I'm Scottish, but I work with a lot of Germans and every so often I try to learn some. I have found that Scots has a lot of similar works to German, sometimes more so than English. I guess this must be because it comes from Middle English which is related to High German. A few examples: "ken" (to know; "kenn" in German), "kirk" (church; "kirch" in German), "loch" (lake; literally "hole" in German), "reek" (smell; "riech" in German), "mair" (more; "mehr" in German). It's interesting to me because the other language I sometimes hear in Scotland other than English is Gaelic, which at least to my ear sounds nothing like any other language I've heard.
"Loch" in Scots isn't cognate with German "Loch" meaning hole, it's from Scottish Gaelic "loch" meaning lake, and cognate with Latin "lacus", English "lake", and German "Lache". Scottish Gaelic is a close relative of Irish and sounds quite similar to it.
Edit: "reek" in Scots means "smoke" and is probably cognate with German "rauchen".
In modern usage, by speakers of Scottish English, it means "smelly". I'm not 100% sure, but I'm confident that "reek" in this context was borrowed from Scots and the meaning has just drifted over time.
Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) and Irish Gaelic (Gaeilge, often just called "Irish") are both direct descendants of Middle Irish, which ultimately comes from a Celtic root. Gaidhlig gradually replaced Pictish, now extinct, about a thousand years ago.
I'm prone to false etymologies, so take this with a pinch of salt. Rauch and riechen, Geruch are probably related, too, only very far back and with lots of different influences in the mean time. I thought that rex, the dog name, could be related to riechen more than roy, king, because that's what they do. I thought so because Egyptian 'fnd' ("fenedj" - nose) does remind a little of 'find'. I'm quite fond of the idea. I reckon, with Egyptian 'rh' ("rekh" - to know), I become somewhat convinced of the idea. It could be from 'r' - mouth, 'hr' - head, top, chief.
Last time someone mentioned a possible connection from Egypt to Europe, it was quickly denounced. I'm not sure why.
There's more: 'rkh' - to burn; 'rh-nswt' - "acquaintance of the king" (nswt or nsw - king, god king; 'sw' - day, also 'hr' - day, if there's a connection from day to sun, sky, this could be analog to 'deus', 'divine', if I say so myself, otherwise 'swt' - sedge [a reed plant?] is considered as symbol of upper Egypt, giving king of the sedge; reeds, especially papyrus is related to writing and knowledge, so ... Ger. 'Gesetz' [law] is probably just from 'setzen' [set]; 'nswt' is not to be confused with German "Naseweiß" [cheeky, smart aleck]; 'rh' as ray is rather attractive, ie. rays of knowledge, rays of the sun figuratively as friends of the king, if connected to 'rkh' [to burn]); 'rht' - royal subjects, humanity [subjects of the king?]; 'rhs' - slaughter [from 'rkh' - to burn?]; 'rhn' - to depend on; 'rk' - time, age, era;
There's a discredited theory by Vennemann that linguistic evidence indicates Phonicians traveled from Spain to the north sea. There are actually finds of DNA that could corroborate something like this https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35179269 - incidentally 'bbr' means babylon, one could think that's related to bereber. 'fnhw' - means and is the root of the word phoenician, but I'm not going to make jokes about anyone's nose, because the theory is that 'fnh' means carpenter. 'fn' means something like misery, by the way, Egypt had problems with Lybian Berbers. They say Jesus was a carpenter. This is getting out of hand, I don't know when to stop.
Common Scottish English usage I encounter daily: "that bin reeks", "my dog rolled in fox poo and she reeks", "I was reeking of sweat", "that place reeked".
For what it's worth - I'm from Perth, Australia (presumably named after Perth, Scotland), and we use the word the same way here. "Oh my god, that absolutely reeks" would be a common usage.
I'm in Montana and we have a local Loch. Except it's pronounced "Lock" (but still spelled "Loch"). But is isn't actually a Loch, just a reach of the river (that runs through it).
Also present in North East English, which can be just as far removed from the Queen's English as the Scottish dialect. "Bairn" and "hus" definitely, and also "gan" (to go), "yam" (home, norwegian "hjem").
The usual criterion for distinguishing language from dialect is mutual intelligibility.
Mutual intelligibility, however, is a continuum, with Scots verging towards the language end while Geordie being more on the dialect end of the spectrum.
There’s a limited degree of mutual intelligibility between some other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian and German, too.
However, for all practical intents and purposes those are still separate languages.
Someone once quipped that languages are dialects with an army, which could explain why Scots historically is considered a separate language while Geordie is not.
> The usual criterion for distinguishing language from dialect is mutual intelligibility.
The problem with this criterion is that mutual intelligibility is not transitive, so it doesn't support an intuitive notion of sameness that one might expect. Consider some language with distinct dialects A, B, and C lying at different points on the dialect continuum. If A and B are mutually intelligible, and B and C are mutually intelligible, it is still possible that A and C are not mutually intelligible. However, this is a property we'd expect if this criterion were enough to say that A, B, and C were all dialects of the same language. In addition to being unintuitive, it also raises some tough questions, like: if they're all the same language today and the last speaker of B dies tomorrow, are A and C still dialects of the same language?
From a linguist's point of view, there's no useful distinction between a dialect and a language. It's more common to talk about "varieties", which is a more general term that includes dialects, regiolects, sociolects, idiolects, &c. Grouping of varieties is done contextually and for utility, often for the sake of convenience, and often according to some guiding principles (phylogeny in diachronic linguistics, for example, helps us to understand the historical relationships among groups).
There's some truth to the quip that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, though: in practice, the distinction between the two is a sociopolitical one. Some people will be very upset if some outside group starts insisting that, in fact, no, you do not speak Arabic anymore, or, no, you do not speak Chinese anymore, or, no, Moldovan was never really a language. For many people, their native language is an integral part of their national identity, and it's not for outsiders to decide. It won't matter how precise and logical a definition someone comes up with, because it was never a scientific or philosophical issue to begin with. We allow social groups to self-actualize their own identities, or everyone is gonna have a bad time.
>From a linguist's point of view, there's no useful distinction between a dialect and a language.
I think you mean, for edge cases, there’s no useful distinction. Mutual comprehensibility is a pretty useful concept, and no one makes “Arabic is a the same language as English” their Hill-to-die-on.
When the edges are numerous and blurry, you have to question the utility of trying to formalize a definition. Obviously, the idea of discrete languages is socially useful in many situations, but there's no point in trying to invent a hard rule to distinguish a dialect from a language. That's why it's better thought of as a continuum, with English vs Arabic being obviously distinct but recently divergent and convergent varieties left forever moot.
In the case of Scots and Scottish English, there's a lot of blurring and the distinction is of questionable actual value -- though I would make that distinction personally. I speak Scottish Standard English, and have a parent whose first language was a variety of Modern Scots. I find it very hard to follow them when they've switched into it to speak with someone from their hometown. Due to the difficulty in parsing it, both in my case and in the case of the other parent after 40-ish years of marriage, I'd consider it more than just a dialect.
Both Scottish English and Scots descend from the same root Anglic, but there's been divergence since then -- in the same way Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are descended from the same root, are somewhat mutually intelligible, but are treated as two different languages. It's useful to make that distinction simply because there is a degree of unintelligibility.
Everyone on this website is speaking an Indo-European language, and I'd bet a majority of them have an Indo-European language as their first language. They're all from the same root, so are they all speaking dialects of Indo-European? Or are they speaking distinct languages? Where, exactly, you decide "this was a dialect, but now it's a language!" I can't say, but that point surely exists. It's obviously muddied by politics and national identity and a hundred other factors, but at some point, surely, a language ceases to be a dialect and becomes a language of its own.
That point exists, but it's contextual. You could draw the line at shared identity. Or political boundary. Or the existence of a body of literature. Or a certain bar of recognition. Or a certain number of university programs. Or some concept mutual intelligibility. Or whatever. But these distinctions will conflict with one another, so there is no clear line.
I have no real authority, but to me, I see no reason why Scots shouldn't be a language. English and Scots would certainly not be the most similar languages to be considered distinct. Plenty of other varieties of the English continuum, for that matter.
The fact that you can recognize Arabic and English as being different languages, with practical implications, means that a substantive distinction exists.
That's a really simplistic way of looking at it. To most people, red and blue are very distinct colors. No one would argue that they're the same. But are crimson and pink different colors, or different shades of the same color? What about #f00 and #f11? It's both arbitrary and contextual.
Categorization is easy when a difference is so large as to be irrefutable. But thinking in terms of continuum is much more useful when looking at small differences.
Language is simply uncountable. House and haus are pretty much the same word to me, so English and German overlap. If they are not disjunct, it doesn't make sense to count them one by one. That would be like counting sand by the corns, and by extension, coast lines by the sand. Language is recursive (a rose is a rose is a ...), what is its Housedorff dimension!? If you take a point in a topological space and give it a closed cover, you can calculate the area of the disc, but ... ok, I have close to no idea of complex analysis (didn't expect it would come in helpful for linguistics). The point is, if two arbitrarily large set's of Language are easier to compare by what they have in common, than where they are mutually exclusive, than you could colloquially call those different sets of language. If you can't even parse the speech, you won't be able to do that, so a natural speaker will perceive it as different. Book keeping Linguists are more interested in, or even bound to writing, as is clear from them calling spoken syntax "grammar" (which is from gramm~graph~scrapho writing, drawing, unless I'm missing something).
Well, it's countable in the sense that a countable number of humans have existed, with a countable (or at least bounded) number of idiolects per human. That's pretty much the "point in discrete color space" point of view I was getting at on one extreme. That's not a very useful level of granularity for much else other than upper bounding. At the lower bound, maybe we all just speak and sign dialects of some inherent Chomsky-esque universal grammar. In between, there are all sorts of ways you can draw borders on the map to tesselate it into languages, but few of these schemes can be defined without resorting to idiosyncratic decisions.
Language is a social construct. We're colloquial beings, and 99% of the time we all agree on what's what. What irritates me are the folks that think that the remaining 1% can be decided in some kind of objective way. Is Scots its own language? Depends on who you ask, and in what context. There are valid arguments either way. Embrace the ambiguity.
It's a matter of ongoing language exchange. So English is still a common language, but Afrikans and Dutch are different, if South African speakers are not exposed to dutch a lot. I'm not sure how it is for Portuguese at home and in Brazil. The Brazilians have little exposure to Portuguese media content, I guess, so I'd expect it would diverge, if it develops quickly, if language change didn't get slower for various reasons, which I suppose it did though due to social and technical developments.
As a German it feels like Scots and English might be described as dialects, i think the variety between standard German and swabian or Bavarian dialect (maybe not the accent of Stuttgart or Munich population but what grandmother spoke and the villagers still speak when they are among themselves).
At least Swiss German is described as a dialect of German, and it is unintelligible for people north of the Main river.
So if Scots is a dialect I would say Swiss German dialects might be their own language.
>I have found that Scots has a lot of similar works to German, sometimes more so than English. I guess this must be because it comes from Middle English which is related to High German.
Yes. I'm not an expert, but it seems so. See this comment by me, for example, on a recent HN thread about German:
I generally like Atlas Obscura's articles, but this one has, to use a local phrase, a load of shite in it.
I've lived in Scotland my entire life and never come across anyone who speaks "Scots" as their main language. It's not taught as a course in any school that I'm aware of, so the idea that 1.5 million people "read, spoke or understood scots" seems like it required a bit of "flexible thinking" to be true.
What is true is that many scottish people understand words which come from scots as their used in vernacular speech.
Things like "Auld" == "old" or "Braw" == "good", but I wouldn't equate that with understanding a language.
Let me see your anecdote with another, growing up in Scotland I had the exact opposite experience.
Depending on the area and interaction, you'll find Scots. Formal encounters are most certainly conducted in English with the odd Scots word thrown in however in my experience, particularly when concerned with community work, Scots was more common than not. On a lighter note, I recall visiting a comic theatre production in Arbroath which to my surprise was mostly spoken in Doric, and found myself odd one out and missing many of the jokes.
Regarding education, in high school we had entire units where we read and wrote Scots, and the majority of classroom discourse took place in Scots. This was not a special language nor otherwise remarkable school in any sense, it just seemed to be par of the curriculum in Angus at the very least.
Well times are obviously different where you are. Over in Glasgow we had no contact or mention of Scots as a language in school whatsoever.
Out of curiousity, what rough timeframe was your schooling in? I have a feeling that it's been seeing more of a resurgance in recent years, my schooling experience was in the 70's and 80's for comparison.
I find Scots words in vernacular speech all the time, but I don't think I've ever heard someone speaking it as a distinct language.
I've heard weegies speak Glaswegian, and I've heard people from the kingdom speak with their accent and dialect, but not people speaking "Scots".
Not parent, but : school in Edinburgh. We code-switched, although the term wouldn't be coined for decades yet. RP in school, some variety of Scots (or whatever we're calling it) outside school.
In school it's likely you were speaking Standard Scottish English. Received Pronunciation (RP) is an accent, not a dialect -- though most RP speakers speak Standard English, so there's a strong correlation between RP and Standard English. I've yet to come across and RP speaker who speaks another variety, excluding the occasional phrase or borrowed word.
Outside of school you were almost certainly speaking Scottish Standard English, rather than actual Scots. Scottish English is a branch of English that's been influenced by Scots and borrowed vocabulary from Scots, but isn't actually Scots. Almost no-one in the 20th century speaks actual Scots; those who do are immediately identifiable and generally hard for a non-Scots speaker to understand. The last vestiges of Scots language speakers are parts of Aberdeenshire and the Borders.
Sources: Highlander born and raised, living in Aberdeen for >10 years. One parent is a Gael whose second language is English, the other parent is from the Borders whose first language is that variety of Modern Scots. Native speaker of Scottish Standard English, with a little time spent studying linguistics and an interest in the subject.
"Over in Glasgow we had no contact or mention of Scots as a language in school whatsoever."
Pretty unsurprising, given that it's Glasgow. You're totally outwith the areas being discussed. It even says in the article that Scots is predominantly in the North of Scotland.
Eh, the Highlands speak Gaelic traditionally not scots in the way they're discussing in the article.
Also to quote the article
"Over the next few centuries, Scots, which was the language of the southern Scottish people, began to creep north"
So that doesn't really support your point
EDIT: so unless I miss my guess you're actually in Glasgow, so I'll ask, have you ever heard anyone speak "scots" as a distinct language, in real conversation? I'm genuinely curious about whether my experience of 40+ years not having heard it is unusual.
It's like saying that some people in London are capable of understanding rural Cork English. It might be true; it doesn't make 'Corkish' a language, even though if you wrote down the language of rural Cork I think it would be as different from London English in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation as Scots.
"There are only two dialects of Irish, plain Irish and toothless Irish, and, lacking a proper acquaintance with the latter, I think I missed the cream of the old man's talk." --Brendan Behan
I would take that with a huge pinch of salt. Census data is self-reported, and most people don't know that Scots is a distinct language from Scottish English, albeit one sharing the same Anglic root and with a lot of borrowed words and phrases.
I live in Aberdeen, and I'm pretty sure if I was to leave my flat and ask people I met in the street whether they spoke Scots or English, I'd get a disproportionate number of Scottish English speakers tell me they speak Scots; I'd also probably get some of the Doric-speaking locals tell me they speak English, even though Doric is actually a descendant of Scots.
Here's a repost of an earlier comment[1] I made on the relationship between Scots and English, which also applies here:
I think you're confusing dialect with language here. Scots and Scottish English are distinct from one another. The latter does borrow some from the former which leads to confusion. Scots is a language, historically equivalent and closely related to English but still distinct.
It's a stretch to argue that "many modern English speakers derive from Scots root". At this point in history, most Scots speak Scottish English with some borrowing from a Scots root -- not the other way around. This is evident in the fact that the vast majority of a modern Scottish person's vocabulary is from mainline English and intelligible by someone from London. That doesn't happen by Scots borrowing vocabulary from English -- it happens from English absorbing vocabulary from Scots.
This is the situation for the vast majority of Scottish people. Coming across those who don't fit into the English-with-Scots-influence only reinforces this. Doric is arguably a descendant of mainline Scots which has converged on English, rather than the other way around, and means it's sometimes difficult to parse even for other Scots. Quite a lot of the Borders also speak a dialect which derives from Scots which has converged on English, and is difficult for other Scots to parse. They sound very similar to each other to someone who speaks neither, but are actually quite distinct -- mistaking someone from Selkirk for an Aberdonian will cause offence!
The Wikipedia has a pretty good article on Modern Scots, though I think it overstates the pervasiveness of modern Scots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Scots It's also worth noting that most speakers of Modern Scots also speak Scottish English, and code-switching takes place frequently and fluidly.
Gaelic is spoken by ~57,500 people in Scotland. Some of them have English as a second language, having been raised with Gaelic as the language of the home. In some cases this does show their English usage. One common tell is slightly unusual phrasing -- one typical and quite common usage is "You will be having tea?" rather than the more common "Will you be having tea?" Even then, they're still speaking a variety Scottish English and not Scots.
tl;dr: Every Scottish person speaks at least one of the dialects of Scottish English. Some also speak a dialect of Modern Scots. An even smaller number speak Gaelic.
Sources: Highlander born and raised, living in Aberdeen for >10 years. One parent is a Gael whose second language is English, the other parent is from the Borders whose first language is that variety of Modern Scots. Native speaker of Scottish Standard English, with a little time spent studying linguistics and an interest in the subject.
"a load of balls" and "pal" are pretty well understood anywhere in Britain. Scouse and Geordie accents have lots of difficult pronunciation and unusual vocabulary like this, and I don't think that they are languages.
I don’t understand your distinction, mutual intelligibility does not discount a tongue from being a language, and discounting dialects from the accent <-> language continuum seems overly logocentric. I agree that dialects like Scouse, Strine, Geordie are not distinct languages; I also think that a rest-of-The-world English speaker would struggle to understand a speaker going full-on with the vernacular.
The trouble with finding equivalent meanings between words with similar spellings/pronunciation is that you’ll conclude English and Dutch are the same language (or Danish/Norwegian/Swedish)
I've lived in Norway for the last 32 years and from my English vantage point Norwegian and Danish are definitely dialects of the same language. Swedish is the one that has made the most progress to becoming a separate language because of the large amount of vocabulary that is not shared with the other two but it is still not really distinct. All three have essentially the same grammar and syntax. I can converse with educated, well spoken, Swedes because the pronunciation is very similar to Norwegian even though spelling, vocabulary, and usage often differ. On the other hand I struggle with Trøndersk which no one claims is a separate language from Norwegian, and Danish is almost impossible in conversation because the pronunciation is so different from Norwegian but reading it is very easy.
These three languages are much more similar than Dutch and English.
I agree with the principles of what you say but I also agree with the other reply to you. It is definitely a continuum and we can only impose artificial boundaries to it; what is mutually intelligible to one speaker may not be to another. However, from my experience of the accents of the Atlantic Archipelago (owning to my political bias here!), I don't think Scots is more different to RP than Scouse or southern Hiberno-English, perhaps with the exception of some very isolated communities.
> The two languages are about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, or Norwegian and Danish.
Well I'm in a fairly interesting position to judge this. I speak Danish, and I lived with a Norwegian guy for a long time. And my in-laws are lowland Scots.
There are indeed some old words like kerk that are Germanic. But I think it's unusual for people to be speaking something that you'd call its own language. At least the inlaws don't use it full-time. It's more that they have a number of phrases that they sometimes pull out, and then there's a load of Robbie Burns (Auld Lang Syne). They seem to be able to decipher his stuff in a way that I as a mainstream English speaker cannot. They'd know what the gas station sign meant, where I would have a reasonable guess but be unsure.
This is probably quite similar to a Dane picking up a Norwegian (or Swedish, which is maybe a step more difficult) newspaper. You'd get most of it, but there would be the odd word you don't get, or there would be an odd spelling, or a noun would fall in the wrong gender. But you'd get the gist of most everything. The problem is without some instruction you won't know what some crucial small words are. (I found when learning German after just a few lessons a whole lot of things fell into place and it went from unintelligible to newspaper standard. Same seems to be happening wrt Mandarin and Cantonese.)
One thing to keep in mind is my inlaws insist the resurgence of Gaelic and Scots are artificial; they didn't have any instruction in either. It's like the languages have been reborn from the ashes, rather than having had a continuous existence (which I guess they actually did). But the big rebirth happened after they grew up in the 60s and 70s. Something similar is happening in Wales. Welsh speakers I've met have tended to be young.
Also, regarding Scots not being that different, people do tend to (not always consciously) modify their speech towards mutual intelligibility when talking to people of different languages. My parents recently visited Tangier, VA[1], and had a conversation with some kids on the ferry, noticing "oh, they speak a bit differently", then they turned to speak to each other and my mom couldn't understand a word.
I really enjoyed this article. Scots is certainly a language of its own - to hear it in the wild you must venture out of the more populous areas (Inverness and Aberdeen are exceptions) of Scotland and into the highlands and rural areas. It is also used much more by older, poorer or more isolated demographics within Scotland: as a farmers' son, I met many Scots-speaking people when I went to the market with my father.
People who claim Scots is "just an accent" don't know what they're talking about.
I'd say it's a dialect, not a language. It's more than an accent for sure, for starters scotland has a load of different accents not just one, as I'm sure many teuchters going to Glasgow have found out the hard way.
But I find it difficult to get to the idea that people "speak scots" in rural areas.
I've lived and worked in Scotland my entire life and in 40+ years, not once has someone start speaking in a language I didn't get in general conversation... not once, and I would not regard myself as multi-lingual.
There's local terms that are used for sure, "you ken"
But that's not a language, that's a variety of local dialects.
My maternal grandparents retired to rural Aberdeenshire, they were both born in Aberdeen itself. I don't remember any of the local farmers speaking in a way that I couldn't understand so my vote is for dialect too.
I've worked in factories in Cumbernauld, I've worked in universities in St Andrews, I've worked in banks in Edinburgh, I've worked in accountancy offices in Glasgow, I've worked in hospitals in Dumfries.
I've visited pretty much every part of the country, and no-one has ever "code switched to match my expected communications preference"
This idea that Scottish people are some generic blob who speak "Scots" just isn't true to the real diversity of the country.
Aberdonians, Glaswegians, Edinbuggers, residents of the Kingdom of Fife, Teuchters and all the rest have different accents and different dialects but they don't speak different languages.
> "Aberdonians, Glaswegians, Edinburghers, residents of the Kingdom of Fife, Teuchters and all the rest have different accents and different dialects but they don't speak different languages."
Spend some time in places like the Shetlands Islands or the Orkney Islands and the dialect vs language distinction is much more debateable, given the number of distinct words borrowed from the Norn language.
Aye I've spent many holidays in Shetland and what's spoken there has more chance of being a distinct language that most areas of Scotland, but they have a different heritage again, with a large norwegian influence.
Not at all, I'm attempting to reflect the reality of life in Scotland as in my lived experience, as opposed to academic notions of language and identity.
There's no "but" at the end of my being a proud Scot. There is a debate about the validity of Scots as a unified language that's used in day to day life, and some romantic notions that we speak in some other language when "foreigners" aren't around.
The reality of Scotland is that in my opinion we're a diverse set of regions, not some unified mass that speaks a distinct language, that's not a lack of pride speaking that's a pride in exactly that diversity (also I don't want to be put in the same bucket as edinbuggers :)
Assuming from your profile that you're scottish, would You say that Edinburgh people spoke the same dialect as people from Glasgow. Would you say that we speak a different language to people in Carlisle or Newcastle?
Mate, I apologise for my comment. I don't have the time right now to have a proper blether about this, just had food and a bottle of wine and I'm a bit knackered. Will maybe catch up with this tomorrow?
I was real interested in this article since my ancestors were about 80% scots or welsh. Welsh is undeniably a language, but Scots makes you wonder about the difference between a language and a dialect. I found this article by a famous linguist:
"English tempts one with a tidy dialect-language distinction based on “intelligibility”...But because of quirks of its history, English happens to lack very close relatives, and the intelligibility standard doesn’t apply consistently beyond it. Worldwide, some mutually understandable ways of speaking, which one might think of as “dialects” of one language, are actually treated as separate languages. At the same time, some mutually incomprehensible tongues an outsider might view as separate “languages” are thought of locally as dialects."
This is spot on. The first thing I did after reading the article was go to Scots Wikipedia. I could read the articles pretty well after a minute, since there seems to be a nearly one-to-one mapping between the Scots words and English words, and so I thought "this isn't a language." The grammar was different than standard english, but similar to the way some southerners talk. But had I grown up speaking another language maybe I'd have a different instinct about whether that intelligibility made it a language. Moreover, says something I chose written language for deciding whether it's a language or not: all english speakers are used to not being able to understand spoken english from other places and classes.
In the end, I suppose the whole difference is socially constructed and involves politics mixed with what people regard as common sense.
Random sample ("featured article") from the scots wikipedia:
"The testicle (frae Laitin testiculus, diminutive o testis, meanin "witness" o virility, plural testes) is the male gonad in ainimals. Lik the ovaries tae which they are homologous, testes are components o baith the reproductive seestem an the endocrine seestem."
> The grammar was different than standard english, but similar to the way some southerners talk.
It's interesting that you mention this, since there are a lot of Scottish-descent people in the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains in the southeast of the United States. I had some distant relatives there who still had a clan affiliation that I met once when I was a child.
Yeah that’s who my mom is descended from and I’m from Alabama. What happened is There was a migration of scots Presbyterians to Northern Ireland, and then from Northern Ireland to Appalachia. In the south they call that ethnicity scots-Irish but over there I think they call it Ulster Irish. For a while there were a series of books about the scots Irish (eg “born fighting” by senator jim Webb and the chapter in outliers by Malcolm gladwell about why scots Irish are so violent—-for some reason all the books were about violence...I suppose because the people who buy the books want to thing if themselves as brave and dangerous).
I'm Scottish. There is a resurgence of Scots in the cities (I'm in Glasgow) but it's a bit hipster. Even most central belt (Glasgow or Edinburgh) Scots think it's a little bit of a joke language. So this is article is interesting even for us.
History has done a good and subtle job of ensuring Scots is thought of as a dialect of the poor - a lesser form of English.
The interesting thing here is the fact that Scots is clearly Germanic - the resemblance is uncanny.
In the cities they have started putting Gaelic place names underneath the English place names on railway station signs etc. Maybe it would have been more appropriate to put Scots versions there, since Gaelic was (and still is) the language of the North and not the lowland cities?
"History has done a good and subtle job of ensuring Scots is thought of as a dialect of the poor - a lesser form of English."
Related processes happened all over western europe. Before radio & conscription, regional english dialects ranged from thick to "can't be understood one county over." There was a conscious effort to unify the language under the official dialect, king's english. Something similar was happening in Flanders, Netherlands right up until recently... Dialects were discouraged in schools and speaking in dialect became associated with a lack of schooling.
Putting Gaelic on the recently introduced Borders Railway signs did strike me as a slightly odd decision given lowland Scotland has zero historical connection with the Gaelic language. It almost comes across as a form of cultural imperialism.
This strong dialect, almost a language type thing is pretty common in the UK in general. I grew up in the Welsh border counties of England, and it was pretty common amongst remote rural people to speak a dialect that would have been impossible to understand by people in the towns 50 miles away. Bits of it survive, in Shropshire it is relatively common to hear locals say the weather is "cowd", and to pronounce words like "sheep" as "ship" (the old phrase "spoiling the ship for hap'orth of tar", meaning ruining something of value for the want of a cheap bit of maintenance, is apparently not about boats).
I find most intriguing that men call each other "mon", like, "Surry mon it's cowd", or "how bin'ee mon". However the equivalent English, "hey man, it's cold today" would be absurd in England. To the old folks "she" was normally replaced with "her", as in "her is cawd".
So those are all variant pronunciations or usages, but it goes further. My father is an upper-wommer (a yokel, but more effectionately meant. Literally someone whose house is high up in the hills). When he spoke to his father I used to struggle to follow say all. They would talk of "tumps" (small hill), "unts" (moles), and the lovely "unty-tumps" (yes mole-hills). Owls were "ulerts", gaps in hedges were "glats" bill-hooks were brummucks. There were bits of old-English thrown in, I was once told a brummuck needed "whetting" (as in whetstone, sharpening stone) and was confused enough as a child that I thought soaking it in oil to treat the rust should do-it.
By the definitions above, if I as a teenager couldn't understand my grandfather (who I saw regularly) talking to my father, surely they were speaking a different language?
Btw despite this being the Welsh borders, Welsh is very uncommon as a language, and whilst I don't speak Welsh, the vocab doesn't seem to come from there. Welsh has a number of sounds like "Ll" that were not used.
Post WW2 farming became very prosperous in the area, and lots of farmers became gentrified and sent their sons to the elite English private schools (confusingly known as the Public Schools, for historical reasons). I think this is largely responsible for reducing the usage of the local language. Know you can still find it on building sites, farm labourers, and in little remote pockets.
One of the points of the article is that Scots is definitely not a dialect, and is definitely a separate language, to the point that the author stopped answering the question of which it is because it was so common a misconception.
That was the point I was answering. Is this border-speak also not a language, if I couldn't understand my own father taking it to my grandfather, as a native English speaker with a shared accent?
I'm surprised to read this whole thread and not see any mention of Irving Welsh. When I studied abroad in Wales, I read Trainspotting, which is written in the Edinburgh flavor of Scots. To an American, it was almost as much effort as reading Spanish.
Speaking of Wales, if my Welsh roommates were talking amongst themselves, their own flavor of English (distinct from Welsh, which they also spoke) was almost completely unintelligible to me. Perhaps less from grammar and vocab as much as an entirely different cadence and very different vowels.
I think the Allusionist is a really interesting podcast, and this episode was a great one. It brought back some early childhood memories of my time in Scotland (where I first learnt to speak), and also of the responses to my accent and vocabulary when we returned to Australia.
I'm not a linguist, but Scots sounds less like a language than a creole (a mix of languages which span essential terms), or even a pidgin dialect (an incomplete mix, requiring phrases or a third language to replace missing concepts). The article doesn't say explicitly, but I imagine Scots varies geographically, with the mix reflecting contribution from local tongues (English, Gaelic, French, Pict, etc).
I think it's fair to debate whether the difference between Scots and English is between two languages or two dialects, but Scots is definitely neither a pidgin nor a creole.
Pidgins are highly simplified proto-languages that emerge to smooth communication between people with no languages in common. Scots is not highly simplified - it's about as complex as English; they share most but not all of their grammar.
Creoles are full languages which arise _suddenly_, generally within a few generations, from a mixture of two or more parent languages. Pidgins often develop into creoles when children grow up speaking them. Scots and English certainly bear influences from many language families, but these influences occurred over many centuries, not a few generations.
Scots does vary geographically, having dialects of its own (just like English), but this isn't unusual.
Yes, there isn't (in my view) such a thing as a singular 'Scots'.
The 'Scots language' is effectively a 20th century invention by early century poets like Hugh MacDiarmid.
They created a pan-Scottish 'Literary Scots' combining language and grammar from across the country. It's beautiful literary work but it is an artifice, not a reflection of a language actually spoken.
The language of the Scottish Borders is a very different thing from the language of the Highlands from the language of a Dundonian.
From my experience you're absolutely correct. This idea that Glasgwegians speak the same "language" as Dundonians or Aberdonians or (heaven help us) Edinbuggers, is just weird.
We don't. There's lots of local accents and phrases and words, but not some "scots language" that we start speaking when foreigners aren't around :)
Aberdonian here. Yep, doric is very different from dialects elsewhere. I married a girl from Edinburgh, and after more than 10 years we're still discovering new words from each others areas!
The “native” inhabitants of Scotland spoke Brythonic and Pictish (both Celtish languages); since then, the Gaels (who were also Celts), Romans, Norse, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans arrived from various directions and displaced them utterly. Scots arose from Old English and diverged from Middle English a scant few hundred years ago, when travel and the printing press made it easy for new terms to disseminate and usage to remain reasonable homogenous.
There are some touches of these previous languages present in some dialects, like Shetland and Orkney using peedie/peerie (derived from Norn) where standard Scots uses wee.
Here's a great lecture about the Scots language and it's history - in Scots. I found I could understand it if I focus, perhaps given my exposure to British comedy.
https://youtu.be/cENbkHS3mnY
Much as I enjoy the Scots accent, it's just that: an accent.
I know: "the difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a navy." (meaning: there is no difference)
But insisting Scots is a separate language feels like a nationalist thing. As the article mentions, it's not that Scotland doesn't have a real language all its own, Scottish Gaelic. But that would take time to study and master, and it's easier to really dive into your local pronunciation up to a point where no one understands it as English, write it down phonetically, and claim it's a language.
From the article:
"Ye may gang faur an fare waur" apparently meaning: "You may go further and do a lot worse",
or,
"you may go farther and fare worse", if you pronounce it in dialect and just write it down like that.
I'd say it's a dialect; with an accent vocabulary matches somewhat, but Scots differs considerably in word use and has grammatical differences. In fact I'd be prepared to say there may be a language hidden away there somewhere, but because in use people mix it with a more standard English it's akin to a creole, perhaps.
My in-laws introduced me to "Scotland the What", and for the first few watchings mutual comprehension with my native British English was on a par with understanding Afrikaans [exaggeration]. But I think that show itself is a dialect of Scots (Doric), which supports the higher claims to linguistic independence IMO.
"Bi foo, fit, far an fan,
Ye can tell a Farfar man" (traditional poem)
Which of you loons and quines recognises that top line as "by who, what, where and when,"?
That said, there are lots of differences in the UK in vernacular language use: What you call your bread rolls (bread cakes, barms, baps, rolls, buns, muffin, batch, cob, etc.), or a lane (wynd [Scots], ginnel, snicket, alley, passage, jitty, etc.), for example.
I imagine this is similar in other countries, certainly it seems that way in France to some extent.
If I tell you what locals called their lunch where I grew up it locates me to within about a 20 mile radius; 5 or 6 towns. But even with that Scots seems more broadly distinctive.
Scots Gaelic is the best option if we have to have one, but TBH I'm not sure that the majority of scottish people really resonate with it, as it's not been a significantly used language for the majority of Scottish people in hundreds of years.
On the scots pronunciation thing, yeah that's usually how I work out what it is, just say the words out loud with a scottish accent and I can work out what they're getting at.
>but that would take time to study and master, and it's easier to really dive into your local pronunciation up to a point where no one understands it as English, write it down phonetically, and claim it's a language.
It's more political than that, there is a protestant/catholic aspect to it too, although that is more pronounces in Ulster.
Is it the dialect in which many characters speak in Walter Scott novels like Rob Roy and Old Mortality, if so it is very intelligible to an English reader.
"To flit" is also standard English, although more specific than the Scots use. It suggests a very small thing moving or fluttering, like a bird or insect.
Norse or perhaps Norrønt, not Swedish. The modern Scandinavian languages diverged later. And anyway most of the Scandinavians in Scotland were surely Norwegian not Swedish.
