Scotland's little-known fourth "language"

“Slaverin, slubberin, gibberin, gabberin, roon wi a wallop, a sklyter, a sweel,” recited the poet. “Yonder’s the burn – in its bairnhood, it’s blabberin. Heich-lowpin puddock, wi virr in its heel…”

Sheena Blackhall, a celebrated laureate from Garthdee, a suburb south of Aberdeen, was in her element performing the opening stanza of her poem. She was reading “Allt Darrarie”, her lyrical tribute to a stream in the East Grampians of Aberdeenshire, straining each syllable with a gruff rasp. “Now, did that make any sense to you?” she prompted, gently. “Ach, I widnae be surprised if it didn’t.”

Blackhall, the author of more than 1,400 poems, songs, stories and ballads – or “a creative screivin fellow”, as she puts it — is a native speaker of Doric, Scotland’s little-known fourth “language” after English, Gaelic and Scots. Colourful yet guttural, the rural north-east dialect is a subset of vernacular Scots, officially protected by the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.

But it is also the one most Scotland natives have problems deciphering. Its ragged tones, cadences and irregular verbs are often mocked as unsophisticated and socially awkward.

Doric doesn’t have nearly the same prestige as English or Gaelic and it’s common for people to be embarrassed to speak it publicly

This “mither tongue” (mother tongue) is spoken widely from Peterhead in Aberdeenshire to Nairn in the Highlands, where one in two people speak it, according to the University of Aberdeen. And yet it remains a paradox: it was once forbidden to be taught in schools and its currency is such that plenty of Scots do not even know Doric exists.

In simple terms, Scotland is a country divided by common languages. Everyone speaks English, but the farther north you travel, the more Scots, Gaelic and Doric lilts fill the air. Scots is spoken by around a third of the population – with pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary differing from its English-language cousin – while indigenous Gaelic is a Celtic dialect of Irish descent and predominantly the tongue of the Outer Hebrides.

Doric, however, is nudged to the north-east of the map, taking the building blocks of Scots, but rearranging them in its own inimitable manner.

“Doric doesn’t have nearly the same prestige as English or Gaelic and it’s common for people to be embarrassed to speak it publicly,” Blackhall told me. “We’re often accused of linguistic hypocrisy by switching to English to be understood, but this is more linguistic courtesy. I’ve been laughed at too many times to count for speaking Doric and that’s something we’ve all experienced in Aberdeenshire. It is snobbery and it is enough to make me want to give someone a ‘cloot aroon the lug’ (clip around the earhole).”

But it turns out the Doric-speaking community currently have plenty to shout about. For the dialect, maligned for so long, is undergoing a revival.

The green shoots to empower Doric speakers are plentiful. There is a new online TV station. A new undergraduate university degree course. A North-East Scots language board. And an interactive cultural map to help visitors discover Doric’s living oral, cultural and social history.

Creating art, music, literature and TV is about growing the Doric world and there is also a Doric Film Festival, as well as Doric-themed food and drink tours with Bothies and Bannocks, Doric hip hop (courtesy of Aberdeen rapper Jackill), and Aberdeen Art Gallery, a proud champion of Doric culture, which reopened in November 2019 after a four-year restoration project.

Even so, for visitors with an untrained ear, it is feasible to walk up and down Union Street in Aberdeen, admiring its silvery-grey granite steeples and spires, or hunt down the perfect Cullen Skink (smoked haddock soup) in Moray, and wonder if the dialect even existed. At times, this is a language lost inside most homes in the north-east.

Doric speakers aren’t like normal Scots language speakers, so many claim. No, their attachment to their dialect runs deeper. Blackhall describes it as a “tongue to be spoken around home and hearth in local communities”. Chris Foy, CEO of Visit Aberdeenshire, says the local lexicon is “tricky to understand but woven with complexities, glorious variances and brimming with the most wonderful, colourful expressions”. Dr Thomas McKean, director of the University of Aberdeen’s Elphinstone Institute, a centre for the study of ethnology and folklore, says it is “a window into who people in the north-east are”.

Souce: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20210321-scotlands-little-known-fourth-language