A brief external history of Scots and Scottish Standard English

We know very little of the linguistic situation in early Scotland. There are traces of Pictish; Jackson (1955) argues that there were probably two Pictish languages, one Indo-European and the other of uncertain ancestry. However, evidence from the Pictish symbol-stones is limited and inconclusive, and the symbols may not be linguistic at all; as McClure (1995: 25) neatly puts it, `the suggestion has been made that they are random jumbles caused by artisans who knew the figurae of the letters but not their potestates'.

Subsequently, a branch of Brythonic or p-Celtic was replaced by Gaelic, a Goidelic or q-Celtic language, following the invasion of the Scotti from Ireland in the fifth century AD. Gaelic spread rapidly across Scotland north of the Forth. Further south, the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Lothian in the seventh century introduced a Germanic competitor language in the form of the Old Northumbrian dialect of Old English: Scots is descended from Old Northumbrian, rather than from the Mercian, West Saxon and Kentish dialects which are the source of most Modern English in England. Synchronic differences between Scots and other varieties of English therefore at least partially reflect a dialect division in Old English, and not the influence of Gaelic. This common misconception merits comment immediately; there is remarkably little Gaelic influence on Scots, and indeed Gaelic has been progressively driven north and west by Scots since the introduction of Old North umbrian to the Lothians (Ó Baoill 1997).

Lothian was ceded to the Scots in 973, but retained its Germanic language rather than adopting the majority language, Gaelic. Em bryonic Scots was influenced successively by Norse, the language of the Viking invaders, and by Norman French, for although the Normans did not conquer Scotland, many were granted land by the Scottish Crown. Scots gradually gained in prestige, aided in this by the rise of the burghs which were founded by David I and his successors and settled largely by Scots speakers, and which rapidly became influential commercial centres. Divergence from English continued between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, although during this period Scots is generally referred to as Inglis, with Scotis used for Gaelic. By the fourteenth century, French influence had begun to recede, and Gaelic was being gradually forced into the hills by expansionist Scots. Inglis appeared in literature with Barbour's Brus in 1375, and replaced Latin as the official language of the Scottish Parliament in 1424. By 1500, Scots was securely established as the official language of the court, judiciary and government, and it is at this point that Scottis is first used to describe `the King of Scotland's Scots as opposed to the King of England's English' (Murison 1979: 8).

Middle Scots, under the Stewarts, enjoyed a notional Golden Age from around 1450 to 1560, as the official language of a reasonably successful independent kingdom, with a vibrant literary tradition exemplified by Henryson, Dunbar and Gavin Douglas. However, the linguistic balance in Scotland began to shift after the onset of the Reformation in 1560. Knox and his followers succeeded in establishing Presbyterianism, but in the absence of a Scots translation of the Bible, they used the Geneva English edition: `from then on, God spoke English' (Kay 1988: 59). This distribution of the English Bible paved the way for the introduction of much more written English; English printers set up shop in Scotland, and English gradually became the standard literary language.

Scots truly began to decline after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England. The Scottish court moved to London, and the acquisition of spoken and written English became the key to successful self-aggrandisement. The linguistic impact is partially documented in Devitt (1989), where a sample of 121 Scottish texts written between 1520 and 1659 were scanned for five features which show distinctively different Scots and English forms; these included the relative clause marker (Scots quh- versus English wh-), and the present participle ending (Scots-and as opposed to English-ing). Devitt reports a gross, gradual increase from 18 per cent to 88 per cent English forms over this period; although the progression is slightly different for each feature, all follow broadly the same course. Finally, after the Union of Parliaments in 1707, English also became the language of law, education and administration in Scotland.

After the Jacobite uprising of 1745, Gaelic was also suppressed, but this did not benefit Scots. Gaelic had already by this period retreated behind the Highland Line, an imaginary frontier running roughly from Inverness to Oban. Scots was never spoken beyond the Highland Line: instead, English was widely taught here, so that speakers switched from Gaelic to English, uninfluenced by Scots. Inhabitants of the Gaelic and post-Gaelic areas today speak Highland English, which retains from Gaelic a distinctive intonation pattern, and some non-standard syntax, like the prevalent It's Donald you'd be seeing/ It's to Skye you'll be going construction. Scots features, however, are few.

Scots continued to lose ground in the Lowlands, while failing to gain a foothold in the Highlands. In the eighteenth century, it dropped out of use almost entirely as a written language; there have been various poetic revivals since, reflected in the verse of Robert Burns or the `synthetic Scots' of Hugh Macdiarmid, but very little prose has appeared. Up-wardly mobile middle-class Scots increasingly sought to replace their Scots with English, and in this trend we see the development of Scottish Standard English.

There seem to be three interacting sources for SSE. First, as many eighteenth century sources show (Jones 1995, 1997), Scots were made uncomfortably aware that their speech was not considered quite socially acceptable by their new English contacts; take as an example Buchanan's (1757 = 1968: xv) contention that:

The people of North Britain seem, in general, to be almost at as great a loss for proper accent and just pronunciation as foreigners. And it would be surprising to find them writing English in the same manner, and some of them to as great perfection as any native of England, and yet pronouncing after a different, and for the most part unintelligible manner, did we not know, that they never had any proper guide or direction for that purpose.

Various bodies, including notably the Select Society of Edinburgh, took it upon themselves to rescue their Scottish fellows from this social affliction by providing just such a `proper guide or direction', in the form of lectures and classes. Scots also assiduously read books which promised to weed out unwelcome Scotticisms. However, and here we find the second source for the particular shape assumed by SSE, these obviously concentrated on features of vocabulary, syntax and morphology, which could be set down easily in writing, while largely ignoring phonetics and phonology. One might appeal to the lectures and schools as a source of approved pronunciation; however, it seems that the journey to Edin burgh, particularly in winter, did not recommend itself to many London based elocutionists, while the accents of those who did offer their services (famously including Sheridan) were such a mixed bag that this aspect of the instruction seems to have failed dismally. SSE, an amalgamation of Standard English grammar and lexicon with a Scots accent, came to be acceptable both within and outwith Scotland. As even Boswell admitted (see Kay 1988: 84), `a small intermixture of provincial peculiarities may, perhaps, have an agreeable effect.' Indeed, the received wisdom by the end of the eighteenth century seems to be that Scottish accent features are incurable: `The English accent can never be acquired; the attempt is hopeless ... Accent must then be abandoned as impossible, and English must, by all Scotsmen, be pronounced with the Scots accent' (Anon 1826: 224).

But which Scots accent? As we shall see, SSE shares phonological features with Scots, but the two are distinct systemically and distributionally, and these innovatory features cannot simply be seen as borrowings from RP ± especially in view of the fact that, as McClure (1995: 79) tactfully puts it, `the English accent known as RP is not a native form in Scotland, nor is it generally regarded as a social desideratum'. Jones (1993, 1995) argues convincingly that the phonological features of SSE are there, not by accident or default, but by design. Jones shows that Scottish writers of pronouncing dictionaries often based their norms, not on London English, but on a pre-existing Scottish professional variety characteristic of `the college, the pulpit and the bar' (1993: 102). SSE may therefore be in origin a more organic and less artificial variety than is usually assumed.

Nonetheless, SSE is a standard variety, and the same concerns over its reality therefore arise as for RP and GenAm. That is, as Giegerich (1992: 46) admits, `the SSE accent is in a sense an analysts' artefact'. I use the term `SSE' to mean the Scottish sociolinguistic equivalent of RP in England. Just as there are varieties within RP and GenAm, so SSE has slightly different characteristics in different areas of Scotland: the variety which I describe below as SSE is typical of middle-class Edinburgh and Glasgow speech ± outlying areas like Aberdeen and the Border country share many but not all of its features. Like RP, SSE is now a native variety for many speakers; others maintain a Scots dialect as a home language, and use SSE in formal circumstances and in the education system, where Scots is typically discouraged. Code switching is therefore commonplace, and many Scots control a continuum from SSE to their local variety of `braid Scots'. Scots dialects are particularly strongly maintained, as one might expect (Milroy and Milroy 1985), among working-class speakers in the cities, and in rural areas ± and much of Scotland is rural. I shall now briefly consider some of the distinctive characteristics of Scots dialects and SSE.