5 - Homogenisation and Survival: The Languages of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century

Summary

The Centripetal Nature of Language in an Age of Homogenisation

By the end of the seventeenth century, Scots had been largely thrust sociolinguistically underground in written domains. To some degree the extent of this change was affected by genre – whether writing was intended for a nonintimate audience or not, for instance – or by gender and level of education. Cruickshank (2006) demonstrates that, in the private correspondence of young upper-middle-class Aberdonians in the mid-eighteenth century, it was women rather than men who continued using local features in their writing, possibly because their education was curtailed and domestic in comparison with their brothers. Distance from the metropolitan centre may also have affected usage, not necessarily in predictable ways: Meurman-Solin (1993) has demonstrated that at least some northern noblewomen continued to follow metropolitan Edinburgh written norms long after their Edinburgh peers had come into line with London usage. Even if the Union of 1707 had not taken place, with practically all higher-level decision-making processes beyond the Church and law being removed south, the Anglicisation of written usage would probably have been completed in similar (although probably slower) ways.

Nevertheless, as discussed in the previous chapter, this shift in written domains need not have affected spoken use. In Early Modern Norway, practically anyone who could write wrote solely in Danish (and languages of trade, most notably German and French) except for the occasional use of local dialect, regularly displaced to the language of lower-class figures, represented in dialogue or in folk verse (a point to which we will return in the next chapter in relation to Scots). While there is some Danish influence upon spoken contemporary Norwegian, it was these dialects, not the ‘national language’ which continued for most (although some people were able to speak a Norwegian form of Danish, either as sole code or when with Danes; in part this formed the source for Bokmal, one of the two standard forms of Norwegian). What happened to the Scots-speaking communities of eighteenth-century Scotland could not have been predicted from the patterns formed in the previous 100 years: a large part of the middle classes, particularly but not exclusively in Edinburgh, shifted away entirely from the local vernacular in their speech, as part of an aspirational choice of the metropolitan norm as sole code.