Novelist and presenter of the Writing Scotland television series, Carl MacDougall, introduces an online learning journey on the words we use in Scottish literature.

Scottish writers work in three languages, Scots, Gaelic and English.

Following the 1707 Act of the Union, English became the standard for refined speech and progress, Scots was associated with coarseness and Gaelic wasn't considered at all.

Despite such pressures, then as now, there were writers who ignored linguistic fashion. Robert Fergusson was one of the most extraordinary writers of his day. His vivid, adventurous poetry recorded the sights, sounds and smells of old Edinburgh. When Robert Burns arrived in Edinburgh in 1786, he set out to pay his respects to the poet he called ëmy elder brother in muse.' Fergusson, who died in the Edinburgh madhouse, aged 23, was buried in an unmarked grave. Burns erected the headstone.

By fashioning Scots into a voice of the people, which has endured to the present day, Burns produced a body of work whose quality is recognised across the world. His powers of observation and ability to extract a universal truth from the mundane are unequalled. More importantly, he does it in a language many of his contemporaries were anxious to lose and which many people still find common.

Hugh MacDiarmid saw a huge creative potential in the Scots language and initially produced a series of deceptive lyrics which appear as pure poetry, but generate intense cosmological statements. His first two collections of poems dragged Scots into the 20th century, and his long poem A Drunk Man Looks at The Thistle carries itself beyond national identity, urges acceptance of the mystery of existence and is packed with optimism at a time when others saw failure and spiritual decline.

His influence is still around. Matthew Fitt was inspired by MacDiarmid to write a science fiction novel in Lallans, But n Ben A-Go-Go.

In the 1960s Tom Leonard began to re-examine the split between language of the intellect and language of the heart. He reopened the language debate by challenging the notion of a standardised Scots, which does not accord with urban experience. Writers could find little difference between an English teacher who told them to speak English without a Scots accent and linguistic purists who favoured Scots without an urban accent.

When James Kelman won the Booker Prize in 1994, there was an obvious hostility among the media and literary establishment, a sense of outrage that a novel which clearly celebrates the language of the street should merit such a prize. It is difficult not to see their objections as simple snobbery, especially since they fail to address, far less appreciate, the right of a writer to claim the English language as a legitimate means of expressing their experience in a voice that is central to that experience.

Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting was published the year previously. People whom publishers, their publicists and booksellers thought were beyond their reach bought Welsh's book. His muscular use of a contemporary vernacular flew in the face of generations of schoolteachers who belted children for not speaking properly, and further rejected the notion that language could be divided into good and bad.

Gaelic now has European minority language status with less than sixty thousand speakers. Writers usually have one voice and write in a single language. Iain Crichton Smith was nothing sort of a phenomenon, producing novels, stories, poems, plays, essays, journalism of extraordinary veracity and quality in both Gaelic and English. Sorley MacLean called Iain's imaginative and creative fertility ìthe wonder of literary Scotland.î

The classroom was the place where Scots and Gaelic were hammered out of us, where we were told to sit up straight and speak properly; so it goes without saying that the survival of these languages has to start in school, working with what we've got rather than standardising or imposing norms.