Here are nine British surnames: Balfour, Campbell-Bannerman, Bonar Law, Ramsay MacDonald, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Blair, Brown, Cameron. Only one or two, I imagine, mean anything to most readers of The Telegraph, only three or four, today, to most Britons. Yet they are witness to a striking fact: the significance in Britain, and hence its culture — and its past empire — of the Scots.
Scotland holds one in 12 of Britain’s population. Yet those nine names are those of just 22 prime ministers that my country has had since 1900. All the names but one (Brown) are clearly Scottish.
Not all the men have been so; despite his Mac, Harold Macmillan, in office 1957-63, was less Scottish in any real sense than I am, who at least spent my childhood there. Ditto today’s David Cameron. Seven of the nine spoke with the standard accent of the English upper class — even Tony Blair, born into a Britain that at last accepted regional accents as respectable, and educated at a Scottish ‘public school’. Only two (James Ramsay MacDonald in the 1920s, and, as it happens, today’s Gordon Brown, Labour Party men both) were and sounded like real Scots.
Yet the Scottish accent went empire-wide, thanks to the many Scots who did, to work on railways or in other such jobs, or as administrators or, especially, missionaries and teachers. I once had a friend from Nigeria whose accent was notably Scottish. India has physical reminders of past Scottish administrators in McLeodganj and Forsythganj, at Dharamshala; and McCluskieganj, near Ranchi, is named after the Calcutta real-estate dealer who founded it as a home for Anglo-Indians in the 1930s. Pakistan has Campbellpore, near Islamabad, named after the British commander-in-chief of 1857; it is now Attock, but its airport retains the old name.
Little impact
“The Scottish accent”? I’ll modify that. There are many accents in Scotland, as in any language in any country. Amongst themselves, ordinary citizens of Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, use an accent which, at its extreme, few outsiders, even Scottish ones, can penetrate, with most consonants replaced by glottal stops. Even the far easier Edinburgh accent, I was once told by an American couple, had defeated them during a week there.
Yet there is an accent that one can reasonably call “the” Scottish one. It’s widespread on the air, to the point that you could think the BBC run by a MacAfia. It also sounds trustworthy; one reason, it’s said, why many British call-centres are sited in Scotland. And it is intelligible: outside Glasgow, most Scots pronounce words more fully than we English do.
The poet Robert Burns to them is, roughly, “Barr-ans” (the as being the a of sofa); we speak of him as if he were on fire. They call their capital “Ei-din-barra”; we say “E-gn-bra” (all the as again spoken as in sofa; gn is the best I can do for an unbreathed sound at the front of the throat).
Yet, strangely, Scottish words and phrases, bar auld lang syne, have had little impact elsewhere. The historical novels of 1920ish John Buchan are full of ‘kailyard’ speech (look it up), but irritating most readers find it. Loch and burn are used for Scotland’s lakes and streams, but no others. Outside Scotland, I’ve rarely met the Scots’ outwith (“beyond”), and never their greet (“cry”), doubt (“expect”, rather than “not expect”) or ashet (from the French assiette, “plate”). Most Englishmen would get their spoken dinnae ken for “don’t know”. But ask us the meaning of their proverbial lang may your lum reek (“long may your chimney smoke”), and we wouldnae ken.
