A Hands-On Approach
A HANDS-ON APPROACH How To… Rebuild A Language In this instalment, Cara McSherry gives us ideas about what we can do to revitalise a language, taking Scots as a working example.
S
cots gets it tough. Its status as a language is hotly contested — more often than not it gets labelled everything from “dialect” to “slang” to “bad English”. We’ve all heard the overplayed (and frankly offensive) line on Scottish people needing subtitles to be understood. But there’s a very vocal group of online activists who are trying to shift people’s perceptions.
1. Write poems. At the forefront of these efforts is poet Len Pennie, who’s combatting the anti-Scots feeling, quite literally, one word at a time. Aside from her fantastically fiery poems, such as I’m no havin’ children, Len has amassed over 100,000 followers on Twitter for her Scots word of the day videos, where she celebrates the language in a fun, accessible, and very digestible way. Her mission is bolstered by a plethora of others who feel similarly passionate about their leid (language).
2. Sing renditions of hit songs. Iona Fyfe is another big name — a singer from Aberdeenshire known for singing in Scots, with a particularly iconic Scots rendition of Olivia Rodrigo’s Driver’s License.
30
