Scots? Nae way

The answer to Ian Johnstone’s question (Letters, 28 September) is that 99.9 per cent of people questioned in the census claimed that they spoke “Scots”.

Just about every one of us when filling in our census forms will have ticked the “aye” box in answer to the question: “Do you speak Scots?” when in fact we do nothing of the sort. What we speak is mispronounced standard English with a Scottish accent and with a few dialect Scots words such as “scunner” thrown in.

If we truly spoke Scots we’d understand every word of Burns’ poetry, or does that not qualify as “Scots” these days? Is it too 
archaic?

Or is it the “modern Scots” 
of the “goanynodaethat” variety that is appropriate nowadays, or is it Ayrshire Scots English, or Fife Scots English or maybe it’s the Doric? Anyhow, another daily newspaper seems to have found the figure for the number of “Scots speakers” which Ian Johnstone couldn’t find – it’s apparently 1.5 million or so.

Presumably that’s based on the one person who filled in the form and doesn’t include the other two or three in his family, so a feeble figure compared with my 99.9 per cent prediction but still far too many to be true.

Jim Adamson

Cupar

Fife