Keeping Scots Language Alive | In Search Of Sir Walter Scott | BBC Scotland

len penny performs poetry in scots and reaches a huge audience online i'm not hearing children i'm going to hear wayne's who'll be gulping and billing when they've got aches and pains so tell us about where did that poem come from and did you know it was going to be like because that kind of launched your career in a way your career is such as it is tell us about it where does it come from these are the words that my nanny and papa used to say and then you know they're no longer here and i was sitting thinking getting a bit emotional thinking well one day my mum's not going to be here and you know if i'd they teach my waynesies words the words will not exist in our family one of the things when we've been talking to people and about school is that people are like the language is really hard one of the things they struggle with is the scots yeah and this is scottish people as much as english people saying that can can you make can i heard no tale of that oh wow wow okay aye aye mr hamer goes in as i tell you he's nowhere to get us to avoid a sense neither he has a gloaming sector what's reasonable that his aims in a wall a gliscor name air but he's cracked brained and cockle he did it about his nipperty tepperty poetry nonsense what do you think of that when you read it it's it's obviously not the same kind of scots that i would use and i feel like if you're a modern scot speaker and you approach that you're gonna you're gonna get fear you're gonna be like this is not how i speak am i doing it wrong i'm not scots enough yeah do you know when we're reading waterscop what we see is people speaking scots at every single level of society and i was surprised when i encountered that you know because i thought well they are not talking like i would a lawyer would talk now if i met an advocate now i'm sure the advocate wouldn't be talking to the scots one of the things that you encounter when you try and speak scots is the classism that's inherent and it's something that you actually have to acknowledge because the reason that scots has been preserved so well is because of the working-class communities and if you don't acknowledge the fact that the reason that it was beating wayne's and the reason that people were discouraged to speak in it is that they wanted to you know have class mobility and and even now when people are saying to me oh you'll never get a job speaking like that you kind of split that in a job interview but why can't we why can't i go into a job you know a respectable company and speak scots because what you're doing is you're you're equating scots to being uneducated in lower class which i think has just been a disservice to the language [Music] it was interesting hearing our talk about being intimidated by seeing scots written down in scots books and i think it's that thing of you know if you if you haven't got the words in your mouth it's harder to hear them in your head and that makes it harder to read them and i think that's one of the reasons why people struggle with it