20.6 Looking ahead

You won't have to go to many Scots language events before hearing Max Weinreich's quip: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” (cited in Weston and Jensen, 2000, p.85). This quote links back to the discussions you were introduced to at the beginning of this course around what distinguishes a dialect from a language. In this statement Weinreich insinuates that a language is a dialect variety of that language that has the most power, and this power can take many forms, for example a government policy. Far more important is that a language variety, if it is to exist in a standard form, has a scule and a polis – meaning that key social and cultural institutions use and accept this language variety as a standard.

There have been excellent moves towards prestige planning for Scots, with the funding for, and the support of Scots language dictionaries, The Scots Language Centre, and the inclusion of Scots in the Curriculum for Excellence; and with The Scottish Book Trust, Creative Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, and many others supporting Scots as a language in its own right. Additional milestones towards this goal include the ratification of the European convention on minority languages in Scotland and the inclusion of a question on Scots in the 2011 census, with a more in-depth question planned for the 2021 census.

All these initiatives and developments are bringing spoken Scots out of its neuks to an existence in the wider public sphere where consensus may be reached upon a standard of Scots required for public discourse.

Yet, there is some way to go… Currently, supporting speakers and learners to express themselves in written Scots does require literacy in English to inform their writing. It has been left to the individual learner to develop more in-depth knowledge about traditional Scots spelling, grammatical forms that may not be immediately apparent to Scots speakers and learners, or how to access dictionaries and Scots language resources alongside developing ideas about best practice.

Often these challenges can be a barrier to literacy in the Scots language. Yet, with the emergence of publicly accessible education resources, and the underlying common store of written and spoken Scots that has become more visible through modern media, a more popular consensus is being reached on how Scots as a public language works. An agreed authoritative standard for written Scots, ratified by authoritative groups, could very well support speakers, learners and teachers in further overcoming barriers to literacy. Agreement on one spelling per word, a grammatical preference and a curriculum for teaching the language are vital components in achieving this. Part of this effort would have to be the gathering of a corpus of written work to present as best practice and core elements of a cultural heritage in the Scots language.

A majority of Scots language literature published to date goes against, in some ways or others, what may be considered best practice. One key question going forward towards a Standard Scots would therefore have to be whether these works ought to be revised for inclusion in a corpus of best practice. Comparing this approach with practice in other languages, we find that classics of historical works preceding standardisation are routinely translated into modern standard languages, such as Beowulf, or the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare in English. This is common practice in order to make the cultural heritage in a particular language accessible to modern speakers of that language. This is a result of the fact that languages are not static entities and that they constantly evolve according to the needs of the speakers through the centuries.

In this unit you have seen that much of the work to achieve a Standard Scots has already been carried out, and the knowledge attained to develop a functional Standard Written Scots that is independent of dialects. Scots is increasingly being brought into the public arena in our multilingual society and there is increasing acknowledgement of the benefits of de-stigmatising and legitimising minoritised first languages such as Scots. Perhaps we are now at a time where our increasing Scots literacy is ready to accept and utilize a Standard Written Scots.