Ulster
Scots: Realities and Myths
From: Ulster Folk Life Vol 44 1998. (Published by Ulster Folk & Transport
Museum, Cultra)
Within the merged continuum, diversity remains, with Scots forms imbuing
different social and political values of identity than English forms. It
is apt to quote as a contemporary witness the eighteenth-century grammarian
and scholar, Joseph Priestley, who wrote, in 1762, in his Theory of Language
and Universal Grammar, half a century after the Union of the Parliaments,
that 'the English and the Scotch, had the kingdoms continued separate, might
have been distinct languages, having two different standards of writing'
(present writer's italics). Many articles by prominent international scholars
in the recently published The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language (edited
by C. Jones, Edinburgh University Press: 1997) show clearly that Scots has
merged or is merging with English or has been anglicised3. No Scot on the
mainland nor descendant in Ulster is monolingually or monodialectally a
Scots speaker. Evolutionary speciation, to take up the earlier Darwinian
metaphor, has given way to growth curtailment and hybridisation. As Görlach
(1998: 57-58) comments:
'in the case of ... Scots, there is the additional complication that formerly
independent languages may come to be felt as dialects of the bigger, more
prestigious neighbouring standard language. We are here involved in a 'vicious'
circle - the more functions are given up, the less useful the receding language
is felt to be, which in due course not only reduces its functions, but impoverishes
its linguistic potential. Moreover, the increasing uses of the related standard
language are likely to lead to convergence with it, which is a misleading
term for what is, in effect, dialect erosion. Whereas Gaelic remains undoubtedly
Gaelic however much influenced by English, Scots can die an unperceived
death by becoming more English all the time, until only pronunciation differences
are left, and therefore not enough distinctiveness to constitute a proper
dialect, let alone a language, whether by abstand ('distance') or by attitude.'
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