Sociolinguistics in Scotland

R. Lawson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137034700
• eBook ISBN: 9781137034717
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Sociolinguistics in Scotland presents a comprehensive overview of sociolinguistic research in Scotland and showcases developments in sociolinguistic theory, method and application, highlighting Scotland's position as a valuable 'sociolinguistic laboratory'. This book is a key resource for those interested in language use in Scotland.

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Introduction: An Overview of Language in Scotland*

Robert Lawson

Introduction

In recent years, sociolinguistic research has gained considerable ground in Scotland. This is not surprising given that, as Manfred Görlach points out, Scotland is something of a ‘paradise’ for researchers interested in the intersection of language and society (Görlach 1985: 3). With its complex linguistic history, rich literary tradition, and intersecting language varieties, Scotland is an ideal ‘sociolinguistic laboratory’, and despite its small size and concentrated population located mainly in the Central Belt, linguistic diversity remains strong.

This book, then, takes as its point of focus sociolinguistic research which centres on speakers and speech communities in Scotland. Primarily, sociolinguists are interested in how people use language and what they use it for (Meyerhoff 2011: 3). Sociolinguists examine language use at a variety of levels; for example, at the phonetic level examining consonantal, vocalic, or suprasegmental variation; at the grammatical level examining differences in the modal system across varieties; at the discourse level examining how speakers construct narratives and tell stories; or at the societal level examining how speakers understand the gendered nature of language.¹ Given the variety of work which falls under the umbrella of ‘sociolinguistics’, a relatively broad definition of what sociolinguistics encompasses is taken in this book, with the 14 following chapters presented here focusing on a range of sociolinguistic phenomena across Scotland. Not only do the contributions shed light on contemporary language use in Scotland and showcase the range of sociolinguistic research happening within its borders, they also contribute to the development of sociolinguistic theory and method more generally and suggest new directions for sociolinguistic research.

In covering these issues, this book aims to be of use to a variety of audiences. First, it will be primarily of value to academic and postdoctoral (socio)linguists, not only in Scotland, but across the UK and further afield. The contributions cover a range of topics, including issues in syntax, phonology, phonetics, lexicography, qualitative methodologies, narrative analysis, and attitudinal work, and the contributors have attempted to flag up the relevance and applicability of their research to a wide audience. The contributors represent a range of international perspectives, including those of Scotland, England, Wales, Germany, USA,

New Zealand, and others, and their remarks should find resonances beyond the borders of Scotland, particularly in light of the rapid changes affecting British and European society, including migration, political nationalism, population shift, and changing material culture.

Additionally, the book serves as a valuable resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students taking sociolinguistic or language variation and change courses, many of which typically include a topic on Scottish English. The chapters go beyond a simple descriptive approach of language in Scotland and offer a comprehensive introduction to current research trends and developments within sociolinguistics.

While a basic familiarity with the central tenets of linguistic terminology will facilitate an understanding of many of the chapters here, the book will nevertheless be of relevance to a range of groups beyond academia, including minority language associations, language revitalisation organisations, and language policy groups. General readers interested in Scottish language issues, readers who wish to familiarise themselves with current developments in sociolinguistics in Scotland, and readers interested in contemporary language research more generally will also find material of interest.

In the remainder of this chapter, I outline some of the pertinent issues related to language use in Scotland. In particular, I focus on the history and interplay between different language varieties in Scotland, before discussing language in Scotland more generally, particularly in light of the inclusion of a ‘Scots language question’ in the 2011 census and the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 (upcoming when this volume was going to press). I end with an overview of each of the chapters and conclude with some general points regarding the importance of adopting a sociolinguistic approach towards language use in Scotland and the future of sociolinguistic research in this part of the world.

Language in Scotland

The linguistic landscape of Scotland is an intriguing one, thus it is worthwhile briefly setting out the major languages of Scotland and their historical trajectories. While my comments here are necessarily brief, there are a number of more detailed treatments of the linguistic history of Scotland, including Aitken (1979), McClure (1994), the collected chapters in Jones (1997b), Macafee (2002), Corbett, McClure and Stuart-Smith (2003), Kay (2006), Douglas (2009), Ó Baoill (2010), and Macleod (2010).

Scotland is host to a number of language communities, including Arabic, Cantonese, Italian, Polish, and many others. Amongst the longest established, however, are Gaelic, Scots, and English, and while the status of Gaelic, a language now mostly restricted to the Northern and Western Isles and used by approximately 58,000 speakers, is unproblematic, we are in far murkier waters when considering the relationship between Scots and English. This debate typically centres around the issue of whether Scots is a separate language, a cognate language (with some degree of mutual intelligibility with English), or a dialect of English. A number of institutions, including the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages, recognise Scots as a separate language, cognate with English. Similarly, the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages afforded Scots ‘regional language’ status in 2001,

while the Scots Language Association states that ‘the Associe threips on the view that Scots maun staun its ben as ane o three leids o the kintra, alang wi Gaelic an Inglis,’² a stance shared by the Scottish government.

In such usage, the term ‘Scots’ tends to be restricted to forms of ‘Broad Scots’. This volume, however, follows the approach set out in Corbett et al. (2003: 1), whereby ‘Scots’ is taken as an inclusive term covering a ‘language continuum that ranges from “Broad” Scots to “Scottish Standard English”’, although this definition requires some unpacking. First, Broad Scots is particularly distinctive due to its vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar, but while the term suggests a relatively homogeneous variety, the reality is that specific substantiations of Broad Scots vary across region and class. As Corbett et al. (2003: 3) point out, Broad Scots encompasses a large number of separate varieties, each with their own distinctive patterns of vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar:

The term ‘Broad Scots’ today covers the regional varieties of Shetland and Orkney; the North East around Aberdeen; the Central Belt from Edinburgh and the Lothians, down through Stirlingshire, Glasgow, Ayrshire and Galloway; the Borders, and the ‘Ulster Scots’ regions of Northern Ireland. Within these regional varieties there is, of course, further local variation. In particular, the major cities of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow also have a wide range of social varieties.

Varieties of Broad Scots coexist alongside Scottish Standard English (SSE), a variety typically recognisable through its pronunciation but having a lexical and grammatical system which is similar to other standard varieties of English (although it has a number of distinctive differences as well; see Corbett and Stuart-Smith 2012 for a discussion of Standard English in Scotland). As Aitken (1979) points out, most speakers in Scotland can style ‘shift’ or ‘drift’ along a linguistic continuum, with varieties of Broad Scots at one end and SSE at the other. These decisions are typically constrained by speaker class, conversational topic, level of familiarity with an interlocutor, and so on. Importantly, both these aforementioned varieties can be traced back to a shared history where they emerge as products of immigration, language contact, and language shift over the course of 1500 years.

In the fifth century, North Britain was comprised of a number of small and autonomous kingdoms. Of these kingdoms, four emerged as particularly important: the Picts in the north-east (the Kingdom of Fortriu), the Gaels in the north-west (the Kingdom of Dál Riata), the Britons in the south-west (the Kingdom of Strathclyde), and the Angles in the south-east (the Kingdom of Bernicia, settled by a Germanic tribe who remained in Britain following the dissolution of the Roman Empire). The political situation in North Britain was further complicated in the late eighth century with the arrival of Viking raiders from the Scandinavian territories of Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. Invading parts of the Gael-controlled Northern and Western Isles, the Vikings brought with them Old Norse, the ancestral language of modern-day Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, and the precursor to a variety spoken in Orkney and Shetland known as Norn (now extinct, although Norn influences can still be seen in modern-day

Orkney and Shetland dialects). Additionally, the Vikings also invaded large parts of what is now England. These settlements of Old Norse speakers would have had some degree of contact with the Germanic Anglo-Saxons, particularly the Angles, leading to the development of variety which can be described as ‘Anglo-Scandinavian’ (Corbett et al. 2003: 6; Douglas 2009: 42). The development of ‘Anglo-Scandinavian’ is also supported by the fact that Old Norse and Old English are related and would have been mutually intelligible, at least to some extent.

Over the course of the tenth century, the Gaelic-speaking Kingdom of Dál Riata began to expand its borders, with the Pictish Kingdom of Fortriu one of the first kingdoms to be absorbed by the Gaels. Although a prevailing view is that Cináed mac Ailpín (Coinneach mac Ailpein in modern Gaelic, typically anglicised as Kenneth MacAlpin) forcibly took control of the Pictish crown, it is more likely that the two kingdoms were gradually assimilated over the course of many years (Woolf 2007). In either case, the end result of the union was the gradual disappearance of Pictish and the emergence of the Kingdom of Alba. The Kingdom of Strathclyde was the next to fall to Alba, and the new Kingdom of Scotland was established some time in the early eleventh century. Given that this new kingdom was controlled primarily by a Gaelic-speaking monarchy, Gaelic was naturally the dominant language of the Scottish court, the Church, literature, law, and education.

In 1066, however, the Norman invasion impacted dramatically on the fortunes of Gaelic. Following the English defeat at the Battle of Hastings and the death of King Harold II, Edgar the Ætheling, the nominal King of England,³ was taken to Normandy in 1067 to submit to William the Conqueror. In 1068, Edgar and his family⁴ escaped to Scotland and sought refuge at the court of King Malcolm III (Canmore), accompanied by a host of refugees who brought with them a number of languages, chief of which was Anglo-Scandinavian. Following the death of Malcolm III in 1093, Malcolm’s brother Douglas became king and forced Malcolm’s son, and eventual successor, David into exile to the court of King Henry I of England.

David became a dependant of Henry I and his education in England exposed him to a range of Norman and Anglo-French cultural influences. When David claimed the Scottish throne in 1124, he quickly established a series of Norman-derived practices, perhaps the most important of which was the creation of royal burghs, towns with special trading privileges (e.g. trade monopolies). This brought increased trade and wealth to Scotland, primarily by attracting significant numbers of traders, craftsmen, and artisans from across Europe, including England, Flanders, the Rhineland, and northern France. David I also implemented feudalism and granted lands to Norman-French-speaking barons who brought with them significant numbers of followers, primarily from the ‘Great Scandinavian Belt’ (‘a belt stretching from Cumberland and Westmorland in the west to the north and East Ridings of Yorkshire in the east, often including part of Lincolnshire but excluding the old kingdom of Bernicia in Durham and Northumberland’; Samuels 1989: 269). Lastly, David I built a number of abbeys and monasteries, most of which were run by Anglo-Norman- and Anglo-Scandinavian- speaking clerics and administrators.

Thus, through processes of mass immigration, dialect contact, and language shift, we see the emergence of a language in Scotland which is a hybrid of Old English, Old Norse, and French, with borrowings from Gaelic and other languages. We can see the reflexes of

this hybridity in a number of modern-day Scots words (although some of these words are also now part of Standard English), including kirk (‘church’), brig (‘bridge’), and lowp (‘leap’) from Old Norse, ashet (‘deep dish’), douce (‘soft/sweet’), and fash (‘trouble/annoy’) from French, oxter (‘armpit’), dicht (‘to wipe’), and reek (‘smoke’) from Old English, and glen (‘valley’), loch (‘lake’), and usquebae (‘whisky’) from Gaelic.

Gradually, this new language (initially called ‘Inglis’, a term used in Scotland to refer to both Scots and English) expanded beyond the lowland centres, driving Gaelic to the north and west of Scotland, particularly the Highlands and Islands. It also began to be used in the written mode, including court documents, literature, religious texts, Acts of Parliament, and so on, a process of linguistic elaboration which saw large-scale lexical borrowings from French and Latin. During the Middle Scots period (1450–1700), ‘Inglis’ began to be replaced by the term ‘Scottis’ in order to distinguish it from the English of its southern neighbour (partly on linguistic grounds, partly on nationalistic grounds, McClure 2009: 8–9). While Scots established itself as Scotland’s national language in the Middle Scots period, supplanting Gaelic (Ó Baoill 2010: 13), it is between the mid-sixteenth century and the late eighteenth century that we start to see a dramatic shift in the fortunes of Scots and Gaelic, facilitated in part by the rise of the Protestant Reformation across Europe, the proliferation of printed English, the political union with England, and the failure of the Jacobite Risings.

The first of these, the Reformation, is a major event in the history of Europe. Scotsman John Knox, a key figure in the Reformation, was aware of the potential influence of the English throne in promoting Protestantism across England and Scotland, and the Reformers knew that closer ties between the two countries would be important in furthering the advancement of the Protestant religion. As such, Knox’s anglicised writings were intended for a broader audience beyond Scotland and repres...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes On the Contributors
• The International Phonetic Alphabet (Revised to 2005)
• Map of Scotland
• 1 Introduction: an Overview of Language in Scotland
• 2 A Short History of Sociolinguistics in Scotland
• 3 Accent Variation and Change in North-East Scotland: the Case of (Hw) in Aberdeen*
• 4 A Socio-Articulatory Study of Scottish Rhoticity*
• 5 Sociolinguistic Variation On the Scottish–English Border
• 6 Hitting an Edinburgh Target: Immigrant Adolescents’ Acquisition of Variation in Edinburgh English*
• 7 Vowel Variation in Scottish Standard English: Accent-Internal Differentiation or Anglicisation?*
• 8 Phonological Repetition Effects in Natural Conversation: Evidence from Th-Fronting in Fife*
• 9 Language and the Influence of the Media: a Scottish Perspective*
• 10 What Can Ethnography Tell Us About Sociolinguistic Variation Over Time? Some Insights from Glasgow*
• 11 From Speech to Naming in a Scottish Pakistani Community: the Interplay Between Language, Ethnicity and Identity
• 12 Change in the Fisher Dialects of the Scottish East Coast: Peterhead as a Case Study
• 13 Syntactic Variation: Evidence from the Scottish Corpus of Text and Speech
• 14 Code-Switching in ‘Flannan Isles’: a Micro-Interactional Approach to a Bilingual Narrative
• 15 Thirty Years Later: Real-Time Change and Stability in Attitudes Towards the Dialect in Shetland*
• Subject Index
• Author Index