You have probably never heard of Graham Grant, which is a great blessing. Grant is the home affairs editor of the Scottish Daily Mail, a far right rag which devotes itself to stories about celebs and royalty and informing its elderly readership of Tory and Reform UK supporters of all the many and myriad ways in which Scotland is shite, which is of course firmly blamed on the SNP, and never on the Westminster Government which holds far more power over the economy, tax, and benefits than the Scottish Government does.
Grant has joined in the attacks against the estimable Billy Kay, who has been subjected to a British pile on on Twatter for daring to suggest the bloody obvious; that so called patriotic Scots who oppose Scottish self determination and like the “Scottish” Daily Mail devote themselves to detailing all the ways in which Scotland is shite due to having its own government, all while giving Westminster a free pass, are not in fact patriotic Scots at all.
Kay had graciously acknowledged, in response to criticism of his statement by right wing journalist Fraser Nelson: “I disagree with Fraser on most things, but I love the fact that he still feels enough of a Scot to value the Scots language and my work promoting it. He is rare though, because the more typical unionist response is to ridicule and disparage it. This was not the case in the past.”
This prompted Grant to opine, displaying that more typical unionist response: “There are brilliant, emotive Scots words but state-backed projects to synthesise a Scots ‘language’ with its own vocab and grammatical conventions are strictly for the glaikit.”
Grant here perfectly illustrates the kind of patriotic Scot who’s not patriotic in the slightest that Billy Kay was talking about. What’s really glaikit, Graham son, is to make a public spectacle of your own arrogance, ignorance, and anti-Scots prejudice, without any apparent awareness that you’re contradicting yourself even as you weigh in on a topic about which you so evidently know the square root of hee haw. It’s a very special kind glaikit indeed when you make a declaration of your lack of understanding of and respect for a foundational aspect of Scottish culture and identity in an attempt to bolster the claim that North Britons such as yourself are indeed “proud Scots”.
Scotland is one of the few countries in the world to have a media and political class which is not only woefully ignorant about key parts of the country’s culture, but which wears that ignorance as a badge of pride. Grahamie boy here being a prime example.
There are two common myths about Scottish languages which are widely held by the “patriotic Scots” of the North British political and media establishment. They lecture those of us who genuinely know better as though holding fast to these myths is proof of their self proclaimed superior intellects and their supposed immunity from the scourge of nationalism – which is a self-serving “patriotic Scot” myth in its own right.
The first linguistic myth is that Gaelic is a dead language which was never spoken in the Lowlands, and is purely a Highland and Hebridean language. Gaelic is still very much alive, but this myth is propagated by those who’d be quite happy if it really did become a dead language. Gaelic was not only once widespread across most of Lowland Scotland, only finally dying out in South Ayrshire in the last decades of the 18th century or the first decades of the 19th, but it was the use of Gaelic which created Scotland as a nation in the first place. The very word Scoti was the mediaeval Latin name for Gaelic speakers. Scotland quite literally means the land of Gaelic speakers, and that fact alone gives Gaelic national relevance to all of modern Scotland.
The second “I’m a proud Scot but” myth concerning Scotland’s languages is the one that Grant so abundantly illustrates in his tweet to Billy Kay, the false belief that Scots is not really a language at all, which we can tell is a myth Grant fully subscribes to by his patriotic Scot use of scare quotes in the phrase Scots ‘language’. For Grant Scots is not a language. Academic linguists beg to differ, but Grant has the unwarranted confidence that comes from being a Unionist patriotic Scot.
He contradicts himself by acknowledging that there are “brilliant, emotive” Scots words but then decries attempts to “synthesise” a Scots language with its own vocabulary. What exactly does he think these “brilliant, emotive” Scots words are part of then? They are part of the vocabulary of the Scots language. That many of these words are also used in Scottish English does not negate the fact that they are part of the vocabulary of the Scots language any more than the use in English of words and expressions like déjà vu, hors d’œuvre, cliché, naïve, or avant-garde means that French is not a language. Grant has made a terrible faux pas here.
There are numerous dictionaries of Scots, the Scottish National Dictionary (SND) contains about 30,000 entries covering modern Scots from 1700 onwards, while its companion, the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST), covering Scots prior to 1700 contains a further 48,500 entries, a total of 78,500. It should be noted that since Scots is closely related to English, there is a degree of overlap in the vocabularies of the two languages. SND and DOST do not list as headwords those words which are common to Scots and Scottish English – that is they are pronounced the same and have the same meaning in both Scots and Scottish English. Those 78,500 entries are words which are specific to Scots. That’s quite an impressive vocabulary which does not need to be synthesised.
English has a larger vocabulary of course, and folk like Grant would argue that Scots doesn’t have words for concepts like television, hydrogen or karaoke, but then neither did English until the word television was synthesised around the year 1900 from a Greek prefix meaning far and the French word for sight. The word hydrogen was coined, that is synthesised, by the French chemists Louis-Bernard Guyton de Morveau (1737–1816) and Antoine Lavoisier from the Greek hydro ‘water’ and a French adaptation of the Greek -genḗs, a suffix meaning ‘born in a certain condition or place’. The word karaoke was borrowed from Japanese where it had been synthesised by compounding the native Japanese word kara ’empty’ with oke, a clipped form of ōkesutora, “orchestra”, itself borrowed from English orchestra. All these words are available to Scots speakers and as such also constitute part of the vocabulary of the Scots language.
You’ll note that I chose these words as examples because all three of them were deliberately synthesised and the history of their deliberate creation is well understood. This process of the conscious invention of words is precisely how ALL literary languages derive their vocabulary. All literary languages without exception are cultural creations, the product of generations of writers enriching their language with words borrowed from other languages, words revived from older stages of the language, existing words whose meaning is extended, or calques, words created by using native words in the pattern of a word or phrase in another language in order to create a new term. An example of a calque in modern literary Scots is wabsteid, based on the English website but using the Scots equivalents wab and steid. Literary languages do not magically spring into being because the language fairy waved her sparkly wand.
These processes and practices are common to written languages the world over. Modern Catalan vocabulary is regulated by the Institut d’Estudis Catalans, Spanish vocabulary by the Real Academia Española, French by the Académie Française, Icelandic by the Íslensk málstöð (Icelandic Language Institute). All these organisations compile vocabulary lists and coin new words and phrases in order to enrich the vocabularies of the languages which they oversee and to ensure that they have the linguistic resources needed in the modern world. “Patriotic” Scots like Grant only see this as being artificial, synthetic, and undesirable when such processes and practices are applied to Scots. That’s because these so called patriotic Scots want to deny to Scots the same range and breadth of usage enjoyed by other languages. Scots as a language threatens their belief in unitary British nationhood, but they’re not nationalists at all, oh no, how very dare you imply otherwise.
Similar comments apply to Grant’s dismissive ignorance of Scots grammar. Scots grammar does not need to be synthesised because it already exists. That Grant fails to recognise it is entirely his own shortcoming, not that of Scots.
Neither Scots nor its close relative English have much in the way of morphology compared to other languages. Morphology is the system of word endings (or prefixes in some languages) which impart grammatical information. Morphology is what the linguistically naïve like Grant often think of as being grammar. Grammar also encompasses syntax, which is a language’s rules for how words are ordered.
Both in morphology and in syntax the grammar of Scots differs from that of English. The formation of the past tense and past participles of many verbs is different between the two languages, examples include tuik and taen the past tense and past participle of tak, ‘take’, gied is the past tense of gie ‘give’. Gaed the past tense of gae ‘go’ where English has the suppletive form went. The forms kep and slep, past tense and past participle of keep and sleep. The past ending -it. Some plural nouns have different forms in Scots, the Scots plural of ee ‘eye’ is een, of shae ‘shoe’ is shuin. The plural of the demonstrative that is thae, that hoose but thae hooses. The ending of the present participle is -in not -ing.
In syntax there are many differences, the formation of the negative of verbs in Scots differs substantially from English. The reduced form n’t of English does not occur in Scots where nae or na (depending on dialect) is used instead. For the uncontracted negative not, Scots uses no, and Scots often prefers to use the uncontracted negator where English uses the contracted form, particularly in questions. Is he no comin? vs English Isn’t he comin? The form *Isnae he comin? is ungrammatical in Scots.
Another grammatical difference is the use of an -s marked singular verb with a plural noun but the plural verb with a pronoun. Eg. The lads pleys/is pleyin wi thair baw, but – They pley/are pleyin wi thair baw. This grammatical pattern is believed to be a result of Celtic influence.
These are just a haunfae of the grammatical differences between Scots and English. If you would like to explore more of the rich wealth of the Scots language, or if like Graham Grant you peddle ignorance and prejudice while claiming to be a patriotic Scot, ye kid dae a hale lot warse nor tae hae a wee squatch at the wabsteid o the Dictionars o the Scots Leid, which gives free access to the entire contents of both SND and DOST.
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