The origins of Scotland’s tongues
February 2007
by J. Derrick McClure
Scotland is, and always has been, a multilingual country. Even now, when minority languages are retreating or disappearing all over the world, we can still boast of having two national languages, Gaelic and Scots, besides a highly distinctive form of the international English language.
And yet: we Scots are a thrawn bourach. It was with the great Scottish literary renaissance of the 20th century that the idea took shape of a single, though composite, Scottish cultural identity capable of being expressed through any or all of our national languages. This surely represented a step forward from the ancient tradition of mutual rivalry and hostility between ‘Highlands’ and ‘Lowlands’; yet even today many of us are strangely reluctant to take this step. All too frequently we find speakers, or advocates, of the Scots tongue denigrating Gaelic, and vice versa. How did this long-standing hostility arise; and how can we overcome it?
A well-founded source of pride among Scots is the fact that we live in one of the oldest kingdoms in Europe. But the Scotland of today has a history as complex as it is long; and an integral part of it is the interplay of many languages and peoples.
Traditionally, the first step in founding the Scotland we know came in 843, when Kenneth MacAlpin, King of the Scots of Dal Riada, succeeded to the throne of the Picts, thus uniting those two peoples under a single monarchy. Kenneth could trace his ancestry back to the fifth-century King Fergus, the founder of his dynasty, and beyond Fergus through a line of semi-legendary figures – perfectly real to him – right back to Adam: the Kings of Scots were the proud heirs of an ancient line long before their domain was anything like the Scotland we live in.
And his language, like that of his people, was Gaelic. This is not in doubt: the people first referred to as ‘Scots’ were Gaelic speakers, whose ancestors had come from Ireland to settle in what is now Argyllshire, and whose domain of Dal Riada was linguistically and culturally an extension of Ireland. The language known to philologists as Old Irish, after Greek and Latin the first language in Europe to acquire a written form and to develop a literature, is the ancestor of both the Scottish and the Irish forms of Gaelic as spoken today.
It should be noted that Kenneth’s people did not call themselves Scots: the word ‘Scots’ does not exist in the Gaelic language; but the Romans called them Scoti and the Angles Scottas, and that is the name by which they are always identified. In the new united kingdom of Picts and Scots, the Gaelic tongue soon superseded the language (akin to modern Welsh) of the Picts, and a Gaelic-speaking kingdom extended from coast to coast.
North and west of this kingdom was Norse territory: not only the Northern and Western Isles, but the northern mainland, were in Viking hands. South of it lay the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria, which in the period of its maximum power extended right up to the Forth. What is now the Scottish mainland – the northern third of the island – was an apex where three cultures met: the Gaelic, with its heartland and main power base in Ireland; the Anglo-Saxon, centred in England, and the Norse, centred in Scandinavia.
It is, indeed, one of the most remarkable facts in the history of the British Isles that out of this heterogeneous assemblage, no more a ‘natural’ political unit than present-day Canada or Indonesia, there should have emerged a confident national monarchy with a firm belief in its own identity and its right to an autonomous existence. But emerge it did, absorbing the Norse territory in the north and the Anglian in the south; and as the Old Irish of Dal Riada gave rise to our modern Gaelic, the Old English of Northumbria gave rise to our modern Scots.
But the question which causes confusion even today, is this: given that the original Scots were Gaelic-speakers, why do we now apply the word not to Gaelic, but to the language of the Lowlands? The answer lies in our turbulent history. Surely everybody in Scotland still knows that the death of Alexander III, and of his granddaughter and heir the Maid of Norway, led to the disputed succession, the intervention of Edward Langshanks of England, the Wars of Independence, and the eventual triumphant restoration of Scottish sovereignty by Robert Bruce.
Alexander III, one of our greatest mediaeval kings, had ruled over a kingdom in which the dominant language (and his own native language) was still Gaelic; but one in which the Norse and Anglian elements were rapidly progressing to a peaceful integration. Had the social and cultural progress of Alexander’s reign been maintained, the whole history of Scotland might have been different, and in particular the tragic division between Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Scots-speaking Lowlands might have been avoided.
But the extinction of the old Gaelic royal line had momentous consequences. The throne passed, after the reigns of Robert Bruce and his son David II, to the House of Stewart, a family whose power-base was in the Anglian-speaking Lowlands. The Lowlands and Borders assumed a greater political importance from their geographical position as the area under permanent threat from the enemy to the south; and other powerful Border families became key players in the national political game.
The national centre of gravity, so to speak, shifted southwards: and as part of this process, the Lowland tongue supplanted Gaelic as the language of king, court and government. James I, one of the strongest and ablest of the Stewart kings, had the royal Acts of his predecessors translated from Latin into the language of his power-base: the Lowland tongue. This was still referred to as Inglis, and there was no thought yet of calling it Scots; but it was now the language of power and prestige in the Scottish kingdom; and soon was to become the vehicle of a brilliant and ardently patriotic literature.
J. Derrick McClure is a Senior Lecturer in English at Aberdeen University, specialising in Scots language and literature. Born in Ayr, but resident for 30 years in Aberdeen, he is well-grounded in the mither tongue in its diverse forms.
This is an article from the February 2007 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.
Thank you for this history of Gaelic. Any mention is worthwhile as we try to save the language.
— Save Gaelic 6 February 2007 #