A little more than 30 years ago a teenager was thrown behind bars for uttering a single word of Scots.

Kevin Mathieson, 18, was sent down - albeit just for an hour and a half - for answering a question in court with an ‘aye” rather than a ‘yes’.

The youngster, an apprentice bricklayer, had been in the dock over a minor matter, the late payment of a fine.

Later - after re-appearing from custody - he apologised to the sheriff, one James Nolan.

But the youth was genuinely confused by why he was in trouble, why he had been threatened with contempt of court.

 “I didn't really know what was going on,'' he said. ''The sheriff kept asking me to say 'yes' or 'no', and I thought I was answering him. The next I kenned I was put in the cells.’'

Nolan’s high-handed abuse of power did not go un-noticed. This newspaper gently mocked him as a ‘Yes man”.

Politicians took up the Mathieson case. The late Argyll MP (and later peer) Ray Michie was especially upset by the treatment of the teenager. She was a Liberal Democrat best known for campaigning for Scottish devolution and Gaelic. But she made it clear she supported Mathieson.  

Read more from David Leask:

Russian investor with links to Putin quietly abandons Holy Loch distillery plan

Build it, they will come: Is this the key to unlocking a Scottish cycling boom?

How a Lanarkshire house became the owner of a mysterious shell corporation

“It is ridiculous that this can happen to somebody who is using their mother tongue,” she said. “Scots should be proud to use the Scots language and never shirk from its everyday usage, in courts, the classroom, and throughout the country.”

Michie was to lodge a motion in defence of ‘aye’ in the House of Commons - where the word, once common in English as well as Scots, remains in daily use. 

She won support from her fellow liberal democrats, such as future UK party leader Menzies Campbell and Jim Wallace, the Orkney and Shetland MP who was to become Scotland’s first deputy first minister.

But there was real breadth if support. The Margaret Ewing, the SNP’s then leader at Westminster, put her name to the motion. 

So did diehard anti-devolutionist Brian Wilson - now a Herald columnist - and his Labour colleague Ian Davidson, a man so virulently opposed to Scottish nationalists that he later referred to them as “neo-fascist”.

Ulster Unionists - after an amendment calling for respect for the word aye to be extended to Northern Ireland - signed up too.  That included the party’s future leader, Nobel-prize winning David Trimble.

In politics, if not in society, there was a growing consensus around treating Scots speakers with respect.

This was 1993. It was the year when the now Scots language Centre opened and when a first international public body formally recognised Scots as a language. 

Just seven years later the Labour Government of Tony Blair guaranteed to protect Scots, Gaelic and Irish under the Council of Europe’s convention on minority languages. 

Unesco and other major linguistic bodies have since recognised Scots as a language - as part of a wider trend of supporting indigenous and minority - or minoritised - tongues around the world. In 2005 the Labour-Lib Dem Scottish Executive put in place the legislation we have to this day on Gaelic.

What about now? Where do mainstream unionists stand on minority languages, especially Scots? Does this consensus of the 1990s and early 2000s still stand?

Look on X, the former Twitter, or Facebook, and you might think pro-UK campaigners had done a 180-degree about-turn.

Mathieson spent his 90 minutes in the cells in Stirling. 

The Scottish Liberal Democrat candidate for that area is a man named Hamish Taylor. 

Outside politics, his business interests are, literally, vanilla. His views on Scots are anything but.

Using a pejorative shorthand from social media, the candidate back in 2022 said: “Another word for Scoats is Scam.” 

Taylor over two years routinely used the term “Scoats’ on what used to be called Twitter.

Last year the SNP -after 15 years in government - introduced its first proposed legislation on Scots and Gaelic.

Taylor, on X, responded: “Why not focus on the Attainment Gap and on educating Scots entrepreneurs to be successful in developing international business.

“‘Scoats’ as so badly read out by middle-class pretend-y Scoatish SNP members in Holyrood is no more a real language than Klingon.”

Taylor last week on X tried to argue his criticism - and use of the term ‘Scoats” -was only directed at one MSP, the SNP’s Emma Harper. This was not the case. 

He has - not unlike very online activists - argued both that ‘Scoats’ is pretend and too like English but also that it is incomprehensible and viewers watching Scots speakers would need subtitles.

Is that a Liberal Democrat position? No, it most definitely is not.

The party is much closer to Ray Michie on respect for language rights than to its Stirling candidate.  

The Herald: LibDem MSP Liam McArthurLibDem MSP Liam McArthur (Image: Jane Barlow)

Liberal Democrat MSP Liam McArthur represents Orkney, one of the heartlands of Scots, in its northern insular dialect.

"Scots and Gaelic are part of our shared cultural heritage. Whether you live in a part of Scotland where they are commonly spoken or not, it should go without saying that these languages are for everyone,” he told Herald on Sunday.

McArthur’s constituency has some of the highest concentrations Scots speakers in the country. 

Some 40 per cent of people at the 2011 census said they spoke the language - with more than having indicating some level of skills. 

Orkney also has some of the lowest levels of support for independence and the SNP. At the 2014 referendum just 32% of Orcadians voted Yes.

This is not unusual. An analysis of the 2011 census and the 2014 referendum result for this newspaper showed some of the biggest concentrations of Scots speakers were in rural unionist heartlands. 

Read more: 

This reality has not stopped some very online pro-UK social media activists, including some with which Taylor frequently interacts, from targeting Scots and Gaelic speakers as proxies for Yessers or SNP supporters. 

There are more Scots speakers - around 1.5m according to now rather dated census figures - than the SNP’s biggest ever haul of votes. 

New data on languages spoken in Scotland from the 2022 census comes out next week.

Mainstream unionists have long been aware that anti-Scots and anti-Gaelic sentiment works against them. 

Pro-UK politicians and their canvassers - perhaps unsurprisingly are not knocking on doorsteps in constituencies like Orkney and telling residents their language is a nationalist scam.

Back in 2018 the Conservative MSP Donald Cameron - now a peer and Scotland Office minister - urged what he called “unionist ultras’ to calm their rhetoric on Gaelic. He also lamented the way the language was appropriated by some pro-independence campaigners who cannot speak it.

Cameron, writing in this newspaper, said:  “Far too often, debates about Gaelic descend into proxy battles over completely unrelated issues. 

“The constitution is a particular culprit, especially on social media. Gaelic is frequently appropriated as a quasi-nationalist cause on the one hand or attacked by unionist ultras on the other.”

McArthur echoed these points, referring to Scots too.

”It would be sad if these languages were to come to be seen as the possessions of one particular political faction,” he said.

"Charles Kennedy used to declare that he was a Highlander, a Scot, a Briton and a European and that he was comfortable with all of these identities. 

“I think that speaks volumes about the kind of respectful, pluralistic and inclusive country that liberals strive for.”

McArthur’s multi-layered identity politics are common in Scotland’s Highlands and Islands. But they also speak to wider traditional unionist values when Scottish and British identities were not just a matter of either/or.

Billy Kay, journalist, linguist and veteran advocate of Scots is on the other side of the constitutional political divide from McArthur. 

But he does not see any contradiction between supporting the UK and defending Scottish indigenous languages.  

Kay himself been the target of online hate, especially after giving a rare speech in formal Scots at Holyrood

The Lib Dem candidate Taylor accused Kay of “utter hypocrisy” for doing “Scoats-free adverts’ for his English-language radio documentaries.

Kay has received far worse abuse. He likes to use a Spanish word to describe such social media warriors: “impresentables”, the kind of people who you would never been seen with in polite company.

“The virulence is quite recent - but social media is too,” said Kay. “It is tragic that language is politicised like this. A lot of the advances in minority languages in Scotland are thanks to unionists. The Gaelic channel came from when the Tories were in power  And there is nothing political about supporting Scots.

“There is a class of unionists - people I would regard as uneducated - whose identity is so fragile that they see anybody who sounds ethnically Scottish to be a threat.

“Historically people like John Buchan and Walter Scott were proudly culturally nationalist but politically unionist and supported the empire. 

“They would birl in their graves at some of the abuse that goes on today.”

Last week the UK Parliament’s Culture committee held hearings in Glasgow about Scots as it investigated minority language rights. 

Linguistics lecturer Dawn Leslie of Aberdeen University brushed off a question about whether Scots was a language or dialect. What matters is how speakers are treated, she said. Later Leslie added: “It is exhausting trying to justify your existence.”

Her colleague Joanna Kopaczyk, a Polish linguist who is a professor of Scots and English at Glasgow University, took an historic perspective on what she saw as 19th century attitudes to Scots. She told MPs: “The linguistic imperialism that was the case through the history of these islands has to stop.”

The verdict of experts is that you do not have to be a Yesser to say Aye to Scots.