SOME have predicted the guid Scots tongue may have one foot in the grave – "yin fit in the mools", if you like.
But the Scottish Language Dictionaries (SLD), a major print and online resource for the language, is fighting back, with the help of actor Richard Wilson and other celebrities who have donated a series of unique items for an eBay auction.
Comedi
an and writer Hardeep Singh Kohli is offering to cook dinner for six, the actress Siobhan Redmond is contributing a signed pair of shoes she wore playing Elizabeth I in Schiller's Mary Stuart, and actor Alan Cumming is donating his own range of men's toiletries. Other contributors include Andrew Marr, Ronnie Corbett, Bill Paterson and Shereen Nanjiani.
Wilson, who is the honorary president of the Scottish Language Dictionaries, has donated a signed T-shirt commemorating the last episode of One Foot in the Grave to the SLD's eBay auction, the bidding for which closes next Friday.
SLD, an Edinburgh University-based limited company and registered charity, describes itself as "the quintessential research organisation for the Scots language". It has been researching and publishing bedrock reference publications for almost a century, from mammoth, multi-volume undertakings such as the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue to the best-selling Concise Scots Dictionary.
Over previous incarnations, it has suffered from recurrent financial uncertainty, the latest being in April, when the Scottish Arts Council withdrew its "flexible funding", which accounted for about three-quarters of the dictionaries' cash input.
"It came as a tremendous shock and surprise to us," Dr Christine Robinson, the director of SLD, said. In a joint statement by the dictionaries and the arts council on the SLD website, the council states that it is "determined to do everything possible to safeguard a stable way forward for it from 2009 onwards".
But Dr Robinson stressed the need for the Scottish Government to establish a firmer official policy on Scots. "There's a Scots audit being carried out at the moment by (culture minister] Linda Fabiani's office, and everyone is telling us not to worry, and to wait for the outcome of the audit. But it doesn't report till October, and (without further guarantee of funding] we will have to start issuing redundancy notices in November. Our board has to plan for all eventualities."
Nothing much has changed over the decades. "There was a situation at one point with the old Scottish National Dictionaries when they didn't actually know where the week's wages were coming from," she said. "We're not quite there yet."
But if they have to start mothballing resources, it would mean, among other things, that the vast online Dictionary of the Scots Language (www.dsl.ac.uk) would shut down – and it has been receiving between 15,000 and 23,000 paid hits per day over a month.
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