I want them back, the written-over names

that gentrifying fashion anglicised,
that bland or blind tuition vandalised.
I want the stories that the map disclaims.
the Brig o Allan, Corntoun, Chuckie Raw,
the Dern Walk, Blackdub Ferm, the U.P. Brae:
layers of meaning, hidden underlay…

These are lines from a poem I wrote some years ago about the erosion of Scots names from the urban and rural landscape in and around Bridge of Allan, where I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. I write ‘erosion’ which implies a natural wearing-down or wearing-out, but words like ‘excision’, ‘deletion’, ‘censorship’ and ‘repression’ can be applied with some justification to the often deliberate process of substituting Scots (or Gaelic) place-names with English ones. The naming of places is a context in which the power-relationship between different languages is sometimes very clearly displayed: the dominant, official language overrules, distorts or eliminates, at least in visible form, the unofficial one. The unofficial language may continue to exist orally and aurally, but it is removed from the view of the reading eye, and this signals that its status is less than that enjoyed by the language of postal deliveries, direction-finding, public notices, local authority correspondence, legal discourse and the like.

An infamous example of the attitude of superiority that the dominant language assumes can be found on the SLC’s own website: the image of the sign in St Andrews which reads,

Baker Lane
formerly Baxter Wynd

No explanation is given for this substitution, perhaps because the perpetrators deemed that none was needed. Interestingly the Scots name has not been wiped out entirely, but remains, referred to as ‘former’. Is this more dismissive of ‘Baxter Wynd’ than if the displacement had been more clinical? If the sign simply read ‘Baker Lane’, who but a few aging locals would ever know or care or think about the place’s previous identity and definition as a ‘wynd’? The sign as it is could be interpreted as a considered acknowledgment of the old name, or it could be seen as a calculated insult: we are now modern, but this other language is antique/dead/unintelligible/quaint. How it is read depends on the attitude and knowledge of the reader. Perhaps there is a story behind how this particular sign came into being – I don’t know. The effect, however, is what matters; and to me, whether this was intended or not, it reads like a proclamation posted by a conqueror.

 All my instincts tell me that we should have more Scots signage – more towns that greet visitors with their Scots names, more streets that read as well as sound Scots, more shops and pubs that advertise themselves in Scots. But let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment. Maybe we shouldn’t be worried or angered by the overwhelming dominance of English in our signage. It could be argued that one of the reasons for the persistence of Scots oral usage when it comes to place-names is the very fact that such usage is ‘unofficial’. If South Lanarkshire Council changed ‘Ravenstruther’ to ‘Renstrie’ on the road signs would local folk miss the superior knowledge they currently enjoy over strangers who pronounce the name as it is spelt? Would they resent the appropriation by ‘officialdom’ of their way of naming places? There is, in fact, an interesting and often pleasurable interaction between spelt and locally sounded versions of place-names. And – if we make a general presumption in favour of the de-anglicisation of such names – is the oral version always more ‘Scots’ than the written one? In the above example, this is certainly debatable.

Historically, the flow of place-name change has been all in one direction, that is from Scots and Gaelic towards English, until very recently. In parts of the country, in the case of Gaelic, that process has been halted and is even in reverse. The appearance of bilingual road signs in the Highlands sends out a very strong message to road-users, that two languages are being given equal validity and value. But Gaelic has the advantage over Scots of total distinctiveness from English. In a re-Scotticised Lowlands, how far would one go? Would Edinburgh be Embra, Forfar Farfar, Stirling Stirlin? Is this about etymology, phonetics, tradition or what? In the case of Stirling, why not go back to older written sources and opt for ‘Striveling’ or ‘Strivelyn’– forms with a well-documented pedigree but not ones written or spoken by today’s Sons of the Rock. Or take a name like Drumbrae, which of course is thoroughly Scots and therefore needs no revision. Or does it? Perhaps it should be taken back to its Gaelic origins and renamed ‘Druim Bràigh’. Where do you stop – or start? Is it possibly more instructive to tell Glasgow children how ‘Sauchiehall Street’ derives from the sauchie haugh, and thus lead them into thinking about linguistic change and continuity and relationships between languages, than simply to change the letters on the signs and let those speak (or not) for themselves? Or – back in St Andrews – maybe it would simply be better to rename ‘The Scores’ ‘The Scaurs’, thus demonstrating that that street-name refers to the nearby cliffs and not the golf course.

This is by no means a straightforward issue, either toponymically or ideologically. I see committees and conventions looming like spectres on the horizon, and, as Tom Shields recently and wisely wrote in the Sunday Herald, ‘What we don’t want is linguistic fascism. The langwij polis goin’ roon telling folk how to talk. People getting too precious over usage.’ Perhaps instead we should recognise that we have arrived at the place and places we are in linguistically because of a traceable historical process, in which powerful linguistic forces have been at work, one of them with the machinery of government, officialdom and the Ordnance Survey behind it. A similar process, but one with different attitudes and priorities informing it, will take us onward. This is not to abandon responsibility for conscious, affirmative action on behalf of Scots place-names, but what we need first and foremost is an informed, widespread debate that leads to a broader understanding of the complex linguistic situation in which we find ourselves. And perhaps this is what the SLC has started.

James Robertson