My name s Bruce, and I m fae Perth.
I ve been performing stand-up comedy in Scotland for sixteen years and I remember
once during a gig somebody actually laughed I ll never forget it, because it was in Dundee.
It wasn t at the end of a joke, but in the middle,
and they didn t just laugh, they heckled me to ridicule
me for using the word hoose.. instead of house. What was I thinking? It wasn t even Burns night.
If you re interested in the people places and events in Scottish history
then click the subscribe button at the bottom right of the screen.
In the meantime let me tell you the story of the Scots language there will be subtitles.
Here s a picture of my sister and me when we were bairns (children).
When we were a little older we were sent to elocution lessons
Now I visited my sister on Christmas day this year and took her some clootie dumpling...
and as we were sitting chatting, something struck me.
Don t get me wrong she didn t hit me with the clootie dumpling.
It was just that we always remember how my aunt made it and I m giving you context for the story
Anyway, I hadn t seen her since COVID and as we were talking and eating I suddenly realised that
when I m with her is when I m most likely to speak naturally
We ve known each other almost 60 years and nobody has airs and graces
If ye need tae fart, ye need tae fart All I m saying is that after all the
cash she spent on elocution lessons in the graveyard they call; our granny Spinning Norah
Normally I try to take you to relevant places, but since I ve got the COVID, I m locked in the little
office in my house for a while so no sweeping Highland vistas.
When I make these videos I don t speak as I would in that relaxed environment with my sister.
I speak a far more standard form of English albeit with a Scottish accent.
Even then one trans-Atlantic critic in the comments section said:
This is completely unwatchable. Why doesn t this guy just learn to speak English?
I can understand your frustration sir. You ve clicked on to a channel that has a
Scotsman talking about Scotland and the sneaky sod has tricked you by
using a Scottish accent. It s worse than that mate.
I spell colour with a u can stick it up your backside.
Y all So, I thought
I should tell you how it all came to this? Now there s a very good book about the Scots
language by Billy Kay, called The Mither Tongue, and I ll leave a link in the description below.
Better still, for the people who support the channel as Patreon members
I m meeting Billy on 24th January the eve of Burns night to put your questions to him.
If you re not a Patreon member then you can become one by clicking the white tab up there.
Send in any questions about Scots language and culture or
anything else for that matter and I ll put them to Billy. But here s the gist.
If you ve been watching this channel then you ll know that I made a series of
videos about who made the Scottish people, including the Picts, the Scots, the Britons,
the Angles and the Vikings coming soon. Now each of these groups brought languages
with them, but from the 9th to eleventh centuries as the country we call Scotland was consolidating,
the Gaelic of the Scots became dominant. There were bits around the edges where other
languages continued, and some folk would be multilingual, but Gaelic was the language
of court, nobility and influence. In the bit that had been Northumbria
they spoke the Germanic language of the Angles. In fact I m told that, as late as WW1 the Germans
could actually understand prisoners of war who spoke in broad Scots.
Now the high point of Gaelic was the time of Macbeth, then Malcolm Canmore came out of exile
to overthrow Macbeth with an Anglo Saxon army. He married the Saxon princess Margaret,
who populated monasteries and other positions with people from the south
so you can see how this Germanic language moved from the fringes to gain more influence.
Malcolm and Margaret s son David had his power base in southern Scotland,
but he brought in Norman and Flemish knights to secure or suppress depending on your point of view
the areas further north. These Flemish incomers,
and of course the Anglo Saxons in the Norman retinues became the administrators,
and this Germanic language took hold further. The language they spoke wasn t called Scots,
but Englis The language of the Angles
So Englis became the language of large swathes of people both north and south of the border.
Some still spoke Norman French, Gaelic, or Norse tongues, but whilst the nobility on either
side at Bannockburn would have understood each other perfectly in Norman French,
large parts of the foot soldiers would have slaughtered each other
in a mutually understood Germanic language. Then, as the short-lived Bruce dynasty gave way
to the Stewarts there was a change. That change between fourteen hundred
to seventeen hundred largely took place in the south of England.
It s called the great vowel shift and it s basically how the English cheat at scrabble.
This great vowel shift meant the south of England moved away
from the original sounds of Germanic Englis I ve seen different explanations given
for the reason: was it migration,
was it words and sounds borrowed under French military, political or cultural influence....
Whatever the reason people in the south of England changed the way that they spoke.
Now think about that thing in a field with the udders that gives you milk
unless you re one of those lactose intolerant soft southern pussies
It s a joke and given that cats are lactose intolerant anyway; the pussies
come from every direction of the compass. The point is that nowadays the English would
call that uddered thing a cow. In fact more properly even a cow.
The Dutch say ko, the Danish say ko,
the Germans say kuh, and of course the Scots say coo.
So as the southern English moved away what was retained
in lowland Scotland became known as Scots. Scots was the language of the Stewarts.
Now some people will start banging on in the comments about Jacobites.
I m talking about the s-t-e-w-a-r-t-s. When Mary Queen of Scots went to France
the French difficulties with sound and spelling meant they changed spelling to s-t-u-a-r-t,
although it wasn t just a turning point for the Stewart name, but the Scots language.
Whilst we re thinking of that turning point, I d love it if you would put a favourite Scots word
in the comments section. I ll start with boorach
You see throughout the reign of James I, II, III, IV, V, Scots was our nation s language
of the royal court, the language of legal court, the language of literature and high culture and
the language of the common people, at least in lowland Scotland... although obviously
the high Scots of the royal court would vary from the language of the peasantry.
Then came the reformation, and the country was divided between pro English
Protestants and pro French Catholics. In the comments section of one video
somebody asked me why it was that John Knox promoted the English language Geneva bible
rather than commission a Scots language bible. Mainly for simplicity.
You see the English may have lost their way and sounded different,
but there was enough similarity in writing that literate people
both sides of the border could look at the same bible and understand it s meaning,
think Norwegians, Danes and Swedes although Knox had spent quite a while
in England, was a bit of an anglophile, apparently wrote in an English style,
so some Catholic Scots would rip the pan oot o Protestant Scots for no being Scottish enough.
The post reformation king of Scots was James VI and he spoke in, and wrote several books in Scots,
but things were about to change .
When he also became king of England some of his writings were re-printed in the English style.
James s grandad James V and HIS father James IV had had court Makars,
poets and literary men writing in Scots. Of course when James arrived in England he was
immediately courted by a poet and playwright who even wrote a play specially for James
in that mongrel English tongue. His name was William Shakepeare
and that play was Macbeth. Not only did court patronage for
Scots makars disappear, not only did the court start adopting that errant southern dialect,
but it became the language of a new bible authorised by King James.
A hundred years later an even bigger disaster was the Union between Scotland and England.
Now as soon as I use these words there will be crazies from both sides of the
debate going on in the comments section. Forget your opinions about the rights or
wrongs or good or ills of modern politics, that event was a disaster for our national language.
The toffs had moved from Scots to English, now
the middle-class business and academic sphere were doing the same.
In that incredible period of the Scottish enlightenment, where there was an explosion
of intellectual thought in Scotland that changed the world. Voltaire said:
It s to Scotland that we look for our ideas of civilisation.
But the Scotsmen who were providing those world changing ideas
were taking elocution lessons to try to rid themselves of their own native language.
Get this. David Hume, one of the worlds greatest philosophers would write a manuscript,
but before he published it, he would send it to a linen draper in Bristol and a cobbler in Norwich
to get them to make sure that his ground-breaking philosophical thought
had any Scotticisms taken out. It s not that English was superior,
he could express his high-flown ideas in Scots. It s just that we d reached the furthest
places of double speak, where the people who had moved away from the origins of the language,
in their ignorance and arrogance, proclaimed that the men of genius reimagining the
modern world spoke a barbarous tongue. Edinburgh Academy became the first of the private
schools in Edinburgh to ban Scots IN EDINBURGH.
This produced students who spoke the standard English that, in posh Scots to this day
is still recognisable, but practically indistinguishable from English.
Of course, once you get the aristocratic class to give up their language,
then you get the middle classes to follow, there s no use for the language s high literature
and you just tell the commoners that they can t speak properly.
They never had a language. They re just speaking English badly.
It s in that period that Robert Burns comes along, and upset the applecart, showing
that Scots was a language of beauty, satire, comedy and expression,
and because he could equally write in English, it was a valid language of choice.
That s why, when I was a child, and being sent to elocution lessons by my granny, and scolded
at school because Scots is for the stupid, you ll never get a job, speak proper English...
that one week a year on Burns birthday we had to compete to see who could speak Scots the best.
What an upside down world that was.
To illustrate just how deep that programming was let me give you an example from this very week.
A bdy in ma hoose came doon with the Rhona Everyone in my house was diagnosed with COVID
Now the track and trace women phoned and spoke to my wife to find out where the dirty hussy
had been spreading the disease. Then my wife passed me the phone,
for my interview and the woman on the
other end was clearly from the North East Aberdeen, Bamph, Buchan, up that way.
She was speaking standard English but with a North East accent.
I was speaking standard English in my Perthshire accent,
which is obviously better. After a few minutes of formalities and questions,
I thought I d have a bit of fun. I started throwing in curved balls by using Scots words.
Of course they weren t curved balls at all. She understood exactly what I was saying.
In fact she started using Scots words as well. Before
you knew it we were both using Scots words, The conversation became more relaxed, less formal,
we exchanged jokes. It was natural. Here s the thing.
My wife is from the north east... but when she d been on the phone I had no idea
that she was speaking to somebody else from that area, because I only heard standard English.
They weren t adapting so that they could understand each other,
but in spite of being brought up in the same area they both knew the rules that had been programmed
into them all those years ago at school. Speak proper English
I ve got a better rule. If you re Scottish, speak what Scots you have.
It s the language of royalty, literature and our nation.
The only reason Scots don t realise that is because of a deliberate
process of cultural colonisation. Now before the political crazies lose it
completely, obviously if there s confusion you change to a language that both will understand.
I ve been in a dormitory in Sweden sharing with a Japanese guy and the
only language we had in common was French. Not once did I say Hootsmon, up yer kilt it s
a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht because nobody in Scotland talks like that
but even if the woman from track and trace had been from Newcastle
we d probably understand each other pretty well without changing to be understood by
some toff Londoner who wasn t even there. We should never restrict Scots to Burns night.
But if you d like a quick summary of the life of Burns in 10 minutes
then I ve got a video coming up on screen now tha mi an d chas gum bi lath math leibh.
Tiorridh an drasda.