Learning to speak, read and write Scots
In which I explore the avenues to learn or miss out on learning Scots
The other day in the Scots Leid Discord chatroom, someone asked “Can anyone teach me Scots?”, the answer was generally positive, but it did get me thinking about how people who do not currently know Scots, are supposed to learn.
Suppose there are three main ways people pick up the Scots language:-
Intergenerational - from their parents at home
Immersive / Environmental - in the street or from people you work next to
School - being taught it as an entirely normal European language (this doesn’t commonly happen)
and within Scotland we can estimate the proportions of Scots speakers who learnt it each way, and knowing the total number of Scots speakers (1,508,540) we can estimate the numbers of each type:-
90% - intergenerational - 1,360,000
8% - immersive - 121,000
2% - school - 30,000
We might imagine interviewing a load of Scots speaker and asking the mechanism by which they learnt to speak Scots. I reckon most people would put it down to their parents speaking it, and a small proportion might have picked it up from their friends and colleagues. And its conceivable that someone from an English speaking household might have read Burns and Ramsay in school and been inspired to teach themselves, but I guess this would be quite rare.
These three general ways to learn Scots can also be interpreted as ways in which people have missed out on learning to speak Scots:-
Intergenerational omission - parents do not speak Scots, only English
Intergenerational suppression - parents actively stop their children speaking Scots
Immersive - do not work in an environment where Scots is used
School - Scots isn't taught or is actively suppressed
If the state wishes to increase the proportion of Scots speakers then they need to understand the scale of each of these vectors and have specific strategies to address them.
From the census about 72% of households don’t have any Scots language ability, so that covers the intergenerational omission vector.
Similarly, in a previous SubStack article we looked at how among 3 to 15 year olds only 21% speak Scots, whilst for other age groups around 28% of people speak Scots, which suggests that in a quarter of Scots speaking households, the language isn’t passed on to the children - “intergenerational suppression” as mentioned above. Although this could equally be explained by non-Scots speakers having disproportionately more children than Scots speakers.
For immersion, written Scots is minoritised in society. There is rarely any written Scots in newspapers, even less written Scots in government, council or NHS literature. Shops rarely sell things that are in Scots over English (except as novelty items).
For spoken Scots some workplaces and some sectors have an abundance of Scots spoken, and in some sectors it is seldom used. Manufacturing and retail versus education and communications.
Scots is often heard in the street, in overheard conversations, police officers giving verbal advice etc.
The amount of Scots heard on TV and radio is difficult to measure, but it does exist. Perhaps an upper estimate of 5% of broadcast media in Scotland is in Scots is too generous, an this would equate to about an hour a day on a typical TV channel. Half an hour per day would be around 2%, although even this seems optimistic.
In Holyrood, only twelve MSPs out of 129 have used any Scots in the chamber, for the remaining 117 MSPs (91%) there is no evidence they speak Scots.
Active education
In terms of learners, we might suppose that globally there are five distinct scenarios or classes of people learning Scots:
Scots for Scots speakers
Scots for English speakers in Scotland*
Scots for immigrants in Scotland*
Scots for non-English speakers overseas
Scots for other English speakers
*Within Scotland, we might imagine that it is relatively easy for people to immerse themselves in Scots speakers, folk might hear it in the street, or at work, or if pushed at the local folk music club. Either way, its far easier to hear Scots spoken in Scotland, than it is in England or France or Poland.
Each of these scenarios might require very different types of teaching or resources. Additionally we might consider the different aspects of competence in a language, as described in the CEFR framework:-
Understanding - Listening
Understanding - Reading
Spoken - Interaction
Spoken - Production
Writing
In answer to our chatroom friend who asked “Can anyone teach me Scots?”, the response should be “it depends”.
Resources
A look at my exhaustive list of Scots books on Google sheets brings up the following list of books that could used for teaching Scots (excluding dictionaries and glossaries)
Luath Scots Language Learner
Grammar Broonie: A Guide Tae Scots Grammar
Modren Scots Grammar
Scotspeak
Spikkin Doric
Doric for Swots
Teach Yourself Doric: A Course for Beginners
Doric For Beginners: Illustrated guide
Ulster-Scots: A grammar of the traditional written and spoken language
Without further analysis it is difficult to recommend each of these books for specific learning scenarios.
We should also consider that teaching children (in school) is very different to teaching adults (outside of school). None of these books are school books, and almost all require some degree of understanding of English.
The publisher Itchy Coo do have a range of readers for small children, which effectively teaches children to read Scots.
I am somewhat reluctant to recommend the way I taught myself Scots, which was to buy several hundred books written in 21st century Scots and consume them all. This might not work for everyone.
However, the market for Scots books is disproportionately small, arguably minoritised compared to the market for English-language books in Scotland, and it would be in the interests of the language to advice people to buy as many books as possible as a public good, not just to learn the language. There are around fifty Scots books published each year.
Scots as a Second Language
There have are occasionally classes and sessions put on by universities and charities to help foreign students and refugees become more familiar with the Scottish vernacular, the sort of language heard on the street.
Educational materials for such classes are uncommon and usually put together by the people running the session.
There have been a couple of occasions where charities ask Facebook groups and on social media for native Scots speakers who might be able to help out, because most of the time the charity workers and organisers are monoglot English speakers (its a class thing).
The rare occasions where natural Scots speakers run session are amazing. This is a clip of a session run by Jimmy McGee nine years ago.
It would be neat to have proper textbooks designed for the purpose of these sessions, but none currently exist.
It is easy to underestimate the impact that these sorts of classes might have, we might note that in some parts of Scotland more than 30% of the population were born overseas (Edinburgh Central, Glasgow Kelvin, Aberdeen Central).
Scots for English speakers
This category is in some respects over-represented in literature, Scots dictionaries are written with definitions in English, Scots grammars are written in English. The default position is naturally that readers are already literate in English, and Scots grammar is English but with a some differences.
A large proportion of written Scots is in prose where the narrative is in English and dialogue is in Scots - most of Sir Walter Scott’s works, Ethyl Smith and Douglas Stuart.
A brief note about Gaelic
It is tempting to carry out a similar exercise in analysis for the Gaelic language, estimating the relative proportions of speakers who learnt Gaelic from different vectors.
But there are some very important differences between Scots and Gaelic to be considered.
Firstly the current figure of 1.5 million Scots speakers represents something of a peak. Its arguable that in the 1910s there might have been more Scots speakers, but there’s little objective evidence to support this. We might generously suggest there were 1.8 million. So today’s figure is in the same ballpark, despite the proportion of the population decreasing.
Whereas for Gaelic, the peak is less understood. In the Westminster Culture Committee hearing on Minority Languages, John Nicolson MP suggested…
Once upon a time, you would have had 1 million or more people speaking Gaelic, all across central and northern Scotland, and the south-west in Ayrshire.
I reckon he’s mistaken, we know the rough population size of Scotland going back many centuries, we have estimates. And we know in which areas which languages were spoken. By my reckoning peak Gaelic occurred in the 1810 with about 330,000 speakers.
(In earlier centuries when a greater proportion might have spoken Gaelic, the total population was a lot smaller. If the total population was less than a million and some proportion spoke Scots, English, Cumbrian and Norse)
In that case, today’s figure of 69,701 Gaelic speakers represents about a fifth of the historic peak.
Secondly, whereas for Scots we identified intergenerational, immersive and school as the three main ways of picking up the language, for Gaelic there is the DuoLingo mobile phone app. We might be inclined to underestimate its influence.
In the last ten years over two million people have started the DuoLingo Gaelic course, maybe as many as 500,000 are currently live users of this course. That is significantly more than the historic peak number of Gaelic speakers, and is about eight times as many people as could possibly have picked it up in an intergenerational manner.
There isn’t a Scots DuoLingo course. But lets imagine a world where a Chinese version of the Outlander TV series became incredibly popular in China, and 10% of the population were “fans”. That would be 140 million people, and if 1% of fans decided to learn Scots with a hypothetical Chinese DuoLingo Scots app, then they’d be getting close to outnumbering native Scots speakers.
Literacy
I have put together a small copypasta infographic featuring a hunner wee mannies, representing the population of Scotland, and the proportions of the population who reported Scots language ability in the 2022 Scottish census.
Most western countries report very high levels of literacy, usually 99%, suggesting that almost everyone is literate in the country’s main language, for the UK this would be English. English is taught in schools, most people emerge from secondary education able to read.
However, there was a news story that went round a couple of years back that reported the average reading age in the UK is 9 years. There is a bit of nuance to this, but effectively that 99% literacy rate is very much dependent on where you set the bar.
If you are reading this Substack article, you are likely to be relatively literate, but many people don’t read very much at all, and write even less.
With the Scots language things are a little different. We can’t measure the literacy rate over the entire population, only across those who can speak Scots. In our infographic it is twenty-eight wee mannies, or 28% of the population who can speak Scots, and twenty-two wee mannies, or 22% of the population who can write Scots, so the literacy rate is about 78%.
But if the “average reading age” for the Scots language is about the same as for English, then of the twenty-eight wee mannies, only fourteen of them can read better than a 9 year old. This would be a total of 770,000 people.
Other business
In Holyrood’s Scottish Languages Bill: Consultation Analysis it was suggested that many Scots language bodies and professionals work in “silos”.
Respondents identified how the Scots bodies tend to work in silos and in areas that are not usually accessible to many people working outside the academic and cultural circles. To break the silos, more collaborative, community-driven approaches are instrumental.
In an effort to single-handedly break the silos, I have put together a draft newsletter.
Crippling anxiety prevents me from emailing it out as unsolicited spam to the various Scots language professions, bodies and activists that I’ve come across. But if anyone wants to subscribe, please let me know, either by email or comments below.