Report on The Future of Scots Symposium
Where in I travel the length of the UK and ponder many things related to the Scots Language
Preface
As a preface it must be noted that for me as an Englishman in England, the Scots Language is a hobby. My vocation and profession is manufacturing engineering, educated by Strathclyde University more than twenty years ago.
By virtue of being neither a native Scots speaker nor a resident in Scotland I must treat the Scots language with a certain degree of abstraction : it belongs to other people.
During the lockdown of 2020 developed an interest in the Scots language, although personally it began as half-remembered Glasgow patter and then developed into an independent research project, compiling a corpus of 21st century Scots writing, from books, poetry, social media, newspapers and so on, then a sprawling corpus website with analytical functions, maps, Euler diagrams and anything else in recreational corpus linguistics that held my attention.
So, imagine my surprise when I received the appoval for my application to attend the Symposium on the Future of Scots hosted by Glasgow University’s department of English Language and Linguistics. On a Thursday night I suppressed the imposter syndrome sirens in my head and set off from London’s Victoria coach station on the legendary M11 Megabus.
For the purposes of narrative and thematically I must mention that in the darkness of the bus as it left London, the driver announced over the tannoy in very measured tones "ah’m yer driver the day, ah’m gaunae go over a few rules ae the bus, the lavvy is at the back behind the grey door, mak sure ye flush it. There's gaunae be nae smokin, nae vapin an aw.... " And so on in what might be described as an authoritative formal register of Scots.
A smile crept across my face, and there were mutterings of confusion from the rest of my cosmopolitan fellow passengers. Some understood and some didn’t.
Glasgow’s leafy west-end
Seven uncomfortable hours later and I arrived in Glasgow, nostalgia compelling me to take photos of landmarks that used to be mundane but now they tug at something deep inside. I walked across town to the leafy west-end venue, arriving an hour early.
I could see figures setting up chairs inside but it would be weird if I was the first punter to wander in so I waited for other attendees to appear.
A lifetime ago as a music-adjacent manufacturing engineer in Glasgow I created a website called Glasgow Indie Eyespy where you could give yourself points for spotting the lead singer for Belle and Sebastian or the drummer from Mogwai. It's hard to shake off my habit of being a niche interest fanboy, so as I entered the venue I started a new game of Scots Linguist Eyespy.
Are professors worth more points than authors? Are poets worth more points than activists?
The room was laid out with about eight tables with about ten chairs each, places for more than eighty in total. The tables slowly filled up. We had all been issued name badges to write ourselves. Some people favoured just first names, others went for a more comprehensive full name, occupation and Scots linguistic organisation.
I wrote my name in block capitals, dithered over there was anything to add, and just kept it as is.
There were already pockets and apparent cliques forming so I found a place at the most sparsely populated table and after peering at name badges introduced myself by name to other people.
At this point there is recognition. A chap at the table has heard of my corpus website and thinks it's great, and I’ve actually included some of their articles in the corpus. It is Jamie from the Mak Forrit blog.
Rather than protesting that I'm a fraud, and that I merely compiled a collection of other people’s work and used other people’s programming languages to the create a website that lets other people play around with word frequencies, regionality and comparisons, I just say thanks and try to turn the conversation back to the Jamie and the particular nuances of their personal orthography in their writing. They used accented characters in a manner different other writers in the corpus, and months ago I had to find out how program plain text searches where accented characters were treated the same as their unaccented equivalents in some contexts, but not others, and then somehow analyse the frequency of accented characters, among other letter frequency counts
Is it creepy that I've analysed such matters recreationally?
At this point I get distracted by a nearby poet.
In addition to my corpus of 21st century Scots texts I have a side gig of trying to compile a Scots language rhyming dictionary that might be useful to both aspiring Scots poets and schoolchildren who have set homework involving writing a poem in scots. It started as an experiment on how to create a rhyming dictionary from scratch, by compiling existing published Scots poetry and its developed to the point where I have half a dozen “proof of concept” copies in a carrier bag on the table.
Whilst I'm very uncomfortable trying to sell stuff, giving things away comes easily, also the front cover features sketches of many Scots poets and I'm just masochistic enough to try find out what they think of it in person.
I handed over one of the previous few draft copies that I had brought along and the poet seems intrigued and delighted.
Is that enough? It's still unclear whether the rhyming dictionary is genuinely useful or an ephemeral novelty. Linguistic infrastructure, like dictionaries, thesaurus, corpora and writing prizes are valid, useful and valuable. A rhyming dictionary is a very small part of linguistic infrastructure, an afterthought even, but is it valid?
On the table that the poet arose from, I spot an independent publisher with whom I have corresponded on social media so I went over and introduced myself. He has brought along a small pile of his book and is more confident promoting them than me.
When I eventually return to my table and pile of belongings, other people from the Scots Language Centre have arrived and are introduced, familiar names are put to faces.
The Symposium
The symposium starts with a couple of speeches from a former Scottish Cabinet Secretary and a former director of the Scots Language Centre about how the Scots language has been shepherded to it's currently position over the last thirty years which provides something of a background to the day’s proceedings.
Within Scots language activism it is noted that there is a preponderance of non-speakers and new speakers of Scots for whom it isn't their native language, I am one of those people. Should I keep quiet, and rescind my involvement? Maybe. It will take me a while to find some native speakers to hand over the corpus and rhyming dictionary to, it would be a shame to otherwise lose all the work that's gone into them.
There's also a mention of how for some activists it is seen as a game. And here's me playing Scots Linguist Eyespy, up to over a fifty points by this stage in the morning. It's been my useful social crutch for many years and situations. I'm unlikely to ever stop gamifying my anxiety.
Mention is made of how some Scots language activist activities occur outside of government funding, and outside of cultural funding streams. There are writers who just have an insatiable urge to write and publish, whether or not there is central funding provided. I’ve seen on social media plenty of writers with donation pages as writing isn’t lucrative enough to pay the bills alone.
Luckily I’m a manufacturing engineer with a profession completely independent of Scots linguistics, I’m fortunate I can fund this hobby and pay my household bills from my day job and leave central Scots funding to other people.
There was a handful of other presentations by academics from overseas who had some pretty neat insights and about how other countries have addressed matters of linguistic diversity of a similar nature to Scotland, with similar prejudices, similar resolutions and similar successes.
In my notebook I have written the word NEOFALANTES which Miriam Villazon Valbuena from the University of California Riverside used to name new speakers of the Asturian language in northern Spain. Its a nice word, I thought I might try to work it into conversations later in the day.
In describing the Nynorsk orthography of the Norwegian language, Dr Ragnhild Ljosland mentioned that they used the slogan “Speak Dialect, write Nynorsk” as a way to protect verbal regional dialects and promote the Nynorsk written form. Would that work in the context of Scots - “Speak Dialect, write Scots”, that might be something to return to during the day’s ruminations.
At this point there is a coffee break and eighty or so linguists retire to another room to refresh and mingle.
Discussion tables
The main work of the symposium takes the form of a number of discussion tables, each having a chairperson or moderator that hopefully keeps the conversation on topic. I could easily slot myself in to express views on any of the discussions underway. The tables were listed as follows:
Education
Getting Rid of Stigma
Official Body/ies
Official Status
Raising Awareness
Standardisation
Sustaining Speakers
and bullet points were given as sub-topics for each table to be discussed.
After a bit of deliberation I decided to start off on the "Getting rid of stigma" discussion table, it was being chaired by an acquaintance who I knew from twitter with whom it previously shared my research on "Common (and easily disproven) anti-scots language tropes used on twitter", this discussion should be right up my street.
About a year ago I went through a phase of taking a note of any recurring themes and arguments that anti-Scots language people on twitter would use, namely:-
It's just a dialect of English, not really a language
No one really talks like that / never met a Scots speaker
No one talks like that round here
There is a true Scots language but that’s not it
It's a conlang created by the SNP to differentiate Scotland from England
The Scots language died out ages ago
The regional variations and dialects mean it's not a language
The Scots language is Gaelic
I understand it so it must be English
It's gibberish, bastardised or incomprehensible English
It's just slang
Some kind of class prejudice, Ned or middle-class
It's not taught in schools / university
Scouse, Cockney, Geordie must be languages too
No dictionary
Used to be very different from English and now its not
And then I spent a month keeping a tally of how often each trope is observed on Twitter.
Some tropes are far more common than others. On the one hand its just stats banter on Twitter, on the other hand, if you were compiling some kind of program to address stigma against Scots language at some kind of future symposium, this sort of research might be useful to prioritise your efforts.
It was exciting to hear one person at the table actually voice the “there is a true Scots language but that’s not it” trope entirely seriously in real life, trying to argue that the people who reported they spoke it in the census were mostly mistaken and merely spoke English with a few Scots words. The discussion became quite lively after that.
It soon became clear that online stigma is over-stated and unrepresentative of the other domains of stigma, Twitter is not real life. There were mentions of the domains where Scots is accepted and permitted, in the playground and pub, and where it was implicitly not accepted in the professional workplace and classroom.
I found myself nodding in agreement with the stories of being told off for not speaking properly at school.
Wait.
I'm English, I was never subjected a Scottish school system telling me off for using Scots.
Is being told to speak properly at school just a common occurrence in all languages and territories?
I clearly remember being told off for saying "wa'er" with a glottal stop instead of "water with a T".
I'm usually so good at agonising over minor mistakes made in my youth decades ago. Was it my English school teacher who was telling me off for not speaking properly, or was it my father (originally from Fife)?
At the "greeting rid of stigma" discussion table I keep quiet until finally contributing my anecdote about the Scots-speaking driver on the overnight Megabus as a way of implying that authority figures are now comfortable speaking Scots in the first instance.
There was a mention that occasionally Scots speech is seen as a sign of low education, low class and low intelligence, this lead to a discussion about the notion of class prejudice. I pointed out that whilst census data suggests there is more of a preference for Scots language with people on the low skilled and unemployed social grades, and less of a preference for Scots amongst the professional and higher skilled social grades, in some Twitter arguments Scots is characterised as a middle class thing.
It was suggested that there might be a stronger relationship between Scots reading and writing skills among middle class social grades and a the Scots speech skills among the working class social grades. I’m pretty sure I can verify or counter this using the census data that’s already available, but it will take me a couple of days.
Media and Social Media
During the Stigma discussion and at other points in the day’s proceedings it was noted that there are no Scots language TV shows, except for the comedies and sketch shows. The BBC have no interest or appetite for funding Scots programming either on radio or TV. But the world has changed, the BBC are no longer the gatekeepers they were, these days kids don’t even watch YouTube, because TikTok is where its at. But still there’s very little Scots programming on any of these media, very little children’s programming too.
Whilst it would be neat for there to be funding and BBC supervision, there are literally no barriers to entry for such media, all it takes is a little consistency and will power.
Outwith Scots research and manufacturing engineering, I have a long history of churning out video projects on YouTube with varying degrees of success. My series of having bands play gigs in my bedroom lasted six months and received thousands of views, my Peppa Pig stop motion animations videos received millions of views before the copyright police took them down, my hand-drawn animated videos had hundreds of views, my Hertfordshire local history videos had literally dozens of views and my dishwashing video series almost broke double figures.
Len Pennie’s Scots Word of the Day videos on TikTok and YouTube get hundreds of thousands of followers and views, she’s very good at what she does, but its literally filmed on her living room floor or in a car. Government funding and production values have no bearing on it, compared to merely getting on with making the videos and slinging them online, regularly and consistently.
Whilst it would be great to get James McAvoy, Kevin McKidd and James Cosmo to enact some professionally directed drama from a critically acclaimed playwright in Scots on BBC One, anyone could easily just use their phone camera to narrate a nature walk round Glasgow, Edinburgh or anywhere in Scots, with a bit of banter or otherwise informative words, edit out the boring bits and put it online once a day or three times a week. Its the consistency and regularity that is important.
As mentioned previously, I’m not a resident of Scotland, I’m not a native speaker, I’m not even a neofalante any more, so these suggestions and ideas are all I can offer.
There’s been an idea for a written Scots thing bouncing around my head for a while, it bubbled to the surface again when someone suggested a newspaper written in Scots. I mean writing a whole newspaper is a huge proposition, there’s not enough writers or market or funding for such a thing right now. Also newspapers are a dying medium.
But, perhaps, wee shareable snippet newspaper images that superficially look like the the Private Eye articles shared on twitter, would that work. Would it be a satisfactory medium to issue exclusive news stories in Scots without the infrastructure of a whole newspaper?
It wouldn’t take much to churn out one or two entirely original news stories in Scots that might hold authority to account in a way that English language news cannot. Also it could be a fun way to find out if Scots language is immune to charges of libel.
Maybe things like planning disputes, holding local authorities and government to account over mistakes and misdeeds, would that work? Maybe the discord between the language of officialdom and Scots as a language of the people would make this particular type of writing catch on.
As a thought experiment we could try to imagine what domains of literature might lend themselves to written Scots, putting aside poetry and comedy. There’s already a small pool of Scots science fiction. But not much high fantasy similar to Tolkien and Game of Thrones. Social realism has been covered by Emma Grae, Graham Armstrong and Colin Burnett, and there are plenty of classic English literature translations. But what about horror and whodunnits, thrillers and satires, romance and erotic fiction?
I’m still not a native speaker or a resident, I can’t write it this myself.
Another point that needs to be made specifically about Twitter is that although its an awesome, there are fewer people tweeting in Scots than is usually supposed. You can easily do plain text searches to find people talking about news items, football, celebrities, but when you search for common Scots words in any combination “dinnae”, “tae”, “wis”, the sort of parts of speech that can’t be avoided no matter what is being talked about, we find on any given day there are maybe four or five people writing tweets in Scots.
Its a datapoint I occasionally sample, but haven’t researched in depth. In total there might be a community of hundreds, but the use of Scots in tweets is over-egged.
On the other hand there are perhaps a dozen Facebook communities that often post writing in Scots every day. Reddit doesn’t have much in the way of a Scots language community. There is a Scots Leid group on the Discord chat utility which has a dozen or so daily participants, evenly divided between native speakers and curious learners.
Standardisation
I have strong views about standardisation but for reasons of abstraction (I'm not a native speaker nor do I live in Scotland) I find it difficult to contribute and articulate the views. Glancing across the room at the Language Standardisation discussion table revealed it to be over-subscribed with lots of people with more passion and skin in game than me.
I shall try write down my views offline (online) instead of participating at that table.
I might be wrong about this but any authoritative standard ought to be based on how people are currently writing and using the language, and not on any desire for internal orthographic consistency or historical preferences.
Any inorganic or artificially created orthography is doomed to fail without buy-in. From my work on the corpus and rhyming dictionary it's clear that there are a wide variety of orthographies in current use. Some are more normative and cohesive than others.
There was a lady on twitter the other week replying to a request that people should use Scots Dictionaries more often, by saying she doesn't need a dictionary because she just “writes how her characters speak” which is almost a clear crystallisation of the problem, a speaker / writer simply not recognising the benefit of a consistent and general orthography.
Earlier I mentioned Jamie from Mak Forrit and his reasoned use of accented characters, this is one example of a distinct personal orthography.
In the Ulster-Scots Society's translation of the gospels they have proactively used accented characters as a means to guide and shape their readers pronunciation of words, and the end result is nothing like the orthographies from anything written by other Ulster-Scots writers.
Scots writer Iain W. Forde has a very distinct style of writing, in comparison with other scots writers it is the most distinct orthography both away from Standard English and away from normative Scots. It feels very old.
Best selling writer Graham Armstrong's personal orthography in his book Young Team is unmistakably Scots but quite distinct, he uses slightly different spellings of "yi", "hur", "git" and "wit" than other comparable writers within the new wave of young urban first time 2020s writers.
Within insular regional dialect areas, Orkney, Shetland and Ulster-Scots, there is some degree of cohesion in writers' orthographies where it is distinct from the central dialect. In Shetland "da" is used for "the", in Orkney there's a preference for "hid" instead of "had" and "cheust" instead of "just", in Ulster-Scots "tha" instead of "the".
These are accurate encodings of the spoken dialect in written Scots, but there is still little orthographic cohesion between different writers.
I think the problem with standardisation isn't a matter of the greatest minds coming together to produce a white paper listing the optimum standard spellings, agonising over the "correct" spelling and the merits of alternate orthographical choices. The problem is there are two million Scots speakers with two million different personal orthographies.
I can point to Thomas Clark with my graphs, network diagrams and analysis, and say that his writing is the most normal and central orthography, if there is a standard it should be based on his writing. But that's akin to saying that all actors should be like Kevin Bacon because he's the origin point of the Kevin Bacon degrees of separation concept.
If an optimum standardised form of Scots is defined successfully, it suddenly becomes a new gatekeeping exercise, a barrier to entry which would exclude best-selling debut writers, Bible translations and established writers, sending them back to their word processors to correct and raise their standard.
Whilst in Norway there are the rival orthographies of Nynorsk and Bokmal, for Scots there would be rivalry between the un-named future standard and two million individual personal orthographies. Effectively there would then be two million and one orthographies.
Any inorganic orthography has to both tell a large proportion of Scots writers that what they have been writing is wrong AND then hope that they can be re-educated and will use the new orthography, which will be somewhat at odds with three hundred years worth of established Scot literature.
Some of my corpus work compares how similar or how different Scots writers spellings are with each other. The authors with the closest similarity ( by my measure - top 200 most common words) are the core writers published by Itchy Coo. This might be expected, they all undergo the same subediting process and cover the same subject matter, namely children's literature.
Itchy coo represents the very pinnacle, best in class, gold standard of consistent orthography between writers.
Conversely every other Scots writer is less similar to every other writer, there are no pairs of writers are more consistent and cohesive with each other than Itchy Coo.
If we want to see what a functional, consistent, standardised Scots language looks like, it is Itchy Coo whether we agree with their spelling preferences or not.
With this in mind, I suggest the creation of a “Guild of Scots Language Subeditors” or at least a book of guidance for subeditors dealing with Scots to nudge them into a more consistent direction between publisher's so even a English language subeditor will be aware of the sort of spelling alterations that might be necessary, so in their notes sent back to authors everyone is aware that spelling choices are actively made rather than random or in isolation.
"These are the top twenty most common spelling issues you may face and how they are commonly addressed…"
"I know stone sounds like stain in your voice but most other Scots writers spell it stane"
Maybe this discussion has already taken place, maybe such guidance for subeditors already exists. Are writers James Robertson and Ashley Douglas rolling their eyes at my imaginings?
Rather than framing it as a prescriptive "this is the new orthography you must use" perhaps "these are the sort of sub-editing changes that are common" would be more productive, or just an unthreatening pamphlet “An Advisory Style-Guide for Written Scots Subediting”.
Between the number of Scots publishers, general publishers who might publish Scots and the dozen or so scale newspapers, there's probably less than a dozen full-time Scots subeditors, and less than fifty English language subeditors who might encounter Scots, but those few will face a readership of around 98% of the population.
Scots guidance for subeditors would not be a best-selling book, but it could be highly influential in making a consistent standard. Instead of targeting two million writers, only a dozen or so industry professionals are encouraged to liaise a little more and sing from the same hymn sheet. So that Itchy Coo, Luath, Evertype, Canongate, Ulster-Scots Agency and so on, are all aware the same orthographical preferences. Also some kind of mechanism for feeding back views and opinions “I think you’ll find that my authors are really keen to use this particular non-standard spelling and I’m not going to fight them” etc.
There's already a huge amount of publishing infrastructure in Scotland, literary agents, specialist publishers, printers and so on, whilst not especially geared towards Scots, it might be beneficial for them to have this toolkit, Scots style guide to reach for when confronted with a Scots manuscript.
It might also be beneficial to include subtitling agencies in recipients of a Scots style-guide. Here the specific spelling of words is somewhat removed from the speaker. Unlike written publishing there’s little or no interaction between the person speaking and the way the words are spelled and presented to the end viewer.
Whilst there’s not much broadcast Scots language programming, having a toolkit available for subtitle writers who might encounter it would ensure that “correct spellings” are presented if the programming ever trouble millions of viewers on the BBC, ITV, Netflix, etc.
Normalization, Regularisation and Normative Orthography
After the symposium lunch of roast turkey, potatoes and veg, I found the Standardisation table had been renamed “Normalization, Regularisation and Normative Orthography”, it seemed quieter than the morning session and I was more inclined to overcome the reservations I held in the morning.
One participant mentioned that when they started reading written Scots, if the words didn't match their regional pronunciation then they felt alienated by the text. From my English perspective of not having a native regional dialect of Scots, I think this is just entirely a matter of literacy.
Its something that seems to lurk behind many of the anti-Scots commenters on twitter, where they simply just aren’t familiar with written Scots, have no conception of its history and think people are making it up, brand new, as they go along. They haven’t read enough of it to see beyond a notion of phonetically written English to appreciate the orthography in the same way that they might be literate in English.
Take for example the words “guid”, “gweed” and “gud” they’re all quite explicit phonetic spellings of the same words that are common in Scots writing. Although perhaps we could just settle or normalise on the “guid” spelling.
And when an experienced Scots reader sees the word “guid” we might hope they know what it means without a prejudice that “its not the way we speak round here”, and then if the same reader were called upon to read it out or recite the word, they might say “guid”, “gweed” or “gud” depending on their own personal regional dialect.
This is the “Speak Dialect, Write Scots” concept that Dr Ragnhild Ljosland mentioned earlier.
By way of comparison, if one were reading a piece of English text and saw the word “you”, one might pronounce it as “yoo”, “ye”, “ya” or even “yow” without ever conceiving the notion that “no one says ‘you’ round here, this text isn’t written for people like us”.
If one was compiling a new standardised Scots rhyming dictionary, the single spelling of "guid" could be listed as rhyming with "fluid", "feed" and "wood" without explicitly reaching for a different spelling. People muddle through with this sort of thing in poetry all the time, we mentally mumble the words until they match phonetically as a different mental process to determining their meaning.
Official Recognition
Towards the end of the day I join the “Official Recognition” table, the handful of us there are unable to locate the people who are supposed to be moderating, so we just go off on our own tangential discussion, which was fascinating.
We discussed what “official recognition” would mean in practice. Is it just another line to chuck about when arguing with anti-Scots folk on twitter? Would it be ignored in the same way that the European Charter for Minority and Regional Languages status is ignored?
If Scots was officially recognised, then it would have to be specifically defined, what is Scots and what isn’t Scots. From my corpus analytics, its clear that Scots writers generally have an innate understanding of what Scots is. There’s no one claiming to write in Scots and coming out with plain standard English.
We might note that in UK law, English isn’t actually recognised as the UK’s official language, we just assume it is as a default. There’s no official definition of what English is and what it isn’t. Is it even possible in a way that doesn’t exclude café, restaurant and envelope.
But without some kind of official definition, someone could just speak French and claim that its Scots and legally there would be no comeback. So perhaps hand in hand with official status you really do need an official language board, to arbitrate on such matters.
I think it was at this point in the day when I mentioned my idea of having a tri-lingual road sign that read:-
Loch Nis
Loch Ness
Lake Ness
So English tourists could finally locate the popular tourist destination.
I jest.
Summing up
At the end of the symposium the moderators of each table summed up the discussions with bullet points and commentary in presentations to the whole room.
My list of notes towards the end was as follows (some of which were heard spoken and some I merely imagined):-
Solvable problem
“CONFIDENCE”
Scots comics
”Being able to speak Scots is an asset”
I need to stay off twitter
Tri-lingual edition of The Gruffalo (English, Irish and Ulster-Scots) - easy win for schools
Network of grass roots groups
(there already are many regional amateur writing groups who often churn out Scots works - check out Glenn Muir)
Media representation
Linguistic diversity
Grassroots counter-culture to hold linguistic authorities to account
”Imagined bogeyman”
”REVOLUTION”
”Every domain”
TV adverts in Scots
Reclaiming those BBC Scotland culture shows that have been axed, but in SCOTS
Overall I felt the symposium was a great success. I couldn’t believe I was there
I regretted not engaging with other discussion tables and running out of time to speak to other heroes of Scots Linguist Eyespy. There are people I ought to contact about my projects and stuff I have spreadsheets on that might be of use in broader fields. I still have queries and missing contexts, and in the dying embers of the day felt like Goethe who on his deathbed cried out in German/Scots, “Mair licht!”
***
Hours later I'm in Central Station retrieving my luggage and hoping that the M11 Megabus will be more comfortable on the way home.
There are a couple of gadgies sitting nearby, on the cusp of cracking open some cans of beer. Now I don't have to remind you that such opening of alcoholic beverages is strictly forbidden by Glasgow bylaws.
Luckily a police officer comes over to remind the gadgies of this with the formal and authoritative words "Naw, dinnae dae that." Perfect spoken Scots from an officer of the state.