Ulster
Scots: Realities and Myths
From: Ulster Folk Life Vol 44 1998. (Published by Ulster Folk & Transport
Museum, Cultra)
Internal evolution meant that there were no longer identical systems of
exponence, or that even similar items shared similar functions - in short,
divergence. The minimal distinction between divergence and mere difference
is that those divergent forms were not simply equivalent or isomorphic but
also had a social, external value of their own; in late medieval Scotland,
a stronger distinction pertained here in that divergence was now being reinforced
externally by a national political ethos, a national sense of identity,
and an awareness of one's place in the overall social order. By evolving
its own elements not shared with any other related variety, out of divergence
politics created autonomy: Scots was created out of English by politics.
However, the divergence was never so strong as to separate the two varieties
entirely: whatever their linguistic differences or political statuses, Scots
and English continued to maintain a common core of shared features and of
overlapping systems which were to facilitate further developments when the
political situation was to change. Evolutionary speciation was restrained
by the need for communication between speakers of northern and, indeed,
southern England and the emerging dialect of Scotland. There was an emergent
need for holding back, without everything being radically changed - in the
core vocabulary, in the central inflections, and in the basic syntactic
structures at phrasal and clausal level2. All the same, by the time of King
James IV, Scots had achieved standardisation and codification to match the
nation's communicative needs.
In 1603, King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England and Ireland
as well. The Union of the Crowns brought an end to Scotland's independence
and, in due course, by 1707, its parliament. Scotland became part of Great
Britain, of which the national tongue was English. After several centuries
of growing and strengthening divergence, there quickly set in the incipience
of convergence, or the merging of the two linguistic systems into one. As
Görlach (1991a: 23) argues, ' ... Scots is and has always been a subsystem
of English, whose incipient separation from Early Modern English was slowed
down as a consequence of political, economic and cultural factors in the
sixteenth century and finally blocked by the adoption of English as the
written (and, later, the spoken) language of higher prestige.' Whether the
reference is to the particular dialects or to their collection referred
to in the abstract, Scots anglicised; it became English again.
Convergence was greatly facilitated by the common core of overlapping systems
and shared features, and within each single system being thereby created,
Scots and English forms merged as exponents of shared systems, acquiring
contrastive values determined by situational use. Scots spelling habits,
which had formed part of a standardised writing system, were quickly replaced
by English ones, without remainder, so that in writing there was complete
convergence. The upper classes were evidently not shy about imitating the
speech forms and habits of their southern counterparts, so that, even today,
members of the Scottish nobility (e.g. The Queen Mother) sound English.
In due course, through the reinforcement of British society, the spread
of literacy and, later, mass education in English, and not least the fact
that the Bible was only ever in English, Scots forms became restricted mostly
to non-upper-class speech. Whereas the retention of spoken Scots features
by middle and lower class speakers led, strictly speaking, to no more than
partial convergence, it did lead to the incorporation of these Scots features
into a single and seemlessly merged linguistic continuum which had been
facilitated by the retained common core features.
The earlier north-south continuum of speech in Anglo-Saxon times had been
reestablished. Just as politics split an earlier linguistic continuum, so
politics reinstated that single continuum again. As Görlach (1991b: 74)
comments, 'spoken Scots ... was deliberately replaced by spoken English
in formal contexts from 1750 onwards, first in the towns, and in the nineteenth
century, especially under the influence of General Education (1870), in
the countryside. By 1920 spoken Scots was thus, within 150 years, reduced
to virtually the same peripheral position as the English dialects, which
had taken a much longer time to suppress'. |
