Yoram wrote me saying “This map is fun, and so are the replies, including the video.” I hope you can see the Twitter post; it shows a “map of oaths and affirmations taken languages other than English” at the swearing-in ceremony of the new Scottish Parliament. “Some patterns: Doric around Aberdeen, Gaelic mostly in the Highlands and Islands, Urdu in Glasgow”; Claire McAllister adds others: “Arabic, British Sign Language, Canadian French, Doric, English, Gaelic, German, Orcadian, Punjabi, Scots, Urdu, Welsh and Zimbabwean Shona…” Thanks, Yoram!
Glad to see that Welsh, the original speech of all Scotland (except Perth, of course) is represented.
Shona is good as a surrogate, too, given that we don’t seem to have KONGO, the original speech of all mankind. Something for next year, perhaps.
I admit that when I saw “Canadian French” listed among the languages I thought at once that it was a mistake of some kind…and as it turns out, it is quite accurate: the Member of Parliament in question, Elena Whitham, is Scottish by birth but lived in Quebec from the age of six to (at least) the age of twenty-one, To my ears she sounds like a native speaker of (Quebec) French who has spent some time in a predominantly anglophone environment, making me suspect she must once have spoken French with native-like (or near-native-like) fluency. Here is the clip of her oath:
https://twitter.com/ElenaWhitham/status/1392923868445163525
This makes me wonder: of the various members of the Scottish Parliament whose oaths and/or affirmations are in a language other than English, how many are in fact native speakers of the non-English language in question?
David Eddyshaw: Proto-Brythonic, or at a stretch Old Welsh, would have been more appropriate as the “original” speech of Scotland than any variety of Modern Welsh. Could you explain why Perth is an exception? If it is a joke, I am afraid it flew over my head…
Macro-Welsh, then …
Whatever the question, Perth is always the exception.
Well, Urdu is not exactly L1 for most….
(and English. And thinking about this, all Welsh speakers that I ever met, they were Russians who learned it as adults…)
The constituency of the lady who took the oath in Welsh does seem to overlap somewhat with the erstwhile territory of Macro-Welsh-speaking Gododdin, although perhaps it is also relevant that she grew up in Herefordshire, rather closer to the current territory where Micro-Welsh (if that’s what it’s to be called by contrast) is presently spoken.
Per the 2011 Census, residents of Scotland who speak Gaelic at home only very slightly outnumber those who speak Urdu at home, although the number who speak Polish at home was greater than those two combined and no one is said to have taken the oath in Polish.
all Welsh speakers that I ever met, they were Russians who learned it as adults
Looking for their Macro-Welsh roots, like poor Ifan ap Tudur in Y Brodyr Cyramaswff.
hmmm that ‘Queen and all her heirs’ bit must rankle. Even the stupid one with the sticky-out ears, who’s about as Welsh as my airse?
I had to swear likewise to become a Citizen of New Zealand. They make provision for Atheists; why not for anti-Royalists? I’d happily have sworn to the Institutions of New Zealand/Office of Governor-General/etc.
If you’re born in Britain, nobody makes you swear to any heirs.
Very disappointing. I saw the Hat headline and thought “great! I can learn how to swear in Scottish!” Alas, it is not to be.
But seriously, swearing-in in languages of some variety of English, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, or even Welsh is understandable, but the others come across to me (an innocent who can’t even swear in Scottish) as showboating.
“roots” – or leaves or fruit. Or flowers.
even Welsh
Especially Welsh.
” slightly outnumber those who speak Urdu at home” – I wonder who are they. Did their ancestors come from today’s India? Or Karachi outnumbered Punjab?
P.S. I also wonder if there is (a considerable population of L1 Urdu or Hindi speakers whose ancestors shifted to those because they are national langauges.
Didn’t he learn some Welsh at some time? Enough to have a conversation with David? Or just to know the plural of eisteddfod?
Karachi outnumbered Punjab?
I don’t know about Scotland specifically, but the distribution of UK citizens whose families originated in India/Pakistan by language is very regional, no doubt because new immigrants naturally wanted to go somewhere where there were already speakers of their language.
(Here in Swansea the relevant group is overwhelmingly Bengali, for example, to the degree that if you meet someone with an Arabic name, they’re much more likely to be Bengali than anything else.)
Even the stupid one with the sticky-out ears
Macro-Welsh ears.
How one can have both roots and ears? (Or is Welsh a cereal?)
no doubt because new immigrants naturally wanted to go somewhere where there were already speakers of their language.
Hm, yes, that is logical. “Karachi”, because only 7% of people in Pakistan claim Urdu as their mother tongue. I think, their concentration is the highest (<50%) in cities in Sindh (Karachi, Hyderabad). There are many more such people in India (any Muslims who speak related dialects). But then for many Urdu is "the langauge of Pakistan".
It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping!
I had the impression that they were just having fun, really – some of it is showing off in a sense, but is it a nasty sense?
I couldn’t tell you which languages were spoken to what extent in Glasgow, but there are definite Indian/Pakistani communities
I don’t know about Scotland specifically, but the distribution of UK citizens whose families originated in India/Pakistan by language is very regional
Eastern Europeans, too. Edinburgh is all Poles – well, 1/40th of the population, I believe – but I was talking to someone from somewhere in England who had essentially no Poles but a lot of (as far as I can remember) Romanians, who I’m really not aware of coming across.
Russians emigrate to Moscow (one more fact about us is that we emigrate, not immigrate;-))
This is why there is not much Russian diaspora to speak about.
And to the sea (this is why there is a considerable Russian diaspora in Montenegro – and in countries like Tunisia too).
I had the impression that they were just having fun, really – some of it is showing off in a sense, but is it a nasty sense?
I agree — if they want to show off their languages, more power to them!
According to one set of statistics, Russian is the fourth-most-commonly-spoken language in New York City (after English/Spanish/Chinese, but ahead of Kreyol/Bengali/Arabic/Korean/etc.). Not sure if it’s the seacoast that’s the attraction although one big cluster of Russophones is indeed on the oceanfront side of Brooklyn.
One thing I saw on the web, FWIW, suggested that MSP’s are allowed to take the oath in a non-English language of their choice as a supplement to, rather than a substitute for, taking the oath in English. This among other things avoids the difficulty of The Authorities confirming that a particular non-English text is in fact an accurate translation containing all the legally relevant substance of the oath. Swear in Romanian and omit the stuff about “heirs” if you want, but don’t think it gets you off the hook.
This is of course silly, because MSP’s should be normatively required to take the standard oath in either Braid Scots or Gaelic (with a preapproved standardized text in both), with the option to supplement in any alternative language, including standard English.
These things would be a lot simpler if only people would stick with Latin, as God intended.
I was very pleased to see ‘Confoederatio Helvetica’ written on a building in Bern. I’d never really figured out why it was .ch before.
J.W. Brewer, it is accurate I think.
I was thinking about Europe and 2000s. There is a very large number of Russian speakers in Germany. I do not know how many of them are Germans and Jews. This does not mean that they are not also “Russians” (in the sense of identity or any other sense) but it is structurally distinct story. Apart of that, European diasporas are not too large I think.
Of course it also easier to move for a Pole.
Welsh, the original speech of all Scotland
I suspect that Wrad, Wirp, Usconbuts, and Canutulachama might have demurred. To say nothing of Bes meqq Nanammovvez.
Even though the percentage of folks in Pakistan who are L1 Urdu-speakers is pretty low, the percentage who are L2 speakers is much higher. So one possibility is that if a bunch of immigrants from Pakistan end up in one corner of the UK and don’t overwhelmingly come from a single linguistic community within Pakistan, Urdu will end up being the functional lingua franca of that particular immigrant community. The Glasgow-born MSP who took the oath in Punjabi, FWIW, is said to be a Sikh, and thus rather less likely to have had parents with L2 knowledge of Urdu.
The Russophone population of NYC goes beyond “ethnic Russians” in the strict sense and reflects the ethnocultural variousness of the former Soviet Union, and also includes people who are not L1 Russophones (being instead L1 speakers of, e.g. Georgian) who nonetheless have greater fluency in Russian than in English. I think I may have mentioned here before that I used to get my hair cut at a Manhattan barbershop (it may still be there but my office is no longer in that neighborhood) where all the employees spoke back and forth to each other in rapid/fluent Russian, including one guy who was very visibly not of Russian ethnicity – playing the percentages based on the racial demographics of the CCCP the most likely possibilities seemed to be “ethnic Korean with ancestors sent by Stalin to Kazakhstan” and “Buryat,” in either case I guess <50% likely to know the non-Russian language his grandparents had probably spoken.
Orcadian, I see, is the Scots dialect of the Orkney Islands.
Wikipedia links to a list of words in the Orcadian dialect:
In the 1930s George V refused to sign diplomatic documents as King of the Irish Free State that were presented to him in Irish, on the ground that he didn’t understand the language. He (or his office) was willing to accept a bilingual document but not an Irish document with a separate English official translation.
The Scottish independence movement still has a long way to go if people can talk about “Doric” and “Orcadian” as if of equal status with “Scots.” Don’t they know how this is supposed to work? The SNP needs to declare some arbitrary and artificial standardized version of Scots confected by underemployed cafe intelligentsia the Only True Scots, and then make OTS mandatory in the mass media and schools, with speakers of regional variants to be shamed as backwards. Only that way can the spirit of True Nationalism gain enough strength to cast off the English Yoke.
mollymooly: Maybe Geo. V just needed a rubber stamp saying (in Irish) something like “please be advised that I have this day signed an English document that I’ve been told is a translation of this document and I hereby approve this document to the extent, but only to the extent, that it’s an accurate back-translation of the document I signed.”
On further reflection maybe de Valera et al. needed to listen to David Eddyshaw. If Geo. V had been presented with official Irish Free State documents in Latin needing his royal signature, he either would have been able to read them or would have been ashamed to admit that he couldn’t.
I’m sorry the swearing-in formula doesn’t mention ungutted coalfish. It would have made the Orcadian instantly recognizable.
the swearing-in formula doesn’t mention ungutted coalfish
I missed that. It seems a curious omission. What are we not being told?
I suspect that Wrad, Wirp, Usconbuts, and Canutulachama might have demurred. To say nothing of Bes meqq Nanammovvez.
Early Polish immigrants, like the Welsh dragon.
Despite the absence of a U.S. official language, the oath of naturalization must be taken in English.
JWB: The Scottish independence movement still has a long way to go if people can talk about “Doric” and “Orcadian” as if of equal status with “Scots.” Don’t they know how this is supposed to work? The SNP needs to declare some arbitrary and artificial standardized version of Scots confected by underemployed cafe intelligentsia the Only True Scots, and then make OTS mandatory in the mass media and schools, with speakers of regional variants to be shamed as backwards. Only that way can the spirit of True Nationalism gain enough strength to cast off the English Yoke.
I’ll give you Doric, which is the worst self-designation I know.
Actually, taking this seriously, if the Scottish parliament wanted to change the sociolinguistic situation and promote a national language with a convergence center within the country’s borders, it should be concerned with the spelling system and the oratory style, not pronunciation.
People get imho unduly excited (pro or con) about the U.S. not having an “official language” in the sense of there apparently being no federal statute that says in so many words “English is the official language.” But anyone applying to become a naturalized U.S. citizen must demonstrate [some level of] proficiency in English unless they qualify for an enumerated exemption from that requirement. You’d think that would be a stronger hint about what’s really going on than the language of the oath, which could be learned more or less phonetically.
Apparently in the UK you can in principle become a naturalized citizen without formally demonstrating proficiency in English if you can demonstrate proficiency in Welsh, but if you go that route it is unusual enough that the media will interview you for a wacky human-interest story and in doing so make it clear that you are, in fact, also proficient in English. Just like a native Welsh speaker these days would be, I suppose. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54355166
Assyria did not have one too, I think.
For my U.S. citizenship test, the English language part consisted of listening to a spoken text, namely the sentence “I live in the United States”, and writing it down. Apparently not everyone taking the test with me found it easy.
It obviously matters a lot in practice how demanding or undemanding the language proficiency test is, but the *symbolism* of having the test at all (and it being at least rigorous enough that some people who qualify for exemptions take advantage of that) is something. My brother needed en route to his Ph.D. (in a humanities discipline, back in the ’90’s) to pass a Latin proficiency exam that I suspect prior generations of humanities scholars would have found unrigorous and easy but the fact that his university even required him to go through the motions signified something of note.
Assyria did not have one too, I think.
Very true. You just had to get conquered. There was no test (and no exemptions.) Firm, but fair.
“You may express your unconditional and abject submission in the language(s) of your choice.”
The newly elected MP for the English constituency of Chesham and Amersham, Sarah Green, chose to be sworn into Parliament today in English and Welsh.
Reasonably enough, as the constituency is part of the historically Welsh region of Lloegr.
Sarah Green is from Clwyd. ‘Tis pity she’s a Liberal Democrat. But it is not for us to judge.
it should be concerned with the spelling system […], not pronunciation
Exactly. That’s how American English (and to a lesser extent British English) works. Oratory style is a higher-order matter that depends heavily on context.
But as Tait points out, there is a perfectly good cross-dialect orthography based on simplified Middle Scots with adjustments which every Scot can read in their own accent (always excepting Insular Scots):
But people who claim to care about Scots writing don’t want to write so as to be intelligible to other Scots. They want to use their own dialectal or ideolectal orthography so they can be as unintelligible as possible outside their immediate speech-group. (What is more, a lot of them don’t actually speak or write Scots either.) For them, Scots is quaint ruralisms and that’s the way it should be:
there apparently being no federal statute that says in so many words “English is the official language.”
No. But there are many such state statutes: 32 of them. But in Hawaii English is co-official with Hawaiian, in Alaska with some 22 Native languages (including extinct Eyak!) and in New Mexico and Louisiana respectively Spanish and French have special status. The five territories make English co-official with Samoan, Chamorro, Chamorro and Carolinian, Spanish, and none (the U.S. Virgin Islands). What is more, a federal official-English bill has been introduced repeatedly, and it fails as repeatedly, as either useless or discriminatory (it would prevent the U.S. government from addressing citizens and non-citizens in any language but English).
the media will interview you for a wacky human-interest story and in doing so make it clear that you are, in fact, also proficient in English
Well, in the most likely case for wanting naturalization in Welsh, you can then address the media in your other language, Argentine Spanish. Surely even the Welshless can understand that.
@John Cowan: One could (given sufficient political support) get rid of most current legal accommodations for linguistic minorities in the US without passing a law saying “English is the official language” or one could pass a law saying “English is the official language” which also preserved or even expanded all existing accommodations for linguistic minorities. It’s a silly thing to fight about unless of course you are (like many people) in the market for meaningless symbolic conflicts to get people to click on your website or whatever. Think of these official-language statutes (unless they do something substantive that could be equally well accomplished by other means) as being akin to statutes declaring such-and-such the Official State Amphibian or Flower or Mineral.
Re the U.S. Virgin Islands (formerly the Danish West Indies), this is no doubt fading consistently with the passage of years but three decades ago when I had some small passing acquaintance for reasons I won’t bore you with with USVI law it was still the case that occasionally in understanding who had what rights to which piece of real estate you might need to consult pre-1917 legal documents written in Danish and I inferred that there were back then still a non-zero (although maybe single-digit) number of people in the USVI legal community with economic incentives to possess some degree of reading knowledge of legal-jargon Danish.
Russian is the fourth-most-commonly-spoken language in New York City
embroidering on what JWB already added:
who the new york russophones are varies a lot from neighborhood to neighborhood – in Rego Park or Forest Hills, it’s largely bukharian jews (who could be cradle-tongue speakers of bukhori tajik, russian, uzbek, english, or israeli), elsewhere mainly georgian or azerbaijani folks. but the biggest single group is almost certainly ukrainian jews – definitely in brooklyn – and i’m pretty sure that inorodtsy are a sizeable majority.
@jc, trond
It is not clear to me that the use of divergent or inconsistent spellings is deliberate. It would be a lot of work to create an overarching dictionary with standardised spellings (and a pronunciation guide covering even the main dialects). This work would not have much point if authors choose English for more formal, serious or official texts. To give an example: the Orcadian word nutheran mentioned above is presumably related to (a) nyitter in the online Shetland dictionary and (b) natter in the DSL (here in Ireland, natter is common in the sense of “chat idly”).
It is not clear to me that the use of divergent or inconsistent spellings is deliberate.
They are (and I follow Tait here) rough and ready representations of local pronunciations, mostly anglicized. If you write (as many do) dother, fadder, vrath, braa, yaave, kwile, steen, sivven, gryte, fyow(e), abeen, gweed, foord instead of the diaphonemic spellings dochter, faither, wrath, braw, awe, coal, stane, seiven, great, few, abuin, guid, fuird, you are proclaiming allegiance to Mid Northern Scots (“Doric”) rather than the Scots language as a whole. (This list is a bit synthetic, since no one part of the “Doric” region uses all of these.) And of course if people throughout Scotland all do the same …
It would be a lot of work to create an overarching dictionary with standardised spellings
Most of the differences, as in English, are with the vowels: when you learn to read and write, you just have to know that what you pronounce [sten] or [stin] depending on dialect is written stane, and what you pronounce [erm] or [ɛrm] is spelled airm. You don’t have to learn how everyone else pronounces these words, any more than I have to know when learning to read and write tire that other anglophones say [ˈtaɪ̯ɚ] or [ˈtaɪ̯ə] or [taːr] or [taː] and not [ˈtaɪ̯ɻ] as I do.
This work would not have much point if authors choose English for more formal, serious or official texts.
Right now lots of writers think this is the Wrong Thing (see above) anyway. But imagine that they chose otherwise and sent off a book to a publisher: it wouldn’t be possible to copyedit the book unless the copy editor happened to be the author’s neighbor. A standard language has to have a reasonably standard orthography (or perhaps two).
FWIW, the oath needed to get a library card at the Bodleian is still in Latin (but if you admit your insufficiency, you can substitute a translation into any of 57* languages, even English). Do fidem me nullum librum […] e bibliotheca sublaturum, […] esse, […] I just now realize that it genders the speaker, not the book.
_______
* approx.
@ Lars Mathiesen. “the oath needed to get a library card at the Bodleian […] genders the speaker.”
The current form of the Latin version of the oath is:
Do fidem me nullum librum vel instrumentum aliamve quam rem ad bibliothecam pertinentem, vel ibi custodiae causa depositam, aut e bibliotheca sublaturum esse, aut foedaturum deformaturum aliove quo modo laesurum; item neque ignem nec flammam in bibliothecam inlaturum vel in ea accensurum, neque fumo nicotiano aliove quovis ibi usurum; item promitto me omnes leges ad bibliothecam Bodleianam attinentes semper observaturum esse.
You are right if the variable part of the eight future active infinitives is considered to be (as was in fact intended) in the accusative masculine singular form: sublaturum, foedaturum, deformaturum, laesurum, inlaturum, accensurum, usurum, observaturum.
However, since those are also the accusative neuter singular forms, one may interpret the oath to be gender-neutral.
If I am not mistaken, it is now possible to take the Latin oath with feminine singular infinitives: change every -um to -am.
I expect that back when the university affiliated with the Bodleian first admitted young ladies as students it could safely be assumed that their degree of Latinity was such that they could make the necessary adjustments in a text that presumed a masculine speaker on the fly as they were taking the oath. In older editions, at least, of the Book of Common Prayer, the convention for services that might have either a male or female object of attention (e.g. the baptism service and the funeral service) was to just use the masculine options for relevantly gendered words but to print those words in italics to cue the priest, if the feminine alternatives were desired, to make the requisite changes as he went, with the typographical highlighting thought to reduce the chance that an appropriate adjustment would be overlooked. The same convention was used where one might wish to switch singulars to plurals as e.g. when baptizing multiple persons at the same time.