A Scot an’ a Sassenach scrieve aboot leid: A three-pairt Scotoethnography

Abstract

This autoethnography is written in three parts and is influenced by layered account writing principles. In part one, the first author develops his “Scotoethnography.” In a poetic and prose mixture of Scots and Standard English, he critically explores his early socialization away from Scots toward Standard English. With examples from his lived experience, his published autoethnographic work, literary texts, and personal communication, he advocates for his use of Scots as an extra conceptual and linguistic resource. In part two he describes his research into the theoretical and empirical grounding of the article. Part three is a critically focused dialogue between the authors. It ranges across defining “Scotoethnography” and the first author’s motivation for crafting the paper; the emerging political and cultural implications of othering, colonization, and silencing of Scottish identity; the passion and creativity inherent in Scots relative to Standard English; and, finally, the implications for autoethnographers who wish to rescue their regional dialects from monolinguistic entrapment in Standard English.