On snell-gabbit besom and snochter-dichter

It's shameful and sad that, to the best of my knowledge, this sentence has never before been written or said. Not because it's a particularly profound or even inventive statement, but because its words belong to a language that, although spoken by nearly one-third of Scotland's inhabitants, is being allowed to wither on the vine.

The Scots language has an 800-year history, a multi-volume dictionary and is still spoken by 1.6m people in homes, playgrounds and pubs. Its literary stars; be it the Medieval Makars dazzling Europe's courts with their poetry or Rabbie Burns blazing melodically into immortality, have drawn upon a rich, descriptive vocabulary to bring expression to the often turbulent existence of Scotland's people living in a beautiful, violent landscape next to England, one of the world's most rapacious empire-builders.

Today it boasts no chatshows, soap operas, radio stations or newspapers and few speak about getting bosky and giving a girl a gaberosie. Its young speakers grow up being punished in classrooms for talking the language of their parents by an education system which teaches that knowledge of Scots history and classics helps nobody succeed in the land and institutions of their southern neighbours.

For 400 years Scots was only spoken and sung by the farmers, fishermen and working class of the cities, and written by a few hardy souls trying to learn from the literary gems of the past.

It was, and still is, marginalised; rejected by the educated, anglicised elite who even question its legitimacy as a language on account of its common roots and features with English.

Billy Kay - whose recently re-released study 'Scots: The Mither Tongue' describes the language's origins, development as a literary medium, and later erosion--argues that its distinctive and expanding vocabulary, as well as unique syntax and grammar, make it as distinct from English as Slovak is from Czech and Norwegian from Swedish. Kay, feeding on a rich diet of Ballads, Medieval Makars, Burns and Hugh MacDiarmid also believes it to be one of the world's most expressive languages where to hochmagandie is to fornicate, a snell-gabbit besom is a nagging woman and a snochter-dichter is a handkerchief.

"Even people who do not understand the language feel its power to communicate something profound in the human condition," Kay says. Then there is Edwin Muir's observation that Scots is a language of the heart while English is one of the head.

Scotland's ever-changing, often-harsh climate moved Alasdair Gray--the author of 'Lanark', probably the Great Scottish Novel of the 20th century--to point out that with its wealth of descriptive words for the weather like dreich, skolder, guster, skuther, hushle, tirl and gurl, Scots was rivalling the Inuit's stockpile of words for snow. But to explain the discords and doldrums of the language, a wee bit of history is needed.

When the Romans withdrew from Britain in the 5th Century, without having conquered Scotland's Picti (painted) tribes, waves of Germanic, Viking and Celtic tribes added their customs and tongues to the pot pourri of the Dark Ages.

Gaelic, brought from Ireland, became dominant across Scotland by the 11th century although Latin was still used for official State business. The Norman invasion of England in 1066 changed it all however. Germanic tribes, who had earlier settled in the southeast of Scotland and north-east of England, were pushed north into the young Scottish state and by the end of the 12th Century their language, the forerunner of both Scots and English, was dominant.

But unlike the Old English variant, which became influenced by the Normans' French, Scots drew its influences from Pictish, Gaelic and Norse tongues and developed in tandem with the fledgling nation. The wars between Scotland and England, erupting sporadically from the 13th century until 1745 when the final Jacobite rebellion was put down, allowed the Scots language to develop its character. War, being a great uniter of social classes, allowed the language to take root. As so often happens, great literature soon followed.

John Barbour's 'The Brus,' a heroic romp with Robert the Bruce through the 14th century Wars of Independence, written about ten years before Chaucer's 'The Canterbury Tales,' is the language's oldest surviving literary work. It laid the groundwork for the Medieval Makars of the 15th and 16th centuries led by William Dunbar, Robert Henryson and Gavin Douglas, whose powerful work--including the latter's translation of Virgil's Aeneid which many thought surpassed the original - was praised in seats of learning across Europe.

Considering the vitality of the description within Henryson's 'The Testament of Cresseid', it's hard to disagree with Kay's observation that Scots was then the equal of English and that it was no more true to say that Scots was a form of English than it would have been to say that English was a form of Scots.

"His face fronsit, his lyre was lyke the Leid (wrinkled, complexion, like, lead)
His teith chatterit, and cheverit with the Chin, (teeth, shaked, shivered)
His Ene drewpit, how sonkin in his heid, (eyes, dropped, hollow, sounding, head)
Out of his Nois and Meldrop fast can rin, (nose, mucus, run)
With lippis bla and cheikis leine and thin; (lips,livid, cheeks, lean)
The Iceschoklis that fra his hair doun hang (icicles, from, down)
Was wonder greit, and as ane spear al slang" (great, one, throw)

But the golden age was coming to an end and the Reformation, culminating in King James VI of Scotland inheriting the throne of England and moving his court to London, brought about the decline of the language, symbolised by the absence of a Scots translation of the Bible.

By the time of the Treaty of Union in 1707 English was the language needed for a successful career in the burgeoning British Empire.

Scots remained the vernacular of the farmers and fishermen; it was the language of Burns, the language of poetry and song while English had the classroom, courts and church.

The exclusion continued to strangle it. Robert Louis Stevenson said in 1887 that "the day draws near when this illustrious and malleable tongue shall be quite forgotten." And perhaps, without one whirling dervish of a writer born five years after Stevenson's prophecy; a man who had been thrown out of both the Scottish Nationalist and Communist parties and who could only get attention for his poems by writing their reviews himself under a different name, just perhaps it would have been.

Hugh MacDiarmid foraged through the ancient Scots classics and devoured the folk traditions of Burns and his peers to wrench the language from its miseries through invention, vigour and an astonishing understanding of its cadences.

Consider this celestial ditty 'The Bonnie Broukit Bairn' written in the 1920s.

"Mars is braw in crammasy, (beautiful, crimson velvet)
Venus in a green silk goun, (dress)
The auld mune shak's her gowden feathers, (old, moon, golden)
Their starry talk's a wheen o' blethers, (empty speech)
Nane for thee a thochtie sparin', (nothing, thought)
Earth, thou bonnie broukit bairn! (broken, hurt, neglected)
But greet, an in your tears ye'll droun (cry, drown)
The haill clanjamfrie" (whole rabble)

His talents reach a zenith with the mighty 'A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle' when the inebriated protagonist says that with his use of Scots he will "spire up syne by visible degrees (rise, thereafter)
To heichts whereo' the fules ha'e never recked. (heights, fools, have, reached)
But aince I get them there I'll whummle them (once, overturn)
And souse the craturs in the nether deeps," (soak, creatures)

MacDiarmid awoke the language and replenished it. He ignited a renaissance and deserves several letters written in his honour. But even though more writers in the 20th century began to use the voice of their ancestors and of the streets around them, and many works of fiction have sparkled with their uneasy "haufway hoose" of Scots dialogue and English narration, a lack of political will is again depriving Scots of oxygen.

Kay's 'Scots: The Mither Tongue' makes the point that the Scottish Parliament--set up with limited devolved powers within the UK in 1999--is happy to spend £10m on education and broadcasting for the country's 60,000 Gaelic speakers but will not take any positive action on behalf of Scots spoken, according to its own estimates, by 1.6m people.

All languages are important and deserve preservation efforts. But this one's personal. Scots is my language. Only fragments of it lay in my youth as the schools governed from hundreds of miles away sanitised our playground and textbooks and now, exiled in London, I rarely hear its distinctive whirring burr, certainly not on television, radio or in political debates.

One can always read MacDiarmid or Dunbar, Burns or Henryson, Some may even sing a ballad. But more need to remember that languages can be fragile. Without exposure, they can fade away.

David Sanderson is a correspondent for The London Times.