirty years. The younger Lorimer was himself an author and translator, his translation of Macbeth into Scots (Shakespeare 1992a) being a particularly fine example. Interestingly (and unusually for Scots), we possess a comparison translation from the same time by David Purves (Shakespeare 1992b). While not without its merits, the latter is less idiomatic and ‘natural’ than the former, with word-for-word transfer from one variety to the other being commonplace (I am grateful to Sandra Weyland for these observations; Corbett (1999: 156–8) provides contrary arguments). Thus, translation into Scots, so much a feature of the contemporary literary scene in the language, has a considerable history of experimentation underlying it (in poetry, this goes further back, as can be seen in MacDiarmid’s Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle). Millar (2018) discusses a number of further modern Scottish plays represented entirely in Scots, including from the popular, often amateur, tradition. Thus, while, as far as we can tell, since any conclusion is based primarily on a combination of individual observations and conclusions, its speaker numbers declined, the opportunities for the use of Scots expanded. These were primarily placed in a ‘high’ cultural framework, however. A parallel use in the artefacts

174  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd of popular literature was also continued from the nineteenth century; it was developed in unexpected directions. 7.4.2  Scots and popular culture The question arises in the twentieth century as it did in the nineteenth: to what extent did a large literate public consume literature written in Scots? It is, of course, difficult to tell, but, given the perceived (indeed often real) difficulty in terms of both the language and subject matter of some of this production, it is unlikely to have percolated far into the general consciousness, beyond an awareness of, say, who MacDiarmid was and, given his rather distinctive appearance, what he looked like. This is not an absolute dichotomy, of course. My great uncle, Jimmy Stewart (1894–1969) was an autodidact cabinet maker. From what I have been told, he treasured his well-thumbed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, his Burns and (unusually for someone from his political background, perhaps) a complete set of the works of Sir Walter Scott, along with the Bible and a range of socialist tracts. He also professed himself a great admirer of MacDiarmid. My mother believed that this had more to do with MacDiarmid being a communist than any in-depth acquaintance with his work. That does not mean that more ‘popular’ literature was not available in Scots, however. What we defined when discussing the nineteenth century as the ‘Scott model’ for the language continued to be the norm in popular literature, whether that was accessed in book or periodical form (although it should be noted that, unlike the nineteenth century, newspapers, with a few exceptions, such as The Sunday Post, were not as likely to run short stories or novel excerpts in any language other than Standard English than had previously been the case). Most readers in Scotland, and many from abroad (including, but not confined to, the exile communities), were exposed to Scots in a variety of ways, through novels, short stories, ‘folk poetry’, reminiscences and other genres. Writers who had had little or no exposure to ‘natural’ forms of Scottish speech also produced ‘Scots’, often to (not necessarily intentional) comic or jarring effect. In the latter case (and often in the former), the Scots used was predominantly conventional in terms of a small pool of lexical, phonological and structural features which are known and readily understood by a widely based audience. In newspapers and other periodicals, the tradition of employing Scots in cartoons continued and indeed proliferated. Possibly the best representation of the Glasgow humorist tradition can be found in the work of William ‘Bud’

c o ntracti on a nd di ssi pa tio n  | 175 Neill (1911–70), whose cartoons graced Glasgow’s newspapers for decades, demonstrating the considerable wit and linguistic dexterity of Neill’s imagination and his love for the speech and characteristics of ordinary Glaswegians. Most famously, he created Lobey Dosser (literally, ‘someone who sleeps rough in a communal hallway’), who is the Sherriff of Calton Creek, a community of Glaswegians who inexplicably have found themselves in the Wild West. All the characters speak Scots except for Rid Skwerr the spy and the villain, Rank Bajin, who speaks Standard English throughout in the way a melodrama villain would (his name is, of course, Scots – rank bad ane ‘extremely bad one’). The level of inventiveness in the characters can be seen in G. I. Bride, who pops up regularly but unexpectedly, holding her baby beside a mode of transport and asking ‘Diz this go the lenth o Pertick?’ Most striking, perhaps, are the ongoing comic ‘soap operas’ published weekly in the Dundee-based Sunday Post, The Broons (from 1936) and Oor Wullie (from 1937). Both set in a fictional city named occasionally as Auchentogle or Auchenshoogle (which bears a striking resemblance to Dundee), the former in a traditional tenement flat, the latter in a ‘new’ council scheme on its outskirts (characters from one strip occasionally appear in the other, so the two locations cannot be distant from each other), both strips inhabit a ‘permanent now’ which has only changed marginally since the 1930s (smoking used to be normal in the strips; it is no longer seen; drink used to be taboo, but is now occasionally featured in social settings). Paw Broon, for instance, has a Kitchener moustache (his father, Granpaw Broon, bears a striking resemblance to Andrew Carnegie). An old-style patriarchal society is apparently portrayed, although this is partly subverted: Maw Broon is a force to be reckoned with in ways that Paw Broon is not, for instance. It is difficult not to like the strips: they are concerned, in the end, with love and tolerance of a variety of types. Their ‘urban kailyard’ setting does paint Scots into a ‘heritage’ corner, however. From at least the time of the well-known music hall entertainer Sir Harry Lauder (1870–1950), popular throughout the English-speaking world (indeed in many ways the first ‘pop star’, his gramophone records being distributed widely and consumed repeatedly with great pleasure), Scots has also had a presence on the popular stage, as well as on the radio, television and in motion pictures. Lauder is an interesting case because he combined both a couthie Scotsspeaking persona and absolute loyalty to the British establishment, a trait which MacDiarmid touches on in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. The ‘comedy

176  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a nd Jock’, mean and (often) drunken, latterly the lover of a poor diet, is a commonplace of non-Scottish comedy to the present day, normally expressed through the use of (sometimes very sketchy) Scots (generally urban in nature), often carried out by people who should really know better (and would never think of using similar material in relation to members of other distinctive ethnic groups). This stereotype blends easily into another: the highly intelligent but mentally unstable Scot, much loved by soap operas and other popular drama forms, again foregrounded by the use of a limited number of Scots features in speech. Comedians (and comic actors) also spread knowledge of the urban vernacular during the period: most notably Stanley Baxter (1926–) in his Parliamo Glasgow sketches, along with Rikki Fulton (1924–2004) and Jack Milroy (1915–2001) in their Francie and Josie personas, as well as, later, in the many characters Fulton assumed in the periodic comedy sketch show Scotch and Wry. From a different, more stand-up oriented tradition came artists like Chic Murray (1919–85) and Billy Connolly (1942–; although the marked Glasgow features in Connolly’s speech have, in my experience, gradually disappeared as he has become part of the establishment). The dialect was also increasingly audible and visible on radio and television. To take one example, the tough Glasgow detective series Taggart (which had a song named ‘No mean city’ as its theme) featured an eponymous Glasgow dialect speaker as its main character.4 Most of his colleagues spoke Scottish Standard English – admittedly this might be a recognition of the increasingly common induction of university graduates into the profession, which previously involved largely working-class recruits rising through the ranks through hard work, ability and training on the job. Although most Scottish popular singers maintained a mid-Atlantic accent, Alex Harvey (1935–82), regularly employed his Glasgow demotic when singing, no matter the subject matter (those of a strong constitution might like to sample his version of Jacques Brel’s ‘Next’ on the Sensational Alex Harvey Band’s 1973 album of the same name).5 7.4.3  Urban dialects: artistic use Thus, many features of Scots in popular culture are urban in nature. As we saw above, Glasgow dialect had negative associations; this may explain why it was not often used in ‘high’ literature.

c o ntra cti on and di ssi pat io n | 177 7.4.3.1  Urban Scots in its creative space This disapproval of urban Scots did not, naturally, mean that urban Scots was not written in the twentieth century (although supposedly urban works, such as the various Wee Macgreegor novels, set in Glasgow and its environs before and during the First World War, generally portray a spoken Scots not obviously different from rural usage; this is likely to be due to work of this type being descended stylistically from the kailyard tradition by a variety of routes). As is often the case with urban varieties, it is in humour and in ‘yellow literature’ that first written representations occur. Disregarding literary value for the moment, the best-known early example of this phenomenon is A. McArthur and H. Kingsley Long’s No Mean City (originally published in 1933; attribution of authorship of specific passages is problematical with this novel due to a complex editorial process), a purported exposé of the ‘razor gangs’ of the Gorbals – a notorious slum on the south shore of the Clyde in central Glasgow – possibly in the inter-war era. The language use in the novel is essentially conservative, with Standard English being employed in narrative and the local vernacular in dialogue: When she paid her mother the usual ten shillings out of her last week’s pay she handed the money over with a defiant laugh. ‘What Ah’m gaun tae dae next week,’ she observed, flippantly, ‘is more than Ah can tell you, for Ah took the sack at the fruit-shop this mornin’.’ Her father was at home at the time and this announcement, or perhaps the manner of it, was the cause of the final quarrel. ‘Whit’s that ye say?’ he shouted angrily. ‘You’ve ta’en the sack? An’ what for, Ah wid like to know? Dae ye think ye’re gaun out jazzin’ wi’ yon little pimp o’ a Bobbie Hurley? No bliddy fears, ye’re no’! You’ll find another job, my lass, and until you’ve found one, you’ll stop at home to help your mother, dae ye hear?’ (McArthur and Kingsley Long 1956 [1933]: 162)

The language of the dialogue is striking in a number of ways. Although this is a short excerpt, it represents a fair approximation of the ways in which local vernacular is treated. Most local features – such as dae ‘do’ – are related to function words. More lexical features, such as home, are represented by the Standard English alternate, rather than by hame. While this particular lexical choice would not be normal in the dialect represented, the use of know rather than mainstream Scots ken may be more representative. Interestingly, the (mild)

178  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d swear word bloody is represented by its Scots equivalent, thereby causing (perhaps) fewer problems for the publishers (although the furore associated with the use of the word in Shaw’s Pygmalion was several decades in the past by the time of publication). In an age of mass availability of education for people from working-class rather than middle-class backgrounds, literary stylists were attracted to the idea of using their native urban dialect. Since the Second World War, free university education and (relatively) generous grants had meant that many people who would not previously have been able to afford to attend university now could do so. Beginning in the 1950s, this wave of writing often involved the ‘phonetic’ representation of speech, in particular in the blurring of word boundaries. A fairly conventional example is ‘The Coming of the Wee Malkies’ by Stephen Mulrine (1937–). Here is the first stanza: Haw missis, whit’ll ye dae when the wee Malkies come, If they dreep doon affy the wash-hoose dyke, An pit the hems oan the sterrheid light, An play wee heidies oan the clean close wa, Missis, whit’ll ye dae? (Rough attempt at translation: ‘Hey, Missus, what will you do when the little thugs come, if they let themselves down by their fingers from the wash-house wall, and smash up the upper landing light, and play keepie-uppie on the clean internal corridor wall: Missus – what will you do? Malkie [i.e. Malcolm] Fraser is Glasgow rhyming slang for razor, but came to refer, particularly in its shortened form, to violent, in particular juvenile, offenders against social norms.)

Strangely, this poem was (and probably is) used regularly in schools by teachers who would otherwise spend much time criticising and attempting to ‘correct’ their pupils’ speech: the Pinkerton Syndrome in the modern world. It is striking, however, that the tenement life described has long since receded into the past; its use now can appear pure nostalgia. Other writers, most notably the late Tom Leonard, took Glaswegian dialect into more striking linguistic and conceptual areas. Others, such as the late Edwin Morgan, chose to use both urban and traditional Scots in an essentially Standard English framework. While much of this production was well thought

c o ntra cti on and di ssi pat io n | 179 of, it would be difficult to say to what extent these experiments encouraged the use of urban Scots beyond its traditional entertainment heartland. 7.4.4  The quest for, and creation of, ‘genuine’ popular culture As well as ‘serious’ urban literature, there were also attempts at approaching the ‘living tradition’ of folk culture (and language) in relation to forms of general culture, both as a thing in itself and also as a bridge towards a more self-consciously ‘genuine’ political and artistic culture. As is undoubtedly the case with most territories where there has been a lengthy and relatively peaceful cultural development, Scotland has carried forward into the modern age a strong folk culture (or folk cultures). This survival has inevitable knock-on effects on language use, particularly in relation to song and poetry (if the two can be truly distinguished, perhaps especially in the Gaelic tradition (see, for instance, MacAulay 1976: 46; also Newton 2013) and other literary forms. Other features of traditional lifestyles – in particular, perhaps, occupations, but also games of various sorts – also encouraged the survival of lexis. In literary terms, both native vernaculars have received a great deal of their status from the use of this ‘living tradition’ in ‘art’ contexts. Sir Walter Scott both employed folk traditions in his ‘original’ writing and edited (at times ‘polished’) folk verse of some quality, as did collaborators, such as James Hogg, who had more direct connection to the folk tradition, perhaps (the first chapters in Buchan 1997 present a critical discussion of these endeavours). Similar collection and employment activities were at work in the Gaelic tradition from at least the eighteenth century on, as several of the contributors to Dunnigan and Gilbert (2013) point out. The association of folk literature with Romantic notions of ‘truth’ and ‘authenticity’, expounded by literary and political members of the intelligentsia of so many European nations (particularly those not associated with their own nation state) in the nineteenth century was potentially damaging, however, there was a danger of the language (or languages) being painted into an ideological corner by the forces of agricultural ‘improvement’ and industrialisation rendering much that was memorable in the past opaque. There were strong, and often impressive, attempts (particularly for Scots) to revivify and reorient the tradition towards this new reality (see, for instance, Gibson (2013) and Bennett (2013)). With a few exceptions, often comic in nature, such as ‘Ye canny fling pieces oot a twinty storey flat’ (written in the early

180  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a nd 1960s by Adam McNaughton; popularised by Matt McGinn), it is difficult to gauge the extent to which this activity truly affected the Scottish popular culture mainstream. Again, particularly with Scots, these revivals produced an unusual phenomenon: people who sing (or occasionally write) in the local vernacular but habitually speak only Scottish Standard English (see Millar 2010b). A similar phenomenon is a regular experience for those attending local or national Mòds (festivals of music and poetry): Gaelic songs being sung by choirs whose members often cannot speak the language. These activities are not, of course, bad in themselves. It is difficult to see a direct connection between them and language maintenance, however. People regularly meet up to sing and speak Esperanto, Quenya or even Klingon. On occasion, however, it is the bearer of the living tradition who has gained prominence, rather than his or her interpreter. Travellers (often in the past known as Tinkers) have played an honourable part in the preservation of traditional Scottish culture, using Scots, Gaelic and elements of Cant, Romani and Irish in their songs and stories. The late Stanley Robertson was the first person from the tradition to be innovative, moving his work into the mainstream of ‘art’ literature, here using the word cane ‘house’, derived from Romani: On een o his usual pilgrimages tae his favourite village he wis bent on haeing a guid time for a week or twa. Whar the dancing burn cam doon in cascades ower the small rapids, Robbie wid aye set up his tent cos this wis a special spot tae him, and he cried it ‘Robbie’s Cane’, meaning Robbie’s hame. (Robertson 1994)

Gaelic ‘high literature’ was less conflicted about the use of ‘folk’ culture in its output. 7.4.5  Gaelic and literature Unlike with writing in Scots, where English is a near relative and competitor, with Gaelic writing, any claim of linguistic autonomy is self-evident. A poet (or, indeed, any writer) using this language will not have her or his wish to consider Gaelic a language questioned; ability is practically the sole critical criterion. Despite rapidly declining speaker numbers in the twentieth century and relatively low levels of literacy among native speakers (my grandmother, for instance, could only read and write in English; she had no means of accessing what writing there was in her mother tongue), no Gaelic poet had to defend

c ontracti on a nd di ssi pa tio n  | 181 his or her use except to those who claimed, and claim, that writing in anything other than English is ‘pointless’ or even ‘worthless’. Although the Renaissance was sympathetic to Gaelic writing as part of its remit and production, it took some time before Gaelic writing became as associated with Modernist ideas and practices as Scots was beginning to be, or in a similar manner. In the figure of Somhairle MacGill-Eain (1911–96; Sorley Maclean), however, Gaelic received a talent at least as great as MacDiarmid, and arguably more consistently brilliant. In the generations following, increasing numbers of talented Gaelic writers – mainly poets but also prose writers and dramatists) – published challenging and engaging work demonstrating a self confidence in moving at least partly away from the preceding folk traditions, helping to develop the language so that it could be used in domains far beyond the personal and the domestic. ’s tha an smùr ’s ghainmheach a’ mùchadh nam briathran ’s a’ càrnadh saoghal ùr air an uachdar ‘and the dust and the sand / is extinguishing the words, / and piling up / a new world on the surface’ (author’s translation)

In this poem of 2007, ‘Cridhe an t-Sluaigh’ (‘The Heart of the People’, as cited in Macleod 2009: 173–4), Derick Thomson (Ruaraidh MacThòmais; 1921–2012) appears to comment on a central issue of the use of Gaelic in literature in the twentieth (and, indeed, twenty-first) century: a vibrant literary scene is matched to a precipitate decline in speaker numbers. Largely, although not entirely, the product of an urban milieu, although normally written by poets from a Highland or, increasingly, Island rural background, ‘new’ Gaelic writers were normally equally happy in both Gaelic and English, a good example being Iain Crichton Smith (Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn; 1928–98; Crichton Smith in fact grew up in the same Lewis township as Thomson). He was merely the most famous Gaelic writer who was also renowned as a writer of both prose and poetry in English. They were the product of high-quality educations at both secondary and higher levels (indeed Thomson himself was Professor of Celtic at the University of Glasgow, while Crichton Smith was, for a time, Principal Teacher of English at Oban Academy). As has already been noted, poetry is only very occasionally likely to attract

182  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d a sufficiently large audience to be profitable. In a sense, the poet subsidises her or his own work, just as the reader of poetry cannot be expected to support the writer. This could be said to be particularly the case with Gaelic poetry, since the size of the readership must be circumscribed as much by speaker numbers as by interest (indeed this is tacitly recognised by much modern Gaelic poetry, as we have seen, where an English translation, often provided by the poet, is presented beside or facing the Gaelic original). The presence of a monoglot English-speaking audience which nonetheless takes an interest in the product of their contemporaries and others is implied throughout. A further feature of Gaelic poetry in the modern age has been the use of the language by writers who do not speak Gaelic as their mother tongue. Hugh MacDiarmid occasionally used Gaelic in his verse, although the level to which he knew the language is questionable (he may have used Gaelic in a way not that different from T. S. Eliot’s use of Sanskrit in The Waste Land: he ‘knew’ what words and phrases meant primarily through scholarship). More striking is the example of George Campbell Hay (1915–84; Hay took the name Deòrsa Mac Iain Dheòrsa when writing Gaelic), who, despite his Lowlands upbringing and his learning of Gaelic as a second language, apparently wrote poetry of considerable quality in Gaelic, Scots and English. Hay is probably unrepresentative of this tendency for non-native speakers to use Gaelic as a literary medium, however: he was a talented and prodigious linguist who produced poetry in a range of other European languages. In a sense he could be seen as a more gifted (but also more troubled) Goodsir Smith. Understandably, economies of scale have meant that ‘art prose’ is less well developed for Gaelic – although the short story and the long newspaper article are a recurring feature in the cultural life of the Gaelic-speaking community. Nevertheless, judicious use of subsidy and alterations in the priorities of government and other actors led to the development of the Gaelic novel as a viable product (Watson 2011); the same forces eventually produced an increasing amount of radio and television programming. The danger of the echo chamber – of production being deemed essential by a very limited group – is omnipresent, however. 7.5 Conclusion By the last decade of the twentieth century, the national vernaculars were central to many people’s appreciation and analysis of the world. They were also –

c o ntracti on a nd di ssi pa tio n | 183 ­ articularly with Gaelic – awarded a small amount of governmental support. p Both languages were also used in a range of ways in popular, traditional and ‘high’ culture. But for many residents of Scotland, no matter their linguistic background, both appeared to be marginalised and of little immediate value. With Scots in particular, the use of the language in a ‘modern kailyard’ way, divorced from the experience of most native speakers, led to its being seen as part of a passed world of little modern relevance. Activists, and others, hoped that the re-establishment of the Scottish parliament in 1999 would be a harbinger of a new position for the languages in the future. The last chapter will give a sense of what these hopes were and how they been addressed, in an increasingly globalised world that passed through a financial downturn worse than practically any in living memory, itself replaced by an increasingly challenging political environment.

8 CONTEMPORARY SCOTLAND AND ITS LANGUAGES, 1999–

8.1 Introduction

T

his is where Scotland stands sociolinguistically in the early decades of the twenty-first century. (Scottish) Standard English is dominant in terms of speaker numbers (as far as we can tell); it is certainly the variety that is most used both across the various linguistic communities in the country and beyond it. Scots remains a major variety within the country (the Census of 2011, the first to ask a question about the language, told us that at least 1.5 million people resident in the country self-identified as Scots speakers; most of these speakers did not appear to see Scots as entirely distinct from English, however (for discussion, see Macafee (2017) and Sebba (2019)). Its discrete nature appears to be being worn down: as a close relative of the hegemonic language, convergence and even merger is entirely possible. Gaelic continues to lose speakers (although at a far slower rate than was the case even thirty years ago). But due to increased immigration from elsewhere in the world, linguistic diversity has recently become significantly greater than was previously the case. Polish in particular has become omnipresent in densely populated parts of the country, with the number of people born in Poland only a few thousand less than reported speakers of Gaelic in the 2011 Scottish Census. The future does not look bright for the Scottish autochthonous vernaculars; conversely, however, the political status of Gaelic has never been higher. Reasons for this conundrum will be suggested in the following. This will primarily relate to the period after 1999; an occasional

co nt e m porar y scotland and i ts la n gua ge s , 1 9 9 9 –  | 185 reference back a few decades will be necessary, however, since the ‘new age’ was not without presage. 8.2 Globalisation Before focusing on specifically Scottish phenomena, we must consider the global economic and political ecology in which the people of Scotland find themselves. In particular, we must define and analyse globalisation and its consequences to the spread of English; this spread, as a sole code, is a feature of Scottish life, despite, in theory, the country’s position in the ‘inner circle’ of Kachru’s famous model of the internationalisation of English (Kachru 2017: in particular, chapter 4). Scotland is apparently anomalous: both at the centre and on the periphery. It would be a mistake to say that globalisation is an entirely modern thing. The spread of Roman power around the Mediterranean littoral and beyond, the expansion of Chinese power and cultural influence over a large part of East Asia and the rise of the Spanish Empire in the Americas in particular are only among the most prominent examples of this phenomenon. Each of these had profound linguistic effects: Latin replaced, with one exception, all of the autochthonous languages of western and central continental Europe. Chinese did practically the same thing with the languages of what became southern China; the language’s influence beyond this territory was considerable, as with the profound lexical influence Chinese has had over Korean and Japanese. Although large numbers of speakers of indigenous languages remain in Latin America, the hegemonic force of Spanish as a language of literacy and, in particular, political and economic power, cannot be doubted. That these past globalisations were less extensive than that we face now cannot be due to any particular virtue of the present age or its hegemonic languages. It is much more likely that the ease, speed and ubiquity of communication (a combination of the increasing mass access to passive and then interactive global media from the 1920s on, quickening in the 1990s) – language essentially – lies at the heart of modern globalisation. Because of the global economic and political dominance of the United States of America throughout the twentieth century and, to a lesser extent, up to the present day, this language is English. While it is generally agreed that globalisation is an ongoing process, there is considerable dissent over what it constitutes. Its ideological basis is particularly slippery to define. Steger (2013: 108) illustrates what he describes as ‘the five claims of market globalism’:

186  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d 1.  Globalization is about the liberalization and global integration of markets 2.  Globalization is inevitable and irreversible 3.  Nobody is in charge of globalization 4.  Globalization benefits everyone 5.  Globalization furthers the spread of democracy in the world

Several of these claims are irrefutable, since they involve the transfer of capital across the world and the sourcing of the cheapest places and people to carry out production; moreover, the routes by which the globalised market develops and mutates are largely controlled by something like Adam Smith’s invisible hand, even if governments and corporations strive for at least some control over the process. The last two claims, however, are much more dubious. It cannot really be claimed that any benefit accrued from globalisation is beneficial equally to everyone. As they say, we need to ‘follow the money’: who benefits most and who benefits least? More importantly, perhaps, it is difficult to argue that globalisation ‘furthers the spread of democracy’ when one of its greatest beneficiaries has turned out to be the People’s Republic of China. Globalisation is therefore a far more complex and contradictory set of phenomena than its proponents claim. 8.2.1  English a glottophage, a language which consumes others? While the linguistic force of English in relation to, for instance, the Internet is not as overwhelming as might be assumed – new technology has in a sense enabled even languages with limited speaker numbers to be used beyond geographical borders – the fact that the World Wide Web itself is essentially configured and controlled by command of this one language and that the economic activities associated with the platform are, both at surface and at a deeper level, connected to the use of that language, demonstrates its hegemonic force. So dominant is English, in fact, that some scholars (for instance, Phillipson 2009) have branded it a ‘language eater’. Competition between languages is as old as bilingualism. Social, economic and political forces are inevitably at work on all societies, no matter their size, no matter their ‘sophistication’, no matter the level of literacy. We can see the results of this conflict even in evidence from pre-history, in ‘language islands’, such as Basque, surrounded by speakers of varieties from another language family, where previously relatives of the ancestor of Basque, as well as other

c ont e m porar y scotla nd a nd i ts lan gua ge s , 1 9 9 9 –  | 187 languages, were spoken. On most of these occasions bilingualism must have existed before language shift. We have seen elements of this set of processes on a number of occasions throughout this book, including the ‘deaths’ of Pictish and Norn. What makes the modern age different, however, is that the now dominant language is apparently perpetually available to (and often ubiquitous for) all speakers of the lesser-used varieties on all occasions. One hundred years ago it would have been quite possible to be an adult Gaelic-English bilingual, living in a community where Gaelic was everyone’s first language, and rarely if ever hearing or using English as a language of everyday interaction. In the contemporary Gàidhealtachd, however, it would be a major feat not to interact with English in both passive and active manners at home and at work. Under these circumstances, it is inevitable that the effects of globalisation, established through political, social and economic hegemony, should lead to an exaggeration of the principle that varieties bearing less political or cultural capital (to use Bourdieu’s conceptualisation, as discussed in Bandelj and Wherry 2011) within a society tend to be driven towards extinction. We need only consider the number of lesser-used languages which have ‘gone to the wall’ since the eruption of modern European imperialism into the rest of the world from the sixteenth century on to appreciate this reality. I am not sure whether anyone has attempted this task, but the equivalent has continued in the last fifty years, but with growth at an exponential level. Does this mean that the use of English (sometimes reified as English, the agent of these changes) acts against the local and that, eventually, it will become the sole language? It is quite common – particularly with the work of commentators from outside academia – for the suggestion to be made that, in the relatively near future, English will be the sole language spoken globally. Interpretations of these views can be of a range of types. The following, therefore, must be interpreted as a schematisation, although, I believe, a useful one. Triumphalist views on this matter are widespread; many (although not all) stemming from the writings of residents of the United States, where a discourse related to the connection between language and national exclusivity is of considerable age (Millar 2005). From this point of view, it is a good thing that other languages will cease to be used. As with our discussion above of globalisation as a whole, this universality, its proponents claim, will encourage and increase trade while at the same time spreading the benefits of liberal democracy everywhere. With some commentators there may also be the view that those who originally

188  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd ‘owned’ the new language would also, at least for a while, possess considerable advantages over those who have newly acquired the language, particularly, perhaps, during the transition. This is, to put it mildly, a rather naïve viewpoint, however. Languages with a large number of speakers – Chinese, Arabic, HindiUrdu, Russian, French, Spanish, and so on – are most unlikely to succumb to English in even the distant future, barring disasters of a Biblical level. Moreover, while languages with a relatively small population base – a situation particularly, although not only, common in regions where historical or contemporary forms of imperialism have been or are being given free rein – are under considerable threat from the speakers of particular languages of literacy associated with the prevalent sources of power structure, this language need not be English. In large parts of South America, it is Spanish which is the language of globalisation, attracting speakers of autochthonous languages by the promise of affluence (or at the very least, the certainty of a regular wage packet) associated with the urban, educated and hegemonic language. Opposed to the triumphalist view is what could be described as the depressive view. This view laments the passing of linguistic diversity along with the folk culture and traditional knowledge which accompanies, and is sustained by, it. English is, according to this interpretation, truly a devourer of language and culture (a striking example of this viewpoint is Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). This highly negativised view of the language may represent (while also masking) anti-American feeling. In its full form, however, it is also highly naïve. As with the opposing view, it seems to ignore the fact that linguistic diversity – albeit not at anything like as healthy a level as we presently know – will almost inevitably continue for the foreseeable future. Moreover – and perhaps most damningly – the view of inevitable loss of native language for a large part of the world’s population appears to remove any agency from the speakers of lesser-used languages, who can only be perceived as powerless victims. A reality check is therefore necessary. While it is, sadly, likely that many languages spoken today will be moribund in fifty years, that does not mean that this will be true for all languages. As we have seen, languages with large numbers of speakers will not only survive but will also prosper in the globalised environment in which English thrives. The point is, however, that speaker numbers and economic associations are now of greater importance and force than was the case until recently. Nevertheless, we need to recognise that the permanence of English’s claim to be the global language is founded upon questionable ideas.

c ont e m porar y scotla nd a nd i ts lan gua ge s , 1 9 9 9 –  | 189 It is salutary to consider the fate of the last globalised European language, French. Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and, to some extent, nineteenth centuries, French was the language of trade, diplomacy and politics throughout Europe and, to a considerable extent, beyond. Educated men and women from a range of backgrounds used French as a lingua franca; the reading of literature and ideas in that language was the expression of a common bond; in the Russian Empire, members of the elite used French as a marker of status, even occasionally with fellow Russians. Where is French as an international language today? Although it remains the native language of a large number of people, and still is perceived as a language of high culture, its use has largely shrunk, no matter the pretensions of some individuals and units within Francophonie, to its native speaker boundaries and the boundaries of former imperial territories (even here, from what I understand, the dominant groups within some countries, such as Rwanda, appear to be beginning to replace French with English as the lingua franca). As far as I can see, no real argument exists which would explain why the future trajectory of English as world language should not be similar. But no matter which languages are hegemonic in the future, it would be very unwise to be sanguine about the futures of lesser-used languages. Gaelic and Scots must be included in this threatened group. Inevitably these forces are at work in Scotland; they may, in fact, be exacerbated by the everyday presence of English as a dominant language in the country for generations. 8.3  Extinction of the Native Vernacular? 8.3.1 Scots A central feature of the Scottish linguistic scene is the debate over the future nature of Scots as a set of varieties, discrete from English and from each other. One dialect (that of the fishing communities of Avoch and Cromarty on the Black Isle) is essentially moribund, with no native speakers left of the traditional variety. This type of ‘death’ is unlikely to be found with other Scots dialects: sheer numbers of speakers mean that there is unlikely to be a time when a ‘no speaker’ outcome will be possible. That these varieties will be less Scots and have more affinities with colloquial forms of (Standard) English is extremely likely. This is particularly the case with the urban dialects, as discussed in the previous chapter. It is a reality everywhere Scots is spoken, however. Specific varieties of Scots which have come under particular pressure are

190  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a nd often associated with a particular way of life which has passed or is now passing. As Millar et al. (2014) report, however, the formerly discrete nature of the Scottish fishing communities is especially striking. In the course of the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, focused fishing communities came into being, funding for the considerable expenditure involved in the building of houses, boats and tackle often coming from ‘improving’ landlords or, later, capitalists who were often fish merchants or otherwise connected to the trade. Improved techniques for fish preservation ensured that the produce could be sold across large parts of Europe (the Protestant Reformation meant that northern European fish merchants could sell Friday and Lenten fish which they no longer needed to southern European Catholics). Communities also quickly developed deep-sea fishing in the North Atlantic, often travelling as far out as Iceland and (eventually) Newfoundland. The new fishing communities were from an early period discrete from their landward neighbours: ‘the corn an the cod dinna mix’. Fishing people often tell ‘foundation myth’ stories which claim that their ancestors came from somewhere else, including (in the case of some communities in Moray) from Scandinavia (this may be a dramatisation of a half-remembered transfer of net technology from Denmark to Scotland). The truth is probably rather prosaic in comparison: most inhabitants of the new fishing communities came from the surrounding area, although there is no doubt that some specialists were lured into communities from elsewhere and that these often, because of their skills, carried considerable weight in community life. Once the communities came into being, their ties tended to be with similar communities along the coast rather than their near neighbours, who often treated them with contempt, accusing them, among other things, of having poor hygiene. By a process of both internal and external ghettoisation, landward and fisher cultures gradually separated, the latter often being associated with evangelical forms of Christianity and a combination of individualist and collective community organisation. Inevitably this specialisation and separation led to differences in language use. While, for instance, some phonological differences were apparent (most notably, perhaps, the pronunciation of the words in coastal in comparison to inland Buchan (Millar 2018: 51), it is with lexis that these differences were most apparent. Most of these differences were, of course, concerned with the fishing trade. Landward people did not have the same need for words for the pre-plastic waterproofing technique – barkin – used by fishing communities;

co nt e m porar y scotla nd a nd i ts lan gua ge s , 1 9 9 9 –  | 191 nor did they need to have words for different stages of the maturity process for different fish species (so that a mattie was a ‘virgin herring’ – a state of some importance for fishermen, because harvesting too many of this type of fish is like cutting your own throat; interestingly, the word appears to be of Dutch origin). Fisher lexical specificity went further than this, however, to weather conditions (dug afore his maister ‘waves beginning to lap although there is no wind, presaging a storm’) and beyond. In research conducted during the period 2008 to 2011, with which I was involved (as reported in Millar et al. 2014), it became apparent that, while much historical, location-specific lexis had been retained in a set of representative communities along the Scottish east coast, other features had gone or were disappearing, even in sites, such as Peterhead, where fishing continues as a major occupation. Even words, such as ware/waar/waur, referring to a particularly common type of seaweed, an everyday (and odoriferous) feature of life on the coast, whether you are involved in fishing or not, were known by only some of the community, and then only in a rather ‘hazy’ way. Commonly known words, such as gansey (in its various spellings, referring to a fisherman’s jersey, often of various types, depending on place and background) or farlan (the tub in which cleaned herring were placed during the gutting process), appeared – at least for younger people – to have been learned outside rather than inside the home and at least sometimes to be connected with the expectations of their employment in the heritage business. We could replay these developments across large parts, if not all, of Scotsspeaking Scotland (see, for instance, Agutter and Cowan 1981; Downie 1983; Pollner 1985; Lawrie 1991; Hendry 1997; McGarrity 1998; Middleton 2001, among many others), even in places, such as Shetland, where, at least until very recently, the local community was highly distinctive in its everyday cultural and linguistic reality (Smith and Durham 2011, 2012; Durham 2017).1 This level of change is also confirmed in England (Upton and Widdowson 1999; Britain 2009), Flanders (Vandekerckhove 2009) and Italy (Ferrari-Bridgers 2010; Repetti 2014), among other places. In lexical terms, the processes involved could be compared with the attrition put forward by Schmid and her collaborators (Schmid 2011; Schmid and Jarvis 2014), with the difference that her work is concerned with immigrants to new language environments, rather than with natives coping with changed economic, occupational and linguistic realities. Similar features are also to be found in highly urban environments, such as those

192  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d explored in Macafee’s classic (1994) study of lexical knowledge and use in the east end of Glasgow, mentioned in the previous chapter. It is necessary to stress that the changes taking place within the Scots dialects are not one way. There is considerable knowledge of local lexis among younger people in many communities (even if, dispiritingly, the items known are often described as slang, particularly by urban users, on social media and elsewhere). This is extremely patchy, however, with people who grew up practically side by side not knowing the same words and phrases (and even denying that these lexical resources are ‘real’, as if they had never heard them). It is, in short, an unhealthy situation. In his seminal discussion of the process of ‘language death’ (1992), already mentioned a number of times in this book, Sasse demonstrates that, in every community where the community language is being abandoned in favour of an external but prestigious one, there will come a point where some parents – often those highly aspirational for their children – choose not to speak the ‘home’ language to them. This is self-evidently what happened in many Gaelic-speaking homes in Scotland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as we will see below. It is, I think, possible to extend it to Scots (whose status as a ‘language’ is rather more complex, as we have regularly recognised). I cannot count the number of dense Scots-speaking parents with whom I have come into contact over the years who have chosen not to pass their dialects on to their children, even in supposedly ‘dialect friendly’ regions like the north-east.2 If the leaders of a community are doing this, it is inevitable that the local dialects become increasingly associated with the socially marginalised and ‘undesirable’ (from a middle-class viewpoint), thus making it even less likely that the young will be given encouragement to pick up the dialect. This also represents a vicious social circle. As has often been recognised during language shift, the elders will eventually choose not to speak their native language to the young because the young people’s forms of the language are considered ‘corrupt’.3 Some might suggest that the final result of these changes is homogenisation across the English-speaking world, with the people of Scotland, like everywhere else, using essentially the same type of Standard English (on a continuum based only on subject and level of speaker familiarity) as everyone else. I do not think this is likely. People will always wish to express their regional identity, even if, as Watt (2002) suggests in relation to the north-east of England, these loyalties are at a rather grander (and less specific) level than was the case in the past. As has

co nt e m porar y scotland and i ts la ngua ge s , 1 9 9 9 –  | 193 been found in the Limburg region of the Netherlands (Hinskens 1996), as well as often in Italy and elsewhere, a ‘middle variety’ often develops, comprehensible to speakers of the metropolitan variety, but still associated with features of local speech; eventually this new variety is identified as the dialect of the region. In Scotland, local phonological features would be heard (so that, for instance, people in north-east Scotland would use /f/ rather than /ʍ/ in common words like fit ‘what’). With lexis, however, certain words might be identified as emblematic of, as having shibboleth status for, a region but subsist in a largely colloquial English environment. I suspect that in many places in Scotland many speakers already access this code as their native one. A striking example of these features is the apparent preference by younger working-class speakers of /f/ for /θ/ in Glasgow and other urban areas. When this feature was first discussed in the late 1990s and the first decade of the twentyfirst century, journalists pounced on this feature as Jockney, since the research suggested that southern England English vernacular varieties were influencing these Scots varieties via the mass media; in particular, the BBC television soap opera, Eastenders. In fact, the scholars behind these headlines (of which they were often rather embarrassed) presented an entirely sober interpretation of the phenomena involved (see, in particular, Stuart-Smith et al. 2013) involving earlier minority usage in the dialect. What cannot be denied, however, is that homogenisation towards an external norm is very much a feature of the language of modern Scots speakers. 8.3.2 Gaelic As we have seen, Gaelic has been in apparently inexorable decline as a spoken language, both in geographical extent and also in native speaker numbers, since at least the nineteenth century. Given the fact that there is absolute Abstand between Gaelic and English, the result of unequal contact is inevitably not that of blending, as suggested for Scots, but rather shift; this means that native speakers are likely to be more aware of changes in their linguistic behaviour. Several studies have covered this process of shift in considerable detail; the most renowned of these is that of Dorian (1981). Although the discussion deals with a period now past, it can stand as an example for many more recent processes. East Sutherland, the fertile, low-lying, largely raised beach strip lying to the east of the northern Highlands, is historically a Gaelic-speaking area. From the Middle Ages on, however, Scots (later, English) had a position of ­considerable

194  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd importance, in particular in the burgh of Dornoch which, while small in Scottish terms, was nonetheless a market for the produce of large parts of the surrounding area, as well as being central to political power in the region. Moreover, the ruling Sutherland family, unlike many other ‘Norman’ elite immigrants in northern Scotland, were not Gaelicised (they had originally lived in Moray and are likely to have picked up Scots there). All of these features meant that the Gaelic-speaking peasantry in the region were likely often to have been bilingual, in ways reminiscent of what we have observed for the north-east. As discussed previously, improvement and concomitant clearances became normal from the eighteenth century on across Scotland. These clearances were particularly brutal in the territory controlled by the Sutherlands. In central Sutherland, the local peasantry were forced off their land in considerable numbers. Some emigrated to various places, but many were induced to settle as fishers in east Sutherland. Despite their lack of skill in these matters, the new arrivals were initially fairly successful in their new endeavour, primarily because of the relatively straightforward availability at certain times of year. Local speakers of Gaelic looked askance at the new arrivals, as with the Scotsspeaking fishing communities. There was considerable prejudice; intermarriage was uncommon. Many locals switched entirely to Scots/English, possibly to differentiate themselves from the fishing communities. Gaelic thrived in that community until the fishing began to decline in the twentieth century (among other issues, the harbours in the area were too small for the new mass fishery developing at that point). Previous prejudices gradually declined, although speaking of Gaelic was often frowned upon in public. While the authorities did attempt to help the use of the language in education sporadically, many of the community themselves became increasingly convinced that the future lay in monolingual English use. By the time Dorian was carrying out her research in the late 1960s and 1970s, entirely native-speaker Gaelic was produced largely by older informants. Many younger informants were semi-speakers, able to understand Gaelic well, but producing a version of the language that betrayed considerable interference from their dominant English. A large part of the young were essentially monolingual English speakers. A student of mine from a community just to the south of east Sutherland surveyed, with Dorian’s help, the community’s use of Gaelic in 2002. Only a few speakers remained; all of them elderly. Only one spoke Gaelic daily; he was married to someone from the Western Isles (who apparently regularly mocked his Gaelic). I suspect that none

c ont e m po rar y scotland and i ts la n gua ge s , 1 9 9 9 –  | 195 would be left now. Although this shift is particularly well covered, it is likely that this process can be found repeatedly across the Highlands and Islands. There is also some evidence that, in the more densely populated parts of the Gàidhealtachd, such as the town of Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis, Gaelic is to a degree marginalised as a marker of age and rural origin, despite its use also being celebrated as a marker of regional and national identity (naturally, as Birnie (2018) points out, counter-indications are also present: it is dangerous to assume group norm adherence in what is essentially a small place to sample). 8.4  Language Planning and Policy Yet despite all of this apparent decline in use and speaker numbers, the social, political and economic presence and status of the two languages is higher now than at any time since the sixteenth century. This is particularly the case with Gaelic, where legal protection is in place in a variety of domains. This section will consider the means by which this apparent protection has been established. 8.4.1  The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages The realities of speaking (and writing) a language which is not the primary prestige variety spoken within the state in which you live cannot be confined to Scotland, naturally. Throughout Europe, for instance, even the most benign regimes contribute, through their education policies and other governmental actions, to an ongoing cultural and linguistic homogenisation. In Greece, to take one example, linguistic minorities – speakers of Albanian, Arumanian (a Romance variety, closely related to Romanian) and various Slavonic varieties – have been rendered mute in many places by what can only be described as the actions of an ethnic democracy, where Hellenism is the presiding ideology. France generally has not been kind to its linguistic minorities, largely because of an ideology based around equality being interpreted as (essential) homogeneity. Even states which generally had a good name for inter-ethnic relations, such as inter-war Czechoslovakia, had a generally covert policy of prejudicial action against large linguistic minorities (Kruchna 2019). In ethnic terms (rather than purely linguistic ones, although these were sometimes invoked, particularly in relation to Croatian), the collapse of the second Yugoslavia from 1989 on demonstrated the extent to which previous or contemporary grievances about access to the political centre and protection of group rights could turn very unpleasant indeed. The rise of new Ausbau varieties, like Croatian, can be represented as

196  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a nd both an expression of these changes and a justification for them. With this in mind, and with the by-products of globalisation becoming increasingly evident, by the early 1990s a head of steam had built up among many activists that concerted and analogous action be taken in relation to the rights of lesser-used languages4 across the continent, both by governments and by all-European institutions. The Council of Europe (an organisation entirely independent of the European Union, with all the states of Europe represented) therefore promulgated their European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRMI) in 1992. This is, inevitably, a complex document, particularly since it attempts to cover a considerable number of scenarios based upon the experience and legal structures of states which are often politically, culturally and linguistically different from each other. From the inception of the project, rightly or wrongly, languages of recent immigration (defined essentially as languages spoken only within the last 500 years in a particular territory) were not included in the provision. The provision which a signatory state agrees to put in place is of two different types. One of these is covered in Part 2 of the Charter and is concerned with the cessation (if this is ongoing) of prejudicial official actions against the regional or minority languages spoken within its borders. Signatory states are expected to protect and promote the language involved, including its use in a range of media and in education. What this provision might involve is kept vague however (probably on purpose). Most languages protected only through this means have not gone through the full process of Ausbau, meaning that government agencies do not have access to a fully codified written form. They are often kin-tongues, close relatives of the official language of the state; some languages, such as Romani in Sweden, have been provided with this provision at the express wish of its speakers, because they wish to keep it as an internal ethnic variety. Committing themselves to the support of languages according to the provision of Part 3 of the Charter involves the promise of much more serious provision by the signatory state. There is something like a menu included there, where signatories choose specific actions from a list which they would consider to be the reasonable and correct means by which a language cannot just be protected but be actively promoted. This might involve the mandated employment of the language in mass media or in education (or both). Based around a cycle of around four to five years, the signatory state pro-

co nt e m porar y scotland and i ts la ngua ge s , 1 9 9 9 –  | 197 duces a report which details what actions it has taken to carry out its obligations under both Parts of the Charter. Following this, a Committee of Experts visits the state and gathers evidence from both government agencies and native speaker organisations and individual users of the languages. Their report is then responded to by the state and a final set of recommendations is made by the Council of Europe over future actions. The state is then expected to carry out these suggestions (although how they do so naturally differs from place to place); these actions are then assessed at the end of the next cycle. Member states of the Council of Europe are not obliged to ratify any Charter produced by the organisation. The ECRMI was particularly divisive, for the reasons already laid out. For a considerable period after it was promoted, most states which signed already had similar provision enacted domestically. For rather different reasons, the governments of the United Kingdom, Greece and France were opposed to ratification. With the first of these states, however, political changes in the late 1990s led to the signing and (in 2001) ratification of the Charter, with Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic being given Part 3 status, while Scots and Ulster Scots were awarded Part 2 status only. Considerable official (or educational, in the case of Irish in Northern Ireland) provision was already in place for the first three languages (although this differed from place to place); this was now to be ‘beefed up’, with more coordinated and coherent action being promised. The Part 2 languages first recognised may have been given protection as part of the provision of the Belfast Accords of 1998, with Scots in Scotland being recognised as an afterthought to Ulster Scots which had (and has) associations tied to the ethnocultural associations of one party to the agreement (as Irish was to the other). The fact that Cornish and Manx (both, at best, languages resurrected by a small number of enthusiasts) and Channel Islands French (essentially moribund with the exception of a small number of elderly people and some enthusiasts) were later recognised by the United Kingdom government under the same provision perhaps demonstrates the level of commitment actually envisaged by that authority to Scots. Responsibility for implementing these provisions was placed in the hands of the new devolved administrations. In the first years after ratification, adherence to both the letter and the spirit of the Charter was mixed. While, as we will see, progress was made in relation to the provision for Gaelic, Scots was barely mentioned in the documentation. Indeed the periodic reports presented by the United Kingdom government to

198  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d the Council of Europe were patchy in their coverage, with the Welsh administration giving cogent and detailed analysis of the progress in its provision for Welsh, the Northern Ireland report showing signs of being hampered by the ongoing issue of the recognition of Irish among some of the Unionist political parties, and the Scottish report demonstrating what might at best be described as a lack of understanding and might even be seen as complete lack of interest. The second report of 2006 is particularly symptomatic of this, with whoever wrote (or edited) the document barely proof-reading a piece which contained a considerable number of typographical errors and, most damningly, regularly confused or conflated Scots and Scottish Gaelic. The Committee of Experts reports were scathing in the most diplomatic way. In an article of 2006 I analysed the treatment of Scots in the first United Kingdom report as being an example of ‘burying alive’. I suggested that, while the correct noises were being made, most initiatives towards the raising of status for the language which were highlighted by the report were either the product of independent initiatives by local authorities (Moray and Angus stand out in this) with little or no central support, or were associated with the secondary provision of support by the (then) Scottish Arts Council (or equivalents) for writing in the language rather than support for the primary encouragement of use of the language by native speakers. The second report of 2006 demonstrated little or no progress in either initiative or attitude. The later reports produced by the Scottish government from 2007 on have demonstrated considerable continuing support for Scots and great sympathy for the language; whether attempts of this type have been entirely successful is difficult to tell. Often ‘respect’ for language appears to have been collated and confused with support. I was at a meeting around ten years ago about government support for Scots. After a particularly bland presentation by a government representative, who consistently talked about respect for the country’s language, an elderly man I was sitting beside (we were strangers) leaned across to me and remarked: ‘they’ll respect us intae oor graves’. What, therefore, have been the highlights of the devolved administrations (of any political type) in Scotland towards the native Scottish vernaculars? 8.4.2  Gaelic and official language policy The new parliament was in theory bilingual in its inception, with a symbolic debate in Gaelic taking place early in the proceedings, although the fact that

co nt e m porar y scotland and i ts la ngua ge s , 1 9 9 9 –  | 199 Gaelic-speaking MSPs are also all native speakers of English means that simultaneous translation (commonplace in, for instance, the Canadian federal parliament) is essentially unnecessary. The parliamentary record is produced in both English and Gaelic, however (but not in Scots, only included in the record when people use words and phrases (or more) in that language). Even disregarding the European Charter, the Scottish Executive (as it was then termed) was committed to extending the language’s provision through legal requirement. A Gaelic Language Act was passed in 2005 which involved (among other things) the setting up of a planning board, Bòrd na Gàidhlig, which placed obligations on public bodies to develop plans for Gaelic provision, along with other matters. Teaching of the language was streamed for different levels of ability and extended to offer immersion teaching in the main urban areas. Given the number of speakers, these provisions could never be as wide-ranging as was constructed for Welsh (spoken by around 500,000 people, out of a total of around three million), although the creation of a Gaelic television channel, BBC ALBA, self-consciously mirrors the creation of S4C in Wales in 1982.5 Possibly, the most visible of these changes was the placing of Gaelic versions of place-names on station boards by ScotRail, although provision in the historical Gàidhealtachd was rather more thorough, causing issues, as with the use of Gaelic forms of names for places in Scotsspeaking (and previously Norse-speaking) parts of Caithness on signs (although the ‘English’ form was also given; it is striking that the Highland region, of which Caithness has been a part since 1974, describes itself as Gàidhealtachd on signs6). In a period of considerable constitutional flux, right-wing populists (and right-wing news outlets) have occasionally seized upon Gaelic signage as examples of the money-wasting conspiracy of the ‘Gaelic Gestapo’ (as an Aberdeen city councillor memorably – and rather worryingly – put it), backed up by the nefarious SNP Scottish Government.7 When my own institution changed the signs at the entrance to campus, the new signs bearing the name of the university in both English and Gaelic, you would have been tempted to think that a murder had been carried out. The fact is, however, that new signs were necessary and that they would have cost the same whether they had had Gaelic on them or not. The bitterness felt by some ‘Doric’ speakers about the foregrounding of Gaelic in a Scots-speaking area and the (assumed) vast sums being given to a language with a very small number of speakers misses the point, however. Gaelic’s success has not been at the cost of Scots: the pot should be deepened and broadened to serve both, albeit in different ways.

200  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d A particularly striking feature of modern Gaelic language politics and policy is the quest for ‘new’ speakers, through immersion in early years education, through adult education and through university provision. It would be foolish to question the importance of these processes: there are at present five professors of Gaelic (or Celtic) studies in Scotland, for instance. One of them deals primarily in historical matters; one is Irish (although not, I think, a native speaker of Irish) and deals both with the historical linguistics of Gaelic and contemporary corpus planning; three are concerned almost wholly with modern Gaelic language politics (one is from the United States, another is Canadian, the third is Scottish). None is a native speaker of Gaelic (although one comes from the Gàidhealtachd); all are highly committed to its development. A considerable amount of time and resources have been expended on these processes; it is probably too soon to have gained a full sense of whether these activities have been successful or not. Nevertheless, a considerable amount of scholarly ink has been expended on its analysis. Indeed, a recent survey and analysis of revitalisation of contemporary Gaelic activities (MacLeod and Smith-Christmas 2018) is inherently dominated by its discussion, rather than by activities designed to cater for the present native speaker community. It is important to ask, nonetheless, what the specific purpose of these initiatives is. Grin (2003) puts forward a threefold means of analysing the level to which language policy and planning initiatives have been successful. In the first instance, the initiative must be democratic: the population affected must be in favour of what is being proposed (or be willing to be persuaded); it must also be effective: strange though it may sound, a number of efforts of this sort have foundered because the agents of the processes involved have not considered either what they wish at heart to achieve or how that can be achieved; finally, it must be cost-effective: can what is intended be achieved within the budget attached to it?8 If we consider lower-school provision for Gaelic immersion in the Scottish cities, for instance, a number of questions might be answered, some of which cannot be posed, at least as yet. Who are the intended beneficiaries of this programme? Who are actually recruited? What are the expected results of the programme? What linguistic repercussions are there for native speaking teachers being removed from the native speaker environment? A former colleague here at Aberdeen (of English extraction, although that is of little or no importance) had his child educated in Gaelic immersion as a sign of commitment to Scotland

co nt e m porar y scotla nd a nd i ts lan gua ge s , 1 9 9 9 –  | 201 and, as he put it, its ‘national language’. It did not seem to occur to him that his child could have learned another of Scotland’s languages by interacting naturally with local children. More importantly, what use has this child made of Gaelic since leaving that school? What I have said here is not intended to criticise the idea of Gaelic education outside the Gàidhealtachd. Seeing it as the future of Gaelic rather than increasing support to Gaelic speakers wherever they are (and particularly in communities where the language is spoken) might eventually be analysed as quixotic, however. 8.4.3 Scots As has already mentioned, the early Scottish administrations after devolution took little or no interest in the promotion of Scots, beyond giving some funds to both the Scots Language Centre (initially, the Scots Language Resource Centre, it was re-envisaged from 2005 on by the strong and focused leadership of Michael Hance) and, through the Scottish Arts Council, writing in Scots. The Scottish National Party governments which followed from 2007 on (Minority 2007–11 and 2016 on – in the second case with a pro-independence Majority provided by Green MSPs; Majority 2011–16), made a more serious attempt to produce a policy for Scots. From 2009 on, focus groups, conferences and eventually a Ministerial Working Party helped formulate a Scots Language Policy in 2015. This is not a particularly impressive document (printed out it barely fills one side of an A4 sheet). It does not appear impressive for almost ten years of effort, although it has to be said that even an undetailed and rather vague set of recommendations is better than the nearly complete lack of steer present before this.9 The fruit of this lack of central policy apparatus can be seen in the provision offered by the different Scottish local authorities. By the middle years of the 2010s, as I have found in a number of surveys, most units primarily have been focused on their response and adherence to the Gaelic Language Act of 2005. Scots language provision in terms of an actual policy is rare. Those councils at the time which generally had something like a policy had one because they had already developed one before any statutory obligation (more recently, Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire have also developed a Doric Language Policy to complement their Gaelic language strategy). Some others have interpreted such provision as being primarily a matter of occasionally inviting writers into schools. Many councils, on enquiry, appeared not to have considered any Scots

202  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d provision as a matter of policy, although I suspect most had some degree of coverage in terms of creative writing in schools. As we have seen previously, there was always some provision for the teaching of Scottish literature in Scots in schools. In the last twenty-five to twenty years, however, this provision has been increasingly formalised by the Education Ministry (under various names). The language requirement has been increasingly promoted, since it was evident that some schools were using Scottish literature wholly in English as part of this requirement. The Scottish Qualifications Agency (a quango tasked with administering and assessing certificate examinations in the Scottish system) began in the late 1990s to develop a voluntary paper on Scots as part of the English and Communication Higher examination. It was rarely if ever chosen by students (Corbett 2003).10 In more recent times a diploma on Scottish Studies has been offered (this gives students credits which are not gained through the conventional certificate examination system). The course envisaged involves considerable input from the use of Scots (or Gaelic) far beyond the analysis of literature. There has been more take-up on this occasion, although, again, this is patchy and appears to be associated with dedicated teachers rather than any central steer either nationally or locally. Nevertheless, the example of what has been achieved in schools, such as Banff Academy, may well encourage other schools to take part (or at least to consider doing so). In 2013, the Scottish government invested in the time of four individuals who acted as champions for Scots. While results were promising (Eunson 2017), financial issues have meant that this has been pared back to one individual for the whole country. Unlike Gaelic, which has Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, a Gaelic-medium college, as part of the University of the Highlands and Islands system, no provision for Scots being used as a teaching medium exists, although its study forms part of the curricula (in English Language or Linguistics systems) at the Universities of Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh (Scottish Literature is also taught at other universities; the use of the language must inevitably be taught and analysed there, albeit sometimes in an uninformed way). The Elphinstone Institute at the University of Aberdeen offers Scots language courses. 8.4.3.1  Scots corpus planning Gaelic entered its expanded phase with decreasing numbers of native speakers from whom there are increasing numbers of readers. While ongoing corpus planning is present for the language (particularly in relation to new vocabulary

c ont e m porar y scotla nd a nd i ts lan gua ge s , 1 9 9 9 –  | 203 formation for new concepts and technologies; the language also labours under not having a fully modern and comprehensive dictionary: Dwelly (1911) is a masterpiece (as is shown by the fact that it continues to be printed and used), but it is essentially outmoded, the spelling system in particular is relatively stable and, for the moment, the written form has come as close as possible to a standard for the now regular occasions when speakers from different dialect areas meet. Scots has little or nothing equivalent to this written language protection. Part of the issue is what both speakers and activists want and whether these relate to each other. Unlike its Norwegian equivalent, Nynorsk, ‘modern Norwegian’, Scots has no one organisation acting as a support. Instead, a range of different organisations assume some responsibility. The most obvious of these is the Scots Language Society. This organisation was originally titled The Makars Club, as discussed in the last chapter; many of its interests are still based in literary concerns: their primary publication is the literary Lallans, the only literary magazine entirely in Scots (of a variety of types). Some literary outreach is attempted. Scottish Language Dictionaries, originally formed by the online amalgamation of the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue and the Scottish National Dictionary, is a major stakeholder in the public promotion of Scots, with considerable work in outreach, in particular in relation to schools. It receives some government funding, primarily for its central lexicographical functions. The Scots Language Centre, based notionally in Perth, provides a means by which activists and users can interact in an informed way. It was crucial to providing as much information as possible in the run-up to the Census of 2011, informing people about what Scots was through their Aye can campaign. It receives some funding from national and local government. Almost inevitably there has been tension both within and between these organisations over whether their roles are to be custodians or developers of the use(s) of the language (for further discussion, see Millar 2018: 203–6). In the 1990s, perhaps reacting against the contradictions and perceived sclerotic natures of some of these organisations, kurns, ‘cells’, small-scale organisations of activists embedded in the community, began to appear. At first working in print, they were soon able to exploit the growth of the World Wide Web. Some continue, although most are rarely heard of. Partly this is because some notice of their goals has been taken by local and national government; it is entirely possible, however, that, for some, the ideological and linguistic ‘purity’

204  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a nd which they had exhibited was too difficult to maintain as they grew older (and gave them an aura of crankishness for many observers, including many native speakers). This plethora of competing organisations means that it is difficult to find consensus. In Millar (2005) I suggested that a major issue was the split between the cultural party, where it was believed that encouraging the language through the cultures in which it was used would encourage its natural employment, and the governmental party, which believed that governmental legislative support was necessary for the language’s guaranteed survival and, indeed, ‘fightback’. These are schematisations, of course; many people, including me, could sympathise with both ideals, although moving slightly towards one end (I would consider myself a very moderate governmental). What these arguments largely ignore, however, is that the actual speaker body has been largely ignored in the debates. This is, of course, dangerous. Twenty years after the debacle related to the development of a new spelling system (of which much more in Millar 2005; see also Bann and Corbett 2015), a system about which hardly anyone outside the ‘movement’ had any knowledge, ‘folk’ poetry and writing, for instance, has rarely deviated from the ‘Burns standard’, bristling with the apostrophes activists consider so belittling. If nothing can be achieved in this relatively straightforward issue, primarily because of disconnect within the movement and between the movement and native speakers (Millar 2009b, 2011), it is unsurprising how little has been done in terms of lexical choice and creation. This is unfortunate, since, as we have seen, it is in lexical use in particular that the Scots dialects are being drawn apparently inexorably towards the colloquial (Standard) English mainstream. 8.5  Language Use and Immigration When we think of ethnic minorities in Scotland, it is very likely that, except among some Protestants or Catholics in the west of Scotland who feel particularly ‘embattled’, where people might still be classified as ‘Irish’, no matter how many generations have passed since their ancestors came to Scotland, the first groups which spring to mind for most people are people of Punjabi origin, whether of Muslim or Sikh background, or people of Chinese background. Since 2004 there has been considerable immigration from Poland into a country which already had a significant population of Polish refugees settled here after 1945. In the larger urban areas, however, people from almost every ethnic

co nt e m porar y scotla nd a nd i ts lan gua ge s , 1 9 9 9 –  | 205 background can be found. Even these rough distinctions hide considerable differences. Your neighbour, whom you classify as a ‘Pole’, may in fact be Czech or Lithuanian; the ‘Russians’ are, in reality if not association, Latvians, and so on. One ethnic minority that tends to be forgotten are people of English origin. As Watson (2003) points out, behaviour and outlook differ through this group: some have become Scottish patriots while others have embraced particularly strong forms of Unionism; some have tried to fit in (and sometimes been given the cold shoulder) while others have kept themselves distinct. It is unfair, in fact, to treat English people domiciled in Scotland as an undifferentiated mass. English northerners do not always love English southerners (this trait is also present with other immigrant groups: western Poles are often at odds with their eastern compatriots, both at home and in Scotland). While not in any way denying the existence of anti-Scottish prejudice (indeed, sometimes racism) in England, the often-whispered term ‘white settler’ for English incomers, replete with the imagery of the Mau Mau insurgency, can be decidedly disheartening. All ethnolinguistic communities naturally act in different ways (as do, of course, their members); what can be said is that every long-term resident of Scotland inevitably affects the language use of the country. Concurrently, the Scottish linguistic ecology will affect every immigrant’s (indeed, every resident’s) language use. The presence of people with limited command of English may make many Scots speakers move closer to the Scottish Standard English end of their personal linguistic continuum more often than was previously the case. By the same token, many immigrants take on elements of local speech, whether consciously or not. Some businesses – such as the bus company in Aberdeen – have given free tuition in the local language to ‘Polish’ workers, with considerable success. A double standard applies for Scots speakers in this regard. They are often touched by the use of Scots features in the speech of some immigrants, while finding condescending (and often grating) the same words in the mouths of other groups (particularly when that group is native English-speaking). It is quite possible that some languages of recent immigration will continue to be spoken, although survival for more than two generations appears to require more than loyalty to the ancestral language; often, cultural spurs, such as religious practice, encourage survival. If people from elsewhere continue to come to Scotland over the next century, it is likely that similar patterns of use will apply, although the languages brought may well be from Africa or parts of Asia.

206  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d 8.6  Cultural Production Scotland continues to produce a wide range of writers of various sorts. In general, the patterns of use for both national vernacular remain the same, although with greater funding for art production than was previously the case. A number of major breakthroughs can be mentioned, however. The first is the production of a range of creative prose works in Scots in both dialogue and narrative (see also Millar 2018: 168–70, for in-depth analyses). As we saw in the last chapter, translations into Scots (including from English) were attempted in the twentieth century. Over the last twenty years these products have become significantly more common. Some of these translations have undoubted literary/art ambitions, for instance Laureen Johnson’s Shetland Scots version of Alice in Wonderland (Carroll 2012). Sheena Blackhall, a novelist and poet in her own right, has published a number of translations into North-East Scots of ‘classics’, such as O Mice an Men (Steinbeck 2018). A striking move towards producing children’s novels and graphic stories in Scots (and in various dialects of the language) have also been highly evident. Often the translations demonstrate considerable wit (and even, sometimes, traditional Scottish perversity). In its original French, for instance, Tintin’s canine sidekick is Neige ‘snow’. In English he is Snowie. In Scots he is Taarie ‘tarry’, i.e. ‘black’. Many of these publications are subsidised in one way or another. There is no doubt, however, that the most popular of these works, such as the various translations of The Gruffalo and its offshoots into a range of dialects, have sold well. That not all of them are being read by children is difficult to prove, but almost inevitable. Gaelic has seen a considerable amount of literary production, including for children and adult learners. The growth in television programming in Gaelic, culminating in the founding of BBC ALBA in 2008, has permitted the building up of core talents both in front of and behind the camera (although how much of the production beyond voice-over takes place in Gaelic is difficult to judge). In the last ten years a full-length film has been produced in Gaelic, although I have heard that some of the actors had to learn their lines phonetically.11 Alongside these achievements it should be noted that the long-awaited foundation of the BBC Scotland channel in 2019 appears something of a failure. Scots is regularly present in the programmes shown, but primarily only for entertainment. Editorial functions are carried by largely Scottish-accented Standard English.

c ont e m porar y scotla nd a nd i ts lan gua ge s , 1 9 9 9 –  | 207 8.7 Conclusion There is a dualism running through this final chapter (and, to some extent, throughout the whole book). Politically and culturally Scotland is now far more distinct from the London centre than it was even thirty years ago. The future for Scotland is uncertain but certainly more promising than appears to be the case for other parts of the Island of Britain. The surviving autochthonous languages are still spoken; in the case of Scots, by a considerable part of the population. They are both given support by local and national government; this is truer for Gaelic for reasons that were described above, but certainly it would be fair to say that something is being done for Scots, beyond the hand-wringing so much enjoyed in the past. Yet it is entirely possible that, by 2100, Gaelic will have few if any native speakers and Scots will have become entirely dialectalised in large koine-type units of colloquial English, where pronunciation will be the primary distinguishing factor. This need not necessarily happen, however. The two languages could thrive in an environment in which the national varieties – including sign language and, quite possibly, the languages of recent immigration with the greatest number of speakers – were treated as an intrinsic part of national life, supported by a secretariat or equivalent within the government that would coordinate linguistic activities and norms in the education system and beyond. Nothing of this would in any way invalidate the awareness that, for whatever reasons, English will be supremely important for the foreseeable future as an international lingua franca. What would be encouraged instead would be a fruitful and beneficial bilingualism or bidialectalism. Without active interaction with the speaker populations beyond the activists, however, this is wishful thinking.

NOTES

Some Preliminaries   1. In the following, in line with presiding orthodoxies, Pictish will be treated as a P-Celtic language – of which more below; any suggestion of a different or augmented origin for the language will be dealt with in Chapter 2; Latin was also Indo-European, although of a different, Italic, sub-family, its descendant French is a member of the Romance languages, a sub-family of Italic. Chapter 1   1. Interestingly, another group of German/Luxembourgish speakers in the far southeast of the country have no such rights; they, however, have lived in the Belgian state since its foundation in 1830, a period when lawmakers were perhaps less delicate in their reaction to multilingualism and minority rights than they are now. Chapter 2   1. Isaac (2005: 204, 208); for a rather more cynical interpretation of the origin of this place-name and others discussed in this chapter, see Rhys (2015).   2. For a discussion, see Nicolaisen (2001: in particular chapter 9); see also Isaac (2005: 191); interestingly, the nearby Don also seems to have had divine associations: Isaac (2005: 192).   3. See, for instance, Hunter (2001); Moffat (2003: 174–6) discusses early relations between Orkney and Rome; Breeze (1994) demonstrates how the world between at least Hadrian’s Wall and the Forth was reshaped during the Roman centuries.

notes | 209   4. A recent overview of Pictish history (with a concentration on the north), including a brief discussion of language use, can be found in Evans (2019).   5. See Nicolaisen (2001). Isaac (2005: 189–90) essentially dismisses this interpretation; his essay, however, presents a small amount of evidence which could be interpreted as supporting the pre-Celtic viewpoint. Rhys (2015) does not rule out the presence of a few pre-Celtic place-names in Scotland, although strongly questioning whether these languages had any chance at all of surviving into the Roman period.   6. For a discussion of some of the ideological concerns influencing and informing Bede and his contemporaries, see Wormald (2006); an older view of his environment can be found in Blair (1976). Stancliffe (2007) notes, however, that Bede was considerably better disposed towards the distant Picts than to his British neighbours.   7. An all too common association made by talented natural linguists with limited training in situations where all other suggestions for relationship appear to have failed; for brief discussions of this unlikely association, see Rhys (2015: 85, 88).   8. For a discussion of the history of the region, see Hartley and Fitt (1988); it should be noted, however, that they are not sanguine about the survival of Brigantian structures after the Roman withdrawal (1988: 116).   9. The term Cumbric is sometimes used for the language spoken in northern England and southern Scotland. I will not follow this practice, largely because the language is not recorded often enough for an absolute split with other P-Celtic varieties to the south to be established. 10. The Damnonii may also be remembered in two place-names – Dowanhill near Milngavie (Dunbartonshire) and Cardowan near Wishaw (Lanarkshire) (Clarkson 2014: loc. 626); see also Driscoll and Forsyth (2004: 4). 11. Roderick was also remembered in the Vita of St Columba, written in Iona in the seventh century (Clarkson 2014: loc. 639–41). 12. The people reporting these names are themselves largely Gaelic speakers: there is evidence across western Britain for eminent people using both P-Celtic and Q-Celtic forms of their names. 13. The place-names of the upper Tweed valley (including Peebles) demonstrate a much longer and more intense British-speaking presence than was the case further down that river (Edmonds 2018: 87–90). 14. A Celtic name, as Bede attests, suggesting that a polity under Northumbrian rule may have replaced, or even evolved from, a pre-existing British territory, probably originally controlled by the Votadini. 15. For a discussion, see Cruickshank (2000); Cruickshank’s treatment could be criticised for placing too much reliance on literal interpretations of material and literary

210  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d artefacts. The battle itself is considered in both Marren (1990: 20–32) and Fraser (2009). 16. See Clancy (2010a: 375–8, 289–91) for a highly nuanced discussion of this issue; a sense of the nature of the Scandinavian spread and diaspora during this period can be found in Donaldson (1990: in particular chapter 2), Forte et al. (2005: in particular chapters 4, 9 and 10), Winroth (2014: in particular chapter 3) and Jesch (2015). 17. It should be noted, however, that the names Unst, Yell and Fetlar – the northern islands of Shetland – cannot be satisfactorily analysed as being of Norse origin (Gammeltoft 2004). 18. See, for instance, Sharples and Smith (2009); discussions of these ideas in relation to Caithness and Orkney can be found in Gourlay (1993) and Lamb (1993); Norse place-names along the Atlantic littoral are discussed in Kruse (2004; see, in particular, pp. 106–7), describing the death of Norse in the region, as well as Jennings and Kruse (2009). 19. The ancestors of the Gall-Ghàidheal [otherwise, Gall-Goidil] ‘foreigner [Scandinavian]-Gaels’ of the Hebrides; the Gaelic name for the Outer Hebrides is Innse Gall, the ‘foreign isles’. Chapter 3   1. Although on both occasions it may not refer to all of the Pictish-speaking areas: northern provinces, such as Moray and Ross, appear, as suggested, to have possessed a level of autonomy which at times at least could be interpreted as independence (Woolf 2007: in particular, chapter 6).   2. As we saw in the preceding chapter, there are some who believe this was the case for the P-Celtic and Q-Celtic versions of tribal names in Argyll. This possibility is admittedly a considerable number of centuries before the contexts described here came into being.   3. Although the fact that Irish speakers could make such a phonological transcription at the time might well provide evidence for considerable possible mutual recognition between the two branches of Insular Celtic.  4. A phenomenon whereby distantly related or unrelated languages spoken in the same area affect each other linguistically, in many cases moving towards each other in usage. A classic example of these processes is the Balkanische Sprachbund, a language union in south-eastern Europe whereby Romanian, Albanian, Arumanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and, to a lesser extent, Greek and Turkish, have become more like each other than (at times) their near relatives or earlier states (for a brief discussion, see Millar 2015: 303–4).

notes | 211   5. Particularly given the widespread temporary or permanent settlement of enslaved enemies, often from a different cultural and linguistic background, in territories distant from their home territories (Woolf 2007: 17–19).   6. Edmonds (2018: 87–8) suggests that, for a large part of Cumbria (on this occasion, south-west Scotland), British was an importation, laid over a previously English- or, more often, Manx-connected Gaelic-speaking tradition.   7. Bloch (1949) is a classically distinguished and nuanced discussion of this viewpoint.   8. Although there is the possibility that the incorporation of Bernicia north of the Tweed into the lands of the King of Scots would have meant that the king was obliged by political necessity to have some understanding of the local Anglian dialects, no matter his place of exile; this conclusion is unverifiable, however.   9. Although Dunshea (2018) suggests that Edinburgh may not have assumed importance for the kingdom as a whole until the time of Margaret’s children or grandchildren. Nevertheless, they would themselves already have been Anglophone and Anglophile. 10. It should be noted in fairness, however, that, according to Oram (2011: loc. 3122), Malcolm IV, the great-grandson of Mael Coluim III and Margaret, son to the essentially English Henry, Earl of Huntingdon, was described by an Irish poet as ‘the best Christian of the Gaels to the east of the sea’. 11. Prior to the accession of his distant cousin, Margaret, Maid of Norway, who died en route from the country of her birth to Scotland for her crowning in 1290, the male line had continued unbroken from Mael Coluim III to her mother (with the small proviso that Malcolm IV, being childless, was succeeded by his brother William). 12. As McDonald (2003) and Oram (2003) demonstrate, the cultural and linguistic relationships between ‘Gaelic’ and ‘incomer’ practice among the nobility were often mutually beneficial and creative. 13. Barrow (1980: 82) argues that the ‘Norman’ settlers in Scotland were already English in language, since their entrance was normally at least two generations after 1066–7. This may well be the case, although the prestige of their ancestral French is likely to have given it considerable status as a means of communication. There was also considerable intermarriage between Scotland and the continent during the period. This might well have been particularly the case with the elite, but it was unremarkable in the lesser gentry. The ‘native’ and ‘Gaelic’ elite also intermarried with ‘outsiders’; French would have been the lingua franca. Barrow (1999) discusses those few French place-name features applied to the Scottish landscape during this period. 14. While later immigrants, such as the Huguenots, maintained contacts with their ostensible homeland, France, for some time, their exile was of a strikingly different

212  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd type, related to the escape from persecution of one type or another, from that of Low Countries’ immigrants to medieval Scotland, whose ‘exile’ was connected to trade; a return to their ‘homes’ was entirely possible. 15. For discussions of citizens of Low Countries’ origin, see Barrow (1980: 6, 91, and elsewhere); Stevenson (1988; in particular, p. 182), where ‘sweeteners’ for immigrants to the burghs are discussed; Oram (2011: loc. 6651–83); the same point is touched upon by Toorians (1996) and Dennison (1998: 116–17). 16. Barrow (1999) discusses the rare occasions when French survives in official and semi-official written Scottish sources from the period. In Scotland, he suggests, Latin remained the language of record, while in England French increasingly assumed this role. This may demonstrate the level to which French actually survived as an everyday language in the northern kingdom; indeed, a number of the rare Scottish uses of French during this period are likely to have developed from contexts where English influence was heavy. 17. According to the analysis of Mufwene (2001, and elsewhere), the variety employed by a community as the prestigious variety is that associated with the founders. These need not be the first occupants of a territory (or, indeed, the most numerous of the inhabitants), but they are likely to be the population with the greatest economic and political power. 18. It should be noted, however, that, as ‘new’ varieties of English, such as that generally spoken in New Zealand, generally display limited geographical variation, which takes a considerable period to develop. 19. These developments could be analysed as the final outward spread for the ‘Irish Sea World’ of Gaelic and Norse admixture, cultural and linguistic, touched upon on a number of occasions in this book. 20. The work of the Milroys on Belfast speech in the 1970s being a notable exception, but also atypical, since the ‘Troubles’ was a very low-level civil war; moreover, their research was carried out in neighbourhoods and places that were united in their doctrinal and political allegiances and often prided themselves on maintaining an air of ‘normality’ and ‘decency’. Chapter 4   1. The classic survey of the systemic hunger of the early thirteenth century is Jordan (1996). Benediktow (2004) presents a magisterial discussion of the Black Death; Jillings (2003) provides a more tentative study about the Plague in Scotland. Campbell (2016) discusses these environmental factors and their connections to the economic, social and political development of European society.  2. The Oxford English Dictionary (s.v. demit) provides only a few examples of this use

notes | 213 of the word, almost all from Scottish writers or people whose names suggest strong Scottish connections.   3. It should be noted, however, that the Property Records of the Book of Deer, dating from as early as the twelfth century, already show considerable divergence from the western usage, providing some sense of what North-East Gaelic at the time was like. This represented functional rather than literary domains, however (Ó Maolalaigh 2008).  4. For a discussion of the politics of ‘race’ in Scottish Lowland elite circles from Fordun to Hume and beyond, see Zahnd (2019).   5. Meek (1991), however, describes crossover during the period between Highlands and Lowlands in traditional song and story.   6. Excellent discussions of these developments can be found in Lindberg (2010) and Palmer Wandel (2011).  7. Winʒet (1888: I, 138). This dichotomy could be seen as representing a spiritual facet of the ongoing tension between Anglophile and Francophile parties within Scotland. This may be simplistic, however: Protestant poets and dramatists continued to write in the mother tongue for a considerable period, for instance. Private writings were generally in Scots well into the seventeenth century (if not longer), unless there were specific personal reasons for writing in English, no matter the writer’s religious adherence.   8. Gillespie (1985) provides analysis of the history of the Scottish settlement in their focal area.   9. Other features of Gaelic structure, such as the use of consonant mutation to express syntactic relationship, have no equivalence in the Germanic languages and would be far more difficult to transfer. 10. That this phenomenon was well known and arguably understood as a Gaelic contact features can be seen in a passage from James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (Hogg 2002 [1824]: 103–4). Interestingly, the action takes place in Edinburgh; the Scots gives no evidence of the speaker’s coming from a north-east (or, indeed, Caithness) background. This might be taken to suggest that the phenomenon of ‘Highland Scots’ was more widespread than previously thought. Chapter 5   1. Central historical points throughout this chapter have been informed by Lenman (2009).  2. For a recent discussion of this apparent ideological anomaly, see Craig (2018: 28–9).

214  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d   3. A project similar to, although not so violently destructive in its outcome, as the Illyrian/Yugoslav construct put forward by many Croatian intellectuals in the nineteenth century (Rusinow 2003), in relation to developing cultural and, eventually, political ties with other South Slavs, Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim, involving a willingness to downplay, if not abandon, your own group identity. Kidd (1993) provides a relatively (and impressively unbiased) straightforward account of the British project (which he terms Anglo-British).   4. Craig (2009) provides a particularly clear analysis of the competing forces underlying this period in Scotland’s intellectual history.   5. Reid was not alone in this. As Broadie (2001: 189–90) points out, several eighteenth-century Scottish scholars took an interest in linguistic structure and use; many more were interested in rhetorical theory and practice. These discussions were overwhelmingly concerned with language universals or linguistic ‘correctness’, however, rather than the nature of everyday usage.   6. An old but well-crafted discussion of these ideas can be found in Campbell (1985).   7. How this view could be squared with the admiration displayed by many leading figures of the Enlightenment for the notoriously superstitious cultures of ancient Greece and Rome is, thankfully, a debate for another place.   8. Although individuals within this new cosmopolitan milieu were sometimes surprisingly variable in their written (and, we assume, spoken) language use (Cruickshank 2011).   9. Although this is likely to have changed for the nobility relatively early, given their regular connections, in business and marriage (if the two could be distinguished for that caste) with their English peers. 10. As an example, while no native speaker of English will misunderstand I’ll not do it, most (unless from Scotland or parts of Ireland) will prefer I won’t do it. Underlying the former is the Scots equivalent which, where I work, is A’ll nae dee (h)it (in my own dialect it is A’ll no dae it). This represents word-for-word transliteration (if not actual translation). 11. The Union has never been loved in Scotland, even by the small majority who voted to remain within its structures in 2014. 12. Although some artists who wrote works which could have been classified as being ‘part’ of this movement, such as Goethe (Brown 2009), disliked intensely being so associated. 13. These views linger. I went to a primary school where Burns’s poetry was little less than worshipped by the headteacher. Practically all ‘natural’ uses of Scots, inside and outside the classroom, were pounced upon, however. 14. Discussions of the issue can be found in Haywood (1986) and Russett (2006); a

notes | 215 particularly splenetic example of how ‘live’ these controversies still are can be found in Curley (2009), who appears to take extreme exception to anyone at any time disagreeing with Samuel Johnson on any matter. 15. Several further analogues exist from the same period, such as the forged Czech national epics, Rukopis královédvorský and Rukopis zelenohorský and even in the fairy tales collected and processed by the Grimms; see McLane (2008) for a discussion of ‘authenticity’ in an English language context during the Romantic period. 16. Meek (2002: 100) discusses evidence of just such written notes in Gaelic, often involving fairly lengthy passages. Chapter 6   1. Many of the following central historical points have been informed by Checkland and Checkland (1989) and McCaffrey (1998). Analyses may be my own, however.   2. This section is based primarily upon the information presented in Scotland (1969) and Anderson (1983, 1997), and papers in Humes and Paterson (1983) and Bryce and Humes (1999).   3. The fact that he and a range of equivalent figures became educated through their own efforts rather than the support of a parish system of education should not be taken as further evidence for Scottish primacy in these matters: the writer James Hogg (1770–1835) represents the same autodidact tendency in late eighteenthcentury Scotland.   4. To be fair to Bakhtin, his own views, as explored in Bakhtin (1981), rather than those put forward by his interpreters, were rather more subtle than might at first appear.   5. As was the case with Scott, unusually, as the product of both the late eighteenthcentury language politics of upper-middle-class Edinburgh and the environment of his grandfather’s Borders vernacular home and background.  6. It is worth noting that, although this date makes the novel historical at the time of its publication, it refers to a period that will have been just in living memory for elderly people in Scott’s youth.  7. Nevertheless, with the exception of one word – waled ‘chosen; elect (in a specifically Calvinist sense)’ – most of the Scots lexis employed is essentially transparent to informed and acculturated English speakers. Even then, many words, such as might, are spelled according to English practice, when there is a good chance that the Scots pronunciation /xt/ is intended.   8. The common ancestor of both varieties probably separated at around 500 CE, at the latest. While some mutual intelligibility might have been possible between speakers

216  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd of Old English and Viking Norse in 900 (for a discussion, see Millar 2016), this is extremely unlikely to have been the case with any of their descendants almost 1,000 years later. Chapter 7  1. Cameron (2010) and Harvie (1993) inform the narrative of much of the following, although the analysis is often my own.   2. Indeed it could be argued that this process is already widespread across urban and heavily populated areas, as my 1999 article suggests.   3. Lorimer himself was not, however, a Church of Scotland minister; he was, in fact, a Professor of Greek at the University of St Andrews, thus giving him immediate access to the original, even if ministers were themselves expected to be ‘learned’ in at least one Biblical language; a discussion of Lorimer’s process can be found in Corbett (1999: 148–51).   4. Although, after Mark McManus’s death in 1994, the show rather illogically kept the name for at least a decade.   5. Strangely, some non-Scottish pop singers have also attempted Scottish accents, not least Paul McCartney in one line of The Beatles’ ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ (1967). Chapter 8   1. Karam (2017) presents a more nuanced discussion of language use among native Shetlanders than is found in the work of Smith and Durham.   2. Although it should be noted that, as Hendry (1997) pointed out, many children receive considerable linguistic input from their grandparents, who do often use Scots words and phrases with them.  3. A further feature of Sasse’s model is that, when a variety is essentially moribund, elements – words and phrases in particular – survive as ethnic markers, as part of ritual or for humorous effect. A commonly observed feature of Scottish life is the ease with which middle-class people can use the vernacular, but only when imitating someone else (as discussed in Macaulay 1991).   4. The history of the terms used in this matter is complex. Lesser-used is often preferred over minority, because, among other reasons, the presiding ideologies of certain states deny the existence of minorities because of the presumed equality of all citizens. Regional is also sometimes preferred over either because, in some parts of the state concerned, speakers of the ‘minority’ language might actually be in the majority.   5. Planning for the channel exhibited considerable wit. Its viewer figures were helped considerably by the channel buying the rights to lower-league football; for many

notes | 217 Scottish people who cannot speak Gaelic this was the only chance to see their team in action without going to the match itself.   6. The former Nairnshire, which has a large Scots-speaking population, is also included in this local authority. The place-name dominant language issue is less of a problem there, since most settlements have Gaelic (or occasionally Pictish) names.   7. The reality that these policies were triggered by the actions of the former LabourLiberal Democrat administrations appears glossed over in these analyses; the Scottish government remains committed to the raising of status for Gaelic, however.   8. Grin, who is by training an economist, makes very plain that cost-effective does not necessarily mean ‘cheap’: a satisfactorily thought-out programme of policy development which costs £3.5 million and is successful is much more cost-effective than a poorly thought-out programme which received £3,500.   9. To be fair, during this period the world went through arguably the worst (certainly the most global) financial crisis ever witnessed. For the Scottish government, bread-buttering doubtless came first. McDermott (2019) provides a fascinating comparison of the development of provision for Scots in Scotland and Northern Ireland. 10. In recent years the SQA Nationals and Higher English curricula have required a Textual Analysis response to a Scottish text (although which language the text is in is unclear). 11. Scots has not reached this milestone yet, although in July 2019 the first awards for producing short films in ‘Doric’ (North East Scots) were presented to film-makers of a range of ages and abilities.

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INDEX

Abercorn, 1–2 Aberdeen, x, 19, 27, 65, 93, 94, 98, 150, 157–8, 159, 166–7, 200 Doric Language Policy, 201 Old, 81 Aberdeenshire, 25, 56, 65, 97, 150, 157 Doric Language Policy, 201 Aberlemno, 36 Abstand, 6, 7–8 Agricola, 25–6 Agricola, Gnaeus Julius, 25 Aitken, A. J., 108–9 Alba, 30, 45–7, 66 ‘Unification’, 42–4, 46 Albanian, 195, 210 Alexander, William, 147–8 Alford, 170 Alphabet, Roman, 49 Alt Clud, 31, 122 Amazonia, 5, 13 America, North, 118 America, South, 181, 188 Amsterdam, 118 Aneirin, 32 Anglo-Saxons in Britannia, 47–9, 34 Angus, 36, 152, 198

Annals of the Parish, 143–4 anomie, 48, 65 antipathy, Highland–Lowland, 70, 82–6, 99, 213 Antonine Wall, 30 Arabic, 11, 88, 188 Aragon, 80 Aragonese, 80 Aramaic, 88 Ardnamurchan, 40 Argentocovus, 26 Argyll, 2, 18, 33, 40, 63, 82, 92, 114, 130, 210 Arran, 63 Arthur’s Seat, 31 Arumanian, 195, 210 Athelstaneford, 36 Atholl, 46 Atlantic Archipelago, 2, 21, 39, 27, 55 Atlantic Ocean, 18, 71 North, 18, 118, 190 attrition, lexical, 166, 190–1 Auld Licht Idylls, 141 Ausbau, 6, 7, 8, 81 Ausbaudialekt, 8 Australia, 158 Austria, 4, 161–2

242  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a n d Avoch, 189 Ayrshire, 19, 36, 78, 130, 143–6 Lollards, 86 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 136, 215 Balkanisation, 31 Balkanische Sprachbund, 210 Baltic Basin, 9, 89, 102 Bamburgh, 35 Banchory, 170 Banff Academy, 202 Barbour, John, 76 Barrhead, 122, 123 Barrie, J. M., 141 basilect, 98 Basque, 12, 186–7 Bass Rock, 129 Bathgate, 32 Baxter, Stanley, 176 BBC, 193 Alba, 199 Bede, 27–8, 34 Belarusyn, 5 Belfast, 212 Belfast Accords, 197 Belgium, 3–4, 34, 102, 208 Bennachie, 25 Berlin, 6, 7 Bernard Shaw, George, 178 Bernicia, 35–7, 38, 44, 211 Berwick-upon-Tweed, 64 Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, 141–3 Bible, The, 82, 88, 115, 171, 174 English in Scotland, 88–90, 91 Black Death, 72, 212 Book of Deer, 65, 213 Book of the Dean of Lismore, 83 Bòrd na Gàidhlig, 199 Boswell, James, 105 Bourdieu, Pierre, 116 Breadalbane, 58 Brel, Jacques, 176 Bressay Soond, 118 Breton, x, 29

Brigantian greater cultural unit, 30 Britannia, 24–6 Post-Roman, 47–9 British Empire, 164 British Isles see Atlantic Archipelago British language, x, 5, 29, 30–2, 34, 36–7, 42, 70, 211 ‘death’ of, 52–3 ‘British project’, 103, 125, 214 Broons, The, 175 Broun, Dauvit, 32–3, 41, 44, 45–7 Brown, George Douglas, 145–6 Bruce, Robert (Robert I), 67 Brussels, 3–4 Buchan, 190 Bulgarian, 210 Burgenland, 161–2 burghs, 35, 61–3, 64, 65–6, 83, 92–3 Burns, Robert, 110–11, 129, 168, 174, 214 Caithness, xii, 39, 40, 66, 99, 117, 152, 210 Calais, 34 Caledoni, 25, 27 Calgacus, 26 Calvinism, 89, 90, 215 Campbell, Ewan, 33 Campbell interest, 82, 86 Canada, 114, 122, 158, 199 Cant, Travellers’, 180 Cape Breton Island, 114, 158 Carham, Battle of, 52 Carlisle, 24, 35 Carrick, 63, 78 Catalan, 9, 13 Catholicism, 86, 88–90, 114, 127, 132, 164–5, 190 anti-Catholicism, 128 Irish, 92, 164–5 Scottish, 164–5 Catraeth, 31–2 Caucasus, 112–13 Celtic languages, 21–2, 26, 34, 35, 37 Insular, 49, 210 non-Celtic place names, 21–2, 28

i ndex | 243 P-Celtic languages (Brittonic), x–xi, 26–7, 29, 32, 33, 50, 208, 210 Q-Celtic (Goidelic) languages, x–xi, 50 ‘Celtic twilight’, 113 Central Belt, 157, 164–5 Chalmers, Thomas, 133 Charles I, 91 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 76–8 China, People’s Republic of, 186 Chinese, 3, 127, 185, 188 Mandarin (Putonghua), 3 Christianity, 24, 60, 71–2 Church of Scotland, 80, 98, 115, 119, 127, 131, 132, 143, 164, 216 Church of Scotland, Free, 115, 127, 130, 132, 133 Cinaed mac Ailpín, 46 Clackmannan, 31 Clackmannanshire, 31 Clearances, 114–15, 19 Clochodderick, 31 Clyde, River, 31, 122, 156 Firth of, 18, 19, 45 Clydeside Conurbation, 130, 155, 166 Co. Antrim, 92, 123 coalmining, 19, 122, 125, 129, 156–7 Columba, St, xii, 49 ‘Comedy Jock’, 175–6 Conservative Party, 159–60 Coptic, 28 Cornish, 27, 29, 74, 197 Cothriche see Patrick, St Covenanting, 139 Cox, Richard, 28–9 Crichton Smith, Iain (Iain Mac a’ Ghobhainn), 181 Croatian, 195–6 ‘Crofters’ War’, 130 Cromarty, 189 Cruithni, 33–4 Culloden, 97 Cumberland, 30, 37 Cumbernauld, 159 Cumbria, 31, 52–4, 211

Cumbric see British Cupar, 29 Cuthbert, St, 36 Czech, 5, 7, 8, 49, 74 national epics, 215 Czechoslovakia, 195 Dál Riata, 5, 31, 33–4, 38, 45–7 Damnonii, 31 Danish, xi, 3, 37, 89, 98–102 Dee, River, 19, 22 Deira, 35, 37 Denmark, 190 Denmark-Norway, 44 des Cartes, René, 167 dialectalisation, 8–9, 81 dialogism, 136 Dickens, Charles, 136, 147, 149 diglossia, 9–12 Dingwall, 4, 62 Domnall Brecc, 31 Domnall mac Donnchada (Donalbane), 47 Don, River, 19, 27 Donnchad mac Mael Coluim (Duncan II), 47 Dorian, Nancy, 193–5 ‘Doric, The’, 173; see also Scots Dornoch, 194 Dossena, Marina, 107–10 Douglas, Gavin, 77–8 ‘Dream of the Rood’, 37 Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, A, 173, 175–6 Dumbarton, 31, 62, 122 Dumfriesshire, 19, 37 Dumville, David, 46 Dumyat, 27 Dunbar, William, 77–8, 78–9, 168 Dunbartonshire, 122 Dundee, 20, 159, 162, 166, 175 Dunfermline, 58 Dunkeld, 27, 41, 46, 58 Dunnichen, 36 Durkheim, Émile, 46, 65 Dutch, xi, 3–4, 7, 61–2, 69, 102 lexical attrition, 191

244  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a nd Eaglesham, 36 East Anglia, 68 Edgar Atheling, 57 Edinburgh, 58, 89–90, 98, 102, 103–7, 108, 137–40, 142, 166, 171, 210, 211, 213, 215 Castle Rock, 20, 31 Edward I of England, 159 Edward the Confessor, 57, 58 Eidyn, 31 Elgin, 65, 93 Eliot, T. S., 182 Elizabeth Tudor, 90–1, 92 Emigration, 158 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 174 Eneados, 77 English, ix, 6, 11, 13, 47, 57, 58, 59–60, 61, 64, 68, 70, 74, 75, 77, 79, 85, 105, 112, 113, 114, 115–16, 118–21, 127, 130, 134–5, 143, 144, 151, 161, 167, 181–2, 184, 193–5, 205, 207, 211, 213, 214 American, 7 Anglian, 5, 34–7, 211 Bernician, xii, 5, 35–7, 38, 63, 65 British, 7 ‘Cockney’, 68, 149 Colloquial, 165–6, 193 Irish, 165–6 lexical attrition, 191 New Zealand, 63, 68 North East England, 192 Northern, 61 Northumbrian, xii, 42, 52, 64 Old, xi, xii, 6, 52, 55, 63, 58, 216 Received Pronunciation, 143 Scottish Standard, xi, 14, 93, 107–9, 111, 121–2, 123, 134, 154–5, 180, 184 South African, 68 South East England, 68 Standard, 7, 63, 79, 98, #107–9, 141, 142–3, 149, 175, 177–8 Ulster, 92, 165

‘Enlightenment’, The, 103–7, 214 Scottish, 103–7 Episcopalianism, 86, 90, 114, 132; see also Protestantism Etruscan, 12 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, 195–8, 199 Executive, Scottish, 198 see also Government, Scottish Faeroese, xi, 19, 117 Falkirk, 163 Falls of Dochart, 18, 129 Fetlar, 210 Feudalism, 54, 72 Fielding, Henry, 136 Fife, 29, 50, 113, 150, 152 Finnish, 113 First World War see Great War fishing, 17, 19, 157, 189–91, 194–5 Dutch in Shetland, 118 German in Shetland, 118 Fishman, Joshua, 53 Flanders, 3–4, 62 Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, 78–9 Fordoun, 84 Forsyth, Katherine, 29 Foula, 119 founder effect, 65, 212 Forth, River, 27, 43 Firth of Forth, 19 Fort William, 18 France, 4, 34, 62, 72, 74, 86, 167, 197 Revolution, 104, 110 Francie and Josie, 176 Francophonie, 189 ‘Frankish Revolution’, 56–67, 72 Franks, 48 Free Kirk see Church of Scotland, Free French, 3–4, 11, 58–61, 64, 74, 80–1, 98, 167, 188, 189, 211, 212 Central, 61, 81 Channel Islands, 197 Norman, 61, 81

i ndex | 245 Frisian, xi Frisian islands, 34 Friulian, 13 Fulton, Rikki, 176 Gaelic, x, xi, 5, 14, 23, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 36, 37, 38, 52–4, 40–1, 41, 42, 44–52, 52–3, 55–6, 56, 58, 59, 62, 64, 65, 67–70, 72–3, 74, 75, 78–9, 79, 81, 82–6, 86, 90, 92, 99, 102, 103, 112–16, 117, 120, 121–2, 122–4, 126–7, 129–30, 132, 155, 158, 152, 160–2, 165, 166, 168, 179, 180, 180–2, 183, 187, 189, 192, 193–5, 195–201, 211, 212, 213, 215, 217 broadcasting, 162 Dean of Lismore orthography, 82 education, 134–5, 162, 200–1 Fife, 69 Language Policy, 198–201 Lowlands, 65 North East, 93, 215 Old see Irish, Old place names, 32 signage, 199 south-west Scotland, 62–3 Gaelic Language Act (2005), 199–201 Gàidhealtachd, 40–1, 66, 82, 97, 113–17, 130, 135, 155, 160–2, 187, 190, 199, 201 Gall-Ghàideheal, 210 Galloway, xii, 62–3, 92 Galt, John, 143–5 Garry, River, 18 Gask Ridge, 24 Gaul post-Roman, 34, 48 Gaulish, 28, 34 Geneva, 89 German, xi, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 58, 74, 98, 102, 162, 167, 208 Bavarian, 8 Low, xi, 9, 61–2, 69, 89, 102, 116 Germania, 25

Germanic languages, xi–xii, 4, 12, 34–5, 94, 117, 213 place names, 32 North, xi–xii, 42, 102, 117 North Sea, 34 West, xi–xii, 26 Germany, 34, 74 Fishing in Shetland, 118 North, 61–2 Glasgow, 19–20, 31, 122, 126, 148–50, 164, 172, 175, 176, 177–8, 193 Diocese of, 53 globalisation, 185–9 ‘Glorious Revolution’, 115 Gododdin, The, 31–2 Goidelic, 49 Goodsir Smith, Sydney, 171 Gorbals, The, 177 Govan, 31 Government, Scottish, 198–9 Government, Westminster, 197 Grampian Mountains, 19, 33, 84 Gramsci, Antonio, 116 Gray, Thomas, 103 ‘Great Barbarian Conspiracy’, 26 ‘Great Disruption’, 127, 133 Great Expectations, 150 Great Glen, 18 Great War, 4, 156, 177 Greece, 195 Greek, 210, 216 Ancient, 131 Greenock, 123, 157 Grimm brothers, 215 Grin, François, 100, 217 Guarani, 13 Gwynedd, 32 habitus, 116 Habsburgs, 161–2 Hance, Michael, 201 Hanoverian Succession, 115 Hanseatic League, 72 Hardgate, 122

246  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d Harvey, Alex, 176 Hay, George Campbell (Deòra Mac Iain Dheòrsa), 182 Heart of Midlothian, The, 137–40 Hebrew Ancient, 28, 88 Modern, 13 hegemony, 116 Hellenism, 195 Henry VII of England, 90 Henry VIII of England, 80, 90 Henry, Earl of Huntingdon, 211 Henry, William, 119 Henryson, Robert, 76 heritigisation, 175, 191 Hindi-Urdu, 188 Hogg, James, 140–1, 179, 213 Holy Roman Empire, 4, 7 Home Rule Ireland, 159 Scotland, 159 House with the Green Shutters, The, 145–6 Huguenots, 211–12 Humber, River, 35 Hume, David, 103, 105, 213 Hungarian, 161–2 Hungary, 7, 58 Huntingdon, Earldom of, 59, 211 Iberia, 55, 71 Iceland, 3, 39–40 Icelandic, xi, 117 Igbo, 3 ‘Illyrian/ Yugoslav project’, 214 Immigration, 158, 204–6 Imperialism, European, 187 improvement, 105–6, 121, 122 agricultural, 105–7 Highlands, 114–15 Lowlands, 105 urban, 106–7 India, 71–2 Indian Ocean, 71 Indo-European languages, x, 12, 33, 207

industrialisation, 19, 97, 121, 125–8 Ingibiorg of Orkney, 47, 57 Inglis see Scots Innse Gall, 210 Inverness, 18 Inverurie, 65, 93 Iona, 36, 38, 41 Ireland, 26, 33, 34, 56, 60, 68, 92, 122, 214 Emigration to Scotland, 127, 164–5 Home Rule, 159 Irish, 4–5, 45, 49–51, 53, 74, 92, 94, 122, 126–7, 165, 180, 197, 210 Bible, 82 Classical, 81–2 Old, x, 51 Irish for Gaelic see Gaelic ‘Irish Sea World’, 18, 40, 41, 44 Islam, 71, 88 Islay, 17, 41, 46 Italian lexical attrition, 191 Italic languages, 208 Italy, 72 Jackson, Kenneth, 28 Jacobitism, 103, 110–11, 112 Rebellion of 1715, 114 Rebellion of 1745–6, 114, 115–16, 116 Jakobsen, Jakob, 119–20 James I, 76–7 James IV, 80 James V, 79–80, 83 James VI, 90 use of Scots, 91 Japan, 156 Japanese, 185 Jerome, St, 88 John Balliol, 59 John of Fordoun, 83–4 Johnny Gibb of Gushetneuk, 147–8 Johnson, Dr Samuel, 215 Judaism, 88 Jura, 17, 46 Jutland, 34

i ndex | 247 Kachru, Braj, 185 Kailyard, 129, 141–3, 170 modern, 183 urban, 175, 177, 178 Kalevala, 113 Karaite, 5 Kashubian, 5 Kennedy, Walter, 78 Kentigern, St, 31 Killin, 18, 129 Kincardineshire, 29, 69, 82, 119 Kincorth, 29 Kingis Quair, The, 76 Kingsley Long, H., 177 kin-tongues, 9, 102 Kipling, Rudyard, 84 Kirkcaldy, 152 Kirkcudbright, 37 Kirkwall, 152 Kloss, Heinz, 6, 8 Knox, John, 89 koineisation, 50, 64, 65, 72–3, 93, 192–3 Korea, 156 Korean, 185 Labour Party, 159–60, 217 Scottish, 165 Ladin, 13 Lallans see Scots Lallans, 171, 203 ‘language death’ see Language Shift language maintenance, 12–13 language shift, 12–13, 192 Latin, 4, 24, 38, 48, 50, 55, 58, 74, 80–1, 86, 88–9, 208 ‘death’ in Scotland, 167 Latvian, 5 Lauder, Sir Harry, 175 Laurencekirk, 84 Law, Scots, 80–1 Leatham, James (‘Airchie Tait’), 150–1 Lennox, 56 Leonard, Tom, 179 Lermontov, Mikahail, 112–13

Lerwick, 118 Leven, River, 18 Lewis, 39, 181 lexical attrition, 191–2 lexifier language, 98 Liberal Democratic Party Scottish, 159–60, 217 Liberal Party, 159–60 Limburg, 193 Lindisfarne, 35 Lithuanian, 5 Loch Lomond, 18 Loch Tay, 18 Lochmaben, xi Lochwinnoch, 123 London, 106–7, 108 Lordship of the Isles, 66 Lorimer, R. L. C., 172–3 Lorimer, W. L., 172–3, 216 Lorrain, 4 Lothian East, 36, 128–9 Mid, x, 141–2 West, 32 Low, Reverend George, 119 Low Countries, 4, 72, 212 Lucy the Factory Girl; or the Secrets of the Tontine Close, 148–50 Luxembourg, 8, 134 Luxembourgish, xi, 8, 123, 134 Macafee, Caroline I., 166, 191–2 McArthur, A., 177 Macbeth translations into Scots, 173 Macbethad mac Findlaich (Macbeth), 56–7 McCartney, Paul, 216 McClellan, Robert, 172 McClure, J. Derrick, 170–1 MacDiarmid, Hugh (C. M. Grieve), 163, 168–9, 169–71, 173, 175, 181, 182 Macedonian, 210 MacGill-Eain, Somhairle (Sorley Maclean), 181

248  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd MacGregor, Rob Roy, 85 ‘Maclaren, Ian’ (Rev. John Watson), 141 McLeod, Wilson, 81 Macpherson, James, 112–13 macrosociolinguistics, 1–14 Mael Coluim III (Malcolm III), xii, 6, 47, 57–8, 211 Magyar language see Hungarian migration, 55 Makars’ Club, 171 Malcolm IV, 211 Man Isle of, 40, 63, 117 Kingdom of, 44, 66 Manau, 31 Manx, 83, 197, 211 Mar, Earldom of, 56 Margaret, Maid of Norway, 211 Margaret, St, xii, 47, 57–8, 211 Margaret Tudor, 79, 80 Marwick, Hugh, 120, 153 Mary I, 90 Maryland, 95–8 Mary Tudor, 90 Mearns, Howe o the, 84 Mediterranean Sea, 21, 25, 181 Meek, Donald E., 82, 115, 130, 152 Melchers, Gunnel, 152 Melrose, 36 Mersey, River, 35 mesolect, 98 Milroy, Jack, 176 Milroy, James and Lesley, 64, 212 ‘Mistral, Frédéric, 169 Móds, 180 monasticism, 55 Mongol empire, 71–3 Mons Graupius, 25–6, 27 Moray, 43, 60, 93–4, 190, 210 Moray Firth, 18, 60 Morgan, Edwin, 178 Muir, Edwin, 168–9 Mulrine, Stephen, 177–8

Murison, David, 62 Murray, Charles, 169–70 Murray, Chic, 176 Nairnshire, 217 Neill, William ‘Bud’, 174–5 Netherlands, The, 61–2, 193 fishing in Shetland, 118 Newfoundland, 190 new technologies, 156–7 New Towns, 157, 159 New Zealand, 158, 171, 212 Nicolaisen, W. F. H., 29 No Mean City, 177 Normaldialekt, 8 Normans, 11, 48, 56, 58–61, 64, 194, 211 Empire, 59 Gaelicisation, 64 infiltration of Scotland, 58–61, 211 Norn, 13, 42, 52, 99, 102, 152–4 ‘death’, 117–21 Norse, xi–xii, 37, 46, 199, 210, 212 Old, 28–9, 46, 63, 64, 66 Viking, xi–xii, 216 North Atlantic Drift, 14–17 North Berwick, 128–9 Northern Ireland, 197, 198 Northern Isles, xii, 19, 39, 41, 44, 52, 102, 117–21, 157–8 North Sea, 9, 19, 34, 157 oil, 19, 157–8 Northumberland (modern English county), 35, 59 Northumbria, 27–8, 31–2, 35–7 Norway, 6, 18–9, 44, 89, 117, 170 Norwegian, 6, 8, 89, 98–100, 117 Bokmål, 102 Nynorsk, 170 Nova Scotia, 114, 158 Oban Academy, 181 Occitan, 102, 116, 169 Oder/Odra, River, 6 Ogham, 38, 49

i ndex | 249 oil North Sea, 157–8 Oor Wullie, 175 Orkney, xii, 5, 18–9, 21, 22, 40, 42, 44, 57, 58, 117–21, 152–4, 208, 210 Orkneyinga saga, 40 Ossian, 112–3 Ottoman Empire, 161 Pae, David, 148–50 Paisley, 157 Panjabi, 3 Paris, 81 Parliament Scottish, 183, 199 Westminster, 108 Partick, 31 Patrick, St, 49–50 Pennsylvania, 122 Perth, 58, 171 Perthshire, 18, 24, 82, 129 Peterhead, 150, 157 pet- place names, 29, 51 Petty, 97 Picard, 4 Pictavia, 26–30, 30, 36, 38, 41, 44, 45–7, 53, 84 Pictish, 5, 27, 28–9, 30, 32–3, 39–40, 41, 53, 66, 70, 120, 208, 210, 217 ‘Celtic Pictish’, 28–9 ‘death’, 44–52 Pictland see Pictavia Pinkerton Syndrome, 111, 178 Pitencrieff, 28 Pitskelly, 29 Poitou, 29, 34 Poland, 5, 6–7 Poland–Lithuania, Commonwealth of, 5, 71 Polish, 3, 5, 6 Portugal expansion, 71–2 Portuguese, 13 Potato Famine, 4–5, 164

Presbyterianism, 88–90, 91, 114, 115, 130, 132 dissent, 115, 122–3 ‘Pritenic’, 29 Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, The, 140–1, 213 Protestantism, 83, 86, 86–7, 88–90, 103, 115, 127, 128–9, 130, 164–5, 213 Evangelisation of the Gàidhealtachd, 115, 130, 190 Irish, 92, 164–5 proto-, 86 Provençal see Occitan Provost, The, 144–5 Prussian, Old, 5 Purves, David, 173 Pygmalion, 178 Qur’an, 88; see also Arabic Reformation, Protestant, 79, 82, 86, 114, 190 Reid, Thomas, 103 Rendboe, Laurits, 118–19 Renfrewshire, 31, 36, 63, 92, 122, 123, 157 Rheged, 35 Rhine, River, 4 Rhineland, 62, 72 Rhys, Guto, 29 Robertson, Stanley, 180 Roderick, King of Strathclyde, 31 Romance languages, 4, 24–6, 195, 208 Roman Empire, 4, 30, 35, 208 Romani, 180 Romanian, 5, 195, 210 Romano-Celts, 47–9 Romanticism, 109–11, 112, 121, 129–30, 179 Ross, 210 Ross and Cromarty, 40 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 84 Runes, 37–8 Russian, 71, 112, 188

250  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi s to r y o f s co tl a n d Russian Empire, 112–13, 127, 189 Ruthwell, 37 S4C (Sianel Pedwar Cymru), 199 Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, 201 Sanskrit, 182 Sasse, Hans-Jürgen, 51, 116, 192, 216 Saxons, 26 Scandinavia, 39–40, 41, 110, 190 diaspora, 56, 210 migration and settlement, 46, 47, 55, 210 Schiehallion, 27 Schmid, Monika, 191–2 Scone, 41 Scotch and Wry, 166, 176 Scots, x, xi, xii, 6, 11–12, 14, 26, 37, 42, 51, 53, 62, 67–70, 80, 82, 82–6, 89–90, 91–2, 94, 98, 99, 107–9, 103, 107, 110–11, 113, 115, 116, 117–21, 121–2, 122–4, 125–9, 130, 132, 134, 135–51, 154–5, 158, 163–7, 167–81, 182, 189–93, 193, 197, 199, 205, 213, 215 Anglicisation, 91–2, 98–103, 107–9 Black Isle, 189 Borrowings from Latin and French, 80–1 Caithness, 95, 213 Central, 94, 98 education in, 133–4 formation, 63–6 Glasgow, 123, 165–7, 174–5, 176, 193 Highland, 213 insular, 152–4 ‘Jockney’, 193 koineisation, 72–3 language planning, 201–4 lexical attrition, 191–2 near standardisation, 74–9 North East, 69, 92–8, 147, 148, 151, 169–70, 173, 192, 193, 213, 217 Northern, 95 Orkney, 94

orthography, 77, 82, 109–10, 171, 172, 204 Rural, 163 Shetland, 93, 94, 121, 152–4, 191, 216 Southern, 94 ‘Synthetic’, 169–71 Ulster, 92, 163–7, 197, 217 Urban, 166, 189 West Central, 165, 166 Scots Language Centre, 203 Scots Language Society, 171 Scott, Alexander, 17 Scott, Sir Walter, 110, 136, 137–40, 174, 179, 215 Model for representing Scots, 140–4, 148 Scotticisms, 104, 107, 111 Scottish National Party (SNP), 159–60, 199 Scottish Renaissance, 168–9 Scottish Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), 115 Second World War, 5, 19, 156–7, 178 Selkirkshire, 36 Shakespeare, William, 136, 173 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 110 Shetland, xii, 18–9, 30, 38–40, 42, 117–21, 210 shipbuilding, 156, 157 Siberia, 14 Silesian, 5 ‘Silk Route’, 71, 72 Sinclair, Sir John, 106 Skara Brae, 21 Skye, 49 Slamannan, 31 Slavonic languages, 5, 49 Old Church Slavonic, 88–9 West, 13 Slovak, 7, 8 Smith, Adam, 104, 186 Social Democratic Party, 159 social networks, 64

i ndex | 251 societal multilingualism, 3–6 sociolinguistics, 1–14 Sorbian, 13 Soutar, William, 171 Spain, 4, 80 expansion, 62 Spanish, Castilian, 9, 80, 185, 188 Spey, River, 18, 43 Speyside, 36 St Andrews, 41, 46, 50, 58 Statistical Accounts of Scotland first, 106–7 second, 128–9 Statutes of Iona, 85 Stirling, 27, 58, 61 Stirlingshire, 31 Stonehaven, 69 Strathclyde, 5, 31–2, 35, 36, 44, 52–3, 63 Strathearn, 56 Strathgryffe, 52–3 Strathmore, 19, 84 Sunday Post, 174–5 Sutherland, 19, 117, 129 East, 193–5 Sutherland interest, 60, 194 Swedish, xi, 6, 8

Ukrainian, 5 Ulster, 33, 34, 63, 165 plantation, 92 Union of Crowns, 108, 214 of Parliaments, 98, 214 Unionism ‘nationalist unionism’, 159 Scottish, 159–60 Unionist Party see Conservative Party United States of America, 122, 164, 185, 187–8 University of Edinburgh, 104 University of Glasgow, 144, 181 University of Oxford, 131 University of St Andrews, 216 University of the Highlands and Islands, 202 Unst, 210 urbanisation, 72–3, 121

Tacitus, 25–6 Taggart, 176 Tasmanian, 5 Tay, River, 18, 21, 41 Firth of, 20 Testament of Cressid, 76 Þingvellir, 40 Thomson, Derrick (Ruaridh MacThòmais), 113, 181 Tom Jones, 136 Transylvania, 161 Travellers, Scottish, 180 Troilus and Criseyde, 76 Trudgill, Peter, 68 Tweed, River, 35, 36, 211 Tyne, River, 24, 52 Tynwald, 40

Wales, 32, 60, 199 Wallace, Sir William, 67, 159 Wallon, 4 Wallonia, 3–4 Wars of Independence, 55, 67–70 Wasteland, The, 182 Watt, Dominic, 193 weaving, 156–7 Wee Macgreegor, 177 Weinreich Max, 6 Welsh, x, xi, 24, 29, 31, 32, 51, 74, 198 Western Isles, 17, 27, 39, 41, 44, 46, 157, 162, 165, 194, 210 Westminster Government, 157, 164 West Saxon Royal House, 58 Whithorn (Casa Candida), 37, 38 Wigtownshire, 37

Venice, 72 ‘Vernacular Revival’, 109–11 Votadini, 31–2, 35, 36 Voteporigis/Votecorigas, 49 Vulgate translation 88

252  |  a soci oli ng ui sti c hi sto r y o f s co tl a nd William the Lion, 211 Williamson, Keith, 134 Winʒeat, Ninian, 89 Woolf, Alex, 33–4, 43, 46, 49–51 Wordsworth, William, 110 Wright, Professor Joseph, 131

Yell, 210 Yiddish, xi, 5, 127 Yorkshire, 31–2, 61 Yugoslavia, 195