'Killer language' cannot take place of Scots

Published on Monday 19 February 2007 00:47

ENGLISH, George Steiner once wrote, is "the killer language", imperilling the survival of all others. No nation knows this better than Scotland, where this has been our experience for the last four centuries.

Scots first came under pressure from English as early as the 17th century. In 1603 the Scottish king, James VI, succeeded also to the English throne. He moved to London and took with him royal patronage of the arts.

This was of benefit to Shakespeare, but snuffed out the vigorous early drama in Scotland. An even more influential act by James was his authorisation of a translation of the Bible into English. This became the most widely read book in Scotland at a time when the Church had a powerful hold on the minds of most people. If God spoke English, where did that leave Scots?

Additional pressure came in 1707, when the English government succeeded in achieving an incorporating Union with Scotland which meant the abolition of the Scottish Parliament and Scottish political independence.

After 1707, London became the capital of political, social and fashionable life and there was great pressure on ambitious Scots to speak - or at least to write - English. The prestige of English was so strong that many Scots were persuaded that Scots was no more than a vulgar and imperfect form of English. Even David Hume took great trouble to expunge Scots words from his books. He said in a letter:

It is admirable how many Men of Genius this Country produces. Is it not strange that, at a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliaments, our independent Government, even the Presence of our chief Nobility, are unhappy, in our Accent and Pronunciation, speak a very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of; is it not strange that in these Circumstances, we shou'd really be the People most distinguish'd for Literature in Europe?

By literature, Hume meant works of philosophy and history, those of the Scottish Enlightenment, including his own. It is also strange he had such a false view of the Scots language, one reflecting the dominance of English taste.

The Scottish people, and particularly the poets, have fought back against the "killer language". One response to the Union was a renewed interest in early Scottish poetry and stimulation of the poets, particularly Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns, who wrote in Scots. There was a similar revival, led by Hugh MacDiarmid, after the Second World War, when Scottish cultural self-confidence was at a low ebb.

The use of Scots in everyday speech has declined, perhaps mainly due to the effect of London-controlled broadcasting. Geoffrey Barrow, in his inaugural lecture as professor of Scottish history in Edinburgh, said the failure to establish a Scottish organisation for public service broadcasting was "the most serious cultural disaster Scotland suffered in the 20th century".

The MacDiarmid revival encouraged a change in the political climate which led to the restoration of a devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999. There was, naturally, a hope MSPs would undertake measures to improve the use of Scots in education and broadcasting. The ruling Labour/Liberal coalition has given valuable help to Gaelic, but so far has been reluctant to do anything comparable for Scots.

The Scottish experience is not entirely discouraging to languages in other small countries which are under similar pressures. The death of the Scots language was predicted by James Boswell in the 18th century and by Robert Louis Stevenson in the 19th; but it's nae deid yet for a' that and is still in vigorous life in our literature. Languages under pressure can always fight back and it is the writers who can and should lead the counter-attack.

There is another point. As English becomes a means of international communication, this has obvious advantages for those who speak it. But it tends to weaken the subtlety and flexibility of the language because its wide use reduces it to the lowest common denominator and makes it unsuitable for fine distinctions or emotional response. It ceases to be adequate for many literary purposes and for these we need our minority languages.

This is the point of a passage in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's novel, Sunset Song. The central character, Chris Guthrie, grows up speaking Scots and then encounters English at school. She describes the conflict between the two languages: "You wanted the words they'd known and used," she says of her parents and neighbours. "Scots words to tell to your heart, how they wrung it and held it. And the next minute... you were English, back to the English words so sharp and clean and true - for a while... till they slid so smooth from your throat you knew they could never say anything worth the saying at all."

In other words perhaps we all have to be bilingual - English for the purposes for which it is useful and our own language for the more intimate and subtle. It is what Scottish novelists have been doing since the time of Walter Scott, English for the narrative and Scots for the dialogue. It is for that reason Virginia Woolf said of Scott's novels that "the lifeless English gives way to living Scots".

• Paul Henderson Scott is a historian and cultural commentator.