No heard that word afore?
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Scots and you
Listen to these words:
Download: Scots Words (367 KB)
| hoose, wrang, aye, baith, bonnie, sair, puddock, sleekit, wabbit, nicht, hame, hert, heid, lugs, midden, bubblyjock, craw, lowpin, fouter, stane, crabbit, thae, pinkie, ingan, howff, fankle, weel-kent, provost, polis, stookie, drookit, shoogle |
How do these Scots words make you feel? Do you recognise them? Do you use some or all of them? Do you know people who do?
Even if it’s the first time you’re seeing some of these words written down, what are you thinking? The Broons? Oor Wullie? Burns? The Medieval Makars? Tenements? Closes? Fermers? Up north, down south, East Coast, West Coast? Folk you know from other parts of Scotland? The guy who lives in our street. He talks like that. Father, mother, grandfather, gran. They used these words.
Me myself? I used them when I was a wean, I mean, when I was a kid, but I don’t any more. My own bairns. They use them and I wish they didn’t. These words are horrible. Look at them. Common as muck. Enough to make your skin crawl. Aye, but they’re beautiful too. They’re part of what makes us different, part of what makes us Scottish.
The Scots language is quite literally all around us. You can’t go far in modern Scotland without meeting it. We hear Scots in the home, in the supermarket, in the street. Scots is spoken by neighbours, colleagues, friends and relatives.
For many of us, it is a part of our being, the prism through which we see and experience the world. It is our mother tongue which, in spite of the other languages and idioms we pick up along the way, never completely fades and is always with us.