The Broons and Oor Wullie: Family Fun Through the Years (Annual): v.15

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With time, the Scottishness of Oor Wullie so very prominent in the earlier issues has been toned down in the more recent issues. This, however, does not mean that Oor Wullie has become less interesting or that it is not just as playful today – with new digital means of communication. Created by writer/editor R. D. Low and artist Dudley D. Watkins, the strip made its first appearance in the issue dated 8 March 1936. [1]

The not-so-changing face of Oor Wullie on his 80th anniversary". BBC News. 8 March 2016 . Retrieved 27 October 2021. This section may contain an excessive amount of intricate detail that may interest only a particular audience. Please help by spinning off or relocating any relevant information, and removing excessive detail that may be against Wikipedia's inclusion policy. ( February 2019) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Although Wullie's hometown was unnamed in the original Watkins strips, it has been called Auchenshoogle since the late 1990s. [7]

Axel Koehler, ‘Patricians, Politics and Porridge Olympics – the Scottish Highland Games and the Swiss Unspunnen Festival and the Idea of the Noble Savage’ (p. 33), in International Journal of Ethnosport and Traditional Games, (1)(2019), 32–59. As with Oor Wullie, Watkins left the location of the strips unnamed, although the Broons' tenement is located on Glebe Street, a commonly used name in many Scottish towns. However, as originally written, Watkins' use of words and phrases more commonly associated with the east coast of Scotland, such as bairn for child, as opposed to the west-central wean, [2] suggests he was using his own immediate environment. (He lived in Broughty Ferry). [3] He worked in Dundee and the Broons' dialect is mainly Dundonian. Since the 1990s, however, The Broons has been set in the fictional town of Auchenshoogle. The Broons ( English: The Browns) is a comic strip in Scots published in the weekly Scottish newspaper The Sunday Post. It features a Brown family, which lives in a tenement flat at 10 Glebe Street (since the late 1990s) in the fictional Scottish town of Auchentogle or Auchenshoogle. For the early Oor Wullie comics, the use of the word ony was very typical. In fact, the first story (from March 8, 1936) both began and ended with We never get ony fun here; as for the next two stories (March 15 and March 22, 1936), we find this famous catch phrase only at the end (although without “here” as the last word). Ony also occurs in other Oor Wullie stories. Indeed, in a corpus of nearly 230 Oor Wullie stories, dated between 1936 and 2004, the expression ony occurs fifty-seven times, with forty-two times alone in the first thirty-four years of the comic strip’s publication. Stringer, Lew (1 November 2016). "BLIMEY! The Blog of British Comics: Diego on the Post". BLIMEY! The Blog of British Comics . Retrieved 31 October 2021.

What are the most visible features of Scottishness in terms of language in Oor Wullie and how are they changing over time? “We never get ony fun here” Starting in 1940 the Oor Wullie strips also appeared in the form of a Christmas annual which alternated every second year with “ The Broons”, another D. C. Thomson product. (No annuals were published between 1943 and 1946.) Pre-1966 annuals were undated. All in all, the expressions jings, crivvens and Help ma Boab are true landmarks in Oor Wullie, linguistically and culturally. In a corpus of 224 comic strips, jings is the most often used of the three. Jings shows a clear increase in use in the 1980s. It was then that the editors of the comics apparently felt obliged to increase somewhat the Scottishness in these stories. Not only was the language made to sound more Scottish (by using older expressions less common today); certain components were also added that were seen as typically Scottish. Now Wullie had a West Highland Terrier; he went hiking in the Highlands, and often attended traditional Scottish celebrations. This publishing policy, however, was changed in the late 1990s, as the Oor Wullie editors seem to have felt that this strategy was focusing too much on traditional Scottish symbols. In an attempt to attract more younger readers, the Scottish English was now slightly diluted. Oor Wullie in the digital ageCriffins, Criftens, Crifty’, Scottish National Dictionary, Dictionary of the Scots Language https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/criffins (Consulted 19 October 2020). Following the 80th anniversary in 2016, additional annuals of Oor Wullie were issued for 2016 and 2018, breaking from the biennial pattern. The first Oor Wullie comic strip was published in the Sunday Post on March 8, 1936. Since then, these comics have been printed every weekend as part of the Sunday Post’s Fun Section and again at the end of the year in annuals. From 1940 to 2015, these were published every other year, alternating with The Broons, a comic strip about a Scottish family, and in Special Collections that come out every few years. Fortunately, as its consistently large readership would put it, since 2015 the annuals have been published every year.