What a stushie! Yes, Scots words have their place – but it’s not in our classrooms

IT was one of the most important documents the Scottish Government had ever produced, one which it hoped would set Scotland on the path to independence.

Referring to Alex Salmond as ‘First Meinister, the Richt Honourable Alex Salmond’, it read: ‘Forby thon, we threap that sovereignty i n oor kintrie belangs wi’ its fowk.

‘As a sovereign fowk, the fowk o’ Scotland – an us oor lane – his the richt tae decide the wey we’r govern’t.’

For the uninitiated (probably including many native Scots), this translates as: ‘ We also believe that sovereignty in our country lies with its people.

‘As a sovereign people, the people of Scotland – and we alone – have the right to decide how we are governed.’

That 2008 document, launching a public consultation on the country’s constitutional future, was baffling enough for most of us. But the Scottish parliament’s website also has an option for users to translate some of its content into Scots, telling them: ‘We wad like tae mak shair that as mony fowk as possible can get tae speir [make inquiries] aboot the Scots pairlament.’

Those desperate to contact Holyrood using Scots used to be gently let down on the parliament’s website: ‘Hooanever, at present we can tak telephone and textphone caws in English and Gaelic juist.’ Now they are advised to email or write a letter.

The reaction of many Scots will be one of amusement – likely to be rapidly followed by complete bemusement and even anger that civil servants, funded by the taxpayer, have wasted time and money on a costly translation exercise.

After all, in day-to- day life, few of us are likely to use or even understand words such as threap or speir, though we might guess their meanings from the context. These are words plucked from history by experts in the tongue in an attempt to create a single language all of us can readily identify as Scots.

The purposelessness of this task is exceeded only by the zeal of those carrying out what they see as an important mission to salvage and celebrate a heritage they believe was suppressed after the Act of Union in 1707, leading to the decline of the Scots tongue.

Undoubtedly, Scots has a proud history and the poetry written by Robert Burns in Scots is famous across the world (though he also wrote in standard English).

Scots words and expressions are still in common usage. Many – glaikit, scunnered, dreich, gallus, f ankle and drookit – are gloriously evocative in a way the Queen’s English often fails to capture.

But the political elite in Scotland, both under the present Government and its Labour-led predecessor, has taken its love of Scots to a whole new plane that exists far beyond logic and rationality.

In 2009, Nationalist MSP Bill Wilson suggested that supermarkets should be forced to relabel turnips, potatoes and blackberries as tumshies, tatties and brambles.

Confusion

A rather disconsolate Mr Wilson later admitted: ‘I haven’t had an overwhelming response. Tesco said no. The other supermarkets thought i t would cause confusion.’

In the same year, a plan was considered to provide an official judicial translation service – from Scots to English, in case suspects in the dock used phrases others may find tricky to understand (for example, ‘I didnae dae it.’).

The proposal appeared in a 157-page study into the use of Scots, commissioned by the then Scottish Executive at a cost to taxpayers of £20,000.

Arts quango Creative Scotland now plans to spend £50,000 on hiring a Scots ‘scriever’, to produce ‘original creative work i n Scots, i ts variants and dialects, across any art-form’.

Far more controversially, another quango, Education Scotland – ironically, online translation websites struggle to produce the Scots equiva- lent – has hired a team of ‘Scots language co-ordinators’, paid up to £40,000 a year, tasked with encouraging greater use of the ‘native tongue’ in schools and nurseries.

In one primary school project, pupils named body parts – or boady pairts – using Scots words such as oxters for armpits and keekers for eyes.

This is the point at which an initiative that is little better than a vanity project threatens t o become educationally damaging. Why on Earth are we promoting the Scots tongue with such dedication, at a time when our pupils are struggling to speak and write using the Queen’s English?

Scottish Government adviser Professor Tommy MacKay has warned that English grammar is in a state of chronic decline – partly because teachers who are supposed to be instilling its basic principles have little better than a fumbling grasp of the subject themselves.

Education Secretary Angela Constance blundered recently, saying in a BBC radio interview: ‘This is work that has went on for over a decade.’

Scottish Government research has shown a marked slide in reading and writing ability in schools. Last year, 45 per cent of 13 and 14-year-olds fell short of meeting acceptable standards, up by 9 percentage points since 2012.

Against this backdrop comes a concerted official attempt to breathe fresh life into a ‘language’ that is, in reality, a rag-bag of different words and expressions, rather than a standard tongue that can be taught or understood.

Children who are struggling to read or write in English are being coached in a means of expression that has little practical application beyond the Border – and which would be greeted with bafflement in real-world situations, such as job interviews, outside Scotland. The repercussions are already plain to see.

The Scottish Qualifications Authority produces ‘ external assessment reports’ each year, which analyse pupils’ exam performance in detail.

In 2012, the Higher English report said: ‘There was a small, but often impressive, submission of imaginative writing in Scots. A number of candidates wrote with confidence and exploited effectively the freshness and freedom this option offers them.’

Of course, there is a proud tradition of fiction in Scots, for example, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting – although its Scots patois must have proved a headache for those translating the 1993 novel, about Edinburgh drug addicts, into foreign tongues.

Attraction

The attraction in all of this for the Nationalists is clear: language is an important tool in the strengthening of national identity, a crucial step in the fight for independence.

But it is a high-risk strategy. There are anecdotal reports of teachers ignoring pupils’ sloppy grammar on the grounds it is ‘local dialect’. Correcting them would be ‘offensive’.

The truth is Scots words and expressions can and should be celebrated – but the boundaries of their correct usage are being slowly blurred.

Laudably, the Scottish Government wants children to learn a second language from P1 and a third language no later than P5.

But quite apart from how it will be funded, the policy also provides further proof of how the promotion of Scots is getting out of control. Remarkably, Scots – and even signing for the deaf – will count as legitimate second languages.

This is perhaps a defining victory for those who campaign for wider use of Scots – raising it to the same status as the modern languages most of us would prefer our children to be learning.

Language is a constantly evolving medium and the Scots words we rightly celebrate will live on without these artificial attempts to ‘standardise’ it for use in official communications or in the classroom.

Despite the burgeoning literacy crisis, this still appears to be the ultimate objective of the Scots language lobby – but it is far from gallus and sure to leave most of us scunnered.