Use it or lose it

Scots is now on a UNESCO list of endangered languages and it was Scotland's education system that put it there.

Although done with the best of intentions, the campaign to force Scottish children to speak only English in order to get on in life has almost killed the Scots language. And this suppression of the mother tongue of millions of people has had a devastating impact on the self-confidence and general literacy skills of many Scots.

It has been demonstrated recently that Scots has an important role to play alongside English in education when the language is accepted as a part of the life of a school. Pupils whose mother tongue is Scots are more willing to engage in reading and writing when given greater opportunities to express themselves in their own language.

Yet in spite of this, it is still absolutely normal in Scottish schools to exclude entirely the Scots language and its literature from the learning experiences of Scotland's children. This year alone, a Scottish high school instituted a policy of punishing pupils who use Scots in class and an official survey of public attitudes revealed that most Scottish people regard Scots as ‘slang'. In January, a Scottish newsreader proudly declared on television that he couldn't understand a word of Burns. It would seem that Scotland has become a country where it is permissible and standard for a person to be ignorant of their own culture. If such wilful stupidity continues to go unchallenged, the Scottish nation will inevitably kill off Scots and lose forever the ability to read, understand and enjoy its own literature written in that language.

But these patently shameful facts should not surprise anyone. Most teachers delivering courses on language and literature to children today were once pupils themselves in schools where Scots was despised. Therefore English teachers in the modern Scottish classroom will invariably choose Shakespeare over Dunbar, Henryson or Lindsay (study of a Shakespeare play is an actual requirement) and Carol Ann Duffy before Kathleen Jamie, Bill Herbert or Janet Paisley. They will even prefer to take on Edwin Morgan's Mercurian language in The First Men on Mercury and never look at his vibrant Scots language translations of Cyrano de Bergerac or Mayakovsky's poetry. They do this because the state has offered them neither the training or resources necessary to teach Scots in schools.

In 2002, James Robertson and I founded Itchy Coo, a Scots language education project funded by the Scottish Arts Council whose aim was to provide Scotland's teachers with the books and guidance they would need to teach Scots to the next generation of young people.

cover image for Precious and the Puggies To date, we have published 35 titles which include the Katie's Coo & Katie's Moose series for readers aged 0–5, A Wee Book o Fairy Tales in Scots, the King o the Midden poetry anthology, the Tam o Shanter's Big Night Oot collection of plays for early secondary and The Smoky Smirr o Rain, a major Scots literature resource for senior secondary. Several Itchy Coo books have been bestsellers especially the popular translations of Roald Dahl novels, namely The Eejits, Geordie's Mingin Medicine and The Sleekit Mr Tod. And Itchy Coo's latest publication, Precious and the Puggies, was a ringing endorsement of the Scots language by one of the world's most respected authors. Alexander McCall Smith kindly granted Itchy Coo the right to translate the first story from the childhood of his famous character, Precious Ramotswe, into Scots and agreed that a year should pass before the story can be published in any language other than Scots. [...]

This article has 2 pages. Go on to page 2 or view the entire article.