Doric, or north-east Scots, was forbidden in schools and dismissed as slang for decades, but is now a key part of Aberdeenshire council’s language strategy. Blackhall and Warnecke point to the impact of social media: at last year’s Edinburgh fringe, Twitter curated an exhibition celebrating the best of the #ScottishTwitter hashtag, which has become an online institution for those experimenting with the Scots language. When McQueer, whose Scots short stories have been described as like “Charlie Brooker on Buckfast”, was interviewed by the Guardian last year, he described the Scots language as a creative treasure trove: “We’ve got so many unique words and phrases. For example, the influence of Irish immigration can be heard in Glaswegian Scots phrases such as “She’s after locking us out”. “There’s still a Scottish cringe type of thing about using Scots, but this is not slang, it’s a highly complex system of language.

Source: The Guardian January 02, 2020 13:18 UTC