AT a wedding in Dumfries I agreed with the poet Willie Neill that it was awkward for us to communicate - our linguistic abilities just weren't good enough. Both of us are reasonably fluent in Scotland's three languages but, to our great disappointment, we settled on English, easily the least appropriate vehicle for what each of us had to say. My Gaelic was learned to deal with television and business and I'm told I speak with a Lewis bias because that is where my teacher comes from. Willie commands a decorated literary fluency which I envy very much. But those differences are incidental. The real reason we did not speak to each other in the language which informed Galloway as late as the eighteenth century was awkwardness. To speak Gaelic at a wedding, on first meeting, felt pretentious and contrived. Doing it not because it felt natural, but only because we could. So we didn't.
And despite the fact that there can be only a few hundred souls who speak Scots, English, and Gaelic, we didn't communicate in Scots either. Perhaps there are better reasons for that. I learned to speak speaking Scots. But I never learned to write the Kelso dialect of our nation's language, I only spoke it. And if I had spoken it in Dumfries, I believe that there is much that Willie might not have understood. Before I went to school in the Borders, I spent a great deal of time with my grannie, Bina Moffat. She had fragments of Romany and knew some songs in the gipsies' language. For centuries gipsies had wintered at Yetholm, near Kelso. I can remember black-haired, silent children in my class at the school. They came only when the weather turned in the autumn and, by Easter, they had gone. No-one seemed to mind that much in the less-regimented education system of the 1950s. At all events
my gran's dialect of Scots was deeply dyed with Romany. Basic words like ''gadji'' for man, ''manishi'' for woman, and a word, which has recently entered fashionable dialogue through the film Trainspotting, ''bari'' for good. Using Kelso dialect variants on the verb ''to be'' and the much-loved local reflexive (''thinks I to myself'') I can still produce sentences and paragraphs impenetrable to anyone raised outside of the Borders, but stuffed with meaning and resonance for me.
It is that very particularity which discouraged me from speaking in Scots to Willie. Despite the fact that it was a grand and very emotional wedding (I was best man) I couldn't find it inside myself to express my feelings in Scots.
So we settled on standard English, or as standard as could be expected after a dram or two.
But I've never felt that English fitted me very well. I write it much better than I speak it - although since I don't write Scots at all and my spelling of Gaelic is patchy, that may not be saying very much. What I mean is that I learned English first to deal with formal education and then with business. But it does not describe my experience well, particularly my experience of Scotland. Adjectives feel borrowed from another place but, of course, English is handy for refracting experience back to other people, and very handy for that on a worldwide scale. My own experience, as I explain it to myself, is however much more problematic.
I suspect that some of this can be solved by place or by setting. Obviously I feel comfortable listening to Scots in the Borders and sometime speaking it. My children enjoy teasing me about the linguistic gear shift that happens halfway over Soutra Hill. And on Lewis or Skye I find my Gaelic and inflict it on most people without mercy. In Los Angeles or London, I have to admit that English is useful.
how can Scots prosper amid all this static and confusion? Particularly among the lifeblood of any language, young people. There is no question, in my view, that the first hurdle Scots has to leap is one of credibility. I believe the overwhelming majority of our people don't see Scots as a separate and distinct language from English. They do see Gaelic as that because most don't understand any of it at all. Actually they do, but they don't
think they do. Whereas, with Scots, if they understand it, then at best it's only a dialect.
My own experience contradicts this widely held belief, but all the same I don't think it should detain us in the formulation of a strategy. Far from seeing the perceived closeness of Scots and English as a problem, it should be used to advantage. Combined with Gaelic, our national language should be projected as the best vehicle for carrying descriptions of Scotland, both geographically and culturally. If you want to understand more about your country then embrace Scots and learn Gaelic. It certainly has been an enriching experience for me. Recently it was a joy to read the schoolbook A Scots Kist which carried a sort of cultural history in our three languages.
Let's have more of this, and for adults, too. Glossy photograph books of Scotland sell well and consistently. When will a publisher see a market opportunity for such a book's captions to appear in three languages? How much richer it could be to see a photograph of Glencoe's great bulwark mountain described as Buachaille Etive Mor and The Great Herdsman of Etive, and The Muckle Hird o'Etive.
Only when some sort of stable credibility among the people of Scotland is established will our language make more of a leap into broadcast media. At the moment its range is restricted to music and drama and, as a medium for discussion, news, current affairs, features or documentary, it does not figure. Some years ago at Scottish Television we asked the redoubtable Billy Kay to front a talk show in Scots. We called it Kay's Originals and invited notable Scots speakers to be interviewed. Despite the attractiveness and talent of all who appeared, it didn't work. Scots simply didn't sound credible in that setting.
Last year, I narrated a series called Scotland the Edge of the Land because I could pronounce the Gaelic and Scots names correctly. What we should have done was to narrate the whole thing in Scots, English, and Gaelic where each language was appropriate to the geography. Again no confidence. But Scots language supporters should take some heart from the recent success of Gaelic on television, something I have been closely involved in. Until 1989/90 Gaelic often had only its music to help the language find its way into mainstream television. Now we
have Gaelic drama, news, current affairs, religion, and much else. Much of the public support for this stems from a general belief that Gaelic is a distinct and worthwhile part of Scottishness which deserves public subvention.
People also believe that Scots is worthwhile, but they don't yet feel it is distinctive and therefore in need of concerted support. Perhaps if in isolated pockets of Buchan, the Borders, and Galloway only 65,000 people spoke the language, public agencies would wake up to the need for action. Let's hope that doesn't have to happen.
n Alistair Moffat is managing director of Scottish Television Enterprises.
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