“I hae tae work at no feelin it. Totally ingrained” Battles over cringe, shame, authenticity, and the natural in Scots, a minority language.

Dr Hamish Pottinger

Expectations of what a language ‘is’ and ought to ‘do’ often hang over minority language movements. Modernist ideals of homogeneity – such as the universality and progress implied by standardisation – represent a means of achieving ‘official language’ status around which specific narratives and norms are centred. For a minority language that is very similar to the majority language and on a continuum with it, such as Scots, there is even greater pressure to establish distinctiveness. One outcome for Scots is that the ‘ideal’ language forms preferred in policy and planning efforts – those which are supposedly apt for the nationwide acquisition of linguistic rights and freedoms – are also those which are rarely used in modern speech. For instance, the archaic ilka [each] is markedly different from its English equivalent and historically well-attested; it fits a revivalist discourse in which legitimacy and longevity are aligned.

This presentation considers how shame is mobilised in this discourse. Many everyday speakers consider words such as ilka to be inauthentic (in the sense that they do not constitute ‘natural’ language). Hearing these ‘fake’ words can cause them to ‘cringe’. At the same time, the dominant premise underlying efforts to promote Scots is that the shame felt about one’s ‘own language’ – known as ‘cultural cringe’ – is a product and tool of English-language colonisation from which speakers need to be released. Scots language activists very often presume the former to be the latter, and it is probable that sometimes the latter has become an interpretive framework for the former. Drawing from interviews with Scots authors and activists, social media discourses, and guides to writing in Scots, I present original data showing how emotional responses to language are read and coded in line with language-political doctrines. Specifically, a language ideology analysis is used to scrutinise the assumption that cringe is always a postcolonial bodily reaction of shame, rooted in centuries of erasure of Scottish identity and history, which ought to be ‘unlearned’.

Bio: Hamish Pottinger has a DPhil in Linguistics from the University of Oxford, where he researched language ideologies in and around Scots language activism. He focuses specifically on how competing liberal views - on minority identity, language standards, or empowerment - create difficult choices for minority language movements. His monograph on Scots is due to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2027-8.