Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/123

Rh be quite forgotten; and Burns's Ayrshire and Dr. Macdonald's Aberdeen-awa' and Scott's brave metropolitan utterance will be all equally the ghosts of speech. Till then I would love to have my hour as a native makkar, and be read by my own country-folk in our own dying language; an ambition surely rather of the heart than of the head, so restricted as it is in prospect of endurance, so parochial in bounds of space."

No one has a better right to speak on this subject than Stevenson. Dowered above most moderns with the gift of style and a temperament keenly susceptible to human influences, he best could stamp the hall-mark of genius on what survives of the humble northern Doric. Since the peasant's pipe fell from the hands of Burns no note has been struck that is so genuinely true to the national character and sentiment as his "Underwoods." To the testimony of a consummate literary artist like Stevenson regarding the existence of local dialects in the north may be added that of a professed philologist, Dr. J. A. H. Murray. His "Dialects of the South of Scotland" is the only systematic treatment of the subject that we may be said to have. Dr. Murray says: "It is customary to speak of Scots as one dialect (or language), whereas there are in Scotland several distinct types and numerous varieties of the Northern tongue, differing from each other markedly in pronunciation and to some extent also in the vocabulary and grammar. The dialects of adjacent districts pass into each other with more or less of gradation, but those of remote districts (say, for example, Buchan, Teviotdale, and Ayr), are at first almost unintelligible, to each other, and, even after practice has made them mutually familiar, the misconception of individual words and phrases leads to ludicrous misunderstandings." He arranges these dialects in three groups—a North-eastern, a Central, and a Southern—which may be further subdivided into eight minor divisions, or sub-dialects. The first group, or dialects north of Tay, seems to fall into three sub-dialects—Caithness, Moray and Aberdeen, and Angus. In the central group are the sub-dialects of Lothian and Fife, of Clydesdale, of Galloway and Carrick, and of the Highland border from Loch Lomond to the Braes of Angus. The southern group is represented only by the dialect of the Border counties from Tweed to Solway, and