Time to broadcast the benefits of a renaissance in Scots language

Published on Thursday 11 October 2007 00:30

DAVID Lee, assistant editor, deserves congratulations for his column in Scotsman Recommends of 26 September. He celebrated the "delightful new vocabulary" which he discovered when he moved to Scotland.

As he says, where can you find a more evocative word than dreich to describe a wet, grey, depressing day? Our vocabulary is rich in such words where the sound alone makes a vivid picture in the mind. This is one of the pleasures of living in Scotland.

Lee was speaking, of course, of the language which is now usually called Scots, although it would be less ambiguous if we followed the lead of Robert Burns and called it Lallans. As he says: "But spak their thoughts in plain, braid Lallans, like you or me."

It is a rich and expressive language, the medium of most of our best poetry for the last six centuries, and of many of our best plays, even if our new National Theatre has so far failed to notice it. Much of the best dialogue in our novels and short stories is also in Scots. Virginia Woolf said of the novels of Walter Scott: "The lifeless English turns to living Scots." If we were to lose Scots, we should lose our understanding of much of our best literature. Henry Cockburn said that Scots was "the sweetest and most expressive of living languages" and R L Stevenson called it "this illustrious and malleable tongue".

The use of both English and Scots, which used to be normal in Scotland, made most of us naturally bilingual. That is a great advantage in life. It is widely recognised that bilingualism stimulates the intelligence and an appreciation of the subtlety of words.

At the same time it makes it easier to learn other languages. This is especially true of Scots because it has so much common vocabulary, not only with English, but with the Scandinavian languages, Dutch and German.

Bilingualism in Scots and English is unfortunately no longer so common as it was. There are two reasons for this. Incredibly, our schools have done their best for generations to suppress Scots. "Dinnae say dinnae. Speak proper!" This is now less prevalent than it was because the schools are now more conscious than they were of their responsibility to introduce the bairns to the pleasures of Scottish literature.

The real killer has been broadcasting, largely controlled from London, and almost exclusively in English. There is about to be a Gaelic television channel, but so far no word of increasing broadcasts in Scots. Recently there was an excellent dramatisation by Gerda Stevenson of Walter Scott's Heart of Midlothian mostly in Scots, but it was on Radio 4, not Radio Scotland. This whole question is the basic problem which faces the Commission on Broadcasting which the Scottish Government have appointed.

In my youth you constantly heard Scots on the streets and shops of Edinburgh. Now that is rare indeed. At this rate of decline Scots is highly endangered. A renaissance of Scots, with its appeal to most of the population and its evocative power, might dramatically enhance our lives.