So some people are @’ing me (sorry, inbox is still closed and my IMs are a Nightmare atm so I’m largely avoiding them while I try to work) wanting to know how the Scots Wiki thing could have gone on for so long without anyone noticing, and tbh, there’s several factors at play here.
One, Scots is a marginalized language (and I will not argue this point. It is a language, not a dialect of English. If you’re going to argue this with me then save yourself some time and fuck off now.) that is primarily spoken, so it doesn’t surprise me that people didn’t even realize the website was a thing. We’re not used to seeing our language written down, and those of us who are, only ever see it at academic levels. Or y’know, Scottish Twitter. There’s also issues regarding dialect, and how there’s not one true form of Scots, so wrangling a project like Scots Wiki would require massive effort on behalf of people who both know it, and are technologically savy enough and have the time to do so. Which is where point two comes in.
Namely that up until recently, Scots was not a part of any official curriculum. We were banned from speaking it in my school, and often told to “speak properly” if we lapsed too far away from Queens English. Scottish Literature only became a thing when I was in my final year of high school (15 years ago), and even then it was an elective and not compulsory. You could choose to study your own language in your own country if you wanted to. But the only books you could read were things like Robert Louis Stevenson and Rabbie Burns. Hardly conducive to the study of contemporary Scots as a living language. I only actually got to study it linguistically when I was in my second year of university and opted to take it as an extra class, and the department was constantly underfunded and struggling. They still are.
My parents were certainly never allowed to study it, and while I was merely scolded for sounding “uneducated” by my teachers if I used Scots words in the classroom, my dad tells stories about corporal punishment being doled out to instill a sense of fear around using it instead of “Proper English”. So while I still spoke Scots at home with my family and friends, there was also a deep sense of shame about it. I was sent for elocution lessons, partly for a mild stutter, but also to make me sound more British. Because my parents knew, they knew if I wanted to get ahead in the workforce I needed to sound less like myself and more “proper”. And I didn’t really realize how right they were till I got a job working at an English based publisher who were surprised to find out I was Scottish. Apparently I “sounded much smarter than that”.
And the microaggressions didn’t end there. It came out in the form of things like “you’re surprisingly thin, I thought all Scottish people ate deep fried mars bars” or making jokes about Scottish money being fake so they could pay me in monopoly money if they wanted to. (Legal tender discourse explained.) They used to refer to me in the office as “the smart” or “civilized Scot”. Usually before they laughed and handed me off to some American writer who needed help unpicking the mess they’d made of their Scottish dialogue. And I would smile and nod and grit my teeth, because it was that or make a fuss and potentially risk losing the only career job I’d managed to get because they made it clear over and over, there were plenty of people who could do my job.
Except there isn’t, not really. Oh there’s plenty of folk who speak it and could have a fair crack at it. But there’s not many actual Scots Linguists. Certainly not enough to save a language. I don’t even qualify as one. I just studied it for two years out of sheer interest. So things like the Wiki project rely not only volunteers, but on people being aware of it. And as mentioned, there’s very good reasons for Scottish people to either not know it existed, or to not want to be associated with it. The Scottish Cringe is very real. And it’s the end result of generations of cultural death and the insidious mantra: “speak properly” repeated over and over again until part of you believes it. I still code switch if I need to do something like talk to the bank or talk to a client. I tell myself it’s because I’m living in America and I want to be understood. But I did it before I moved here. I did it while living in Scotland, because I knew having the “proper” accent helped.
So yeah, the idea of a brony destroying a Scots based wiki with nonsensical gibberish sounds funny. But only until you realize it’s part of a broader problem rooted in systemic cultural and class warfare. It’s also why it’s no very funny when people post things like “what language is that LOL” under Scottish media, because the answer is Scots. And it’s dying.
Edit: I also shouldn’t need to say this, but seen as how this is tumblr and we are in Hell: if any of you take this post and use it to play oppression Olympics with Black and marginalized people I will manifest in your home like snakes, rip your spine out through your toes and beat you to death with it. Our history of oppression does not negate the harm we do. If anything it means we ought to know better, and the fact that we don’t is beyond reprehensible.
