Ganfer 4

4. Policy and the Influence of Scots.

The comment somewhere in the video that this is the first time that a Shetland language policy has been created is not true, unless it means within Shetland itself. It is certainly not true of the UHI, where I was involved in the creation of just such a policy around the turn of the millenium. The fact that this has been completely forgotten shows how effectively it was eliminated by the Scottish academic establishment. There was no interest in it in Shetland - anyone who did come across it objected to it - and it was then undermined by ‘Scots’ (but not Scots speaking) linguists from Edinburgh, who replaced it with ‘real sociolinguistics.’ (We clever people, you guinea pigs - savvy?) Shetland is in the information space of Scotland, and most of the attitudes to ‘dialect’ in Shetland stem from Lowland Scottish attitudes to Scots.

Scots is dominated by a postmodernist emphasis on variety and individual ‘voices’ which depends on endemic illiteracy and demonises any form of consolidation. I was also involved, prior to this, in an effort to bring together the various strands in Scots orthography, which was again undermined by the dominating forces in Scots. (I, by the way, live in Aberdeenshire, and speak Scots as well as Shetlandic.)

Scottish linguists similarly depend on endemic illiteracy in order to fuel their dissertations. As linguistic anthropologist James Costa (not a Scottish linguist, but an observer of the situation) states, ‘...the unique way in which the debate is framed makes Scotland a tremendously important place to study for scholars of language ideology, in a globalised context where issues of standardisation and legitimate ‘voice’ emerge in minority settings throughout the world.’ (‘Language History as Charter Myth? Scots and the (re)invention of Scotland’ in Scottish Language 28, 2009)

To some extent, this video - almost twenty years after I gave up trying to emancipate my mother tongue - reminds me of young Scots enthusiasts who think that Scots is just ‘starting off,’ not realising that those they look up to as the doyens of Scots deliberately ‘scotched’ any chance of it being treated as a language a generation ago. If you point this out - such as James Robertson’s explicit statement in black print that Scots cannot have a standard orthography because it has to retain it’s ‘less-than-respectable’ connotations to be exploited by writers such as himself (A Tongue in yer Heid, 1994) - they accuse you of using ‘straw man’ arguments. I was once told by Shetland dialect enthusiasts that my criticisms of Robertson’s views were a ‘lot of shite.’

A few years ago I was persuaded to attend a Scots language video group led by a young Scots activist, recommended by the Scots Language Centre, who said that people correcting Scots did her head in, that instead of ‘speak’ she might use ‘spack’ (the preterite - she’d apparently picked it up from old songs without understanding it) and that she found speakers of traditional ‘Doric’ from her own home area in Aberdeenshire ‘tiring’ to listen to. The activist group ‘Oor Vyce’ similarly uses the preterite ‘cam’ as a present tense, or imperative, and such usages - which would be learners’ mistakes in any other language - are simply picked up by the SNDA and recorded for posterity in the supplements to the Scottish National Dictionary.

In the UHI, the Scottish Cultural and Linguistic course which I was originally supposed to be involved with included a traditional fiddler who regarded the dialect of her own Caithness area as ‘disgusting,’ justifying that by saying that it wasn’t Scots. I have been told by Shetlanders from other areas that my pronunciation of certain vowels is ‘hideous,’ presumably because they are less like the English pronunciations.

In Scotland, this leads to a ‘starting from scratch,’ Ground-Hog-Day approach in which all the existing scholarship is completely ignored, largely because it has been expunged from the narrative and its proponents demonised as ‘language dictators,’ ‘linguistic fascists’ and the like. The linguist who displaced myself at the UHI - by making my position untenable - declared orthography to be completely irrelevant, banned words like ‘autochthonous’ (introduced by Gaelic activists) and ‘Anglic’ (introduced by myself) from any courses she had anything to do with (both words were in the actual official policy, which I had helped to write and which she was clearly determined to undermine) and introduced as a coursebook for the UHI (University of the ‘Highlands and Islands’) a guide written by herself for actors on the pronunciation of urban Scots in Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen.

In this she says that Scots ‘lags behind’ in the use of some traditional verb forms compared to English, which ‘thank goodness’ is getting ‘easier,’ and where some varieties of Scots have lost traditional forms, she describes this as ‘further down the road of simplification.’ In the UHI, she said that she did not intend to teach Scots ‘as if it were a foreign language,’ but she didn’t intend to teach in Scots either. I never heard her speak Scots, and have no reason to believe that she could. This is why I now refer to that institution as the University of the Highlands and Islands of Edinburgh.

In a later article in Lallans magazine, in which she described people such as myself who were in favour of a more traditional approach as ‘language extremists,’ she defended her ‘non-prescriptionist stance’ by implying that the decision of whether to spell the preterite of the Scots word ‘ettle’ (intend) as ‘ettelt’ or ‘ettled’ was too ‘kittle’ (puzzling, intractable) to be solved.

As I later put it in a parody:

‘I’m an Edinburgh expert

with an ehnti-purist stehnce.

I hehv no time for clehssic Scots,

it’s not so fahr advehnced.

I spit on lehnguage fehscists

and I’m as proud as Hell

that ahfter decades in the job

I still cannae spell.’

This is the sort of view which has influenced some Shetland writers. In the past, several have mentioned the influence of the Glasgow poet Tom Leonard, who makes a principle of ad hoc incomprehensibility (‘helluva hard tay read theez init /stull /if yi canny unnirston thim jiss clear aff then /gawn /get tay fuck ootma road.’) They are enthusiastic about dialect per se, because of its non-standard connotations and expression of an ‘up yours’ attitude, and any normalisation would spoil this perception. Perhaps they think that if they can represent Shetland dialect - which, as one of them stated, is ‘just what you write poetry with’ - as an aggressively sub-standard form of English, they can tap into the cool factor generated by the Scottish literary obsession with urban deprivation. Even if that doesn’t quite come off, they will still avoid the opprobrium of the Shetland establishment, whose own cool factor only slips if ‘dialect’ appears in areas where it is ‘not fitted.’

Shetland ForWirds expresses its aims as ‘to foster and promote the use of written and spoken Shetland dialect as a valued and essential element of Shetland’s distinctive heritage and culture.’ A current co-convener, who is or was employed by Shetland Islands council as a dialect promoter, once wrote an article called ‘It’s me or the dialect, and I choose me’ in which he defends his practice of writing oddly spelt English as ‘dialect’ (e.g. these as ‘dhese’ which (a) has a non-traditional initial voiced dental fricative, and (b) is a plural demonstrative which doesn’t exist in traditional Shetlandic anyway.)

In this article, he says outright that he is contributing to the decline of Shetland dialect, and describes more traditional forms - such as spoken or written by myself - as ‘broad’ and ‘the dialect of old.’ In the past, any criticism of his practices (not by myself) was denounced by dialect enthusiasts as ‘discouraging wir young fock’ and ‘nasty pedantry.’ His role as dialect promoter has apparently been adopted as a model for Scotland as a whole, and he is currently a tutor of Scots language teachers for the Open University, presumably teaching them how to contribute to the decline of their own dialects.

Doubtless it is good value for the Scottish and Shetland establishments to employ people who will ensure that Scots and Shetlandic remain in their ‘fitted’ place as ciphers of disreputability. Existing ignorance of Scots appears to be an essential qualification. A person newly employed in that capacity appeared once on a Scots language forum, and commented on the spelling of some word, ‘Whaur the fuck did that come fae?’ Someone pointed out that it was the headword in one of the SNDA dictionaries. On Scots language forums, if you respond to comments like ‘Wha the hell speaks like that?’ or ‘Ye soond auld-farrant’ by citing dictionaries which record your own spoken usages which differ from Central Scottish urban demotic you are accused of being passive-aggressive. As the urban gull in my verse ‘yur maw’ says,

moov oavur doo face

ahm thu nyoo scoah

The time is not now. The time was twenty years ago, and even then, it was probably already too late. Languages reach a point where they go off a cliff edge. It’s many years ago now since I received a call from a Scots enthusiast who surmised that over 90% of Shetlanders would speak Shetlandic. (Scots enthusiasts were late in becoming aware of the opprobrium attached to the term.) At that time I was still on speaking terms with members of Shetland ForWirds, and one of them made inquiries at local schools in country areas. (Most if not all Lerwick children had already been monolingual English speakers for quite a long time.) The teachers said that maybe one sixth of pupils spoke ‘some dialect.’ The person who made the school inquiries said that she wished I hadn’t asked the question.