Back Bella’s Scots Language Content

SCOTSMT-1Bella Caledonia brocht in 2016 wi a clanjamfry o new scrievin in Scots. Ilka scriever publisht on Bella’s Scots pages gangs their ain gate wi whit they want tae say and hou they want tae scrieve it. Bella’s gien the leid a plettie for ideas, opeenions and debate it didnae hae afore. It’s the re-roadin o kittle readable Scots prose and is as democratic as it’s diverse.

Amang the ither pro-indy onliners, Bella Caledonia’s licht sheens brichtest. Aw that’s wantin noo is the siller and support tae keep it burnin.

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  1. Sheikh MaBunnet says:

    No tae be ower picky, bit yon link taks ees tae the fu Bella tin-rettler.

    Ah luv whit is gaun oan wi Bella’s promotion o the Scots leid, bit ah hae ma doots aboot sum ae thair poleetical screivins. Is there ony wey oo cun support jist the Scots program, wi-oot peyin tae gee publeecity tae the loonier fringes?

  2. seastnan seastnan says:

    My teeth grate when I read this so called Scots-tongue. It’s like your spell checker has gone crazy. “opeenions” a genuine Scots word? It’s just made up from the poorly pronounced sound of the original English languageword.

    Scot’s is for middle class cringy Scots and Tory ladies who want to sound like they are down with the proles.

    Modern Scots is NOT a language as it’s just a regional dialect of English. Is ‘geordie’ a language, for example or ‘yorkie’? There may have been a time in the distant past when Scots could have developed into a fully formed language but that was lost with the 1707 union.

    Getting real, the Scot’s languages are GAELIC and English. It’s Gaelic as one of the authentic Celtic languages you should be promoting (and you do of course) but I would not waste resources on something so called Scots-tongue linguists are clearly just making up as they go along.

    Just my ‘opeenion’ guys!!!

    1. Hairy Mary says:

      Since there’s nae universally accepted criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects you’re talking pish matey. what your saying is no better than xenophobia, just because you’ve no interest in the culture doesn’t give you a right to say who should be. There’s Legions of writers, poets, essayists, cartoonists and comedians that would blow your elitist conceit theory right out the water! That’s ma twa baw-bee opeenion onieway.
      See the Scots Wikipedia too. One of 5 anglic language versions

      1. seastnan seastnan says:

        Nah! Don’t buy that at all. Insulting me does not an argument make. This is just your own opeenion too and not backed up by anything at all.

        I continue to maintain that written Scots is just made up as the guys go along as they think ‘well I write it as I sound it’ and you can see that as different people write it in different ways. Read anything written in the Scots tongue and count the number of complete English words in between the local slang and you can easily see just how badly and incoherently they jar together. So yes your Scots-tongue is just a dialect and not in the least a fully-formed and developed language.

        I’m 100% Castlemilk Glasgow working class Scots and a Gaelic and Russian language speaker. Those are languages. Glasgow slang is just that.

        I don’t see English people desperate to defend the Geordie language or the Yorkie language. England is full of regional dialects and Scotland has its regional dialects too but it is totally pretentious to demand full language status for them.

        Side tracking the urgent language debate in Scotland with the see-how-down-with-the-proles-and-unelitist-I-am as I write in the guid Scots tongue (or should that be “tong” or “tung”?) is a total diversion and a waste of scarce resources. In my experience it is the elitist-cringy Scots middle class who are obsessed with the dialects. Most of the genuine workers don’t give a flying fuck. They just speak to their mates the way their mates speak to them and just laugh at pretentious people.

        1. Anonymous says:

          “it is the elitist-cringy Scots middle class who are obsessed with the dialects. Most of the genuine workers don’t give a flying fuck”

          hmm it may be true that lots of (lower) middleclass people are obessed with dialects… people liked Melvyn Bragg (from a working class background in Wigton, Cumbria, but luckily for him went to a grammar school and then Oxford – so might now be middleclass I suppose). He has made a career out of writing/broadcasting about language/dialect. In his BBC series “The Routes of English” he talks about speaking a broad Cumbrian dialect when he was wee – with many of the same norse influences as Scots- when at home in Wigton. I think that often middle class kids/young folk often straddle two worlds: the playground/street in Wigton and the seminar room in Oxford. Or in my case: a school of miners kids in Midlothian and an Edinburgh uni department with barely enough Scots staff to rub together. My point being that it’s middle class kids (as much as “genuine workers”) who have two tongues in their heads – their playground/street voice and their ‘posh’ voice for home/uni. Don’t be too harsh on them for noticing and caring – and in many cases respecting – the languages/dialects/tongues they grew up with

          1. seastnan seastnan says:

            Interesting perspective which I can see some truth in as I have my Castlemilk voice and my Professional voice which is a close to ‘standard’ English as I need to be.

            My beef is I just don’t call my Castlemilk voice a language.

  3. Oyveh says:

    The problem with this writing is that syntactically it just looks like Queen’s English with ‘Scotch’ lexical items added from some handy dictionary or other. The linguistic continuum with the Scots of the 15/16 century has been broken. Restoring the link is, however, possible as the ‘science’ is well tested with other once decayed languages in Europe. Scots/Scottis as a medium needs to be treated seriously by government, recruiting to the task open-minded, competent linguists who understand the principles of language revival and planning and not leaving the job entirely to the idiosyncratic amateur, however well intentioned. The ‘Scots’ or rather Anglo-Scottish dialect on Wiki is inconsistent and revelatory of the deep structural influence of the composer’s fluency in Standard English. Be that as it may, it presence on line does bring language use in Scotland out of the shadows.

    1. seastnan seastnan says:

      Yes I can see and go with those points you have just made as they more-or-less acknowledge the concerns I raised with a viable solution.

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