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This article appeared as the leader on May 19 2008, and is reproduced here with the permission of the Scottish edition of the Daily Express. Please note that it remains their copyright. Also note that Bill Wilson MSP is unrelated to Colin Wilson, the linguist also mentioned in the article. Big day is going to be hoachin' . . . unless the luvvies have their way.
by Dorothy-Grace Elder THE registrar will invite the groom to "gie the bride a coortie" at an Aberdeenshire wedding in June.
He will become her "lawful guidman, tae hae and tae haud fae this day on". And she will acquire not so much a husband as "ma lawful guidman".
The marriage of Scots linguists Colin Wilson and Fiona Henderson will be the first known civil ceremony in many years conducted in Doric. The couple have written the service and a local registrar has agreed to voice it their way. A few church weddings have been in Doric or Scots. But it's a breakthrough for a civil service.
The most unusual word will be "coortie". Mr Wilson explained: "It's a very local word for a kiss, from Fiona's home town of Fraserburgh.
Neither I, from Peterculter, nor the registrar, from Strichen, had ever come across the word before knowing Fiona." The couple are not among those who use Scots archly on occasion to impress. "We use it every day, " says Mr Wilson, who has written The Luath Scots Language Learner.
Their happy day should symbolise the revival of interest in Scots and Doric. There's now an astonishing number of hits - 20,000 a day - to the website of Scottish Language Dictionaries, a 22-volume collection.
But just as the language of Burns began blossoming again, Edinburgh's luvvies have dealt it a killer blow. The Scottish Arts Council is to wipe out most grants for aiding the language from next year. With a Na-tionalist government long pledged to encourage the language, this quango is making funding poorer than ever.
OVERALL, the SAC has thundered through Scotland like the fifth horseman of the apocalypse, causing fury by destroying the next three years of money for some of our best-loved companies. Grants are being axed from the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, the 7.84 Theatre Company, Borderline Theatre, Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association, Fife Arts Co-operative, the Scots Music Group, Scottish Traditions of Dance Trust and many more.
The single biggest grant - GBP 225,820 - goes to Theatre Cryptic "to support experimental music" which, to my ear, sounds heid-nipping.
Shouldn't we encourage the rich language which gives us dreich, dour, drookit, glaikit, gowk, muckle, scunner, crabbit, tumshie and numpty? (The lone survivor of the SAC purge is the "Itchy Coo" series of visits to schools).
The Scots Language Resource Centre and the Scottish Language Dictionaries get only GBP 159,000 between them - which they'll lose next year.
I contacted Northern Ireland to find we're the poor relations.
Some GBP 400,000 goes to the 'Ulster Scots' Irish version of Scots, partly from Westminster as well as from the Northern Irish Assembly. And the North has a population of only 1.7 million compared with Scotland's five million. Moreover, the Ulster Scots Agency gets GBP 3million annually for "culture and public understanding" of an Irish Scots tiny minority.
The Scottish Language Dictionaries will have difficulty keeping up that website with those 20,000 daily hits from all over the world. The director, Dr Christine Robinson, said: "We've no other main funding unless the Scottish Government intervenes. More people than ever are interested. We're asked for translations of phrases from wills, poems and half remembered phrases used by grandparents." An item on the BBC's Re-porting Scotland last week mentioned Manchester was "hoachin" with Rangers fans.
"Hoachin" shows how neatly descriptive Scots can be - it was perfect for the crowded but pleasant atmosphere hours before things turned vile.
WHEN I worked for the BBC on news, it kept Scots or Doric out of news reports and those of us who slipped it in were regarded as rebels who might offend the masters in London.
That Scottish cringe has lessened - helped by the use of Scots at Holyrood by a few. The SNP's Alex Neil fended off a heckler during a debate like this: "I get enough heckling at hame without ony mair here!" [you will find this remark just above Col 11437 on this page] and Fergus Ewing, asking a Tory MSP to be quiet: "Haud yer wheesht for a wee minute." [See Col 721 here.] Lib Dem MSP Jamie Stone accused a Tory of getting himself "in a bit of a fankle over tax" while the Greens' ex MSP Mark Ruskell called marine environment laws "a complete guddle". [See Col 22163 here.]
The Scottish Parliament's lead language campaigner is SNP MSP Dr Bill Wilson, an ecologist who speaks Spanish as well as Scots and English.
"At school, I was strapped for saying 'aye' because that was thought common, which it isn't, " Dr Wilson told me.
"But, as a survey shows 88 different languages are being spoken in schools in Edinburgh alone, dis-crimination against Scots is now, thankfully, being rejected in the classroom." But he is aghast (if not sair black affronted) about the grant cuts and asks: "Would people in Scotland support a programme of local lan-guage eradication in Africa? Certainly not. So why harm it here?" While I was writing this, my elder daughter, who is in Australia, chanced upon a Scottish Day in a public park at Salamander Bay, New South Wales. "There was an old time Scottish wedding in the park, with handfasting and a Scots blessing, " she e-mailed to say.
And the souvenirs Australians bought? Coasters covered with Scots words including crabbit, glaikit and clishmaclaver (dictionary site www.dsl.ac.uk might help).
If our donnart, glaikit, doited luvvies don't value our words, Australians do!
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