Page:The dialect of the southern counties of Scotland - Murray - 1873.djvu/19

Rh in which the Yankee dialect of the descendants of the New England Puritans is American—in other words, they are not Scottish at all. They are forms of the Angle, or English, as spoken by those northern members of the Angle or English race who became subjects of the King of Scots, and who became the leading race, and their tongue the leading language of the country; to which, however, another race, with whom the monarchy had originated, gave its name. More particularly they are forms of the Northumbrian or Northern English,—

which, up to the War of Independence, was spoken as one language, from the Humber to the Forth, the Grampians, and the Moray Firth; but which, since that war, or at least since the final renunciation of attempts upon the independence of the kingdom, has had a history and culture of its own, has been influenced by legal institutions, an ecclesiastical system, a foreign connection, and a national life, altogether distinct from those which have operated upon the same language on the southern side of the border. And yet, despite these diversifying influences, which have obtained more or less for five centuries,—despite the incessant warfare, the legacy of wrongs done and suffered, and "undying hate," which were entailed from father to son, on both sides, during the first half of that period, and the remembrance of which it has taken nearly the whole of the second half entirely to efface,—the spoken tongue from York to Aberdeen is still one language, presenting indeed several well-defined sub-dialects on both sides of the Tweed, but agreeing, even in its extreme forms, much more closely than the dialect of Yorkshire does with that of Dorset. It is the old phenomenon with which ethnology has continually to deal, of a community of name concealing an actual difference, a diversity "of names disguising an identity of fact. The living tongue of Teviotdale, and the living tongue of Northumberland, would, in accordance with present political geography, be classed, the one as a Scottish, the other as an English dialect: in actual fact, they are the same dialect, spoken, the one on Scottish the other on English territory, but which, before Scottish and English had their political application, was all alike the Anglian territory of Northan-hymbra-land. The living tongues of the Carse of Gowrie, at the mouth of the Tay, and of Eannoch, at its sources, would both be viewed as dialects of one Scottish county, and their speakers classed under the common appellation of Scotchmen, while in fact they are representatives of two distinct linguistic families, more remote from each other than English and Eussian, or English and Sanscrit.

§ 3. The early history of the Lowland Scottish, therefore, especially in the southern counties, is not the early history of Scotland, with which it came into contact only at a later period; but of the Angle settlement, state, or kingdom, of