"Is The Dialect Dying?" seems to be a rather limited responce to a very serious problem; the problem is the increasing debasement of language, both written and spoken, that is going on all around us. If you delete from the press, and from the broadcast output, all the slack sentences, all the limp cliche, all the pretentious padding, all the coy euphemisms . . . there is little left.

Thought and language are in reciprocal relationship; slackness in either promotes slackness in the other. If we slip, as many young people seem to be slipping, into transmitting grunts and receiving logoranto then we will be able to tell one another next to nothing and able to learn next to nothing from one another. We are a highly communicative species and we depend for our betterment upon effective stimulating communication one with another.

It seems to me that one way of helping people to take language seriously, as the essential communication tool that it is, is to try to make everyone at least bilingual. I regret never having had instruction in the classics and also having abandonned modern foreign languages in spite of gaining distinction in both French and German in my late 1930's youth. Learn another language!

In places like Orkney and Shetland where there are still local speech forms - be they distinct languages or simply dialect variants is not very important - there is a ready opportunity to promote multilingual habits. There should be, at least, proper instruction in local language and proper instruction in standard English; the one speech form is a valid mark of cultural identity and proper self-esteem, the other is a key to wider experience as well as being a negotiable asset in a world in which English is more important than its declining country of origin.

Experience seems to show that if you can master two languages then you can tackle a third, and a fourth, relatively easily - simply because using more than one language makes you aware of what language is. That awareness is a necessary key to using any language effectively.

What I think is very unhelpful is the practice of writing in 'dialect' - usually a merely eccentric spelling of standard English words in the hope of being 'phonetic'. The pleasure of listening to a genuine local speaker is in stark contrast to the tedious chore of working out what some correspondent is trying to write using idiosyncratic spelling. Hearing John Goodlad during the 1987 election campaign was a pleasure; unscrambling some of the letters in, say, the Shetland Times is something I have long since given up.

What would people say if I wrote 'woz' (simply because that is the way I say it) while some people say 'wiz' (rhyming with 'his') and some say 'wuz' (rhyming with 'buzz'). I don't know anyone who says 'was' to rhyme with 'jazz' but it is simply very convenient to spell it in the standard, admittedly non-phonetic, manner.

What if our local radio stations ceased to be the means whereby language is debased daily in the weather forecasts? Could we not have a weather forecast in decent local speech followed by the same information expressed in decent standard English. The two need take only four minutes all told. I, for one, would like to think that very little 'in the way of' rain might perhaps mean a shortage of umbrellas and that perhaps, just sometimes, we could have an even shower to break the soggy monotony of the ubiquitous odd ones. And that's the story!