ScotsThe endonym for Scots is . is an Anglic language variety of West Germanic origin descended from Early Middle English. Thus, Modern Scots is a sister language of Modern English.Alexander Bergs, Modern Scots, Languages of the World series, No. 242 (Bow Historical Books, 2001), , pp. 4, 50. "Scots developed out of a mixture of Scandinavianised Northern English during the early Middle English period... Scots originated as one form of Northern Old English and quickly developed into a language in its own right up to the seventeenth century." Scots is classified as an official language of Scotland, a regional or minority language of Europe, and a vulnerable language by UNESCO. In a Scottish census from 2022, over 1.5 million people in Scotland (of its total population of 5.4 million people) reported being able to speak Scots.
Most commonly spoken in the Scottish Lowlands, the Northern Isles of Scotland, and northern Ulster in Ireland (where the local dialect is known as Ulster Scots), it is sometimes called Lowland Scots, to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language that was historically restricted to most of the Scottish Highlands, the Hebrides, and Galloway after the sixteenth century; or Broad Scots, to distinguish it from Scottish Standard English. Many Scottish people's speech exists on a dialect continuum ranging between Broad Scots and Standard English.
Given that there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing a language from a dialect, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about whether Scots is a dialect of English or a separate language.
Nomenclature Native speakers sometimes refer to their vernacular as (or "broad Scots" in English) or use a dialect name such as the "Doric" or the "". The old-fashioned Scotch, an English loan,Aitken, A. J. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press, 1992 p. 892. occurs occasionally, especially in Ulster. The term Lallans, a variant of the Modern Scots word , is also used, though this is more often taken to mean the Lallans literary form. Scots in Ireland is known in official circles as Ulster-Scots ( in revivalist Ulster-Scots) or "Ullans", a recent neologism merging Ulster and Lallans.
Etymology Scots is a contraction of , the Older Scots and northern version of late (modern English "Scottish"), which replaced the earlier i-mutated version . Before the end of the fifteenth century, English speech in Scotland was known as "English" (written or at the time), whereas "Scottish" () referred to Gaelic. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the English language used in Scotland had arguably become a distinct language, albeit one lacking a name which clearly distinguished it from all the other English variants and dialects spoken in Britain. From 1495, the term was increasingly used to refer to the Lowland vernacular and , meaning "Irish", was used as a name for Gaelic. For example, towards the end of the fifteenth century, William Dunbar was using to refer to Gaelic and, in the early sixteenth century, Gavin Douglas was using as a name for the Lowland vernacular. The Gaelic of Scotland is now usually called Scottish Gaelic.
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. Some historians have traditionally argued that the regions later known as Lothian and the Scottish Borders became attached to the Kingdom of Scotland in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, but this is no longer accepted and the takeover that does take place is not fully evident until the twelfth century and probably incomplete until at least the thirteenth century., at pp. 4-5, pp. 36–65. The common use of English remained largely confined to Lothian and the Borders until the thirteenth century, where the local varieties were reshaped in response to migration from the Scandinavian-influenced North and Midlands of England that came with the foundation of the first burghs in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Scots language scholar Robert McColl Millar framed Early Scots as a koine of the varieties of English spoken in Bernicia and the Danelaw that had been brought to the new burghs.
Later influences on the development of Scots came from the Romance languages via ecclesiastical and legal Latin, Norman French, and later Parisian French, due to the Auld Alliance. Additionally, there were Dutch and Middle Low German influences due to trade with and immigration from the Low Countries. Scots also includes loan words in the legal and administrative fields resulting from contact with Middle Irish, and reflected in early medieval legal documents. Contemporary Scottish Gaelic loans are mainly for geographical and cultural features, such as cèilidh, loch, whisky, glen and clan. Cumbric and Pictish, the medieval Brittonic languages of Northern England and Scotland, are the suspected source of a small number of Scots words, such as lum (derived from Cumbric) meaning "chimney". From the thirteenth century, the Early Scots language spread further into Scotland via the burghs, which were proto-urban institutions first established by King David I. In fourteenth-century Scotland, the growth in prestige of Early Scots and the complementary decline of French made Scots the prestige dialect 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, some 200,000 Scots-speaking Lowlanders settled as colonists in Ulster in Ireland.Montgomery & Gregg 1997: 572 In the core areas of Scots settlement, Scots outnumbered English settlers by five or six to one.Adams 1977: 57
The name Modern Scots is used to describe the Scots language after 1700.
A seminal study of Scots was undertaken by JAH Murray and published as Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland. Murray's results were given further publicity by being included in Alexander John Ellis's book On Early English Pronunciation, Part V alongside results from Orkney and Shetland, as well as the whole of England. Murray and Ellis differed slightly on the border between English and Scots dialects.
Scots was studied alongside English and Scots Gaelic in the Linguistic Survey of Scotland at the University of Edinburgh, which began in 1949 and began to publish results in the 1970s. Also beginning in the 1970s, the Atlas Linguarum Europae studied the Scots language used at 15 sites in Scotland, each with its own dialect. As of November 2022, Scots is represented on the Scientific Committee of the Atlas Linguarum Europae by David Clement of the University of Glasgow.
Language shift From the mid-sixteenth century, written Scots was increasingly influenced by the developing Standard English of Southern England due to developments in royal and political interactions with England. When William Flower, an English herald, spoke with Mary of Guise and her councillors in 1560, they first used the . As he found this hard to understand, they switched into her native French.Joseph Bain, Calendar State Papers Scotland, vol. 1 (Edinburgh, 1898), 322 no. 662 King James VI, who in 1603 became James I of England, observed in his work Some Reulis and Cautelis to Be Observit and Eschewit in Scottis Poesie that (For though several have written of (the subject) in English, which is the language most similar to ours...). However, with the increasing influence and availability of books printed in England, most writing in Scotland came to be done in the English fashion. In his first speech to the English Parliament in March 1603, King James VI and I declared, ."A Speach in Parliament. Anno 1603" in "The Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince Iames, by the Grace of God" (1616), pg. 485 Following James VI's move to London, the Protestant Church of Scotland adopted the 1611 Authorized King James Version of the Bible; subsequently, the Acts of Union 1707 led to Scotland joining England to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, having a single Parliament of Great Britain based in London. After the Union and the shift of political power to England, the use of Scots was discouraged by many in authority and education, as was the notion of "Scottishness" itself. Many leading Scots of the period, such as David Hume, defined themselves as Northern British rather than Scottish. They attempted to rid themselves of their Scots in a bid to establish standard English as the official language of the newly formed union. Nevertheless, Scots was still spoken across a wide range of domains until the end of the eighteenth century. Frederick Pottle, the twentieth-century biographer of James Boswell (1740–1795), described James's view of the use of Scots by his father Alexander Boswell (1706–1782) in the eighteenth century while serving as a judge of the Supreme Courts of Scotland:
However, others did scorn Scots, such as Scottish Enlightenment intellectuals David Hume and Adam Smith, who went to great lengths to get rid of every Scotticism from their writings. Following such examples, many well-off Scots took to learning English through the activities of those such as Thomas Sheridan, who in 1761 gave a series of lectures on English elocution. Charging a guinea at a time (about £ in today's money), they were attended by over 300 men, and he was made a freeman of the City of Edinburgh. Following this, some of the city's intellectuals formed the Select Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland. These eighteenth-century activities would lead to the creation of Scottish Standard English. Scots remained the vernacular of many rural communities and the growing number of urban working-class Scots.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the use of Scots as a literary language was revived by several prominent Scotsmen such as Robert Burns. Such writers established a new cross-dialect literary norm.
Scots terms were included in the English Dialect Dictionary, edited by Joseph Wright. Wright had great difficulty in recruiting volunteers from Scotland, as many refused to cooperate with a venture that regarded Scots as a dialect of English, and he obtained enough help only through the assistance from a Professor Shearer in Scotland. Wright himself rejected the argument that Scots was a separate language, saying that this was a "quite modern mistake".