Talk:Lallans

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The phonetic spelling ‘Lallans’ (i.e. ‘Lowlands’) was coined in 1786 by Burns. As the ‘traditional’ name of a dialect however it can be traced back only to 1946 when radical political activist Douglas Young wrote “As it is convenient to have some term of distinction for that part of Scottish literature which is written in Braid Scots or Anglic, to refer to it separately from Scots literature written in Gaelic, English, Latin, or any other tongue, I suggest ‘Lallans’, adopting the term of Robert Burns.” (Source: OED). Young was an associate of Hugh McDiermid, and was Scottish National Party Chairman 1942-45 (mostly spent in prison); Young and David Murison [Ed SND] were life-long friends and associates. The Lallans Society was founded in 1972: its founding President was SNP activist George Philp; its Vice-President was the ubiquitous Hugh MacDiermid. Another supposedly ‘traditional’ name ‘Doric’ also came into such use only in the 20th century; the Greek-derived word ‘Doric’ i.e. ‘rustic’ or ‘rural’, an adjective once used throughout all of Britain by the classically-educated elite, having apparently been mistakenly assumed to be, or perhaps intentionally adopted as, a proper noun by Hugh MacDiermid who first wrote of ‘the Doric’ only in 1925 (notwithstanding an earlier, but ambiguous, quote cited by the OED, dated 1870).