An unforeseen event marred the journey. Off the island of Pharmacussa – one of the Sporades to the south of Miletos – Caesar's ship was seized by pirates, the ferocious pirates of Cilicia. The most colourful account of this episode, which is also found in the historical writing of Velleius, is by Plutarch, and Suetonius too provides details which concur with the vivid account by his Greek contemporary. It is difficult to imagine that anybody but Caesar himself could be the source of the story. The sardonic self-confidence with which the whole episode is related must come from him. ‘The pirates demanded twenty talents for his ransom,’ says Plutarch, ‘and he laughed at them for not knowing who their captive was, and of his own accord agreed to give them fifty.’ He dispatched messengers from his entourage to collect the money, keeping only his personal doctor and two slaves at his side. Although a hostage for thirty-eight days while waiting for the messengers to return with the money, he quickly assumed a leading position. When it was time to sleep, he would send one of the two slaves to command silence. When his captors were practising their sports and exercises, he gave directions, as if he had assumed command with their consent. They even provided him with an audience. To make profitable use of the enforced idleness of captivity, he composed poetry and speeches, which he recited in the presence of his captors, expecting their admiration.

General histories, grammars, studies of phonology and dictionaries of Scots

There are a number of good single volume discussions of the history and use of Scots. A good idea might be to read both McClure (1997) and Jones (2002). The first is written from the perspective of an activist for the language; the latter from the perspective of a descriptive linguist who does not distinguish between ‘Scots’ and ‘English’ in contemporary Scotland. Jones (2002) does not cover some of the grammatical features which mark off Northern and Insular Scots from more southerly varieties.

Jones (1997) presents essays on aspects of the history of Scots written by experts in various fields. The level of scholarship contained in this volume is impressive to say the least. Some of the essays are a little advanced for readers with little or no background in linguistics, however. I would single out Macafee (1997) as a particularly lucid discussion of the contemporary state of, and changes in progress in, Scots, nonetheless.

The early history of Scots is especially well-covered in Macafee (2002); the lack of Celtic influence on most varieties of Scots is discussed in Macafee and Ó Baoill (1997). The history of the variety's ‘decline’ in the face of Standard English is handled by Aitken (1979) and Dossena (2005), among others.

The primary sources for discussion of the morphosyntax of Scots are Macafee (1992–), Beal (1997), Purves (2002) and Miller (2003). I have found Macafee's and Beal's works particularly useful in the writing of this book.

Introduction: language contact and language shift

With sufficient perspective, the linguistic history of northern Scotland and the Northern Isles is one where, on a number of occasions, the inhabitants have changed languages, although what these languages were has differed from region to region. Therefore, to understand many of the distinctive features of these dialects, we need to understand how the inter-related phenomena of language contact and language shift work upon the variety speakers are shifting to.

Language shift has always happened. When we look at the Mediterranean basin today, we can see that many languages, such as Gaulish, Etruscan or Punic, whose speakers wielded considerable power, are no longer spoken. In their place are languages associated with political power and cultural uniformity, such as Latin and its Romance daughters or Turkish, languages associated with an all-pervasive ideology, such as Arabic, or languages associated with immigration, such as the Slavonic languages.

If these processes can be illustrated for areas with a lengthy recorded history, it would be perverse to suggest the opposite for areas less well reported, such as those discussed here.

Sasse (1992) provides a model for what happens when one language dies, and another takes its place. How does transfer from one language to another affect the language of the transferring community? How does it affect the language of those who speak the target language?

Northern and Insular Scots

This book is concerned with the Scots dialects of northern Scotland and the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland; dialects spoken by a wide variety of people living very different lives in divergent natural environments. Many speakers of the varieties concerned would be surprised to have their dialect included with some considered here, since many speakers see their dialects as being unique, even at a very local level. Yet all of these dialects are inter-related historically and culturally, even if particular dialects might be more closely connected to some members of the set than are others. They also share two further features. They are the most conservative dialects of Scots, being, at least until recently, vibrant features of the language use of almost all members of their communities. Dialect use has rarely been associated with a particular social class as is regularly the case elsewhere in the English-speaking world. Second, these dialects have all been affected by long-term contact with at least one other language.

These dialects, spoken in the North-East, the Black Isle, Caithness, Orkney and Shetland are relatives of, but not derived from, Standard English (although most inhabitants can also speak and write Scottish Standard English [SSE]). In their ‘broadest’ forms, these varieties are not intelligible to monodialectal speakers of any English variety spoken outside Scotland and Ulster. In the rest of northern Scotland, most inhabitants speak Highland English, essentially Standard English spoken with a Scottish accent, with some small-scale influence from Scots on lexis and structure, as well as phonological influence from Gaelic. Some still speak Gaelic as well.

Introduction

Unlike phonology and, in particular, lexis, morphosyntactic systems are quite stable and slow to change. Close relatives, such as Standard English and all of the Scots dialects, may not be as divergent in structure as they are in lexis and phonology. An absolute distinction between northern English and Scots usage rarely exists. Moreover, although elements of the grammar of the Northern and Insular dialects are sometimes different from other Scots varieties, most of what follows is true for all Scots dialects, unless otherwise stated. Finally, there have been generations of day-to-day contact with Standard English for all Scots speakers, both in writing and, latterly, in speech. There is much carry-over from one system to the other. Many elements of both standard and colloquial English grammar are found in even the ‘densest’ Scots.

Conversely, since grammar distinctions are both more deeply embedded in a native speaker's consciousness (in the sense that we appear to be much less aware of using particular constructions than we are of using particular sounds or words) and are also least likely to be abandoned in adulthood for other patterns, hearing and reading constructions which native speakers would consider Standard English, but which are actually peculiarly Scottish, is common. Aitken (1979) termed usages of this type ‘covert Scotticisms’. These represent those occasions where speakers believe that the structures they are employing are Standard English but which can cause a degree of confusion – or at least surprise – for people outside Scotland.

Introduction

When dealing with Scottish dialects, it must always be remembered that while it suits language activists to treat Scots and Standard English as separate languages, and the speech of many Scots may not be readily intelligible to English speakers who do not live in Scotland, most people regularly blend SSE and local dialect features in their everyday speech. This state of affairs is a relatively recent arrival to the Northern Isles and the northern mainland, and may, as we will see in Chapter 5, differ from place to place, but it is nonetheless present. Some people may rarely employ the word to sound correspondences of their local dialect; they will nevertheless come into daily contact with other locals who do. The relationship of the local Scots dialects and SSE is one of mutual interpenetration.

In addition to this, as we have already noted, a great many – probably the vast majority of – people local to these regions will not keep their local phonological system and that of SSE entirely apart. This works in two ways: there is regular ‘seepage’ from the SSE pattern into the local one; the opposite tendency is also present, of course.

Many speakers will employ local phonological patterns when they are self-consciously speaking English. For instance, it is quite common to hear, particularly in the speech of older people in Aberdeen, bother being pronounced /'bΛðәr/, even when the rest of their discourse may be conducted entirely according to the phonological pattern of SSE.

In the following texts I have attempted to provide as comprehensive as possible a ‘snapshot’ of local speech norms throughout northern Scotland and the Northern Isles in the last year or so. Inevitably this has meant that more examples could be given of present-day Shetland dialect than of the dialects of the Black Isle, since the dialect is very much alive in the cultural and social lives of people on the various islands and regions of the archipelago. For each sample, I have provided a transcription into a Scots form of English spelling, a broad phonemic transcription and a discussion of the particularly noteworthy features of the informant's speech. Where words or phrases are used which are not normal outside the Scots-speaking world (or are confined to a particular Scots dialect), a glossary is provided after the first transcription.

Shetland

George Jamieson, Unst, October 2005

George Jamieson: When A wis born here an brought up here on i croft – ma father wis a crofter all his life, came here in twenty-eight …

Millar: Ay.

George Jamieson: … set up the … built the house an de wee steeding doon there. And so you were born in a situation, an did things in a situation, where the usage o de dialect wis much stronger obviously than now … o … We were using ponies or mares – there wis no such word as ponies on Unst whin A wis young – which we used as work ponies. So we were harrowin an usin swingle-trees an all the bits an pieces o the crofts, an things, an dennin spades and kwat-no, takin our peats home from the hill on ponies.

Introduction

When I first moved to the North-East, I was struck by the ‘richness’ of the local dialect's vocabulary. Many words, such as bide, ‘to reside’, while known to me, were associated in my mind with the speech of my grandparents. I now heard them daily in the language of children and young adults. This is, in fact, a feature of all the Northern and Insular dialects: many of the words which make them distinctive were once common in other Scots dialects.

This does not mean, of course, that the various dialects do not have lexical features which make them distinctive in the eyes both of native speakers and outsiders. Indeed, there were – and are – certain words and phrases which act as shibboleths. Peerie (or peedie), ‘small, little, young’, is peculiarly a part of Insular and Caithness speech, although recognised by other northerners; tyaave, ‘to struggle, exist, survive’, is associated in particular with the North-East. Indeed, for the larger dialect areas, a veritable industry has come into being dedicated to the production of popular, or semi-scholarly, dictionaries and phrase books.

Nevertheless, our knowledge of the lexis actually used in particular places is often sketchy. This is especially the case with the less populous (and most threatened) dialects. What follows is therefore largely a work in progress and more anecdotal, personal and indicative than I would wish. I will nevertheless attempt to show how a close analysis of the evidence may lead us to a number of (tentative) conclusions about the particular semantic fields which are well-represented, along with explanations for the distinctiveness of local vocabulary.

By the end of the First World War, the cinema was an established cultural fact in an era of rapid social change. In America, theatres or dream palaces were crucial to the structuring of the film industry. They were the places where cinema came to the masses and the studios successfully exploited such venues as they did the movie stars under contract to them. The first movie palaces were built in 1913. The story of Loew's Corporation in New York is representative. Building on his success and to secure his own suppliers of movies, Marcus Loew bought Metro Pictures in 1919 and went on to buy Goldwyn Pictures, creating Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer (or MGM) – what would become the most powerful studio of the 1930s. The vertical integration of aspects of the industry ensured a corporation like Loew's could control the manufacturing of films, their retailing and their exhibition.

In this period, audience concentration spans would stretch from short one-reel films to features of around seventy-five minutes in direct correlation with their worshipping of stars such as matinée idol John Barrymore, swashbuckler Douglas ‘the Great Lover’ Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino and a host of beauties including Mary Pickford, Mae Murray, Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri and Greta Garbo. Cinema had begun by borrowing known quality from the theatre. In Germany Max Reinhardt, an acclaimed theatrical producer, had begun working in the cinema around 1910 and demonstrated a phenomenal ability to spot talent that would work in the studio as well as on the stage.

If Hollywood managed to avoid regulation by state institutions through the use of the Hays Office, and the British documentary movement relied on state institutions, it is often suggested that in the totalitarian states of the 1930s – the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the Japanese Empire – the cinema was no more than a crude form of state propaganda. Certainly these were not liberal states and overt opposition was not tolerated, but it would be equally wrong to see the films that were produced in these countries as simply propagandist.

Admittedly Soviet cinema had been state controlled since the revolution but in the 1930s there was a push to increase the number of films produced in the Soviet Union. The man placed in charge of this process was Boris Shumyatsky, who was anything but the stern propagandist. On the contrary, he was a champion of entertainment and opposed Soviet montage on the grounds that it was too difficult and intellectual. He therefore favoured a cinema that spoke more directly to popular competences and dispositions.

This did not mean that Soviet cinema was not subject to censorship and, from 1934, socialist realism was the approved style of filmmaking. However, this style of filmmaking is often caricatured by critics who want to present it as simple propagandist affirmation of Soviet society. It was supposed to present Soviet communism as representing historical progress, and as leading the world towards a socialist Utopia, but it was also associated with the rejection of the objective ‘documentation’ of reality.

The 1950s saw the breaking up of the studio system in the new age of television and a refining of the cinematic experience. Technologies that were pioneered in the 1920s, such as zoom lens and widescreen, found their niche in the cinema of the 1950s. It is not a coincidence that the 1950s is associated with a series of technological innovations in cinema. As television began to take off outside the studios' control, audiences for theatre-based entertainment declined. Hollywood made both bold and sometimes outlandish attempts to bring them back. By the end of the 1950s, widescreen entertainment had become entrenched as a Hollywood staple and film producers and exhibitors were even competing for the best way to pipe smells around an auditorium. In the meantime events like the Paramount decision of 1948 and resistance to having to qualify for the MPAA seal of approval for films with controversial content contributed to the rise of independent producers and directors.

In a decade in which leisure became a market, cinema was only one of a panoply of options for entertainment; driving and camping holidays, and home improvement, for example, provided a veritable democracy of consumption. The emphasis on families spending time together and the rise of the suburbs in the 1950s speaks to a general disinclination to travel downtown to the cinema on a regular basis.

American cinema's domination of world markets coincided with the rise of the Hollywood studios. The Hollywood Studio System would properly take hold by 1930 once five companies – Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, RKO, Fox (later Twentieth-Century Fox), Warner Bros. and Paramount – had emerged victorious from increasing competition and a scrimmage of mergers and takeovers of production and distribution companies. By 1930 it is estimated that there were around 24,000 cinemas in the US with the five major studios controlling at least 50 per cent of the total industry output. By 1931, D. W. Griffith had made his last film and the film industry was primed to establish the classical Hollywood era with the new technology of sound. In fact, the era from the coming of the sound film to the end of the 1940s is often called Hollywood's ‘Golden Age’. During those years the Hollywood film factory fitted a Fordist model of capitalist mass production. In order to understand the success of the American film industry, it is important to examine the 1920s: the decade in which the studios employing thousands of people changed the face of Los Angeles and in which Thomas Ince's idea of the ‘factory system’ of production took hold.

After over a quarter of a century of declining audiences, the cinema of the 1980s saw not only the stabilisation of audience numbers, but also the creation of new audiences. One of the main reasons for this was the emergence of new forms of film exhibition. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the emergence of home video as a new form of domestic technology. One use of the video was to time shift the viewing of television programming by taping its transmission and playing it back at another point. It also allowed the distribution of films on video that could be viewed in the home.

The studios initially reacted with horror at the technology, which was viewed as a major threat to cinema exhibition, but it was soon discovered that video reawakened interest in film in general and not only did cinema attendance start to grow once more but, by the mid-1980s, over half the revenue from feature film production came from video. In other words, just as the studios had previously operated the zone-run-clearance system, the contemporary film industry was able to use a video release to prolong the life of a film once it was played out at cinemas and hence it could continue to generate income from it. Indeed, since the mid-1980s, video has become even more important than the cinema financially (although it is being replaced by DVD) so that it is often claimed that cinema exhibition is no longer the key medium for Hollywood but now operates as a means of promoting the film prior to its release in other media.

It is ubiquitous to state that the United States emerged from the Second World War as the international superpower but the wider effects on film history were socio-economic. In an economy lifted out of the Depression by the war and readjusting to peace in an evolving Cold War context, the industry enjoyed the last significant boom before facing a crisis in the 1950s. To begin with, the studios continued to enjoy the boom they had had during the war with film comedy, as when Paramount's Bob Hope saved Madeleine Carroll from Nazi spies in My Favorite Blonde (1942). In the postwar years his winning comic formula was copied by Red Skelton and the most popular postwar comic Danny Kaye. RKO's The Bells of St Mary's starring Ingrid Bergman and Bing Crosby was the studio's biggest success ever in 1945 and conflict itself proved a creative force with the most successful postwar films at the box office drawing on the war as a catalyst for drama, as in Britain with David Lean's almost-love story Brief Encounter (1945) and Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949). Starring Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Orson Welles and Trevor Howard, Reed's story of postwar racketeering, murder and intrigue was internationally acclaimed and remains iconic in its visualisation of war-torn Vienna augmented by the haunting zither playing of Anton Karas.