The latest Scots Language Ambassadors newsletter (issue 4) is out now.

In this edition, we hear fae oor twa ambassadorial Bills – Wullie Oliphant and Bill Herbert – aboot their excitin first-hand experiences o workin wae Scots in schools in Fife and Dundee.

First, we hear fae Wullie, reflectin on his experiences o teachin Scots in primary schuils in the Auld Grey Toun:

Syne the stert o the year a’ve been in eicht wee schuils arooond the Auld Grey Toun Dunfermline daein a wheen o work wi the leid. A’ve worked fae P Wan aw the wey up tae P Seeven!

Some heidies wanted me to dae aw the classes wi wan visit each, an ithers went fir the twa classes wi five or sechts visits.

Up tae noo we’ve looked at pairts o the boady, claethes and beasts and a’ve yaised boxes o claethes an stuffed toys – games  – sangs, poems an even the wee PowerPoint noo an agin!!!

Some o the dominies have been daein their ain poems roond about Burns Nicht and the bairns have luved letting me hear them.

Am really gled tae say that A’ve got dates in ma diary richt up tae the end o Merch and will hae visited aboot fowerteen schuils bi then!

It gans withoot sayin that a’ve had Romanian, Polish and Latvian bairns in ma classes and they have aw had a smashin time learning some o the leid o their new hameland!

And noo, fae Bill Herbert, poet, Professor O Creative Writin at the University o Newcastle, and Scots Language Ambassador at Grove Academy, Dundee:

When I was working as Scots Language Ambassador with kids from my old school, Grove Academy in Broughty Ferry, our discussions about Scots were probably more helpful for me than for them.

As you might imagine, very few pupils from a predominantly middle class catchment area were interested in stating that they spoke Scots, so a distinction between use and recognition vocabularies proved very useful: everyone was prepared to understand far more Scots than they said they spoke. The old assumption that it is a working class speech, in other words, remains intact. It was my job not to get them speaking Scots, however, but to recalibrate their classification of it to suggest that they already spoke more Scots than they might realise.

We started with some basic category divisions. Working from the old Dundonian tricolon of jute, jam, and journalism, we tried thinking of Scots as being composed of three elements, accent, vocabulary, and grammar. We also considered it as ranging across three categories, Dundonian, a more general Scots, and Scots English.

A final group of three that enabled further vocabulary-building arose from the distinction that while one type of Scots may be spoken now, we were also well aware of words or phrases belonging to our parents’ or grandparents’ generation, then adding to that the idea that some words from any of these categories had other origins (ie were loan words). That gave us an overall grid as follows:

accent | vocabulary | grammar

Dundonian | Scots | Scots English

contemporary | historic | loan

Of course, some of these terms were less familiar than others, but these were bright kids, and it didn’t take more than a few examples to kick off discussion:

Eh | dreich | awa the messages

peh | pech | outwith

radge | chittery bite | cundie

Crucially, the addition of an historic or etymological level added a degree of analytical rigour to the discussion (as well as the possibility of literary usage), especially in the key area of identifying what might be uniquely local or culturally Scottish about what we were saying or could remember hearing or having read.

Food was a good topic, as was weather or mood, and one example that proved very useful was street names, where I opposed the local examples of the West Port and the Nethergait. Working from the unexamined or default principle that anything not recognisably Scots must therefore be English, people conjectured that the West Port referred to a former dock area, while the Nethergait must have something to do with some medieval gate into the city.

I then pointed out (in my role as fascinating Professor Pedanticus) that there had never been a port at the West Port, but that the city gate (or, in French, ‘port’) had indeed been there, and, while there was never a gate at the Nether-, Over-, Murray-, or Seagate, we did have a word for ‘walk’ derived from the Scandinavian: ‘gait’.

Ye can read more o Bill’s fascinatin thochts on Scots on his blog here:

Bill’s blog

In ither news, the Scots Language Coordinators team and the Scots Scriever Hamish MacDonald have been working with teacher colleagues in the Scottish Prisons Service with a view to enhancing Scots learning provision for Scottish prisoners. Co-ordinators Diane Anderson and Simon Hall have also been co-delivering at SQA Understanding Standards events for the Scots Language Award in Glasgow, and lecturing to PGDE English Students at Strathclyde University. A series of partnership events coordinated by Bruce Eunson have taken place with agency Into Film, revolving around four new Scots versions of Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo’s Child – in the Shetland, Orkney, Aberdeen and Dundee varieties. Finally, a joint project between Education Scotland, Orkney Islands Council and the Orkney Heritage Society will see the launch of a brand new, digitised version of the Orkney Dictionary at the Royal Society of Edinburgh on April 8^th.

Please keep us up tae date wi all your Ambassador engagements, and if you have any contributions for the next issue o the SLA News we would love tae receive them! We are very grateful tae oor Ambassadors for their time and commitment. Please mind on that receipted travel expenses for schools visits can be reimbursed. Expenses forms are available fae Simon Hall