Living with the Double Tongue: Modern Poetry in Scots

Abstract

The linguistic pluralism inherent in Scottish cultural identity has made contemporary writers in Scotland peculiarly sensitive to how subjectivity is simultaneously constructed and undone in the precisions and imprecisions of language and in the tangled translations and transitions (and the political and social complexities) between utterance and reception. Such factors are doubly relevant to the unique status of Scots as a literary language, both demotic and constructed, both familiar and estranged, that is both 'other' to, and 'othered' by English. In this respect the 'double tongue' of poetry in Scots has a telling relationship with the instabilities of expression and identity as realised by contemporary writers, who are more concerned with the problematics of personal, existential, political or sexual being than they are with an older generation's interest in recovering a national identity and establishing validating links to an older literary tradition.