Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/136

112 "mill-fuds" and "corks," or an "'ouk" in rural Garioch with "gudges" and "getts."

These dialects, fast giving place, the school inspectors tell us, to a mongrel, characterless medley, have suffered the neglect that overtakes the familiar. Local story-tellers and versifiers have used them as literature of a kind, but they have received no study worthy of the name. Jamieson—storehouse of much that is valuable—is here very defective. From Burns we do not receive much aid. He has given a local character to a good deal that passes for Ayrshire simply because he has used it, but, in his vernacular at least, he was not "the singer of a parish." We know too little of the sources of his vocabulary. Where his vernacular is not common to comparatively modern Scotland—that is to say, is but English with a provincial look about it—its source is the poet's reading in Ramsay, Fergusson, Hamilton, and hte treasures of ballads and popular verse. He is so little vernacular as never to use the characteristic relative "'at"—witness "Scots wha hae" for "Scots 'at hes," or such a common colloquialism as "div" and "divna."

If we turn from the diction of dialect to the grammar and accent we have nothing to guide us but Dr. J. A. H. Murray's monograph on the dialects of the South of Scotland. There is, indeed, no work on the phonetics of dialects in the United Kingdom. And all is passing away of the old and only the new and the vulgar remains. Yet what a wealth of national character, social customs, folk-lore, lies in dialect! It represents the operation of individual enterprise in language, rapidly being crushed out by the Juggernaut of collective trading through literature and education. To gather up what remains is not the work of one, but of hundreds. Germany devotes imperial funds and the marvellous philological instincts of an academic people to such work, and even little Denmark has kept a student for months in the Fair Isle observing and collecting.

The sturdy survival of a vigorous vernacular, alongside of a language of books and of education, must go far to account for the fact that Scotland's contribution to English literature has been, both in quality and quantity, out of all proportion to her size and position. Her authors have never needed to strain after such artificialities as characterise the Renascence period,