Scots

## Overview

**Scots** is the Germanic language variety spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster (where the local dialect is known as Ulster Scots). It is sometimes called **Lowland Scots** to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language which was historically restricted to most of the Highlands, the Hebrides and Galloway after the 16th century. The Scots language developed during the Middle English period as a distinct entity.

As there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing a language from a dialect, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots and particularly its relationship to English. Although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects exist, they often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English at the other. Scots is often regarded as one of the ancient varieties of English, but it has its own distinct dialects. Alternatively, Scots is sometimes treated as a distinct Germanic language, in the way that Norwegian is closely linked to but distinct from Danish.

A 2010 Scottish Government study of "public attitudes towards the Scots language" found that 64% of respondents (around 1,000 individuals being a representative sample of Scotland's adult population) "don't really think of Scots as a language" but it also found that "the most frequent speakers are least likely to agree that it is not a language (58%) and those never speaking Scots most likely to do so (72%)". In the 2011 Scottish census, a question on Scots language ability was featured.

## History

Northumbrian Old English had been established in what is now southeastern Scotland as far as the River Forth by the seventh century, as the region was part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Gaelic was the then language of the Scottish court and the common use of Old English remained largely confined to this area until the thirteenth century. The succeeding variety of Early northern Middle English spoken in southeastern Scotland, also known as Early Scots, began to diverge from that of Northumbria due to twelfth and thirteenth century immigration of Scandinavian-influenced Middle English-speakers from the North and Midlands of England. Later influences on the development of Scots were from Romance languages via ecclesiastical and legal Latin, Norman French and later Parisian French due to the Auld Alliance as well as Dutch and Middle Low German influences due to trade and immigration from the Low Countries. Scots also includes loan words resulting from contact with Gaelic. Early medieval legal documents include a body of Gaelic legal and administrative loans. Contemporary Gaelic loans are mainly for geographical and cultural features, such as *ceilidh*, *loch* and *clan*.

From the thirteenth century Early Scots spread further into Scotland via the burghs, proto-urban institutions which were first established by King David I. The growth in prestige of Early Scots in the fourteenth century, and the complementary decline of French in Scotland, made Scots the prestige language of most of eastern Scotland. By the sixteenth century Middle Scots had established orthographic and literary norms largely independent of those developing in England. From 1610 to the 1690s during the Plantation of Ulster large numbers of Scots-speaking Lowlanders, some 200,000, settled there. In the core areas of Scots settlement, Scots outnumbered English settlers by five or six to one. Modern Scots is used to describe the language after 1700 when southern Modern English was generally adopted as the literary language though Scots remained the vernacular.

## Status

Before the Treaty of Union 1707, when Scotland and England joined to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, there is ample evidence that Scots was widely held to be an independent sister language forming a pluricentric diasystem with English.

The linguist Heinz Kloss considered Modern Scots a *Halbsprache* (half language) in terms of an abstand and ausbau languages framework although today, in Scotland, most people's speech is somewhere on a continuum ranging from traditional broad Scots to Scottish Standard English. Many speakers are either diglossic and/or able to code-switch along the continuum depending on the situation in which they find themselves. Where on this continuum English-influenced Scots becomes Scots-influenced English is difficult to determine. Because standard English now generally has the role of a Dachsprache, disputes often arise as to whether the varieties of Scots are dialects of Scottish English or constitute a separate language in their own right.

The UK government now accepts Scots as a regional language and has recognized it as such under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.

### Language Shift

During the first half of the twentieth century, knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary norms waned, and currently there is no institutionalized standard literary form. By the 1940s, the Scottish Education Department's language policy was that Scots had no value: "it is not the language of 'educated' people anywhere, and could not be described as a suitable medium of education or culture". Students reverted to Scots outside the classroom, but the reversion was not complete. What occurred, and has been occurring ever since, is a process of language attrition, whereby successive generations have adopted more and more features from Standard English. This process has accelerated rapidly since widespread access to mass media in English and increased population mobility became available after the Second World War.[54] It has recently taken on the nature of wholesale language shift, sometimes also termed language change, convergence or merger. By the end of the twentieth century, Scots was at an advanced stage of language death over much of Lowland Scotland. Residual features of Scots are often regarded as slang. Recently, attitudes have somewhat changed, and the status of the language has been raised in schools in Scotland.

## Number of Speakers

It has been difficult to determine the number of speakers of Scots via census, because many respondents might interpret the question "Do you speak Scots?" in different ways. Campaigners for Scots pressed for this question to be included in the 2001 UK National Census. The results from a 1996 trial before the Census, by the General Register Office for Scotland, suggested that there were around 1.5 million speakers of Scots, with 30% of Scots responding "Yes" to the question "Can you speak the Scots language?", but only 17% responding "Aye" to the question "Can you speak Scots?". (It was also found that older, working-class people were more likely to answer in the affirmative.) The University of Aberdeen Scots Leid Quorum performed its own research in 1995, cautiously suggesting that there were 2.7 million speakers, though with clarification as to why these figures required context.

The 2011 UK census was the first to ask residents of Scotland about Scots. A campaign called Aye Can was set up to help individuals answer the question. The specific wording used was "Which of these can you do? Tick all that apply" with options for 'Understand', 'Speak', 'Read' and 'Write' in three columns: English, Scottish Gaelic and Scots. Of approximately 5.1 million respondents, about 1.2 million (24%) could speak, read and write Scots, 3.2 million (62%) had no skills in Scots and the remainder had some degree of skill, such as understanding Scots (0.27 million, 5.2%) or being able to speak it but not read or write it (0.18 million, 3.5%). There were also small numbers of Scots speakers recorded in England and Wales on the 2011 Census, with the largest numbers being either in bordering areas (e.g. Carlisle) or in areas that had recruited large numbers of Scottish workers in the past (e.g. Corby or the former mining areas of Kent).

## Scots excerpt from Wikipedia article "Scots leid"

Anglian spikkers wer weil staiblisht in sooth-eist Scotland bi tha 7t yeirhunder. In tha 13t yeirhunder Norman launainers an thair reteiners, speakin Northumbrian Middil Inglis, were bade tae cum an sattil bi tha Keeng. Scots kyth'd fer tha first tym en wrutten form en tha mids o tha 14t yeirhunder an didnae differ mukkil fae ither northren Inglis byleids. Th' Anglian leid o Scotland gra an its ain sinsyn. Bi tha lat 15t yeirhunder tha sicht fowk haed o tha differs wi tha leid spaken faurder sooth cam til tha fore an Scots-spikkin Scots begoud tae crie thair leid "Scots". Scots haes lend-wirds fae tha fak thit tha Scots fowk haed contak wi Gaelic spikkers. Thair lend-wirds is fer ordinair anerlì fer geographical an cultural hings, sik as *clan* an *loch*. Lyk onì leivin leid, Scots haes chynged ae bittie ower tha yeirs, tho it haes arguablì stey'd naurer til its Anglo-Saxon springheid than Inglis. Monie Scots wirds hae becum pairt o the Inglis ava: *flit, greed, eerie, cuddle, clan, stob*.