I saw Rory Bremner performing recently, impersonating Gordon Brown. So leaden are his public pronouncements, joked Bremner, he sounds as if he's speaking a second language. How the audience laughed – in innocence, presumably, of the fact that, when Brown speaks standard English, he is speaking his second language. Brown is of a generation with my parents, and grew up calling a chimney a lum, an ear a lug, a frog a puddock, and the likes of David Cameron, a sleekit skellum. Gordon Brown grew up speaking Scots.
It's no surprise that Bremner (a Scotsman) should neglect this fact. As a Scottish government report revealed this year, 64% of people in Scotland do not consider Scots a language, "just a way of speaking". We Scots have spent 400 years being told (or worse, telling ourselves) that the language of Barbour's Bruce, of Robert Burns and Gavin Douglas – who wrote the first translation into any Anglic language of Virgil's Aeneid – is nothing more than a slovenly version of its sister tongue, English. But an auld dug snaks siccar – an old dog's bite holds fast. Despite centuries of neglect, the Scots language refuses to let go.
Should its tenacity be encouraged? That was the subject of a carnaptious (or bad-tempered) debate in Scotland after the release in January of Public Attitudes Towards the Scots Language. Cultural nationalists stressed the survey's positives (85% of respondents spoke Scots "at least some of the time", and more than half wanted it taught in schools), while a Tory spokesman dismissed his own national tongue as "a collection of regional dialects of the English language". At the same time, a collieshangie (some call it a controversy) broke out over the National Theatre of Scotland's refusal to stage classic works of Scots-language drama – particularly, Sir David Lyndsay's 1540 play, Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. "As long as I am [here]," Vicky Featherstone, the NTS artistic director, was quoted as saying, "we shall not do any of these plays."
Here, I declare an interest. I write plays in Scots, one of which – a comedy about the Scottish Enlightenment called David Hume's Kilt – was developed at the NTS. The play stages one of the most ignominious moments in the history of the Scots tongue. In the mid-18th-century, "it is to Scotland that we look," said Voltaire, "for all our ideas of civilisation." But in that civilised land, English was already the medium of economic and social advancement. And its finest men of letters – including Hume, Adam Smith and James Boswell – were so ashamed of their native tongue they hired an elocutionist to purge "Scotticisms" from their speech. (The elocutionist was Irish.)
Not much has changed since Hume's day. As John Corbett of Glasgow University said of the recent report: "It suggests that many [Scottish] people don't rate their own speech very highly." That's a tragedy. Scots was undeniably one of the great languages of medieval Europe. Even the watered-down form that survives today can be as distinct from standard English as Czech from Slovak and Portuguese from Spanish. More importantly, it's a wonderfully expressive way to talk about the world.
That's why I write plays in Scots – because it's a vernacular that leaps from the page. In "this most onomatopoeic of languages" (says scholar Derrick McClure), you can be scunnert and stamagastert rather than surprised; skelpit, dirled or sklaffed instead of hit; and instead of just complaining, you peenge, yammer or girn. Scots is also a window into a unique way of seeing the world. In proverbs such as "A cock's aye crouse on his ain midden" Scotland's tough, sardonic history is distilled. To meekly let Scots die would be to lose irreplaceable insights into human experience. But with a little smeddum, or spirit, Scots could be saved – and celebrated.