The Auldest Tung

Foreword

It is said there are in Scotland the stains of six languages apart from those of most recent introduction and the flecks of several others, including the one, Latin, with which the word Scots itself arrived on our shores. All six, three Celtic, three Germanic, have been, at one time or other, also immigrant tongues and all have left their legacy on the way we speak, the words and expressions we use and the places where and the occasions when we use them. All too have left their marks on the landscape, sometimes solo, sometimes jointly, sometimes seemingly interchangeably, sometimes in places overwriting or failing to do so as the linguistic tides have ebbed and flowed. Without even considering the Gaelic or either of the two other Celtic players, Pictish and Brythonic, more of less Welsh, in our sextet one look at “The Mound” and you know why but what are the original sources of “Newbiggin” or “Newbigging” for “new building”, why in “Downhill” you get double your money and in “Law Hill” the same, if not double-your-money plus?

And that “plus” is it, the crux of this book, the idea that interleaved amongst all the words we might use there is something else, a source of verbal communication that most cannot draw from, some tap into everyday, whilst others slip in and out to a greater of lesser extent, more often than not without thinking and always without recognition. And here I am not talking about the Scots tongue itself, because that is already one of the six. No, this is something to my mind behind that, indeed hidden by it or rather its explanation, something non-generic and older still that actually was, as I hope to illuminate, a seventh language, there in usage today and as more than a trace, yet historically beyond the relatively recent, even though I have made an ugly attempt to invent one, with no real name.

Where this language is normally spoken seems clear. It is on Scotland’s East Coast from north of the Firth of Forth, perhaps even once upon a time to Sutherland, through Fife, notably the East Neuk, South and East Angus, Kincardine, Aberdeenshire, Buchan and east Moray. It is normally, as if it were a single voice, described, as with all Scots, as a dialect of English, or even a development of Northumbrian, itself one iteration of one half of Anglo-Saxon. In part that is because to the victors go the spoils and in this case they, the victors, linguistically at least, were the Edinburgh literati of the late 18^th and early 19^th Centuries, who, steeped as they were in the Classics, gave to how they spoke a descriptor of Hellenic origin because they believed it or rather they needed to maintain that they and it mirrored the Greece of 1000 BC, which in a way indeed it did and more precisely even than they recognised.

Two thousand years ago there had been Attic, the lingua franca of Athens, in fact just one dialect of one of the four branches of Ancient Greek, with another branch being Doric. But there had also been snobbism, otherwise known as plain snobbishness. Because Greek Doric was the speak of distant, small town and country, despite being the language of the Illiad, it was by the metropolitans mocked. Then two hundred years ago there was the Scottish Enlightenment, a need to distinguish, high regard for Classicism and also snobbishness once more so it was decided to differentiate between the increasingly Anglicised Scots spoken in our capital city and the vernacular elsewhere. With the Gaelic that was easy. Despite as written word a two thousand year history, including for several hundred of them being both the linguistic store and vehicle of European civilisation, it could be mocked as Irish or better still the “Erse”, as in “coming out of”. With Scots it was more difficult but a way would be found. The language spoken by those centrally in power, whether politically, culturally or intellectually, in Edinburgh would be labelled Attic and increasingly displace the Scots, the Scuots tongue, as the Lowland language. This whilst all that outwith would be Doric, the rough speak, which also in time has been further narrowed to be one of the ten still Scots dialects that today are identified with five of those same variants specifically in Scotland’s east and north-east above the Forth, have their own literature, old and new, and, in a book close to my heart for personal reasons of childhood and child, perhaps their own relatively modern Illiad in “The Scots Quair”.