Rab McNeil
Speaking in tongues 28 August 2009  TODAY, I want to discuss the inability of Scottish people to speak English properly. I was first struck by this perception before, during and after the first parliamentary meeting about the release of the Lockerbie bomber. Let me first make clear that I don’t want to linger on the substance of the debate and, indeed, just want to use it as a touchstone for other matters. Though I attended the last day of Mr al- Megrahi’s trial in Holland, that was in a different journalistic capacity, and I do not feel it would be appropriate for me to discuss in any way the crux of such awful affairs. Here in the back seats, it’s all form and no content, and I’m happy to revel in irrelevance. To the point: any foreigners or English people watching Kenny MacAskill, the Justice Secretary, will have found him a reassuringly stereotypical Scot. Sombre and solemn, his sad sing-song voice reeked of homily and penance. Of course, anyone would have had to be sombre and solemn, given the occasion, but not all could have brought off the ingrained presbyterian tone. Rain-soaked dourness oozed from every syllable. It was magnificent, in its way, but he was still speaking in a foreign language: English. That’s why he sounded so Scottish and, once he’d relaxed after the initial tension of the opening statement, it was noticeable that he began frequently to mux ip his words. Inevitably, it was worse when the backbenchers stood up to ululate. Many did that Michael Martin thing of hesitantly reading from notes, like five-year-olds with school essays, and herein lies the possible origin of the problem. I don’t know what schools are like now. I meet a lot of kids who really love school and can’t wait for the holidays to be over, so they’ve obviously changed a lot since I was a pupil. In our day, there was a definite Colditz feeling to the whole experience. One felt a need to try and see things out, keeping the head down, and taking any opportunity to escape that might present itself. Back then, teachers routinely poked you in the eyelobe if you didn’t speak “English” properly. And that was for speaking Scots, a similar lingo, never mind what the poor folk blessed and cursed with Gaelic must have suffered. Whether your family and community deployed lingua Leithioramic or old Scots Shetlandic in their everyday life, they had to discard it in school and learn to speak approximations of ruling class speech. Today, the pressures are different and contradictory: it isn’t, officially, frowned upon to speak in your own tongue but, at the same time, the anglicisation of Scotland has proceeded so massively in the last 20 years, particularly in Edinburgh and the more attractive rural areas, that “proper” southern English will be common and even predominant in some classrooms and workplaces. It’s possible that, with our own Parliament noo, and particularly after pawkily standing up for ourselves over the Lockerbie release, we will slowly become more assertive and confident in ourselves. But whether this extends to language remains to be seen. In broadcasting, at the moment, we always sound like we are aping proper people south of the border. It goes a stage worse when DJs on commercial radio stations affect a transatlantic twang. Here, the attempted abandonment of Scots can be quite comical, as in the effort – often heard in Parliament, too – to avoid the glottal stop by speaking of “this magnificent cirry of Edinbugh” and even of “the Scorrish people”. I know it can be argued that Scors – sorry, Scots – is a form of English, but that doesn’t mean it’s a derivate of the form spoken south of the border. They are different versions of the same thing, which originated in Schleswig- Holstein. Our public speech isn’t relayed in our language. Hence we’re uncomfortable in it. It’s like asking Japanese people to read the news in English. They’d be uncomfortable, too, and would know they weren’t saying the words right or using the correct intonation. On television, I watched a series of people in Scotland talking about the Lockerbie debate, then we went over to their Englishman on the green at the Hoose o’ Commons and, suddenly, it was all loud, confident, relaxed and authoritative. He was a man whose tongue was at ease in its ain mooth. You may counter with Eddie Mair or Kirsty Wark, who do speak creditably from the heart of the beast, but these are exceptions to the rule. Politics is essentially about talking, and while we have our own Parliament, I don’t think we’ve learned yet to speak for ourselves. All languages evolve anyway. It’s tempting to say that any attempt to remove old or forbidden ways of speech, or to create new ones based on these, would be doomed. But the Norwegians sorted out their language when they became independent, and it’s not unusual for other countries (eg the French) to try and codify their speech. Still, it’s obvious that it’s best for language to change as organically as possible, and to avoid the exaggerations of the over-enthusiastic. Somehow, these forced emanations never sound right. My own Scotticisms were knocked out of me – partly by my teenage self, in a misguided attempt to get on – but I like to bung the odd bon mot into written work, just to remind folk where I’m coming from, ken? Related articles: Politics and principles 3 September 2010 Hello voters 25 June 2010 Off the menu 11 June 2010 Life but not as we know it 28 May 2010 Magnetic result 17 May 2010 See all articles in this category Your comments
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