Introduction

Since 2019, Dr John Burns has been investigating the changing language, voices and words of Galloway. From ‘blether’ to ‘wabbit’, and everything in between!

With a particular focus on Lowland Scots, John produced a popular questionnaire, seeking feedback on the changing use and awareness of vocabulary items. This has been complemented by interviews with people in Galloway and broader work regarding the social history of Galloway. This report looks at John's findings and gives an overview of the changes he has identified.

Like many people in The Stewartry I grew up in a Scots-speaking household, something which I just accepted as normal. I knew that if I was speaking to someone like the doctor or the minister I had to tone it down a bit and speak very clearly in a language that was closer to “proper English”. That was just part of normal growing up and entering the world beyond family.

When I went to primary school in 1960 this sense of having two languages, the family language and the language used in the grown-up world of learning and “getting on”, was made even more pronounced. We even had a text-book called The King’s English from which we learned how to express ourselves in perfectly modulated English. Unlike some who went to school in earlier times I was never belted for using Scots words or pronunciations, but I was certainly corrected on many occasions.

For some reason I did not find it difficult to speak Scots at home and write English at school. Like many Scots I would consider myself bilingual. I learned not to write Scots words like “wee” or “hame”, but when it came to speech it was much harder to ignore them.

I well remember once when I was in “the wee room” which faced the local hill Bengairn and I was asked by the teacher if I knew the name of the hill which we saw outside the window every day of our lives. I knew it was called Bengairn . Now, my dad often worked outside in the gairden and I knew that the gairden and the garden were actually the same thing but one was posher than the other, so after a bit of thought as to how to answer I said, “Yes, miss, Ben Garden.” The class erupted in scathing laughter and I realised that in attempting to use what I thought was “correct” pronunciation, I had distorted the name and given a ridiculous answer. This led to a lasting embarrassment.

That kind of embarrassment or cultural cringe is something that many of us have felt and it is based on a lack of confidence in our own language, something that has long been bolstered by our education system. The Scottish Government has now has made great strides forward in trying to improve the status of Scots in schools yet many Scots are still haunted by the mistaken idea that Scots is just poor English. Until very recently the use of Scots was really only encouraged in schools around Burns Night in late January. And even then it was often restricted to recitations of poems or songs learned by rote and probably only half-understood. This was a terrible fate for a writer of Robert Burns’s world stature, and it sold our children short. Many of us took years to come back to Burns, or just forgot all about him. Nowadays, there is a concerted effort to bring Scots back into the classroom, to teach and learn poems, songs, stories that are lively and relevant to the lives of all pupils living in Scotland. Scots can now even be heard on the BBC where programmes like Chewin’ the Fat, Still Game, and Off the Ball among others regularly use and encourage the use of Scots vocabulary and accents from aw the airts. Often this is done for comic effect but it has done a lot to help people understand there is nothing wrong with their own language. The important thing is how you use it.

So, Scots is not bad English. It is a language that has produced one of the world’s great literatures, and it was once the language of the royal court as well as the language of the law courts. Kings spoke and wrote in Scots. Even famous judges and politicians spoke and wrote in Scots. It had a social status that began to decline seriously after the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the Union of the Parliaments in 1707. The translation of the Bible into English rather than Scots, and the decision of the great writers of the Scottish Enlightenment choosing to write in English instead of Scots further weakened the status of the language. Indeed, several of those world-renowned Enlightenment philosophers, historians, and economists were so nervous of being ridiculed for their language that they had their works checked for Scotticisms before publication. Nowadays it seems astonishing that writers of the importance of David Hume or Adam Smith were so lacking in confidence in their own mother tongue.

Yet, think about your own attitude to the use of Scots. Think about your own ability confidently to write a letter, an email, or, God forbid, something as extravagant as a poem or a song in Scots. Many of us are happy to sing along with a weel-kent folk song in the pub but many of us would be hesitant to attempt to write in what for many of us is our own language. The simple fact that extended writing in Scots has fallen away over the last three hundred years means that the status of Scots has fallen lower and lower in the eyes of the public. Indeed several people pointed out that they did not recognise the written form of a word on our questionnaire but knew it immediately when they heard it read out. Words are often not recognised because Scots does not have a regular spelling system and every attempt to agree on one descends very quickly into heated arguments.

But ask that same public to discuss, remember, or defend the words they use and you are met with a vehement outpouring in favour of the “old” words. People are genuinely fascinated by language and by the nuances of meaning, social class, and social attitudes enshrined in these words. Scots has been “dying” for hundreds of years but it still lies at the heart of our speech and many of our ideas of class and status. And it is still being revivified by young people today who maybe don’t know the “old” words but are busy making up new ones to fit the world they are growing up in.