On ‘politicising’ Scots

It’s the Unionists who are politicising Scots – not us

LAST week the Scottish Government announced it was giving £2.5 million in support of an initiative to produce a new Gaelic dictionary. The news was greeted with the usual opprobrium from sections of the Scottish media, and a howling barage of derision from British nationalists on social media complaining about nationalism.

Wee Ginger Dug in fine form; “when Scots writers adopt the same tactics to produce a literary variety of Scots, they’re accused of creating an artificial plastic Scots that isn’t real. They’re accused of politicising Scots. Yet what is really politicising Scots is to deny it the same means of enriching and developing itself which have been used by every other literary language. By denying Scots these avenues of enrichment, opponents of the language are seeking to diminish its use and confine it to a dialectal ghetto. Scots, they say, isn’t a proper language, and they’re going to do whatever it takes to ensure that it can’t act or be used as a proper language.

It’s wrong to politicise Scotland’s languages. Opponents of Scottish independence need to stop using them as footballs, and need to recognise that Scotland’s languages have the same right to enrich themselves as any other language, and the same right to support that other languages receive. Gaelic and Scots belong to everyone in Scotland, not just independence supporters”.

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