Page:The dialect of the southern counties of Scotland - Murray - 1873.djvu/9



local dialects are passing away: along with, them disappears the light which they are able to shed upon so many points in the history of the national tongue that supersedes them, and the contributions which they, more than artificially trimmed Literary idioms, are able to make to the Science of Language, whether in regard to the course of phonetic changes, or the spontaneous growth of natural grammar. They are passing away: even where not utterly trampled under foot by the encroaching language of literature and "education, they are corrupted and arrested by its all-pervading influence, and in the same degree rendered valueless as witnesses of the usages of the past and the natural tendencies of the present.

These pages attempt to photograph the leading features of one of the least-altered of these dialects, that of the Southern Counties of Scotland, and, with this as a basis, to illustrate the characteristics of that group of dialects descended from the old 14th century "Inglis of the Northin lede," which under the names of Northern English and Lowland Scotch, still prevail in more or less of their original integrity from the Yorkshire dales, to the Pentland Firth. Farthest removed from Celtic contact, and from the influence of the literary English, the Northern tongue has in the south of Scotland retained more of its old forms than elsewhere, and so far as concerns its vocabulary, and grammatical structure, affords almost a living specimen of the racy idiom in which Hampole and Barbour, at opposite extremes of the Northern-Speech-land, wrote five centuries ago. Its pronunciation has of course changed since then, but with a consistent course and definite direction; and its system of sounds is still of interest, showing in actual operation, the processes by which the