The Doric Columns
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The Doric Columns |
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Fit Like Min? Nae Sae Bad! The ever evolving Dialect used in the North East of Scotland for swiftness of communication To navigate around this website please use the left hand or top banner links" Doric - The Language Attributed to or relating to the Ancient Greek Dialect of the Dorians - or was it all Greek to the Academics of Aberdeen's Universities when trying to converse at street level with the economically adept Aberdonians. Seldom has such a dialect been given such a far reaching Greek name worthy of supporting the rich architecture of its heritage and transferred phonetically from successive generations down the millennia yet never taught in any written form. Spoken in a higher pitch than most Scottish Dialects and delivered with such haste that whole sentences are compressed into what appears to be a single word to those that are unfamiliar with the urgent brevity of exchanges - no doubt born of getting information across quickly for fisherfolk in open boats rowed many leagues out to sea and before steam trawlers pillaged the bounteous harvest of Herring, Cod, Halibut, Ling etc of the generous North Sea. The first Scot to apply the name Doric – as an alternative name for the Scots language in general – was the poet Allan Ramsay (1686-1758), writing in 1721. Scots was now compared with the ‘Doric’ speech of ancient Greece, spoken in Doria, and associated with the country and peasantry, while English, now the formal language of Britain, became associated with Attic, the ancient Greek language of the city states. When Ramsay described Scots as Doric he meant that it was associated with the countryside, peasantry and working class: it was therefore another way of saying rural or rustic language. Ramsay used the term with affection, and it was often understood to mean simple, ‘pure’, plain-speaking, but people coming after him often used it in derogatory or dismissive senses such as conservative or unsophisticated. And the name was not confined to Scotland: some writers in England also called the speech of the peasantry in England Doric too. Doric was first used to describe the dialect of North East Scots in 1792 when it was used by the Banffshire-born academic named Alexander Geddes. However, not one of the ministers describing the language of North East parishes in the Old and New Statistical Accounts, in the 1790’s and 1830’s, used the term Doric, but preferred names such as Scotch, Scots, Buchan or Aberdeenshire, etc. But in the usage of Scotland, the name Doric was not confined to any single dialect but came to be employed as an alternative name for the Scots language generally, whether from Aberdeen to Ayr or Dunbar to Dumbarton. But specifically, it was most often used to describe rural speech. In contrast to regions such as Lanarkshire, where change driven by industrialisation was significant, the counties of Kincardine, Aberdeen, Banff and Moray remained very rural and so retained a strong sense of continuity, tradition and, perhaps, conservatism. For this reason the term Doric had even more relevance than, say, a county like Lanark. Gradually, during the 20th century, the use of the name Doric fell out of use in many places that experienced strong industrial growth and Anglicisation. More recently the name has taken on new life in the North East where its use has been increasingly preferred to Scots as a way of highlighting the very distinct features of the dialect spoken in the region. And, because Doric was closely associated with rural speech, it has been used by North East organisations to give a name to the way of life in the region. Though farming and fishing, of course, are not peculiar to the North East alone.
Fariwigan -
where are we going?
faa? who,
whom? Awa ye swick! - defaulting on an obligation - to cheat it may prove that that this dialect was the precursor to the ever abbreviating text language so beloved of those with ambi-dexterous thumbs a mobile phone and an urgency to get the message over quickly.
“I mean o' coorse, to write to ye in the same way as I wud dae if
I were crackin’ wi’ ye ower the fireside, using my ain auld Doric for the maist
part, no because I couldna’ manage to write gae an’ fair English, if I were to
pit mysel’ till’t in earnest, but jist because I think my ain hamely Scotch to
be every bit as expressive, - or even mair sae!" The citizens of Aberdeen were never Gaelic-speakers. (If they had been, Aberdeen might now be called Inverdeen) They spoke Lowland Scots, albeit with a notably shrill intonation and an extensive vernacular vocabulary. Lowland Scots was a version of the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria, which for about 500 years extended from the Humber estuary to the Forth estuary, or from Hull to Edinburgh and beyond, from the 6th to the 11th centuries. Before this time, the Pictish people of N.E. Scotland would have spoken a Celtic language best described as an early form of Welsh, hence the place-name ‘Aberdeen’. There are many place-names beginning with Aber- in Wales, none at all in Ireland. The Northumbrian or Anglo-Saxon language developed into ‘Inglis’ (English) and ‘Scottis’ (Lowland Scots) variants, which were distinct but mutually comprehensible. ‘Scottis’, or Lowland Scots came to be regarded as the authentic language of the people of Scotland. The real, Gaelic-speaking Scots, the Highlanders of the north and west, came to be referred to as ‘the Irish’ and their language, incomprehensible to Lowlanders, as ‘Irish’ or ‘Erse’. But the Lowland Scots dialect itself began to lose ground as a literary language from the 15th century, although it remained the spoken language of the common people. The advent of the King James Bible in 1611 served to standardise its version of written and spoken English in both England and Scotland. A Welsh version of the Bible was produced fairly early on, but Scots and Gaelic versions did not appear until much later, for the simple reason that there was insufficient demand; the Lowland Scots could read English easily enough, and there weren’t enough monoglot Gaelic-speakers to constitute a worthwhile market.
Fit'sit a' aboot North East Scotland has traditionally spoken a form of the Scots language, just like its neighbouring regions, and the dialect was often known as Scots and Scotch too. But the North East has very distinct features not present in other regions, features such as the classic foo, fit, far and fan, which in general Scots are hoo, whit, whaur and whan (English how, what, where, when), or forms like steen and been – general Scots staneand bane (English stone and bone). Also, in the North East, people don’t say thir and thae (English these and those) but rather 'is and 'at. In other respects much in the dialect is in common with other Scots-speaking areas, but features like those above made it stand out. This gave rise to such rhymes as: Bi foo, fit, far an fan, Ye can tell a Farfar man which meant the border where hoo changed to foo, or whit to fit, etc, started around Forfar, in Angus, and ran northwards, though Northeasters today probably wouldn’t think of Forfar as ‘Doric’. An illustration of the distinctness of the North East dialect, even 150 years ago, can be gleaned from the following little extract. In 1850 William J Milne, from Forfarshire (Angus), travelled through Formartine district, north of Aberdeen, and left his general impression of the language spoken there. He commented: “I also found myself among a people speaking a quaint-sounding and strange Scotch dialect, not exactly uncouth, rather musical, but much of it really silly in its idioms, and very redundant in its colloquialisms, where the Scotch adjective diminutive was used to almost everything, and everybody, large or small, and where in the case of a stranger asking his way on the country roads, and the distance to the place he wished to arrive at, he was told it might be a mile, or any number of miles, “an’ a bittie,” this gait, or that gait, while the distance undefined, but said to be “a wee bittie yet”, in the informant’s reply, was generally longer than the number of miles.” Americans Insight to Aberdeen - Tanks for the Memory!
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