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HEEDRUM-HODRUM THE recent tartan days in Canada and the USA put me in mind of terms for Scottish traditions. I landed on heedrum-hodrum, though Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) defines this as: “a derogatory term for Highland music”. Its appearance in the DSL dates from 1988 in Raymond Vettese’s collection The Richt Noise and Ither poems: “the spreit that lowps whaun it meets the swecht o oor true past, and greets no oot o seep-sappin heedrum-hodrum but oot o whit we were ...”. However, it is not always used in a derogatory sense – as shown in The Times of August 199...

AS somebody that’s campaignt for the Scots language owre mony years, I wis maist upliftit tae read aboot the young singer Iona Fyfe, supportit by MSP Clare Adamson, persuadin Spotify tae recognise Scots as a language, an saicondly, tae hear her arguing the case for a Scots Language Act. It’s a proposal some o us hae buin advocatin for mony years – probably even afore Iona wis born– but withoot much success it has tae be said, at least up tae noo. On the ither haun, when I read some bloggers’ predictable comments aboot this in The Herald, I wis remindit that owre mony Scots sti...

Spotify has recognised the Scots language on its global streaming platform following a campaign by Huntly singer Iona Fyfe.

In Scotland, we have three national languages – English, Gaelic and Scots. The 2011 census revealed that 1.5 million people identified as speaking Scots, yet much of Scotland’s population is unaware that they possess skills in reading, writing and speaking Scots. Scots is part of the West Germanic language family and is a sister language to English with close affinities with Scandinavian languages such as Danish and Norwegian. Scots has four main dialects: Insular, Northern, Central and Southern, but for me, it was just the way folk spoke in their everyday lives. Growing up in rur...

HUDDERIE LOCKDOWN has been tough for so many of us, but I hadn’t realised quite how important a haircut was for morale. Home hairdressing has, for me at least, never really “cut it” and I fear that – when I finally manage to get professional attention – I will be much more shaggy than I care to be. In other words, I am becoming exceptionally hudderie. According to the citations in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk), the adjective hudderie first appears at the beginning of the 19th century, with the general meaning of slovenly or untidy. Hudderie seems to deri...