| And lo, the Essay Spam begins: Part one, Language |
 And lo, the Essay Spam begins: Part one, Language
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May. 13th, 2009 @ 12:27 pm 
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I will, for the sake of the sanity of my readers, make the effort to edit this post, rather than adding new ones, however.
Usual practice: Notes are public, actual proper essay content is locked until after the essay is handed in. If people are interested, they can read the essay itself when it's complete (probably I'll just throw a PDF up). I'm pretty sure that I've granted access to everyone who's subscribed to me, now. Locked content tends to be either Very Personal stuff (although, since I've made a medium-grade effort to keep the hateful trolls who've made me reluctant to post in my own livejournal from knowing this one is here, middling-personal stuff will probably be reasonably open), fiction works in progress, and chunks of essays and the like; if you'd rather be dropped from access for easier filtering of my posts, let me know.
Anyway, essay. My topic is the anglicisation of Scottish culture after the Act of Union - the degree to which it happened, and the manner whereby it happened. This may be affected by the fact that my other major is Linguistics, but I've done some looking into the ways language factors into this. This is the summary of my argument I wrote up for my workshop:
Language and Literature.
The most overt manifestation of the linguistic conquest of Scotland is in the Highlands, where Gaelic was deliberately and quasi-forcefully supplanted by English. However, a more subtle process in the Lowlands was achieving something similar. Over time, Scots English was reduced from a distinct dialect, with ties to other dialects and its own literature and history, to the status of a crude vernacular, a corruption of proper English rather than a dialect with its own value.
Economic and social pressure to conform to a newly-standardised English was strongly applied to the Scots, leading to pressure from within Scotland as well as from outsiders (notably, Sheridan, very influential in this, was Irish) for the Scots to overcome their linguistic heritage.
This led to the complete transformation of Scottish literature - the patterns of its production, and the appreciation of its existing canon. Not unrelatedly, around this time, English scholars and others were looking into a deliberate, overt linguistic and literatic imperialism, consciously seeking to establish the English language literature canon as the classics and cultural basics for as much of the world as possible. Having observed that it is cultural imperialism that let previous great world empires leave their permanent mark after empire itself declined, they were out to establish the same for English.
As Scots were the soldiers of empire, including the Scots in this was vitally important.
Okay, I have references for all that, although the essay will probably need at some point to be explicit about the "Scots as soldiers of Empire" thing and why therefore integrating the Scots with England culturally was so important, which is something I haven't outlined at all really. To do: work out a summary of the historiography around this issue. (Because I have the argument I want to make, but in order to make my essay better, I need to be able to show that I know what arguments other people have been making, and so on...)
I can do this. I can.Current Mood:  working Current Music: Cold Fairyland - A-jia-li-yalai
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