Peter Ross: Their mither's pride

• Farmers at Thainstone auction speak Doric. Photograph: Donald Stewart

A confetti of gulls scatters through the turbulent air above deep-brown furrows, marking the coming together of rain and gale. It is the sort of day, as they say, fit for neither man nor beast. Yet both are here at the Friday morning cattle auction at the Thainstone Centre near Inverurie, and it's worth paying attention to what is said by the men sitting round the ring.

"Ah shifted oor stooks last weekend," a farmer with white hair and ruddy cheeks is saying to a friend. "Twa acre. Aa the grain was landin' in the turn-up o' ma breeks."

A bald man, putting on his tweed cap in preparation for stepping out into the rain, tells his party: "Ah dinna like tae get the heid weet, noo."

The committed eavesdropper will find his ear tuning in to the occasional colourful phrase, but most is lost in a static of clanging metal gates, bellowing cattle, and the rough bark of the white-coated engineer. The atmosphere is somewhere between the stock exchange and a gladiatorial arena.

Even if there was perfect quiet, it would be extremely difficult for an outsider to follow what is being said. The hundreds of farmers speak to each other in the Doric - the north-east dialect. "Doric is a relatively recent term for what speakers prefer to call "oor mither tongue". The term derives from Ancient Greece, where it referred to the rustic way of speaking of the Dorian peoples. In Scotland, Doric's spread is reckoned to extend from Elgin to Forfar.

The legal status of Doric, indeed the whole Scots tongue, is ambiguous. Scots is recognised under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, which the UK government signed in 2001. However, Scots - unlike Gaelic - is not an "official" language, enshrined in law and protected by an Act, and it doesn't receive anything like the funding or promotion.

You cannot send your children to Doric school, as you might to Gaelic school. In part, that's to do with social class. The popularity of Gaelic schools in lowland cities is essentially a middle-class phenomenon; Scots speakers, meanwhile, are predominantly working-class.

At the cattle auction, the air smells of sawdust, dung and money, but the accents are thicker than even that heady scent. It's a humbling, and rather pleasing experience, to find oneself unable to understand the speech of one's countrymen. It proves even in an increasingly homogeneous nation, it is possible to find real difference.Not everyone follows the herd.

"Ah've got this awkward streak. Ah dinna like to be telt fit tae dee, ken?" explains Sandy Stronach, 73, director of the Doric Festival, over tea and a rowie in the auction-room's cafe. The festival, now in its "sivinteenth" year, is a celebration of the language and culture of Aberdeenshire. The programme includes exhibitions, concerts, a ploughing contest, and a singing competition in which the winner will take home 50 and the coveted title of Doric Lintie.

The festival could not ask for a better ambassador than Stronach, whose passion for the Doric runs deep. He is a tall, strong man in a Barbour jacket, who breeds Aberdeen-Angus and keeps blackface sheep. He is also a part-time lecturer in engineering, and the sort of reader who will quote Shakespeare and Wilde at you. He writes his e-mails in Doric and speaks it with pleasure and aplomb. Reach his answerphone and this is what you hear: "Michty ah'm nae here noo, bit leave a message efter the bleep, and if metters canna wait, try ma gyaan-aboot phone."

Stronach sits me down at a table and introduces me to three of his cronies - Alex White, Eion Lobban and Geordie Walker. "This is Peter," he tells them. "He's a foreigner fae Glesca here tae hear the true speech o' the Gairden o' Eden."

The group of pals approve of this plan and go about speaking amongst themselves so broadly that later, even slowing down the voice recorder, it's impossible to follow. When they want to make a specific point to me, they switch - full of pity - into an approximation of standard English, but sometimes struggle to find the right word. Effectively, they are bilingual.

"When you started the school at five, you'd virtually to learn a new language," says Alex White, 67, a dealer in farm machinery. "There was nae English spoken in the hoose at hame."

They were thrashed if they dared to use Doric at school. "Ah goat nine ae the strap fae the dominie for speirin' his wife fa she wis gan," explains Geordie Walker, 78. Translation: he was belted for having the audacity to ask the headmaster's wife where she was going, when he saw her pass the playground on her bicycle.

I ask what it was like to be told that the way they and their families spoke was wrong, to have it beaten out of them. Did it make them feel inferior in some way? Everyone shakes their head at this, but Sandy Stronach says to them, "Ye're nae bein' truthfu' noo. Whit happened wis ye were telt tae spik proper, so ye grew up wi this Scottish cringe as we ca it."

Not that it has held them back. They have all made a success of farming and other trades. One tells me that he used to work in the oil business - "in the ile" - and that he'd speak English to executives by the day, then go home at night and switch to the Doric. They enjoy the fact their speech excludes outsiders. It gives membership of a private club and creates a sense of community. The farming business, up here, runs on Doric.Deals are done between men using a mutual language easing negotiation and trust.

These men see themselves as hard-working, innovative pragmatists, their values built on a bedrock of respectability. They are, as they say, "intolerant o' coorseness". This attitude of mind is entirely bound up, they feel, with the way they speak. The language is old-fashioned and so are their standards. They lament the lack of Doric amongst the younger generation and feel that as the old tongue fades, so too does the respect for graft and for elders. Most of all, they feel that the softened language of the young - lacking the hard consonants and throat-clearing "ch" sounds known as velar fricatives - is indicative of a whole generation grown soft.

Certainly, a stroll along Aberdeen's Union Street suggests the farmers are right to feel Doric is fading. In the cattle auction, the standard greeting was, "Fit like?" In the city, I mostly hear "Howzitgaun?" - evidence, perhaps, of the Weegie-fication of Scottish culture which Doric speakers dread, and which they blame on the influence of Glasgow-centric television. "It would be a gey sad thing," one tells me, "if everyone sounded like Jackie Bird."

Perhaps because they feel excluded from the mainstream media, Doric speakers have embraced social networking sites. A Facebook group dedicated to Doric has in excess of 13,000 followers. Even more impressive is the popularity of Derek Minty, a 33-year-old from Forres, now living in France, whose Doric rap - "Nae Mince In Moray" - attracted almost 186,000 views.

Minty, who performs as The ChielMeister, says: "The internet is a place where people can show their roots and speak whatever Doric they know. It's our playground, where we can express ourselves."

What's clear from Doric's web presence is that this is a culture with a fine sense of comedy. The north-easterner, as seen from the central belt, is dour and humourless. Not so, says Patrick White, a 53-year-old Aberdonian actor and comedian, who explains that there is a distinct Doric humour with a roughness and blackness that would put Glasgow to shame. He works as a successful stand-up all over the region, delighting in using the old words, yet finds when he ventures south, even to Dundee, audiences don't get him. "They're not open to the north-east," he says. "They regard us as yokels and, to put it bluntly, lesser beings."

In The Grill, an old-fashioned pub on Union Street, the bar is busy with regulars determined to keep their outside dry and their insides wet.

Countdown is on the telly, but none of the contestants risk such fine words as weet, cankert or dreich - all of which describe the prevailing weather.

Sandy, a plumber sitting at the bar, explains the Doric is more common in Aberdeenshire, the city itself being increasingly multicultural.Suzie Gill, a woman in her early forties, tells me that she's been helping a Polish barmaid learn such key Doric phrases as "Kin ah hiv twa nips?"

My last stop of a day spent in search of the Doric is the Lewis Grassic Gibbon Centre in Arbuthnott, where the first concert of the Doric Festival is being staged. Acts include a teenage accordion prodigy and a fantastic traditional singer called Moira Stewart, introduced as "the postmistress o' Turriff". The event, which offers "tea an a peecie at halftime", is being compered by a retired farmer called Geordie Smith. Mad Men-esque in a stylish suit and tie, he's a sort of Bridge of Don Draper.

Smith is 75 and passionate about the culture from which he comes. But as for the Doric, he's mystified by my interest.

"Weel," he frowns, "ah never thocht onything aboot it. It's jist the wye we spik."