the heritage of language.

'Can we not go?' says my little girl, which to me, sounds a little bit Miss Jean Brodie, putting the 'not' in that place.

'Is it five and twenty past?' she says- rather than the more usual, twenty five past- which again sounds like a little touch of Scots to me.

My little girl may be adopted but I can hear my mother (who grew up in Glasgow) in her when she she talks. She must have copied her as I don't think I speak like that. Copying the way we speak and act is what children do, of course. I know an adopted child who is not an academic at all but who talks and acts in the manner of a university lecturer, as was his adoptive father.

But no wonder our language is so gloriously rich when a little girl in South of England has picked up Scots phrases from a woman she doesn't see all that much and who hasn't been to Scotland herself since she was a child.