A quick post-script to the speak-only and read-onlys

In which I stumble across something somewhat meaningful about people who speak Scots without reading it and read it without speaking it

Back in December I wrote a short article about the people who reported in the census that they considered themselves able to speak Scots, but not read it, and those who considered themselves able to read Scots but not speak it.

These groups each make up about 3.5% of the Scottish population
Read-only - 193,302 people (3.65%)
Speak-only - 174,242 people (3.29%)

This sort of puts pay to the zombie mis-information that Scots is a distinctly oral language, which keeps getting quoted by politicians who should know better.

But Why?

In December, I was able to pin down that people in the north east were more likely to report being speak-only, whilst people in Edinburgh were more likely to report being read-only.

Perhaps its a cultural thing, where “up north” people are more likely to hear Scots, and unlikely to see much of it written down - we might imagine a stalemate in the conflict between DC Thomson’s Press and Journal with their Doric Column, and the Sunday Post with Oor Wullie, versus Aberdeenshire’s public libraries who disproportionately shy away from stocking Scots books.

Conversely in that cosmopolitan Edinburgh, English voices and tourists are more likely to be heard, and its perhaps easier to find written Scots.

New factoid alert

The other week after I wrote that article about nationalist voteshare and Scots language ability, had a go at the Scottish census table builder utility (have a read here) to check out the National Identity preferences of people with Scots language skills

Whilst gross numbers of people are cool, I like to use colours and percentages.

The census gave people a variety of options to consider about their national identity, and allowed people to tick as many boxes as they wanted. We might imagine someone with a Northern Irish parent and a Welsh parent, who grew up in England but now lives in Scotland, would be entirely justified in ticking four or five boxes.

The census reports the various combinations of people ticking one box only or several boxes:-

65.46% ticked Scottish identity only
13.93% ticked British identity only
8.22% ticked both Scottish and British
2.30% ticked English identity only

When we look at the split by Scots language skills, we can see that unsurprisingly people who speak, read and write Scots are most likely to report Scottish only:-

But among those who read Scots but cannot speak it, its somewhat below the average at 58.9%.

So in general those folk who consider themselves able to read Scots but not speak it, feel less Scottish than Scots speakers.

Conversely this group, the Read-only group, also feel the most “British”.

This contrast with the Speak-only group who feel almost the least “British”.

Educational and Qualifications

A second interesting thing about the Read-only groups is anent their level of education.

On average across the whole aged-16 and above population, 32.5% of people have degree level education and 16.7% left school with no qualifications.

In a general sense people with Scots language skills (speaking, reading, writing) have worse qualifications. 28.2% of people with any tangible Scots skills have degree level education and 17.9% left school with no qualifications.

But if we look at specifically the Read-only group we find this completely reversed, 58.3% have degrees and only a tiny 4.1% left school with no qualifications.

Despite the Read-only group being fewer than 200,000 people, they are disproportionately better qualified than other Scots-speakers and the general population.

Conversely, within the Speak-only group only 21.3% have degrees and 20.2% left school with no qualifications.

The null hypothesis

In an equitable world, the language you speak shouldn’t have any bearing on what qualifications you attain in a country’s education system, especially if you speak a language that has been spoken in the country for hundreds of years.

Yet this data ‘clearly’ shows that people’s Scots language ability is strongly correlated with their highest levels of qualifications.

And its complicated. The ability to merely speak or to merely read Scots is very strongly polarised.

People who reported in the 2022 census that they consider themselves able to read Scots, but can’t speak it, are almost three times more likely to have degree education than people who speak Scots but don’t read it. And correspondingly, people who speak Scots but can’t read it, are six times more likely to leave school with no qualifications than people who can read it but not speak it.