Let’s not erect cultural barriers

John Fleming insists Gaelic was once spoken in almost all of the Scottish mainland (Scotching a myth about Gaelic, Letters, October 2). However it was stated by WFH Nicolaisen in Scottish Place-names that “Gaelic was never at any time the language of everybody south of the ForthClyde line, and that as far as ‘Lothian’ is concerned, there is at most evidence of a temporary occupation and of the presence of a landowning Gaelic-speaking aristocracy and their followers for something like 150-200 years”.

The status of Gaelic in southeast Scotland at that time (11th-12th Centuries) was therefore similar to that of French in southern Britain in the same period, spoken only by the tiny but influential minority which held power after the Norman Conquest. In both countries the language of the common people was English, in Scotland the Anglian dialect of Old English which had gradually supplanted Cumbric from the 7th century and from which stems the language now known as Scots.

With Paul Brownsey (Gaelic in the Lowlands, Letters, October 9), I deplore any desire, apparently supported by Douglas Turner (Let’s celebrate Gaelic culture, October 16), to erect a cultural hard border between Scotland and England. Scotland has plenty of points of difference, some of them linguistic such as the presence in Scottish standard English of borrowings like loch and glen from Gaelic, ashet and vennel from French.

There is no need to add to outsiders’ perception of our Scottishness by promoting Gaelic where it was never the everyday language. Martin Allen Thornhill