Bilingual people no longer need to feel left out: yes, Stew hates you too

As far as I can remember, I don't think we had definite proof until now that the controversial "Stew" blogger's hostility to Gaelic also extends to Scots, but it's not a huge surprise to learn that it does.  Of course it takes a different form in the case of Scots, because whereas he hates Gaelic and regards it as alien and useless and wants it to be totally eradicated, he's merely trying to reclassify Scots as just English in a funny accent.  That has the same ultimate effect, though, because if Scots is seen as merely a non-standard variant of English, it becomes acceptable for authority figures to "correct" people's Scots speech and push everyone towards standard English.  By contrast, accepting that Scots and English are closely-related but distinct languages means giving parity of esteem to Scots and English words and phrases and treating them as equally valid and legitimate.

It may totally blow Stew's mind that it's possible to understand the words of another language without being bilingual, but it's certainly not news to Portuguese people, who can watch Spanish TV and understand the bulk of what is being said without needing subtitles, simply because Spanish and Portuguese are very closely related languages.  That doesn't make Portuguese people bilingual, except for the minority who have taken the trouble to learn to speak Spanish themselves.  The same principle applies to Scottish Gaelic speakers, who can generally understand what is being said on the Irish language channel TV4 without much difficulty.  But for the most part they are not Irish speakers and are not bilingual in Gaelic and Irish.

So by the same token, most monolingual English speakers in Scotland can understand the fragments of Scots spoken in Still Game because the words are closely related to their English equivalents, and also because everyone in Scotland (except maybe in the Highlands) has been passively exposed to Scots throughout their lives.  But what about people who can actually speak Scots themselves, and not just understand it - are they bilingual?  Well, yes they are.  In most cases they don't recognise that fact about themselves, because speaking both Scots and English is just second nature to them and thus seems utterly unremarkable.  

Think about how Scots is used in the real world (and also in Still Game, for that matter).  There's probably nobody who truly speaks "pure Scots" (as I discussed in my podcast with Len Pennie four years ago), but by the same token, there's probably well over a million people in Scotland who never speak pure English either.  Scots speakers tend to constantly 'code-switch', often within the same sentence.  You might hear a sentence like "get aff that floor".  The word 'that' is common to both Scots and English, but 'off' and 'floor' are different in Scots.  In this case the speaker has used the Scots word for 'off' but not for 'floor'.  Does that mean he or she speaks a transitional dialect which incorporates 'aff' but not 'flair'?  Nope.  He or she knows both versions of both words, but has just semi-consciously chosen in the moment, probably for no particular reason, to use the Scots version of 'aff' but the English version of 'floor'.  They know which one is "Scottish" and which one is not, and if you asked them to translate from the Scottish version of each word to the English version, or vice versa, they would be able to do so.  But how can anyone "translate" unless Scots and English are different things?  How can they pull off the feat unless they're bilingual?

Answers on a postcard, folks (to be sent to Bath).

Incidentally, just as a general observation: why does someone like Stew, who still nominally claims to be an independence supporter (despite regularly urging his readers to vote against independence) want Scotland to be as similar as possible to England?  Why does he seemingly want to eradicate all points of difference, of which Gaelic and Scots are prime examples?

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