The Linguist: Fraser and a Multilingual Scottish Highlands

To consider the Highlands before Culloden as exclusively monolingual, either Gaelic or English, would be false. Being trilingual became the norm in Fraser’s ‘firthlands’, it comprising a region where Gaelic, Scots and, by the 1650s, English, all had their uses for everyday speech, in which some were accustomed to a high standard of education, and to national and international travel for military, socio-economic or cultural reasons, thus to picking up other languages. It is almost certain that Fraser uttered his first words in Gaelic, this followed by him acquiring a speaking knowledge of Scots, reading knowledge of English, Latin and some Hebrew, while his travel memoirs record his unusually-fixed determination to attain verbal dexterity in French, Spanish, Italian, German, ‘Slavonick’, Hungarian, ‘Bohemian’ and Dutch. Nevertheless, Fraser’s surviving writings, while they are ripe for harvesting in terms of their references to languages, are in a Scots-influenced English, reflecting his wish to reach a wider audience.