AS somebody that’s campaignt for the Scots language owre mony years, I wis maist upliftit tae read aboot the young singer Iona Fyfe, supportit by MSP Clare Adamson, persuadin Spotify tae recognise Scots as a language, an saicondly, tae hear her arguing the case for a Scots Language Act. It’s a proposal some o us hae buin advocatin for mony years – probably even afore Iona wis born– but withoot much success it has tae be said, at least up tae noo. On the ither haun, when I read some bloggers’ predictable comments aboot this in The Herald, I wis remindit that owre mony Scots still cannae help spewin oot cairtloads o ignorant an snobbish keich, (or cac in Gaelic) aboot Scots (or Gaelic), revealin ugsome prejudices that were deeply plantit in their nappers by previous generations o dominies wha were theirsels ignorant aboot the fact that Scots isnae “bad” English at aw, but “guid” Scots, an that it is a language by ony criteria ye care tae pit furrit. The EU’s
In Scotland, we have three national languages – English, Gaelic and Scots. The 2011 census revealed that 1.5 million people identified as speaking Scots, yet much of Scotland’s population is unaware that they possess skills in reading, writing and speaking Scots. Scots is part of the West Germanic language family and is a sister language to English with close affinities with Scandinavian languages such as Danish and Norwegian. Scots has four main dialects: Insular, Northern, Central and Southern, but for me, it was just the way folk spoke in their everyday lives. Growing up in rural Aberdeenshire, I didn’t realise that the way people speak – in Doric, a vernacular or byleid of Scots – was a special and unique trait of the regions people, lore and history. At the time, I was unaware of the similitude of Scots to other European languages, I was unaware of the language’s history and the significance of the literature written in the language, and I was unaware of i
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HUDDERIE LOCKDOWN has been tough for so many of us, but I hadn’t realised quite how important a haircut was for morale. Home hairdressing has, for me at least, never really “cut it” and I fear that – when I finally manage to get professional attention – I will be much more shaggy than I care to be. In other words, I am becoming exceptionally hudderie. According to the citations in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk), the adjective hudderie first appears at the beginning of the 19th century, with the general meaning of slovenly or untidy. Hudderie seems to derive from a slightly older verb – hudder, itself a form of hod, which can mean “to jog along on horseback … of a poor rider”. Robert Burns, in The Holy Fair, refers to how “Here farmers gash, in ridin graith, Gaed hoddan by their cotters”. DSL also notes the noun howd “a lurching, rocking movement”, especially at sea; the expression “Having a howd round St Abb’s” is recorded