Bairn noun Child
‘“Printers are sociable creatures, as a rule, and they congregate in taverns of an evening. I’ve never known one to rise wi’ the lark, save he’s got bairns wi’ the colic.”’ (An Echo in the Bone)
Scots has many words with their foundations in the languages of Europe. This word came to us from our Scandinavian neighbours. Trading between Scotland and the countries of Northern Europe and France resulted in many such borrowings: pinkie from the Netherlands; fash from French, ashet also from France. Hoast (a cough) remains in use both here and in Germany - the list goes on and on. In the Scandinavian countries a young child is still called a barn.
Bairn is defined in the Dictionaries of the Scots Language (DSL) as ‘a child, male or female; offspring of any age’. The very earliest mention we have in DSL comes from circa 1420 in The Oryngynale Cronykil of Scotland by Andrew of Wyntoun: ‘Thai slew thare barnys’.
The word is still a general term for any child, old or young. In some places the youngest child in a family is always referred to as ‘the bairn’ irrespective of their actual age.
In 1909, Green’s Encyclopedia of the Laws of Scotland defined the word in case anyone might be in doubt of its meaning in a legal context: ‘In the law of succession, the Scotch word “bairns” means the children or issue of a person’.
In the west of Scotland bairns are also called weans. The terms can be used interchangeably though, as this exchange (recorded in The Herald’s diary of March 2020) shows: ‘Granny’s looking after her five-year-old grandson who’s been sent home in disgrace from school for being cheeky to the jannie [janitor]. The boy’s warned by granny that: “Santa doesn’t come to bad boys”. … granny picks up the telephone, dials a few digits at random and says: “Right, Santa, don’t bring any presents for…” and proceeds to give the wean’s name and address. … “I’ll just phone Santa back and tell him it’s okay,” responds the uppity bairn. “You don’t know his number,” says granny. After a moment’s thought, the wee man grabs the phone and presses the redial button’.