BORN and bred in Paisley, Fraser Scott has a “guid Scots tongue in his heid” – but he used to loathe the way he spoke.
“I really hated it and when I wasn’t with Scottish people, I was conscious of the way I sounded and cringed when I heard Scottish voices on the telly,” he told the Sunday National.
Realising he wasn’t alone in being ashamed of the way he spoke, Scott began to look into it and found it was part of the so-called Scottish cringe.
“I read a lot about this phenomenon of the Scottish cringe where we are embarrassed by how we speak and embarrassed by our own accents,” he said.
Becoming fascinated by the issue, Scott decided to write a play exploring it, which developed into a broader look at the Scots language, identity and accents.
The result is Common Tongue, a new play from a team of young independent Scots theatre makers about the impact of language and identity in Scotland.
“It looks at why so often Scots is not treated as a language but treated as a lesser form of English or slang,” said Scott.
“Like so many other people, I thought that was the case and my hope with the piece is that it empowers folk to realise the way they speak is not inferior. Scots is not improper, it is its own language and I hope the play gives people some confidence about the way we speak.”
However, the play would not have seen the light of day without modest public funding support, according to Scott.
While he is grateful for the money he received, he said the outlook for the arts in Scotland is “scary”.
The funding, which amounted to a little more than £50,000 and supported upwards of 15 people, came from Creative Scotland’s Open Fund, an important source of funding for new work, but which faced the axe because of government cash cuts.
“As a young freelance playwright and director, I don’t know how this show would have gone on without that money,” said Scott. “In the grand scheme of theatre production, it is not a huge amount of money but it is not money we would have been otherwise able to access and it made it possible for a small group of independent artists to employ upwards of 15 people.”
He said arts organisations and freelancers across the sector were suffering from the cuts.
“It’s a really tough time for everyone to be honest and I think the Government needs to make more money accessible because we are on our knees,” said Scott.
“We contribute a lot of money to the economy every year and legacy in theatre is really important but often there is not enough support to take shows further. Hopefully we will get more support to take this further but it feels like a scary time at the moment to be an artist in Scotland.”
Scott said he hoped the recently announced Scottish Government review of Creative Scotland would help to strengthen the organisation.
“It feels amazing as a young Scottish creative to have the support of Creative Scotland as it is a real affirmation of your path as an artist,” he said.
“I feel very lucky and grateful that we are getting the chance to put on this work – and I hope people get something from the show itself.”
An innovation in the play is live captioning featuring Scots words like dreich, drookit, dour and mochie.
“We are working with a really exciting video designer to have all the words visible on stage because many Scottish words are spelt similarly to English words and are often dismissed as misspellings instead of words in their own right,” said Scott.
“We are not only celebrating the main character’s journey but also these words that we are in danger of losing if we don’t reclaim them.”
The play follows a young girl called Bonnie who grows up in Scotland, goes to university and then studies abroad for a year.
“She encounters all these different people who have different opinions about how she speaks and different assumptions about who she is, based on how she speaks,” said Scott.
“She goes through the experience, as so many folk do, of changing the way she speaks to fit in and a lot of the play is her journey investigating why she does that.”
The play also features Bonnie’s grandfather, an elderly man who loves the Scots language and passes this on to his granddaughter.
“Hopefully people will take away the idea that the Scots language is different for everybody and we all have different relationships with it but that doesn’t mean you are any less of a Scots speaker or that you are any less of a Scottish person,” said Scott.
“We all have different experiences of people telling us to speak properly or more clearly but my hope is that this is a celebration of Scots and the words that we use in Scotland.”
Common Tongue premieres at Cumbernauld Theatre on September 26 and 27 before moving to the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh on September 28
