Jings, Crivens! Oor Wullie`s turning English

Anne Hoyer from Heidelberg University has been carrying our research into the language used in the Sunday Post's Oor Wullie cartoon strip. Hoyer has discovered that Wullie is using less Scots than he was when the spiky haired lad first emerged from Dudley Watkins' imagination over 60 years ago. The bucket loving boy still has a "guid Scots tongue in his heid", he just doesn't have such a large range of vocabulary as he did in the past. Hoyer says there has been a definite decline in the quality and quantity of Wullie's Scots. Hoyer first encountered the Scots language when she spent a year living in Stranraer. Having spent just a few days there, Hoyer claims she went out and bought a Scots dictionary in the hope that she would find out more about the local speech forms.