Understanding and speaking Scots and English
At one point they discuss what should be done to improve the prospects for Scots, and one thing Michael stresses is that schools should stop telling kids Scots words are wrong.
I have a lot of sympathy for this view, but as a foreign learner of Scots I have some concerns, too.
When I moved to Scotland in 2002, I couldn’t understand half of my Scottish colleagues at all (the other half had such a posh pronunciation that I could just about follow what they were saying). It only lasted a few weeks before I was more or less able to understand them, but it just shows that a strong Scottish pronunciation of English (we’re not talking about Scots here!) is enough to complete confound a foreigner. It’s also obvious that my parents are still struggling to understand their daughter-in-law and their grandchildren (when they aren’t speaking Danish, of course), although they have such a posh pronunciation that some Scots think they’re English.
After getting used to the Scottish pronunciation of English, building up a decent vocabulary of Scots work took a long time (and there are still many I don’t know).
The reason I’m mentioning this is because Scottish people often forget how hard is is to understand Scots if you haven’t lived in Scotland. It can be very difficult even if you’re a native speaker of English, and it’s practically impossible if you’re a non-native speaker.
If we start encouraging young people to speak Scots in public, the effect will be that they will find it harder and harder to use their language abroad. It would be a bit absurd if Scotland became the only place in Europe where nobody speaks English.
I guess the solution would be to encourage Scots/English bilingualism. I’m not sure whether that should be done through English-as-a-foreign-language lessons at school, or whether there’s another way.
I guess Scotland could learn some lessons from Switzerland:
Unlike most regional languages in modern Europe, Swiss German is the spoken everyday language of all social levels in industrial cities, as well as in the countryside. Using dialect conveys neither social nor educational inferiority and is done with pride. There are only a few specific settings where speaking Standard German is demanded or polite, e.g., in education (but not during breaks in school lessons, where the teachers will speak in dialect with students), in multilingual parliaments (the federal parliaments and a few cantonal and municipal ones), in the main news broadcast or in the presence of German-speaking foreigners. This situation has been called a “medial diglossia”, since the spoken language is mainly the dialect, whereas the written language is mainly Standard German.
I think standard English should be the language of education in all areas of Britain (as a geographical area) and localism (whether slang or dialect words) should be discouraged in formal settings. (This was the subject of a recent controversy in Middlesbrough.) There’s nothing wrong with the use of localisms in any part of geographical Britain in informal situations but use in work meetings excludes and/or confuses non-locals. Your experience at Collins is a good example. Another example is the conference calls I have with my London client: the project manager is from Taiwan and uses correct, standard English. If the Londoners were to use Cockney Rhyming Slang, she would feel excluded from the conversation.
There is an interesting trend towards education in English around the world for children whose mother tongue is not English. Polly’s niece is just about to start at a school in Bangkok where all tuition is in English rather than Thai.
Languages have two uses: inclusive communication with others; and exclusive group identity. Standard English allows the former while use of Scottish words or Scots or Geordie or technical jargon fulfils the latter.
I think standard English should be the language of education in all areas of Britain (as a geographical area) and localisms (whether slang or dialect words) should be discouraged in formal settings. (This was the subject of a recent controversy in Middlesbrough.)
There’s nothing wrong with the use of localisms in any part of geographical Britain in informal situations but use in work meetings excludes and/or confuses non-locals. Your experience at Collins is a good example. Another example is the conference calls I have with my London client: the project manager is from Taiwan and uses correct, standard English. If the Londoners were to use Cockney Rhyming Slang, she would feel excluded from the conversation.
There is an interesting trend towards education in English around the world for children whose mother tongue is not English. Polly’s niece is just about to start at a school in Bangkok where all tuition is in English rather than Thai.
Languages have two uses: inclusive communication with others; and exclusive group identity. Standard English allows the former while use of Scottish words or Scots or Geordie or even technical jargon fulfils the latter.
I am trying not to find it irksome that Thailand has adopted American English as its standard English 🙁
That might sound reasonable on paper, but you know as well as I do that Scots tend to associate knowledge and use of Scots with class. For instance, although Phyllis grew up amongst speakers of Scots, she isn’t able to speak it herself because she grew up in a middle-class area (although of course she uses the occasional word, like everybody else in Scotland), but many people, especially the ones that didn’t do well at school, aren’t able to speak standard English at all.
This means that the choice facing Scotland now is to proceed down the road that’s been taken for generations now, which will soon make it impossible for most people to understand proper Scots (as in Burns’s poems), which will be a significant loss of an important identity marker. The alternative is to encourage Scots (a bit like Norwegians are encouraged to speak their local dialect in all situations), but that will impede international intelligibility.
The accent-class association was one thing I was glad to get away from when I emigrated.
Doesn’t it exist in NZ?
One of the less good things about growing up in Britain is that you are almost programmed to make an immediate judgement of someone’s education level based on their accent and you consciously have to overcome it.
Not really. Although there are people from some areas of Auckland and Wellington who speak in what comes across as rather affected tones.
… they just come across as pretentious rather than educated!
Yeah, that sounds similar to Denmark.