3 - Incipient Linguistic Homogenisation: Medieval Scotland

Summary

Introduction

At the end of the first millennium, Scotland remained a patchwork of different ethnic and cultural groups, often speaking different languages. Scandinavian dialects were spoken in Orkney and Shetland and in a broad swathe along the northern and western coasts; in particular in the Western Isles. Pictish was spoken in the north and east of the country; its near relative British in the south-west. Gaelic was used in the west and was actively spreading in the south-west; Northumbrian Old English in the south-east and in pockets of the south-west. Yet this apparent stasis, with a linguistic environment similar to that of 200 years before, is illusory: change was quickening. Gaelic was spreading among people in the north, east and south who had not previously used the language. This was particularly the case in the north, where Pictish was the ancestral language, associated with the ruling class and a culture which, while perhaps not as distinctive as earlier scholars suggested, certainly possessed distinctive localised traits. In the south-west, British was also in decline, residents switching to Gaelic and, eventually, the ancestor of Scots. An explanation for these changes is necessary.

The ‘Unification’ of Alba

To a large extent these processes can be ascribed to changes in the ways in which the territories we now know as Scotland interacted with each other. The unification of land north of the Forth under a single leadership was already quite advanced by 1000, although Moray, to the north and west of the Spey, was often treated separately from Alba (otherwise Scotia), regularly at least autonomous; this situation remained problematical (for the Scottish royal house) into the thirteenth century (Woolf 2007: chapter 4). While the situation can be interpreted in different ways, it was certainly the case that, for most of what had been Pictavia, locally significant figures, whose ancestors had held power through their own rights and ancestry (although not necessarily primogeniture), were now, in law, subordinate officers of the king's will, no matter how autonomous they were in practice (Taylor 2016: chapter 1). South of the Forth the authority of the King of Alba continued to grow, as northern Bernicia fell increasingly among the regions over which he claimed control. Nevertheless, the territory was still perceived as English and, on occasion, part of England (perceived culturally and linguistically; see, for instance, Broun 2018).