Scots

Scots is a West Germanic language. It is sometimes called Lowland Scots or Lallans. It is not Scottish English but the two are similar. Scottish English is a dialect of English and Scots is a separate language. Ulster Scots is a form of Scots found in the north of Ireland. Scots is very different from the Scottish Gaelic language, which is a Celtic language.

There have been disagreements about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots. Focused broad Scots is at one end of a scale, with Scottish Standard English at the other.A.J. Aitken 1992. In The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press, p894Stuart-Smith J. 2008. Scottish English: phonology in Varieties of English: the British Isles. Kortman & Upton (eds), Mouton de Gruyter, New York. p47 Scots is generally regarded as one of the ancient varieties of English, and has its own distinct variants such as Doric.

 History 
Origin
Northumbrian Old English was established in what is now southeastern Scotland as far as the River Forth by the seventh century. The region was part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria.A History of Scots to 1700, Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (DOST) Vol. 12 p. xxxvi Early Scots began to diverge from Northumbrian English in the twelfth and thirteenth century. There was immigration of Scandinavian-influenced Middle English-speakers from the North and Midlands of England.A History of Scots to 1700, DOST Vol. 12 p. xliii

Later influences on the development of Scots were from Romance languages via ecclesiastical and legal Latin, NormanA History of Scots to 1700, pp. lxiii-lxv and later Parisian French from the Auld Alliance and Dutch and Middle Low German influences by trade and immigration from the Low Countries.A History of Scots to 1700, pp. lxiii Scots also includes loanwords from contact with Gaelic.
13-14th century
From the 13th century, Early Scots spread further into Scotland through the burghs established by King David I. The growth in prestige of Early Scots in the 14th century and the decline of French in Scotland made Scots the prestige dialect in most of eastern Scotland."A Brief History of Scots" in Corbett, John; McClure, Derrick; Stuart-Smith, Jane (eds) 2003. The Edinburgh Companion to Scots. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. . pp. 9ff
17th century
From 1610 to the 1690s, during the Plantation of Ulster, many Scots-speaking Lowlanders, about 200,000, settled there.Montgomery & Gregg 1997: 572 In the core areas of Scots settlement, there were five or six times as many Scots as English settlers.Adams 1977: 57 Southern Modern English was adopted as the literary language after 1700, and "Modern Scots" is sometimes used to describe the spoken language after 1700.

 Related pages 
 Scots Wikipedia

 References 

Category:Scotland
Category:West Germanic languages