Why we're gonnae no speak Lallans

Charles Jones

Tuckwell Press, (pounds) 12.99

Charles Jones lays his cards right on the table in the very title of this stimulating and informative little book. The language spoken by the people of Scotland is English, in a Scottish variety, of course, with different degrees of accent, quite a lot of local vocabulary and a few, rather trifling differences of grammar from the standard English of England.

As such, this Scottish variety can reasonably be placed on a par with the American or

Australian varieties of the same language. When discussing it we can also usefully refer to it in shorthand as Scots, so as to avoid a more cumbersome term. This is the convention adopted by the author, who is professor of English language at Edinburgh

University.

But, if we follow him in that, we must take care to distinguish the subject of his book from a second language which can lay claim to the name of Scots. This is the venerable and versatile literary language with a pedigree going back to the middle ages, rich enough to provide an attractive medium for many writers who still want to use it in the 21st century. To make the distinction clear, Prof Jones refers to this as Lallans.

What the presence of these two languages does in Scotland is to create a linguistic situation not unlike that in the Arab world. All Moslem Arabs will be, to some extent, familiar with classical Arabic because they know verses of the Koran, just as we know verses of Tam O' Shanter or A Man's a Man for A' That. But nobody normally speaks classical Arabic. In everyday life, Arabs use their local vernacular, which may vary from Muscat to the Maghreb as much as English does from Dutch.

In Scotland, the disparity is, if anything, somewhat more extreme. Not only do Scots not speak the Lallans which developed from John Barbour to Hugh MacDiarmid, they often cannot understand it if they hear it outside the most familiar contexts. The text of, say, Edwin Morgan's translation of Phedre was not immediately within the grasp of the audiences who saw the play staged. Nor indeed can most Scots even comfortably read such texts without a crib, which is why practically every work published in Lallans comes equipped with one.

It would be fair to say, of course, that the Scots literary language and the spoken vernacular have much in common. Even so, they do not overlap precisely. The Concise Scots Dictionary, the most accessible of the works of reference on the literary language, does not, for example, admit the word bampot, even though this is in everyday usage. Therefore, it does not admit derivatives such as jam-bam, a man who will take nothing but jam in his pieces, or tam-bam, a man who habitually wears a tam o' shanter.

If I had the time, I could find a good number of the more vulgar Scots colloquialisms similarly excluded: a foreigner trying to follow Irvine Welsh with the CSD in hand might not get far. At the same time, it contains thousands of words which are no longer used and nobody understands.

That is fair enough, since it is primarily the historical record of a written, not a spoken medium. And there is no reason why poets and playwrights should not trawl it for whatever verbal effects they wish to produce or whatever aspects of Scottish

culture they wish to use.

This discussion has carried me a little way beyond the limits of Jones's work, for he confines himself fairly strictly to Scots as it is spoken in the home, the street or the workplace - though the way he deploys any essential historical or theoretical background is highly skillful and

illuminating.

He does not try to tell anyone how they ought to speak. He simply describes how they do speak. So he wastes little space on Lallans, the ''largely artificial and reconstructed version of the English spoken in Scotland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and revived in the early part of the 20th-century''.

What jumps out from these pages is how alive Scots is compared to how dead Lallans is. In Lallans you can only say something which has been said before.

By contrast, ''the Englis

spoken in Scotland is actively undergoing change at every level''.

The speakers of this language are constantly inventing new ways of saying things. And there are new syntactic structures: ''Gonnae no dae that.'' There are new words for new concepts, such as bidie-in.

The inventive process of change which keeps the language alive springs not from the search of ancient texts but from the barely conscious habits of its speakers. It never occurred to me that most male working-class speakers in Edinburgh pronounce the letter ''l'' as a thick, dark sound, as in Mull, whereas the females pronounce it as a thin, light sound, as in mill, presumably because the alternative sounds too macho.

I have occasionally heard people who cannot produce the ''ch'', and say Lock Lomond instead. But it was news to me that some pronounce bath as baff, just like a Cockney.

The differences in regional dialect remain important, yet some of the most interesting

linguistic distinctions are to be found between classes or sexes or age-groups within a single dialect.

If there is any trend towards uniformity, then it appears that Scots speakers are beginning to sound more and more Glaswegian. This is partly a matter of choice, because they believe that dialect identifies them more clearly as Scottish than any other.

It is also because Glaswegians, especially young male working-class Glaswegians, are leading the process of linguistic change with their demotic, argotic ways. The glottal stop seems to be here to stay and one day, perhaps, bampot will even find its way into the Concise Scots Dictionary.

Michael Fry