'MR EEJIT wis an eejit. He wis boarn an eejit. And noo, at the age o sixty, he was a bigger eejit than ever. The hair on Mr Eejit's face didna grow sleekit and fankled the wey it does on maist hairy-bardie faces. It grew in jags that stuck strecht oot like the broostles o a nailbrush."

Thus reads the rendering into Scots of part of Roald Dahl's story about the world's most revolting couple, The Twits. Translated by Matthew Fitt and published by Itchy Coo, the well-known - or even weel-kent - children's classic breathes new life. In Dahl's original, Mr Twit was horrible and hairy and his good lady was simply ugly. In The Eejits they are honkin, mawkit, bowfin and manky.

I would imagine that many Herald readers grew up bilingual, in the sense of having one language for the playground and another for the classroom. I certainly did. You were taught to speak "proper" English at school, which implied that the Scots vernacular was, as John Reid might put it, "not fit for purpose". Your granny might have told you that you had a "guid Scots tongue in yer heid", but you could be belted for using it in the wrong place. Gaelic had even worse problems. Yet the common language of most of the people of Scotland used to be the language of the Scottish court, government and judiciary. Scots literature f lourished, and educated people wrote, conversed and carried out philosophical and legal arguments in the Scots tongue. But not now. The Anglicising tendency has long since won the day.

One of the motivations behind the Reformation was to give ordinary people the scriptures in the vernacular, but it was southern English that prevailed. Had there been a Scots translation of the Bible at a time when the new printing presses were revving up and people were hungry for learning, our national cultural story might have been told differently.

With the union of both crowns and parliaments, the language of court and government became Anglicised. And when it became more polite to speak received English, Scots was perceived as uncouth; even the chattering classes of the Scottish Enlightenment sought to eliminate Scotticisms from their speech. Edinburgh's New Town merchants began to practise "How now brown cow" in their substantial houses.

Once people become ashamed of their language, critical issues of national identity arise. It's hard to maintain cultural confidence if one's natural means of self-expression is mocked as inferior and vulgar. Standard English became the language of a dominating Empire.

We have hardly begun to assess the extent of our loss. When you don't acknowledge the depth of your cultural bereavement, how can you even begin to name what is at stake? Is it possible to reclaim our native tongue, with its layer upon layer of forgotten, sophisticated meanings? There are certainly yearnings around, and there have always been prophets crying in a variety of cultural wildernesses, but that does not yet add up to a movement with momentum.

What was powerfully evident in the sell-out event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in which Tom Fleming read parts of WL Lorimer's Scots translation of the New Testament was the sheer energy and vitality of the language. When you're used to the rolling cadences of the King James Version - which I love - it's easy to forget that the New Testament was actually written in vernacular Greek. Some modern translations are fairly banal, but the Scots version captures both the majesty and the earthiness of the original text.

What riches there are! The Scottish publishing house Black & White has produced a marvellous Scots anthology of writers, edited by Carl MacDougall. Contemporary poets such as Kathleen Jamie are turning to Scots to express things which are almost beyond English words. It may be through songs and poems - think MacDiarmid's Bonnie Broukit Bairn - that we learn to fall in love again with our own tongue, validating Edwin Muir's assertion that English is a language of the intellect and Scots a language of the heart.

Some lessons may be learned from Orkney. Here, where I live, not just farmers and fishermen but the director of education, the retired chief librarian, accountants and teachers speak Orcadian on all occasions, with neither self-consciousness nor embarrassment. There was a time when Orcadian speech was discouraged, but that is past. This is a confident culture which is thankfully not ashamed of its language.

With a new parliament in Edinburgh, can there be a cultural revolution which begins with the speaking of tongues? It's time to use the guid Scots tongues in our heids, while refusing to be made to feel like eejits for doing so.