Letter: Politics of Gaelic

The 2001 census indicated that Scots Gaelic speakers make up around 1 per cent of the population (Letters, 15 February).

Even they can speak English, meaning that there is not a single person in Scotland, or indeed the world, who sees a road sign saying "Glasgow" and needs it to be translated into "Glaschu" before he or she can understand what it means.

Therefore, dual signage should not be understood as a linguistic aid to cater for a minutiae of Scots.

Rather, it is a deliberate political project intended to promote a particular concept of Scottishness.

This is done in order to revise our history as if to suggest that such Gaelic represents some kind of "authentic" Scottishness which has hitherto been "repressed" by the English speakers, and to make uncomfortable those Scots and other British who do not identify, or who are unsympathetic, with this element of our history.

In short, every time we see a bilingual sign it is a little bit of ethnic cleansing propaganda from the SNP administration telling us: "If you don't like this, then xxxx off to England."

We've been here before, several hundred years ago.

Alistair McConnachie

Bath Street

Glasgow

"Our language is very much alive and well" (Letters, 15 February). What a load of rubbish. Derrick McClure and Dr David Purves, well as those in the Scots Language Society, have been busy trying to wipe the most used name, of Scotch, from the face of the earth.

This was the name given by millions of Lowland Scots from the 18th into the 20th century. Their Scots was only used by a handful of people, until well into the 20th century, when that contemptible lot set about changing history about Scotch, and how it was all wrong.

Over the years three names were used: Scots, Scottish and Scotch. Nobody minded which till the Scots Language Society came along.

I have spoken the same Scotch as Robert Burns for more than 80 years; the same as was spoken by all the folk roundabout.

Their brainwashing has been so successful that I seem to be the only patriotic Scotchman left, or the only one with the guts to speak out.

Robert Pate

Newton Stewart

Wigtownshire

The language spoken between the Humber and the Forth (the then Kingdom of Northumbria) was Anglian, the ancestor of the Scots language, the national language from the Wars of Independence until the Union of the Crowns, not, as stated by R Mill Irving, "Saxon" (Letters, 15 February).

Anglian was separated by the Danelaw from the southern Saxon languages, spoken in Sussex and Wessex, which became English.

The two languages are cousins, deriving from different Germanic languages.

In this year's census there will be a question (requested for at least the past 30 years): "do you speak, read, write Scots?"

Scots includes all the dialects: Doric, Lallans, Caithnessian, Shetlandic, Ulster Scots etc and this will be an opportunity to see how alive the Scots language is.

Then both the national languages of Scotland can flourish as well as English.

Susan FG Forde

Fons Scotiae

Main Street

Scotlandwell, Kinross-shire