i'm very emotional about scots and i don't even speak it. i'd love to talk about it with you any time
YAY
i’m no linguist but i know i have strong emotions about how my opinions were formed based on english opinions of my country. i think, had the english not interfered, we would be perfectly fine with how we speak, and scots would be seen as less of an embarrassing/funny language to speak on a regular basis and more of an ‘actual’ language. i always use the anecdote that, when i was in primary school giving a presentation, i once said “wah-uhr” instead of “wotter” for “water” (bad description, but think of it as saying ‘otter’ without the T sound and replacing the O with the same A you’d say in the word ‘attic’? it’d sound something like ‘ah-uhr’), and my teacher told me i sounded ridiculous and to stop talking slang, and refused to let me continue until i did say ‘wotter’. why was that? in hindsight it’s so ridiculous, because it’s the same word. on top of that, it was a school in a poor area in the east end of glasgow, why was a teacher telling me to speak english in a majority scots area? i never understood. same thing happened when i DID pronounce the T, but pronounced the A wrong, pronouncing ‘water’ in the same way you’d pronounce ‘batter’.
it was really jarring for 8 year old me, who came from an east-end household where everyone spoke purely scots, in an east-end street where all my neighbours spoke purely scots, and went to an east-end school that spoke english because scots made me sound wrong. i thought it sounded perfectly fine, and the bottom line was i could speak english just fine too! I just chose not to because... why should i? it was not the majority language. why would i speak english in a conversation when the person i was talking to was speaking scots? maybe not as stark a difference, but it would be like speaking german to a friend who is responding to you in french. you’d look like a fool and maybe even a bit of a dickhead. the only people that spoke purely english in my school were teachers who grew up learning english was the prime language and scots was slang, everyone else around me spoke scots. english was the minority language, yet scots was seen as the inferior language.
i don’t have much of a cohesive discussion of it because my only real thoughts are “can i say this? does it sound like slang?” and “god i hope some clown doesnt chat at me about what language is this and is this even english or whatever”
i guess the bottom line is it does sound kinda funny to people who don’t speak it, but i find that’s usually because, like me, they were taught that scots = slang english, so when they hear words like ‘dinnae’ and ‘honnae’ they immediately compare them to ‘didn’t’ and ‘haven’t’, because scots kinda... uses the same rules as english, just with different words. there’s even a bias against scots in places that shouldn’t have it. my dad recently made fun of my purely scots speaking neighbour for saying ‘honnae’ instead of ‘haven’t’, when he, on a constant basis, says ‘aye’ and ‘dinnae’ and ‘huvnae’. he said ‘honnae’ isn’t a real english word. of course it’s not! it’s a scots word! if we all just stopped comparing a non-english language to english...
throughout my life i’ve been told i sound like a ned, like a wee hairy, like an idiot, for speaking my first language, and i used to agree and speak as “proper” as i could, but i guess somewhere down the line i stopped caring. i can speak english when it’s necessary. i type mainly in english because i know that’s what people understand, but i also find that typing in scots brings about some amount of fucking clowns, like i said above, who insist on asking what language i’m speaking, or saying ‘what does this say?’ or some clever remark that was never funny to begin with. no really, it’s not fucking funny, you’re really not funny.
and i suppose some of my frustration comes from that too. most of the scottish twitter boom involves a lot of scots, and i think, mostly, people just find it funny because it’s written ‘funny’. a lot of the stuff posted isn’t... that funny. and most of them posted are just english people trying to cash in on a language they make fun of on a constant basis. similar to when white people make fun of people who say ‘bae’ then say things like ‘on fleek’ -- of course there’s a big disparity between scots and aave and the appropriation of the two, but for examples sake, that’s how it is. anyway, most of the comments being made in the tweets are as simple as ‘the weather is bad, it’s raining’, but because it’s written funny, people take it as something hilarious. not the comment itself, but the ‘backwards’ and Obviously-Not-English way it’s written. scots itself is a joke, and it’s tiring, especially because i speak scots much more comfortably than i speak english, but the worry that some smart-arse is gonna jump in and turn my text post popular by insulting and laughing at me and my language forces me to keep to english. sometimes i consider making a blog where i can comfortably speak scots just to avoid people like that.
not to mention, and maybe this is just a personal preference, but the sound of myself and other scottish people speaking english makes my skin crawl! the scottish accent is not meant for primarily english speech, at least not to me. it sounds so forced and cringey. maybe some people find it sexy, but usually when they say ‘ah scottish accents are so sexy...’ they link to, like, scottish tv presenters who need to specifically speak English to reach a bigger audience, and you can always tell those people don’t speak english primarily and are trying their absolute best to sound “sophisticated” for television.
anyway. i really don’t mind scottish people who speak english primarily, because as i’ve complained about, there’s a large stigma against us who don’t speak english primarily, and some people just feel more comfortable speaking english! but i don’t, i never have, i get embarrassed by my english pronunciations, and i’m tired of being told that’s wrong of me and makes me less of a person. i live in scotland, i’ll speak scots until someone needs me to speak english, because i don’t see why i should have to make things awkward for myself because some english brat thought my language was too ugly for them.
i can’t remember where i was going with this, but my point is, i’m tired of how people treat scotland as a whole, and the language aspect is just one source of severe frustration that i can at least rebel against with certainty.
