Languages of Scotland Edited by A. J. Aitken and Tom McArthur (review)

196LANGUAGE, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 1 (1981) Fodor, Janet D. 1970. The linguistic description of opaque contexts. MIT dissertation. [Indiana U. Linguistics Club, 1976.] Seuren, Pieter A. M. 1972. Autonomous versus semantic syntax. Foundations of Language 8.237-65. Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Singular terms. In his Linguistics in philosophy, 33-69. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [Received 22 January 1980.] Languages of Scotland. Edited by A. J. Aitken and Tom McArthur. (Association for Scottish Literary Studies, Occasional paper 4.) Edinburgh: Chambers , 1979. Pp. viii, 160. Cloth £4.50, paper £3.25. Reviewed by Nancy C. Dorian, Bryn Mawr College Three speech varieties are discussed in this volume: Gaelic, Scots, and the Standard English of Scotland (SES). Only the first two have a very long history in Scotland; they are consequently the exclusive focus of the first section, which treats the 'history and present position of Scotland's languages'. A second section is devoted to SES alone. A third presents a review ofthe recent literature on all three speech varieties. For the reader with no special background in the linguistic history of Scotland, the first section will be particularly useful. David Murison's opening paper offers a general external linguistic history, placing in perspective all the linguistic tides which spilled over Scotland: Pictish, p-Celtic, q-Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Anglo-Norman, and even the trickle of Flemish influence by way of weavers imported from Flanders and Brabant. Murison traces the fortunes of Gaelic and Scots from positions of strength to their current greatly weakened positions. Gaels will be doubtless bemused, here as elsewhere in this volume, to find their linguistic position described as relatively favorable—simply because it is possible to decide easily whether what is being spoken is Gaelic (as opposed to the frequent uncertainty about where 'Scots' leaves off and 'English' begins). Rarely does a language which has lost roughly three-quarters of its demographic strength in a period of 80 years (cf. Census 1961) have occasion to be envied. Technically speaking, however, Murison's point about the definitional advantage ofGaelic must be conceded, as must Derick Thomson's contention, in a later paper in the same section, that Gaelic is 'not a peasant language' (p. 17). With regard to the latter point, it is true that Gaelic in its surviving focal areas (almost exclusively the Outer Hebrides) is spoken as mother tongue by nearly all indigenous members of the local society, regardless of socio-economic status. But this cannot disguise the fact that there is a major functional separation in the uses to which Gaelic and English are put, by most if not all bilinguals in Scotland (and there are scarcely any adult monolingual Gaelic speakers): English is used for the greater part ofall public, official, or formal purposes (religious services being the single major exception), while Gaelic is reserved for the more intimate settings and homely purposes. As of the 1971 census, 50% of all Gaelic speakers were unable to read Gaelic, and 69% were unable to write it. Clearly this is not a language which enjoys anything like equality of role in the lives of its speakers, even though it is not a 'peasant language'. A language which one speaks but cannot write is automatically relegated to very limited and informal uses. Although the fates of Gaelic and Scots are deliberately placed side by side in Murison's paper, and then in parallel papers by Thomson and by J. Derrick McClure, a great deal more could undoubtedly be made of similarities in the histories and present positions of the two. They share exclusion from public and official life, for the most part; and both have to contend with the view, deeply entrenched in Scotland, that a relatively close approximation to the standard language (though with some latitude as to accent) must be both used and taught in the schools. No doubt largely because the traditions of scholarship in these two speech forms have been quite separate, REVIEWS197 experts on either one usually know rather little about the other, and the similarities in their life cycles are seldom fully exploited. Despite short shrift in the number of papers devoted to it in this volume, Gaelic is rather more...