From: cwilson@gssec.bt.co.uk (Colin Wilson)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Accent and Dialect, the politics there
Date: 19 Nov 92 14:48:46 GMT
Organization: BT

In article <1992Nov18.174903.19913@maths.nott.ac.uk>, anw@maths.nott.ac.uk (Dr A. N. Walker) writes:
|> 
|> *If* Scots is a separate language,
|> *then* its distinctive words are Scots words that *may* be understood
|> (as foreign words) by speakers of English;  if, on the other hand, Scots
|> is "just" a dialect, then its distinctive words are words of English.
|> To argue that "burn" [stream] isn't (a word of English) is making
|> a political statement [which is not to imply that the statement is false].
|> Every region of the UK has words for local topography, flora and fauna,
|> parts of the body, etc., derived from many sources.

Scotland is not a "region", it is a nation with regions of its own, and
whatever Scots is it cannot be _a_ dialect, as the various regions of
eastern and southern Scotland have a variety of Scots dialects. These
_cannot_ be bracketed with the regional dialects of England, for reasons
which I have stated before, but which I will repeat. They include:

(i)  the fact that Scots was once the official spoken and written language
     of state, with a standard form based on the speech of the capital;

(ii) the linguistic hiatus at the border between Scotland and England,
     whose effect is that the speech of the inhabitants of Coldstream
     in Roxburghshire has more in common with that of their compatriots
     in Wick, hundreds of miles away, than with that of their
     neighbours in Cornhill-on-Tweed, Northumberland, which is less
     than a mile away.

Scotland's nationhood is not a political issue: earlier this year even
John Major (of the Conservative & _Unionist_ Party) stated that
Scotland's status as a nation should and would be fully respected
within the union. (With regard to "would", of course, he was lying.)   

   [I write...]
|> 
|> >		   some of the words that I mentioned are used in
|> >Lincolnshire, but the fact remains that in English these words are not
|> >part of the literary language, whereas in Scots they are.

   [Dr. A. N. Walker writes...]
|> 
|> 	Again, this begs the question.  Most English writers try to
|> write "standard" English, with dialect confined to attempts to locate
|> particular characters as being Lincolnshire, Cockney, Cornish, Welsh,
|> or whatever.

Again, you are making the same mistake of seeing Scotland as a
locality, in the same way as London or Lincolnshire. A writer who
writes in Scots is using a national language, appropriate (for the
purpose of fiction) to a character from any region or nation. For
instance, in a novel with the action set in Russia, it would be as
appropriate for the dialogue to be in Scots as in English, German, or
French. Of course, it is also possible for a writer of Scots to use
local dialect to locate characters to particular areas of Scotland.

|> >Scots
|> >(however it might be categorised) is used by a sizeable proportion of
|> >the population of Scotland.
|> 
|> 	Of course.  But millions of UK citizens speak Yorkshire dialect,
|> millions more speak Lancashire, etc., not to mention Scouse and Geordie
|> (for which the case is at least as good as for Scots).

Matthew Huntbach expressed doubt that Scots is widely spoken, and I
set out to convince him that it is. Numbers of people who speak regional
dialects of English don't have anything to do with it.
 
|> 	[All I'm really saying out of all this is that *every* region
|> of the UK, let alone other English-speaking parts of the world, has
|> its own dialect, with its own special vocabulary, syntax, sound, etc.;
|> some of these are admittedly more acceptable in "literature" than others;
|> some are less comprehensible to outsiders than others;  and the point
|> at which a dialect becomes a separate language is purely political.]

Let's see then: if the dialects of Scotland and those of England
(including standard English) really are all dialects of one language,
then it follows from this that the name "English" is a misnomer, as the
language belongs equally to Scotland and England, having an equally long
history in both nations.

Please tell me, then, what name ought to be used to replace it, and
whether you believe that the people of England would accept and use
that name. In regarding our national language as Scots, my and other
Scots' position is no more and no less political than English people's
in regarding theirs as English.

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