#Scots Language

[celestialmazer]

Shout out 🍻 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🤝🇮🇪

Will ye go, lassie, go?/Wild Mountain Thyme/Purple Heather/The Braes of Balquhidder - Robert Tannahill/Francis McPeake/Robert Archibald Smith

With Scots language subtitles - https://youtu.be/U4amVK3NL3w?

Full article below

Sinners Star Jack O’Connell on Playing an Irish-Dancing Vampire in Ryan Coogler’s Hit Film

“We just threw it down and started jigging.”

by Claire Valentine McCartney April 29, 2025

Spoilers ahead for Sinners.

For the first hour of Sinners, the Southern Gothic blockbuster from Black Panther director Ryan Coogler, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that the Michael B. Jordan-starring film is billed as a horror-action flick. Coogler dedicates such care to building the intricate world of the first half of the story (which is set over one 24-hour period in 1932 Mississippi) that when Jack O’Connell’s Irish vampire, Remmick, first appears onscreen—his bare skin smoking and peeling as a group of Native Americans chase him away—it’s a jolt. When he shows up a second time, politely asking to join a party at the Jordan-played twins’ freshly opened juke joint, it’s a marker that the film’s genre and tone are about to shift. And indeed, all hell breaks loose into a cataclysmic bloodbath.

O’Connell, 34, has been a cult-favorite actor since his days on beloved U.K. teen drama Skins. In Sinners, he plays the grinning Remmick with a charismatic edge. Although his character is a ravenous vampire seeking to turn the entire town into fellow undead (and steal their memories, talents, and music in the process), in the context of the viciously racist Jim Crow world the film is set in, where the Klu Klux Klan still runs free and violence waits in the shadows—Remmick offers a false but alluring post-racial utopia to his would-be prey. As an Irishman turned into a vampire before he arrived in America, Remmick seems to view race from the viewpoint of a disenfranchised outsider, rather than in the literal black-and-white terms the characters are otherwise boxed into. It’s an interesting dynamic that O’Connell says was already “all on the page” when he first received the Sinners script.

“Instantly, you could tell that Remmick was very well-written, with a lot of depth,” he tells W. “When you’re offered that, it’s a great starting point.” British-born with an Irish father, O’Connell was uniquely prepared for the role, which includes a climactic Irish step dance to the classic 19th-century folk song “Rocky Road to Dublin.” Below, O’Connell talks working with Coogler, getting back into his step dancing groove, and the next horror roles he already has lined up:

How does the huge reception to Sinners feel? It’s the number-one movie in America right now.

It’s massively rewarding to think that it’s gone down how we’d hoped. You just never know. Ryan Coogler is just a fucking brilliant filmmaker, so I’m just buzzing for everyone—but mainly for Ryan.

What did you think when you first read the script?

Obviously, I wanted to know about “Rocky Road to Dublin” and what that was doing within this piece. I wanted to know about the Irish dance, and I was massively surprised to find out that Ryan was going to try and do the genuine, traditional Irish stuff. He caught me off guard. But once I knew that he was down for the real deal, I thought, “Count me in.” It suddenly made sense.

Sinners goes deep on the history of Black American music and its ties to other cultures, like “Rocky Road to Dublin.” Is that something you and Coogler talked about?

We spoke about it quite a lot. It’s about the sharing of ancient cultures and customs, be it within music or within language. It’s that migration of people, and the similarities between them. It’s impossible to put a precise start date on these cultures sharing things, but more recently and more localized for us would be the melting pot that was within the South, with African peoples, Irish and Scottish peoples, Europeans—all of them bringing these ancient forms and traditions with them.

Remmick hints at his life in Ireland before he was turned. Did you create a backstory for him?

If I can lay claim to bringing anything to the party, it was “Go Lassie,” one of the ballads. It’s a Scottish song, the second song you hear the trio singing. That’s pretty much the only thing I invented. Everything else was on the page—that’s all Ryan.

How did you prepare for the big Irish dance scene in the middle of the film?

The dance was one of the first things I started preparing, mainly out of nerves and fear of getting it wrong. I used to do [Irish dance] as a kid, but that was nearly 30 years ago, so it felt a little out of my comfort zone. I teamed up with Angela O’Connor with the Academy of Irish Dance in London. We rented a space and just threw it down and started jigging. It was cool, man. She also choreographed something for that dance scene, and the timing of “Rocky Road to Dublin” is quite uncommon, the way the tempo is structured. So she had to wrap her head around that.

What was that day like on set?

It was a really transcendental experience. We’d done the outdoor section of that amazing one-shot journey through music, starting with Sammie’s song. Then the second half of the night, we got to “Rocky Road.” It was crazy. Everyone had their makeup and attire on, and the music was playing, and everyone was happy, and there was a real, eminent joy we felt. And then the sun came up, and we all had to stop, just like our vampires. We all had to go home and get some rest. It was really mind-blowing, life imitating art.

You had to wear quite a lot of prosthetics. Did that help you get into character?

Yes—the application of them can be a bit trying, with the contact lenses, and stuff going in and out of your mouth, things attached to your fingers. But once you surrender to it, things reveal themselves to you. Details make themselves apparent, and it can really help the character evolve.

There’s a lot of symbolism in the film, and Remmick’s character seems like a pretty clear metaphor for cultural appropriation and exploitation. What did you make of what he symbolizes, and did that affect how you played the character?

I’m probably going to take Ryan’s lead and just kind of agree that any metaphor within the story is in the eye of the beholder. As an actor and an artist, I’m always looking for hidden meanings and intellectual answers, so that’s not to say that they’re not deliberately put there. I definitely had my takes. But they’re so open to interpretation, and I respect Ryan for not really wanting to be too explicit about it.

You have the horror films 28 Years Later and its sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple coming up next. What makes you drawn to this genre?

It’s zombies, rage, apocalypse—we’ve got it all in there. But the genre is just coincidental. Filmmakersare what draw me. To go from Ryan Coogler’s set straight to Danny Boyle, I was just pinching myself. And then onto the Nia DaCosta set [for the sequel], it was a dream come true.

[ayeforscotland]

Hi folks, my friend @future-circuit is doing their dissertation on The Internet and the Scots Language, and they've put together a survey to get people's views.

Please consider filling in the form above, it's a super interesting topic and I'd love to read it when it's finished!

[victusinveritas]

Today, 17 September, is National Fox Day.

Fox

Ian Hamilton Finlay

Published in Glasgow Beasts, an a Burd, with papercuts by John Picking and Pete McGinn (The Wild Flounder Press, 1961).

[gemmahale]

Y’know what? If I’m going to be writing Scottish family members and such for Righteous Fury, I should have someone Scot-pick it. (This is a play on @pfhwrittes’ Brit-picking he helps me out with.)

I know I want to include Scots, because it’s a language that deserves more exposure, and it makes sense for the MacTavishes to speak it, I think. (We canonically know Soap slips terms into conversation, so he’s not unfamiliar.)

I’m drawing a blank on who might be able and willing to help me with this. I’m more than happy to negotiate a price, because expertise deserves compensation.

I don’t know that knowledge about the CoD characters is necessary. Probably gives an advantage though.

Help an author out, friends?

I want this to be done right, not by the seat of my pants.

[zinnie-zoloft]

Grabbing marvel writers and shaking them until they learn the difference between nae, no, and naw in the scots language

[meichenxi]

UK accent bias, discrimination, minority languages and the question of the 'default, normal' english speaker

today I came across something overtly that is usually a covert problem, and I wanted to take a chance to talk about the questions it raises about what it means to be 'normal' and speak 'normal english' in an anglocentric, global world.

let's start at the beginning. I was aimlessly googling around and came across this article, discussing ergodic literature:

I hope that you will see what angered me right away, but if not:

brogue? inaccessible, insufferable brogue? that is so difficult to read you might want to relieve your frustrations by harming a housepet, or striking a loved one?

what????? the fuck??????

my dearly beloathed. this is not a made up sci-fi language. this was not written for your convenience.

this is the glaswegian dialect.

this is how it is written. scots, which is very similar to this, is a language whose speakers have been systematically taught to change and hide and modify their speech, to not speak it in the classroom, to conform. this is NOT comparable to any of the made-up dialects or ways of writing in cloud atlas or any other specularative fiction. the suggestion of ir is deeply insulting.

(the line between various 'dialects' and 'languages' I speak about here is by definition sometimes political, sometimes arbitrary, and often very thin. what goes for the glaswegian dialect here in terms of discrimination goes for scots in general - which is, in fact, even more 'inaccessible' than glaswegian because it has a greater quantity of non-english and therefore non-'familiar' words. speakers of different englishes will face more or less discrimination in different circumstances. caveat over.)

you can find it on twitter, in books, in poetry; and more than that, on the streets and in living rooms, in places that this kind of england-first discrimination hasn't totally eradicated.

an imporant note - this book in question is called Naw Much of a Talker, and it was written originally in Swiss-German and then translated into Glaswegian to preserve similar themes and questions of language and identity. rather than detracting from anything I'm saying, I think the fact this is a translated piece of fiction adds to it - it has literally been translated so it is more accessible, and the article writer did not even realise. it also highlights the fact as well that these are questions which exist across the globe, across multiple languages, of the constant tension everywhere between the 'correct' high language and the 'incorrect, backward' 'low' language or dialect. these are all interesting questions, and someone else can tackle them about german and swiss german -

but I am going to talk today about scots and english, because that is how the writer of this article engaged with this piece and that is the basis upon which they called it 'insufferable brogue', the prejudice they have revealed about scots is what I want to address.

so here, today, in this post: let's talk about it. what is 'normal' english, why is that a political question, and why should we care?

as we begin, so we're all on the same page, I would like to remind everyone that england is not the only country in the united kingdom, and that the native languages of the united kingdom do not only include english, but also:

scots

ulster scots (thank you @la-galaxie-langblr for the correction here!!)

scottish gaelic

welsh

british sign language

irish

anglo-romani

cornish

shelta

irish sign language

manx

northern ireland sign language

and others I have likely forgotten

there are also countless rich, beautiful dialects (the distinction between dialect and language is entirely political, so take this description with a pinch of salt if you're outside of these speaker communities), all with their own words and histories and all of them, yes all of them, are deserving of respect.

and there are hundreds and thousands of common immigrant languages, of languages from the empire, and of englishes across the globe that might sound 'funny' to you, but I want you to fucking think before you mock the man from the call centre: why does india speak english in the first place? before mocking him, think about that.

because it's political. it's ALL political. it's historical, and it's rooted in empire and colonialism and all you need to do is take one look at how we talk about Black language or languages of a colonised country to see that, AAVE or in the UK, multi-cultural london english, or further afield - the englishes of jamaica, kenya, india. all vestiges of empire, and all marked and prejudiced against as 'unintelligent' or lesser in some way.

and closer to home - the systematic eradication and 'englishification' of the celtic languages. how many people scottish gaelic now? cornish? manx? how many people speak welsh? and even within 'english' itself - how many people from a country or rural or very urban or immigrant or working class or queer background are discriminated against, because of their english? why do you think that is?

if you think that language isn't political, then you have likely never encountered discrimination based on how you, your friends, or your family speak.

you are speaking from a position of privilege.

'but it's not formal' 'but it's not fit for the classroom' 'but it sounds silly'. you sound silly, amy. I have a stereotypically 'posh' english accent, and I can tell you for a fact: when I go to scotland to visit my family, they think I sound silly too. but in the same way as 'reverse racism' isn't a fucking thing - the difference is that it's not systemic. when I wanted to learn gaelic, my grandmother - who speaks gaelic as her own native language - told me, no, you shouldn't do that. you're an english girl. why would you want to learn a backward language like gaelic?

discrimination against non-'english' englishes is pervasive, systematic and insidious.

it is not the same as being laughed at for being 'posh'. (there's more about class and in-group sociolinguistics here, but that's for another post)

and who told you this? where is this information from? why do you think an 'essex girl' accent sounds uneducated? why do you think a northern accent sound 'honest' and 'salt of the earth'? what relationship does that have with class? why does a standard southern british english sound educated and 'intelligent'? who is in charge? who speaks on your television? whose words and accents do you hear again and again, making your policies, shaping your future? who speaks over you?

think about that, please.

and before anyone says: this is so true except for X lol - I am talking about exactly that dialect. I am talking about that accent you are mocking. I am talking about brummie english, which you think sounds funny. I'm talking about old men in the west country who you think sound like pirates, arrrrr.

(actually, pirates sound like the west country. where do you the 'pirate accent' came from? devon was the heart of smuggling country in the uk.)

so. to this person who equated a book written in scots, a minority and marginalised language, to being 'insufferable, inaccessible brogue':

and also to anyone who is from the UK, anyone who is a native english speaker, and anyone abroad, but especially those of you who think your english is 'natural', who have never had to think about it, who have never had to code-switch, who have never had to change how they sound to fit in:

it might be difficult to read - for you. it might be strange and othering - to you.

but what is 'inaccessible' to you is the way that my family speaks - your english might be 'inaccessible' to them. so why does your 'inaccessible' seem to weigh more than theirs?

and why does it bother you, that you can't understand it easily in the first go? because you have to try? or because perhaps, just perhaps, dearly beloathed author of this article, after being catered to your entire life and shown your language on screen, constantly - you are finally confronted by something that isn't written for you.

and for the non-uk people reading this. I would like you to think very carefully about what a 'british accent' means to you.

there is no such thing. let me say it louder:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A BRITISH ACCENT

there are a collection of accents and languages and dialects, each with different associations and stereotypes. the clever aristocrat, the honest farmer, the deceitful *racial slur*. there are accents, languages and dialects that you hear more than others because of political reasons, and there are accents, languages and dialects which are more common than others because of discrimination, violence and the path of history.

if you say 'british accent', we - in the UK - don't know exactly what you mean. much more than the US, because the english-speaking people have been here longer, we have incredibly different accents just fifty miles away from one another.

but we can guess. you probably don't mean my grandmother's second-language english - even though, by american conversations about race, she is the whitest person you could possibly find. you don't mean my brother, who sounds like a farmer.

you mean my accent. tom hiddleston's accent. benedict cumberbatch. dame judy dench. sir ian mckellen. and they are all wonderful people - but what sort of people are they, exactly? what sort of things do they have in common? why is it that you associate their way of speaking with all of the charming eloquence of 'dark academia' or high levels of education, and my family's english with being 'backward' or 'country bumpkins' or 'uneducated' or, more insidiously, 'salt-of-the-earth good honest folk'?

we are an old country with old prejudices and old classes and old oppression and old discrimination and old hate. my brother speaks with a 'farmer' west country accent; my aunt with a strong doric accent that most english people cannot understand; my father with a mockable birmingham accent; my grandmother with a gaelic accent, because despite the fact that she is from the UK, as scottish as you can get, english is not her first language.

these people exist. my grandmother is a real person, and she is not a dying relic of a forgotten time. her gaelic is not something to drool over in your outlander or braveheart or brave-fuelled scottish romanticism, the purity and goodness of the 'celt' - but there are fewer people like her now. and I would like to invite everyone to think about why that is the case.

if you don't know, you can educate yourself - look up the highland clearances, for a start, or look at the lives of anglo-romani speakers in the UK and the discrimination they face, or irish speakers in northern ireland. like many places, we are a country that has turned inward upon itself. there will always be an 'other'.

and then there's me. raised in southern england and well-educated and, however you want to call it, 'posh'. so why is it that it is my voice, and not theirs, which is considered typically british all over the world?

I think you can probably figure out that one by yourself.

when you talk about the 'british accent', this is doing one of two things. it's serving to perpetuate the myth that the only part of the UK is england, rather than four countries, and the harmful idea that it is only england in the UK that matters. (and only a certain type of people in england, at that.)

secondly, it serves to amalgamate all of the languages and accents and dialects - native or poor or immigrant or colonial - into one, erasing not only their history and importance, but even their very existence.

dearly beloathed person on the internet. I have no idea who you are. but the language scots exists. I'm sorry it's not convenient for you.

but before I go, I would like to take a moment to marvel. 'insufferable, inaccessible brogue'? what assumptions there are, behind your words!

is it 'insufferable' to want to write a story in the language you were raised in? is it 'inaccessible' to want to write a story in the shared language of your own community?

I don't think it is.

I think it takes a special sort of privilege and entitlement to assume that - the same one that assumes whiteness and Americanness and Englishness and able-bodiedness and cisness and maleness and straightness as being the 'standard' human experience, and every single other trait as being a deviance from that, an othering. that's the same entitlement that will describe Turning Red as a story about the chinese experience - but not talk about how Toy Story is a story about the white american middle class experience.

people do not exist for your ease of reading. they do not exist to be 'accessible'. and - what a strange thing, english reader, to assume all books are written for you, at all.

and despite the fact that the text that prompted this was written by one group of white people, translated into the language of another group, and critiqued by a third - this is a conversation about racism too, because it is the same sort of thinking and pervasive stereotyping which goes into how white people and spaces view Black language and language of people of colour around the world. it's about colonialism and it's about slavery and it's aboutsegregation and othering and the immigrant experience and it's about the history of britain - and my god, isn't that a violent one. it's inseparable from it. language is a tool to signify belonging, to shut people out and lock people in. it's a tool used to enforce that othering and discrimination and hate on a systemic level, because it says - I'm different from you. you're different from me. this post is focusing more on the native languages of the UK, but any question of 'correct language' must inevitably talk about racism too, because language is and has always been a signifier of group belonging, and a way to enforce power.

it is used to gatekeep, to enforce conformity, to control, to signify belonging to a particular group, to other. talking about language 'correctness' is NOT and never CAN be a neutral thing.

it reminds me of a quote, and I heard this second hand on twitter and for the life of me cannot remember who said it or exactly how it goes, but the gist of it was a queer writer addressing comments saying how 'universal' their book was, and saying - no, this is a queer book. if you want to find themes and moments in it that are applicable to your 'default' life, 'universals' of emotion and experience, go ahead. but I have had to translate things from the norm my entire life, to make them relatable for me. this time, you do the translation.

I do not speak or write scots or glaswegian, but I grew up reading it and listening to it (as well as doric and gaelic in smaller measures, which are still familiar to me but which I can understand less). for me, that passage is almost as easy to read as english - and the only reason it is slightly more difficult is because, predictably, I don't have a chance to practice reading scots very often at all. it isn't inaccessible to me.

(I was about to write: can you imagine looking at a book written in french, and scowling, saying, 'this is so insufferably foreign!' and then point out how ridiculous that would be. but then I realise - foreign film, cinema, lyrics increasingly in english, reluctance to read the subtitles, the footnotes, to look things up, to engage in any active way in any piece of media. this is an attitude which even in its most mockable, most caricature-like form, is extremely prevalent online. *deep sigh*)

because. what is 'inaccessible'? it means it is difficult for people who are 'normal'. and what is 'normal', exactly? why is a certain class of people the 'default'? could that be, perhaps, a question with very loaded and very extensive political, social and historical answers? who is making the judgement about what language is 'normal'? who gets to decide?

I'd also like to note that this applies to everyone. it doesn't matter if you are a member of an oppressed group, or five, or none, you can still engage in this kind of discrimination and stereotyping. my scottish family, who have themselves had to change the way they speak and many of them lost their gaelic because of it, routinely mock anglo-romani speakers in their local area. I have an indian friend, herself speaking english because of a history of violence and colonialism, who laughed for five minutes at the beginning of derry girls because the girls sounded so 'funny', and asked me: why did they choose to speak like that? my brother, who sounds very stereotypically rural and 'uneducated', laughs at the essex accent and says that he would never date a girl from essex. I had a classmate from wales who was passionate about welsh language rights and indigenous and minority language education but also made fun of the accent of her native-english speaking classmate from singapore. it goes on and on and on.

take the dialect/language question out of the topic, and I think this reveals a much broader problem with a lot of conversations about media, and the implicit assumptions of what being 'normal' [read: white, anglo-centric, american, male, straight, young, able-bodied, cis, etc] actually means:

if something is written about an experience I do not share, is it inaccessible? or is it just written for someone else?

so, please. next time you want to write a review about a dialect or language you don't speak, think a little before you open your mouth.

the rest of the world has to, every time.

[torchflies]

“Mammy?” Pete asks her later, around a mouthful of chicken and dumplings from a big pot that's bubbling away on the stove. “Is you a princess?”

She nods and smiles, wiping her hands on her apron; it’s dotted in little fishies. “Ah usit tae be, a long time ago. Ma name was Princess Anne Mary Fraser Stuart, but ah like Mrs. Annie Mitchell much better now.” She kisses him on both cheeks until he laughs so hard he nearly chokes.

She talks funny, his Mammy, and she sings funny too, but Pete likes it — it sounds like home.”

(In which Maverick is sometimes a prince).

[enbycrip]

Fox, by Ian Hamilton Finlay

Published in Glasgow Beasts, an a Burd, with papercuts by John Picking and Pete McGinn (The Wild Flounder Press, 1961).

Today, 17 September, is National Fox Day in the UK.

I fucking *love* Scots writing, especially Scots poetry. There’s such expression and sharp humour in it.

I’ve only written one story in Scots myself. I keep meaning to try to write more.

[ebenelephant]

okay Takin' Over The Asylum peeps, how do we feel about a tota fic written with scots dialect in the prose?

to clarify, this would not be a scots language fic but rather the scots dialectical english which is spoken in the show and by the majority of scots in real life. many of the words would be fairly intelligible to their english counterparts - eg dog vs dug or wis vs was or otherwise easily understood given context. i'm not about to throw a tattiebogle at you apropos of nothing, but campbell might make a joke about somebodies geks in the obvious context of their glasses, yeah?

browsing through the tota tag on ao3, i suddenly became aware that a number of fics have very little scots in them even when they're in campbell's pov, or otherwise have him speaking scots dialect but the prose doesn't support this, and I was thinking a lot about how this in a way alienates the language of the characters in their own stories – especially as I began a wip with this approach. I suppose I was just wondering if non-Scots would persevere?

[mekanikaltrifle]

one good fun thing about writing in Scots, and knowing the dialects, is that I get to pick and choose which spelling variant of a given word I'm needing to use-- For instance, when using my own Fife/Glasgow mixup dialect, I write the plural form of you as youse.

However, when writing the very Glaswegian Malcolm, I write the same word as yez instead.

There are several other variants of the word in play, all valid, and all good fun. Scots is a fantastic language.

[e-von-dahl]

I recently found out about the Doric phrase “hoos yer doos?” which is a way of asking “how are you?” but literally means “how are your pigeons?”

After the initial confusion I realised it’s absolutely adorable and I will now be thinking of all my life events and emotions as metaphorical pigeons

[reiverreturns]

'oh scottish twitter is so funny' yeah but do you even understand how i fucking cackled at this for ten minutes straight

[victusinveritas]

Kidspoem/Bairnsang

Liz Lochhead

Published in A Choosing: The Selected Poems of Liz Lochhead (Birlinn, 2017)

[scots-scrievins-an-att]

A'v went aun uploadit a wee documentary about ee Scots language oan ma YouTube. Feel free tae check it oot.

Watch Here

[zinnie-zoloft]

I’m all for representation of the Scots language, it’s very important to me, and that’s why I need people to realise it’s a separate language, not just slang or a dialect of English

The Night Nurse isn’t actually Scottish, she’s an interdimensional maybe-demonic-maybe-angelic entity who happens to have a Scottish accent

Unless it’s an AU where’s she’s human she wouldn’t be speaking Scots unless communicating with someone who’s a native speaker, everyone at the agency is a native English speaker so she might as well be speaking to them in Friesian or Norse

She has the languages the boys speak written down in their files, and presumably she can communicate in every human language because it’s necessary for her job, she’d have no reason to be speaking Scots to them

In a human AU it makes sense because it’s her own native language, but in canon she’s been alive since before humans ever set foot in Scotland, her native language is probably incomprehensible to humans if she has one

TLDR: Scots is an entire language, stop treating it like a dialect of English, treat it like you would any other language

[dimity-lawn]

I got The Canterbury Tales, and Middle English is weird.

I can see similarities to Scots, which I suppose isn’t really surprising given that that’s where it branched off, but it is interesting to see those similarities.

The spelling is atrocious (it took time for Modern English to adopt standardized spelling, so we’re hundreds of years away from spelling that we are most familiar with), but so far I love it (mostly).