Breaking the mould

After the Union with England in 1707, it was the language of that country that increasingly came to be the language of formality and officialdom, in spite of the fact that most people spoke Scots. Scots continued to appear as a written language in the ‘chapbuiks’ of the period. These were collections of news, stories and poems sold by travelling pedlars and others, and they were very popular precisely because they were written in the language everyone spoke. Take, by way of example, a moral story composed by Dougal Graham who was employed as a bellman in Glasgow during the 18th century. His tale ‘Jockey and Maggy’s Courtship as they were coming from Market’, printed in Glasgow in 1779, gives a vivid picture of the Scots spoken at that time. In the story the character Jockey goes with his mother to look at an illegitimate child and is met by Marion the other grandmother of the child and who considers that he isn’t good enough for her daughter:

Marrion: A wae be to sic credit it’s no worth the cracking o’, an’ whar was a’ his noble equals whan he bute to lay a leg on my poor lassie, poor clarty clunky it thou is? An’ if they warna baith ae men’s wark I wad think naething o’ it; for they warna a needle o’ differ between their dadies an’ what war they baith but twa stickit taylors at the best? Ye had as good a gane hame an’ a counted bow-kail stocks, as come here to count kindred wi’ me.

Jockey: Hout awa daft witless wives, I kenna what you’re fltying about, I wad rather see the wean gin it be ony thing wally and like the warld.

Marrion: Indeed sall ye John, you’ll see your ain picture for little siller, a muckle mouth’t haverel it is just like yoursel.

The dialogue of the above is quite down to earth and shows that the Scots spoken in the city of Glasgow was still very similar to that spoken in other Scots-speaking parts of the country. However, this situation was on the eve of change. From about 1800 the Glasgow region began to experience significant immigration from Highland Gaelic and Irish communities which contributed in no small part to a linguistic melting pot. Now people were crowded together speaking Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Irish-accented English, Ulster-accented Scots, Highland-accented English, and Scots itself. This melting pot of languages drew comment from about 1830 onwards and began a shift that distinguished Glasgow from other Scots-speaking areas. With no standard Scots to act as a common model for everyone, the local dialect began to be eroded. It was still common, however, to find traditional Scots being written in 19th century Glasgow, both in newspaper columns and poetry. James P Crawford (1824-1887), who was born in Ayrshire, but lived in Glasgow from age five, and died in Ibrox, was a great observer of working class life in the city and an accomplished poet in Scots. Perhaps his best known piece is ‘The Drunkard’s Ragged Wean’ which comments on the state of the children of a drunkard. In it he says:

Oh, see the wee bit bairnie, his heart is unco fou,
The sleet is blawin’ cauld, and he’s droukit through and through,
He’s speerin’ for his mither, and he won’ers whaur she’s gane,
But oh! His mither she forgets her puir wee raggit wean.

Other poets, such as John Young (‘New Year’s Address to the inmates of Barnhill Poor House’), were also writing in a Scots that most Glaswegians today would regard as ‘teuchter’ but which was then still native to the city.

For the most part Glaswegians remained Scots-speaking, but now they began to discard some parts of the language and replace them with grammar and words from the immigrant communities. When the English columnist ‘Cuthbert Bede’ visited Glasgow in 1863 he found the language difficult to understand. On asking directions to George Square he was given a reply by a ‘cannie Scotch porter’ “…in a dialect that I feel myself quite unable to put down on paper, and which I therefore translate into the Anglo-Saxon tongue.” Similarly, wandering through the Saltmarket Bede commented

…the ear is stormed by a babel of bastard Scotch and bad English, mixed with fragments of genuine Gaelic, and the rolling periods and rough brogue that mark the Irish Celt.

In an unusual book, written in the 1870’s, one author described the ‘Glesca-Eerish Language’ (also called ‘Factory-Eerish’ and ‘Factory-Scotch’) which he believed had started when Glaswegians tried to ape the speech of English people. He described it as spreading among all classes, except for the “aul folk in Glesca” and commented

“The Grammar o’t, ye should joost hear’t; it wud gar yer hair stan on en, them o ye’ ye yt haes o’t; it’s fair awfu! Neither English, Eerish, nor Scotch, nor a decent mixture; “gibberish” wud be the best name for’t.

It was certainly true that the speech of Glasgow had undergone change, and that significant parts of the traditional language – things that people regarded as important Scots markers – were being lost. However, the idea was born that people in Glasgow now spoke a ‘corrupt’ or ‘impure’ language and that it was something that ‘polite’ people and ‘genuine’ Scots speakers should avoid speaking. It did not occur to commentators in that era that the Scots of the region was simply adapting to huge pressures and cultural dislocation.