Scots language
Encyclopedia
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 variety spoken in most of the western Highlands
and in the Hebrides
.
Since there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing language
s from dialect
s, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots. Although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects do exist, these often render contradictory results. Focused broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English
at the other. Consequently, Scots is often regarded as one of the ancient varieties of English
, but with its own distinct dialects. Alternatively, Scots is sometimes treated as a distinct Germanic language, in the way Norwegian
is closely linked to, yet distinct from, Danish
. Those positions are also reflected in the 2010 Scottish Government study of "public attitudes towards the Scots language" in which 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 where "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.
as braid Scots (or "broad Scots" in English) or use a dialect name such as the "Doric", "Teri
" or the "Buchan Claik". The old-fashioned Scotch, an English loan, occurs occasionally. The term Lallans, a variant of the Modern Scots
word lawlands ˈlo̜ːlən(d)z, ˈlɑːlənz, 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 (Ulstèr-Scotch in revivalist Ulster-Scots) or "Ullans", a recent neologism merging Ulster and Lallans.
and northern version of late Old English Scottisc (modern English "Scottish"), which replaced the earlier i-mutated
version Scyttisc. Prior to the 15th century English speech in Scotland was known as "English" (written Ynglis or Inglis at the time), whereas "Scottish" (Scottis) referred to Gaelic.
By the beginning of the 15th century, the English of Scotland had arguably become a distinct language, albeit lacking a name which clearly distinguished it from the English of southern Britain. From 1495 the term Scottis was increasingly used to refer to the Lowland vernacular and Erse, meaning Irish, as a name for Gaelic. For example, towards the end of the 15th century William Dunbar
was using Erse to refer to Gaelic and in the early 16th century Gavin Douglas
was using Scottis as a name for the Lowland vernacular. The term Erse is usually considered pejorative, and the Gaelic of Scotland is now usually called Scottish Gaelic.
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
. It remained largely confined to this area until the thirteenth century, continuing in common use while Gaelic was the language of the Scottish court. 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
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 burgh
s, 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.
, 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 Ausbausprache – Abstandsprache – Dachsprache 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. Since standard English now generally has the role of a Dachsprache, disputes often arise as to whether or not 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 recognised it as such under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages
.
Evidence for its existence as a separate language lies in the extensive body of Scots literature, its independent – if somewhat fluid – orthographic conventions
and in its former use as the language of the original Parliament of Scotland
. Since Scotland retained distinct political, legal and religious systems after the Union, many Scots terms passed into Scottish English.
of England due to developments in royal and political interactions with England. When an English herald
spoke to Mary of Guise
and her councillors in 1560, at first they spoke in the "Scottish tongue" but because he could not understand they continued in French. With the increasing influence and availability of books printed in England, most writing in Scotland came to be done in the English fashion. In 1603 King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England
. The Protestant Church of Scotland adopted the 1611 Authorized King James Version of the Bible and the Acts of Union 1707
which led to England joining Scotland to form the United 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
, considered themselves 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 seventeenth century, illustrated for example, in the summary by F. Pottle, James Boswell
's twentieth century biographer, concerning James' view of the speech habits of his father Alexander Boswell
, a judge
of the supreme court
s of Scotland
:
like 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. From such eighteenth century activities grew 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.
During the first half of the twentieth century, knowledge of eighteenth and nineteenth century literary norms waned, and currently there is no institutionalised 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, of course, 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. 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
. A Scottish Government study in 2010 found that 64% of respondents (being a representative sample of Scotland's adult population) "don't really think of Scots as a language", however, "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%)".
of Scots. Scots may be covered superficially in English lessons, which usually entails reading some Scots literature and observing the local dialect. Much of the material used is often Standard English disguised as Scots, which has upset proponents of Standard English and proponents of Scots alike. One example of the educational establishment's approach to Scots is "Write a poem in Scots. (It is important not to be worried about spelling in this – write as you hear the sounds in your head.)", whereas guidelines for English require teaching pupils to be "writing fluently and legibly with accurate spelling and punctuation." Scots can also be studied at university level.
The use of Scots in the media is scant and is usually reserved for niches where local dialect is deemed acceptable, e.g. comedy, Burns Night
, or representations of traditions and times gone by. Serious use for news, encyclopaedias, documentaries, etc. rarely occurs in Scots, although the Scottish Parliament
website offered some information in it.
. 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, suggesting that there were 2.7 million speakers.
The GRO questions, as freely acknowledged by those who set them, were not as detailed and as systematic as the Aberdeen University ones, and only included reared speakers, not those who had learned the language. Part of the difference resulted from the central question posed by surveys: "Do you speak Scots?". In the Aberdeen University study, the question was augmented with the further clause "… or a dialect of Scots such as Border etc", which resulted in greater recognition from respondents. The GRO concluded that there simply wasn't enough linguistic self-awareness amongst the Scottish populace, with people still thinking of themselves as speaking badly pronounced, grammatically inferior English rather than Scots, for an accurate census to be taken. The GRO research concluded that "[a] more precise estimate of genuine Scots language ability would require a more in-depth interview survey and may involve asking various questions about the language used in different situations. Such an approach would be inappropriate for a Census
." Thus, although it was acknowledged that the "inclusion of such a Census question would undoubtedly raise the profile of Scots", no question about Scots was, in the end, included in the 2001 Census. The Scottish Government's Pupils in Scotland Census 2008 found that 306 pupils spoke Scots as their main home language. A Scottish Government study in 2010 found that 85% of respondents (being a representative sample of Scotland's adult population) claim to speak Scots to varying degrees.
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.
's The Wallace
(fifteenth century). From the fifteenth century, much literature based on the Royal Court in Edinburgh and the University of St Andrews
was produced by writers such as Robert Henryson
, William Dunbar
, Gavin Douglas
and David Lyndsay
. The Complaynt of Scotland
was an early printed work in Scots. The Eneados
is a Middle Scots
translation of Virgil
's Aeneid
, completed by Gavin Douglas in 1513.
After the seventeenth century, anglicisation increased. At the time, many of the oral ballads from the borders and the North East were written down. Writers of the period were Robert Sempill
, Robert Sempill the younger
, Francis Sempill
, Lady Wardlaw and Lady Grizel Baillie
.
In the eighteenth century, writers such as Allan Ramsay
, Robert Burns
, Robert Fergusson
and Walter Scott
continued to use Scots – Burns's "Auld Lang Syne
" is in Scots, for example. Scott introduced vernacular dialogue to his novels. Other well-known authors like Robert Louis Stevenson
, William Alexander, George MacDonald
, J. M. Barrie
and other members of the Kailyard school
like Ian Maclaren
also wrote in Scots or used it in dialogue.
In the Victorian era
popular Scottish newspapers regularly included articles and commentary in the vernacular, often of unprecedented proportions.
In the early twentieth century, a renaissance
in the use of Scots occurred, its most vocal figure being Hugh MacDiarmid
whose benchmark poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
(1926) did much to demonstrate the power of Scots as a modern idiom. Other contemporaries were Douglas Young
, John Buchan
, Sidney Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch
and Robert McLellan
. The revival extended to verse and other literature.
In 1955 three Ayrshire
men, 'Sandy' MacMillan, an English teacher at Ayr Academy
, Thomas Limond, noted town Chamberlain of Ayr
, and A.L. (Ross) Taylor, Rector of Cumnock Academy collaborated to write Bairnsangs (Child Songs), a collection of children's nursery rhyme
s and poems in Scots. The book contains a five page glossary of contemporary Scots words and their pronunciations.
Alexander Gray
's translations into Scots constitute the greater part of his work, and are the main basis for his reputation.
In 1983 William Laughton Lorimer
's translation of the New Testament
from the original Greek was published.
Highly anglicised Scots is sometimes used in contemporary fiction, for example, the Edinburgh dialect of Scots in Trainspotting
by Irvine Welsh
(later made into a motion picture of the same name).
But'n'Ben A-Go-Go
by Matthew Fitt
is a cyberpunk
novel written entirely in what Wir Ain Leid (Our Own Language) calls "General Scots". Like all cyberpunk work, it contains imaginative neologisms.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
has been translated into Scots by Rab Wilson (published in 2004). Alexander Hutchison has translated the poetry of Catullus
into Scots, and in the 1980s, Liz Lochhead
produced a Scots translation of Tartuffe
by Molière
. J. K. Annand
translated poetry and fiction from German and medieval Latin into Scots.
The strip cartoons Oor Wullie
and The Broons
in the Sunday Post use some Scots.
of Older Scots
had become more or less standardised by the middle to late sixteenth century. After the Union of the Crowns
in 1603 the Standard English
of England came to have an increasing influence on the spelling of Scots through the increasing influence and availability of books printed in England. After the Acts of Union
in 1707 the emerging Scottish form of Standard English
replaced Scots for most formal writing in Scotland.
The eighteenth-century Scots revival saw the introduction of a new literary language
descended from the old court Scots, but with an orthography that had abandoned some of the more distinctive old Scots spellings and adopted many standard English spellings. Despite the updated spelling, however, the rhymes make it clear that a Scots pronunciation was intended. These writings also introduced what came to be known as the apologetic apostrophe
, generally occurring where a consonant
exists in the Standard English cognate
. This Written Scots drew not only on the vernacular but also on the King James Bible and was also heavily influenced by the norms and conventions of Augustan English poetry
. Consequently this written Scots looked very similar to contemporary Standard English, suggesting a somewhat modified version of that, rather than a distinct speech form with a phonological system which had been developing independently for many centuries. This modern literary dialect, ‘Scots of the book’ or Standard Scots once again gave Scots an orthography of its own, lacking neither “authority nor author.” This literary language used throughout Lowland Scotland and Ulster, embodied by writers such as Allan Ramsay
, Robert Fergusson
, Robert Burns
, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Murray
, David Herbison, James Orr
, James Hogg
and William Laidlaw
among others, is well described in the 1921 Manual of Modern Scots.
Other authors developed dialect writing, preferring to represent their own speech in a more phonological manner rather than following the pan-dialect conventions of modern literary Scots, especially for the northern and insular dialects of Scots.
During the twentieth century a number of proposals for spelling reform were presented. Commenting on this, John Corbett (2003: 260) writes that "devising a normative orthography for Scots has been one of the greatest linguistic hobbies of the past century." Most proposals entailed regularising the use of established eighteenth and nineteenth century conventions, in particular the avoidance of the apologetic apostrophe
which supposedly represented "missing" English letters. Such letters were never actually missing in Scots. For example, in the fourteenth century, Barbour spelt the Scots cognate
of 'taken' as tane. Since there has been no k in the word for over 700 years, representing its omission with an apostrophe seems pointless. The current spelling is usually taen.
Through the twentieth century, with the decline of spoken Scots and knowledge of the literary tradition, phonetic (often humorous) representations became more common.
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...
language
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
variety
Variety (linguistics)
In sociolinguistics a variety, also called a lect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, accents, registers, styles or other sociolinguistic variation, as well as the standard variety itself...
spoken in Lowland
Scottish Lowlands
The Scottish Lowlands is a name given to the Southern half of Scotland.The area is called a' Ghalldachd in Scottish Gaelic, and the Lawlands ....
Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
and parts of Ulster
Ulster
Ulster is one of the four provinces of Ireland, located in the north of the island. In ancient Ireland, it was one of the fifths ruled by a "king of over-kings" . Following the Norman invasion of Ireland, the ancient kingdoms were shired into a number of counties for administrative and judicial...
(where the local dialect is known as Ulster Scots). It is sometimes called Lowland Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language variety spoken in most of the western Highlands
Scottish Highlands
The Highlands is an historic region of Scotland. The area is sometimes referred to as the "Scottish Highlands". It was culturally distinguishable from the Lowlands from the later Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands...
and in the Hebrides
Hebrides
The Hebrides comprise a widespread and diverse archipelago off the west coast of Scotland. There are two main groups: the Inner and Outer Hebrides. These islands have a long history of occupation dating back to the Mesolithic and the culture of the residents has been affected by the successive...
.
Since there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
s from dialect
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
s, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots. Although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects do exist, these often render contradictory results. Focused broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English
Scottish English
Scottish English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Scotland. It may or may not be considered distinct from the Scots language. It is always considered distinct from Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language....
at the other. Consequently, Scots is often regarded as one of the ancient varieties of English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, but with its own distinct dialects. Alternatively, Scots is sometimes treated as a distinct Germanic language, in the way Norwegian
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
is closely linked to, yet distinct from, Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
. Those positions are also reflected in the 2010 Scottish Government study of "public attitudes towards the Scots language" in which 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 where "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.
Nomenclature
Native speakers sometimes refer to their vernacularVernacular
A vernacular is the native language or native dialect of a specific population, as opposed to a language of wider communication that is not native to the population, such as a national language or lingua franca.- Etymology :The term is not a recent one...
as braid Scots (or "broad Scots" in English) or use a dialect name such as the "Doric", "Teri
South Scots
Southern Scots is one of the names given to the dialect of Scots spoken in the Scottish Borders counties of mid and east Dumfriesshire, Roxburghshire and Selkirkshire, with the notable exception of Berwickshire and Peeblesshire, which are, like Edinburgh, part of the SE Central Scots dialect area...
" or the "Buchan Claik". The old-fashioned Scotch, an English loan, occurs occasionally. The term Lallans, a variant of the Modern Scots
Modern Scots
Modern Scots describes the varieties of Scots traditionally spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster from 1700.Throughout its history, Modern Scots has been undergoing a process of language attrition, whereby successive generations of speakers have adopted more and more features from...
word lawlands ˈlo̜ːlən(d)z, ˈlɑːlənz, is also used, though this is more often taken to mean the Lallans
Lallans
Lallans , a variant of the Modern Scots word lawlands meaning the lowlands of Scotland, was also traditionally used to refer to the Scots language as a whole...
literary form
Literary language
A literary language is a register of a language that is used in literary writing. This may also include liturgical writing. The difference between literary and non-literary forms is more marked in some languages than in others...
. Scots in Ireland is known in official circles as Ulster-Scots (Ulstèr-Scotch in revivalist Ulster-Scots) or "Ullans", a recent neologism merging Ulster and Lallans.
Etymology
Scots is a contraction of Scottis, the Older ScotsEarly Scots
Early Scots describes the emerging literary language of the Northern Middle English speaking parts of Scotland in the period before 1450. The northern forms of Middle English descended from Northumbrian Old English...
and northern version of late Old English Scottisc (modern English "Scottish"), which replaced the earlier i-mutated
Germanic umlaut
In linguistics, umlaut is a process whereby a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel. The term umlaut was originally coined and is used principally in connection with the study of the Germanic languages...
version Scyttisc. Prior to the 15th century English speech in Scotland was known as "English" (written Ynglis or Inglis at the time), whereas "Scottish" (Scottis) referred to Gaelic.
By the beginning of the 15th century, the English of Scotland had arguably become a distinct language, albeit lacking a name which clearly distinguished it from the English of southern Britain. From 1495 the term Scottis was increasingly used to refer to the Lowland vernacular and Erse, meaning Irish, as a name for Gaelic. For example, towards the end of the 15th century William Dunbar
William Dunbar
William Dunbar was a Scottish poet. He was probably a native of East Lothian, as assumed from a satirical reference in the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie , where, too, it is hinted that he was a member of the noble house of Dunbar....
was using Erse to refer to Gaelic and in the early 16th century Gavin Douglas
Gavin Douglas
Gavin Douglas was a Scottish bishop, makar and translator. Although he had an important political career, it is for his poetry that he is now chiefly remembered. His principal pioneering achievement was the Eneados, a full and faithful vernacular translation of the Aeneid of Virgil and the first...
was using Scottis as a name for the Lowland vernacular. The term Erse is usually considered pejorative, and the Gaelic of Scotland is now usually called Scottish Gaelic.
History
Northumbrian (Anglo-Saxon)
Northumbrian was a dialect of the Old English language spoken in the Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria. Together with Mercian, Kentish and West Saxon, it forms one of the sub-categories of Old English devised and employed by modern scholars....
Old English had been established in what is now southeastern Scotland as far as the River Forth
River Forth
The River Forth , long, is the major river draining the eastern part of the central belt of Scotland.The Forth rises in Loch Ard in the Trossachs, a mountainous area some west of Stirling...
by the seventh century, as the region was part of the Anglo-Saxon
Anglo-Saxon
Anglo-Saxon may refer to:* Anglo-Saxons, a group that invaded Britain** Old English, their language** Anglo-Saxon England, their history, one of various ships* White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, an ethnicity* Anglo-Saxon economy, modern macroeconomic term...
kingdom of Northumbria
Northumbria
Northumbria was a medieval kingdom of the Angles, in what is now Northern England and South-East Scotland, becoming subsequently an earldom in a united Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England. The name reflects the approximate southern limit to the kingdom's territory, the Humber Estuary.Northumbria was...
. It remained largely confined to this area until the thirteenth century, continuing in common use while Gaelic was the language of the Scottish court. The succeeding variety of Early northern Middle English
Middle English
Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
spoken in southeastern Scotland, also known as Early Scots
Early Scots
Early Scots describes the emerging literary language of the Northern Middle English speaking parts of Scotland in the period before 1450. The northern forms of Middle English descended from Northumbrian Old English...
, began to diverge from that of Northumbria
Northumbria
Northumbria was a medieval kingdom of the Angles, in what is now Northern England and South-East Scotland, becoming subsequently an earldom in a united Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England. The name reflects the approximate southern limit to the kingdom's territory, the Humber Estuary.Northumbria was...
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
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, Norman
Norman language
Norman is a Romance language and one of the Oïl languages. Norman can be classified as one of the northern Oïl languages along with Picard and Walloon...
and later Parisian French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
due to the Auld Alliance
Auld Alliance
The Auld Alliance was an alliance between the kingdoms of Scotland and France. It played a significant role in the relations between Scotland, France and England from its beginning in 1295 until the 1560 Treaty of Edinburgh. The alliance was renewed by all the French and Scottish monarchs of that...
as well as Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
and Middle Low German
Middle Low German
Middle Low German is a language that is the descendant of Old Saxon and is the ancestor of modern Low German. It served as the international lingua franca of the Hanseatic League...
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
Céilidh
In modern usage, a céilidh or ceilidh is a traditional Gaelic social gathering, which usually involves playing Gaelic folk music and dancing. It originated in Ireland, but is now common throughout the Irish and Scottish diasporas...
, loch
Loch
Loch is the Irish and Scottish Gaelic word for a lake or a sea inlet. It has been anglicised as lough, although this is pronounced the same way as loch. Some lochs could also be called a firth, fjord, estuary, strait or bay...
and clan
Scottish clan
Scottish clans , give a sense of identity and shared descent to people in Scotland and to their relations throughout the world, with a formal structure of Clan Chiefs recognised by the court of the Lord Lyon, King of Arms which acts as an authority concerning matters of heraldry and Coat of Arms...
.
From the thirteenth century Early Scots spread further into Scotland via the burgh
Burgh
A burgh was an autonomous corporate entity in Scotland and Northern England, usually a town. This type of administrative division existed from the 12th century, when King David I created the first royal burghs. Burgh status was broadly analogous to borough status, found in the rest of the United...
s, proto-urban institutions which were first established by King David I
David I of Scotland
David I or Dabíd mac Maíl Choluim was a 12th-century ruler who was Prince of the Cumbrians and later King of the Scots...
. The growth in prestige of Early Scots in the fourteenth century, and the complementary decline of French in Scotland, made Scots the prestige language
Prestige dialect
In sociolinguistics, prestige describes the level of respect accorded to a language or dialect as compared to that of other languages or dialects in a speech community. The concept of prestige in sociolinguistics is closely related to that of prestige or class within a society...
of most of eastern Scotland. By the sixteenth century Middle Scots
Middle Scots
Middle Scots was the Anglic language of Lowland Scotland in the period from 1450 to 1700. By the end of the 13th century its phonology, orthography, accidence, syntax and vocabulary had diverged markedly from Early Scots, which was virtually indistinguishable from early Northumbrian Middle English...
had established orthographic and literary norms largely independent of those developing in England.
From 1610 to the 1690s during the Plantation of Ulster
Plantation of Ulster
The Plantation of Ulster was the organised colonisation of Ulster—a province of Ireland—by people from Great Britain. Private plantation by wealthy landowners began in 1606, while official plantation controlled by King James I of England and VI of Scotland began in 1609...
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
Modern Scots
Modern Scots describes the varieties of Scots traditionally spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster from 1700.Throughout its history, Modern Scots has been undergoing a process of language attrition, whereby successive generations of speakers have adopted more and more features from...
is used to describe the language after 1700 when southern Modern English
Modern English
Modern English is the form of the English language spoken since the Great Vowel Shift in England, completed in roughly 1550.Despite some differences in vocabulary, texts from the early 17th century, such as the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible, are considered to be in Modern...
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 BritainKingdom of Great Britain
The former Kingdom of Great Britain, sometimes described as the 'United Kingdom of Great Britain', That the Two Kingdoms of Scotland and England, shall upon the 1st May next ensuing the date hereof, and forever after, be United into One Kingdom by the Name of GREAT BRITAIN. was a sovereign...
, there is ample evidence that Scots was widely held to be an independent sister language
Sister language
A sister language is a cognate language, that is, coming from the same once-existing language or hypothetical root language. The latter language is the so-called proto-language. There are many examples of sister languages...
forming a pluricentric
Pluricentric language
A pluricentric language is a language with several standard versions, both in spoken and in written forms. This situation usually arises when language and the national identity of its native speakers do not, or did not, coincide.-English:...
diasystem
Diasystem
In the field of structural dialectology, a diasystem or polylectal grammar is an analysis set up to encode or represent a range of related varieties...
with English.
The linguist Heinz Kloss
Heinz Kloss
Heinz Kloss was a German linguist and internationally recognised authority on linguistic minorities....
considered Modern Scots a Halbsprache (half language) in terms of an Ausbausprache – Abstandsprache – Dachsprache framework although today, in Scotland, most people's speech is somewhere on a continuum ranging from traditional broad Scots to Scottish Standard English
Scottish English
Scottish English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Scotland. It may or may not be considered distinct from the Scots language. It is always considered distinct from Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language....
. Many speakers are either diglossic
Diglossia
In linguistics, diglossia refers to a situation in which two dialects or languages are used by a single language community. In addition to the community's everyday or vernacular language variety , a second, highly codified variety is used in certain situations such as literature, formal...
and/or able to code-switch
Code-switching
In linguistics, code-switching is the concurrent use of more than one language, or language variety, in conversation. Multilinguals—people who speak more than one language—sometimes use elements of multiple languages in conversing with each other...
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. Since standard English now generally has the role of a Dachsprache, disputes often arise as to whether or not 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
Regional language
A regional language is a language spoken in an area of a nation state, whether it be a small area, a federal state or province, or some wider area....
and has recognised it as such under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages
European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages is a European treaty adopted in 1992 under the auspices of the Council of Europe to protect and promote historical regional and minority languages in Europe...
.
Evidence for its existence as a separate language lies in the extensive body of Scots literature, its independent – if somewhat fluid – orthographic conventions
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
and in its former use as the language of the original Parliament of Scotland
Parliament of Scotland
The Parliament of Scotland, officially the Estates of Parliament, was the legislature of the Kingdom of Scotland. The unicameral parliament of Scotland is first found on record during the early 13th century, with the first meeting for which a primary source survives at...
. Since Scotland retained distinct political, legal and religious systems after the Union, many Scots terms passed into Scottish English.
Language shift
From the mid sixteenth century written Scots was increasingly influenced by the Standard EnglishStandard English
Standard English refers to whatever form of the English language is accepted as a national norm in an Anglophone country...
of England due to developments in royal and political interactions with England. When an English herald
William Flower (officer of arms)
William Flower was an English Officer of Arms in the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. He rose to the rank of Norroy King of Arms, serving in that capacity from 1562 until his death in 1588.-Life and work:...
spoke to Mary of Guise
Mary of Guise
Mary of Guise was a queen consort of Scotland as the second spouse of King James V. She was the mother of Mary, Queen of Scots, and served as regent of Scotland in her daughter's name from 1554 to 1560...
and her councillors in 1560, at first they spoke in the "Scottish tongue" but because he could not understand they continued in French. With the increasing influence and availability of books printed in England, most writing in Scotland came to be done in the English fashion. In 1603 King James VI of Scotland became King James I of England
James I of England
James VI and I was King of Scots as James VI from 24 July 1567 and King of England and Ireland as James I from the union of the English and Scottish crowns on 24 March 1603...
. The Protestant Church of Scotland adopted the 1611 Authorized King James Version of the Bible and the Acts of Union 1707
Acts of Union 1707
The Acts of Union were two Parliamentary Acts - the Union with Scotland Act passed in 1706 by the Parliament of England, and the Union with England Act passed in 1707 by the Parliament of Scotland - which put into effect the terms of the Treaty of Union that had been agreed on 22 July 1706,...
which led to England joining Scotland to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain
Kingdom of Great Britain
The former Kingdom of Great Britain, sometimes described as the 'United Kingdom of Great Britain', That the Two Kingdoms of Scotland and England, shall upon the 1st May next ensuing the date hereof, and forever after, be United into One Kingdom by the Name of GREAT BRITAIN. was a sovereign...
, having a single Parliament of Great Britain based in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
. 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
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
, considered themselves 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 seventeenth century, illustrated for example, in the summary by F. Pottle, James Boswell
James Boswell
James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland; he is best known for the biography he wrote of one of his contemporaries, the English literary figure Samuel Johnson....
's twentieth century biographer, concerning James' view of the speech habits of his father Alexander Boswell
Alexander Boswell (judge)
Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, 8th Laird of Auchinleck was a judge of the supreme courts of Scotland. He was the father of the author and biographer James Boswell, and grandfather of songwriter Sir Alexander Boswell....
, a judge
Judge
A judge is a person who presides over court proceedings, either alone or as part of a panel of judges. The powers, functions, method of appointment, discipline, and training of judges vary widely across different jurisdictions. The judge is supposed to conduct the trial impartially and in an open...
of the supreme court
Supreme court
A supreme court is the highest court within the hierarchy of many legal jurisdictions. Other descriptions for such courts include court of last resort, instance court, judgment court, high court, or apex court...
s of Scotland
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
:
He scorned modern literature, spoke broad Scots from the bench, and even in writing took no pains to avoid the Scotticisms which most of his colleagues were coming to regard as vulgar.Others did however scorn Scots, such as intellectuals from the Scottish Enlightenment
Scottish Enlightenment
The Scottish Enlightenment was the period in 18th century Scotland characterised by an outpouring of intellectual and scientific accomplishments. By 1750, Scots were among the most literate citizens of Europe, with an estimated 75% level of literacy...
like David Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
and Adam Smith
Adam Smith
Adam Smith was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations...
, 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
Elocution
Elocution is the study of formal speaking in pronunciation, grammar, style, and tone.-History:In Western classical rhetoric, elocution was one of the five core disciplines of pronunciation, which was the art of delivering speeches. Orators were trained not only on proper diction, but on the proper...
. Charging a guinea
Guinea (British coin)
The guinea is a coin that was minted in the Kingdom of England and later in the Kingdom of Great Britain and the United Kingdom between 1663 and 1813...
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
Edinburgh
Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland, the second largest city in Scotland, and the eighth most populous in the United Kingdom. The City of Edinburgh Council governs one of Scotland's 32 local government council areas. The council area includes urban Edinburgh and a rural area...
. Following this, some of the city's intellectuals formed the Select Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland. From such eighteenth century activities grew Scottish Standard English
Scottish English
Scottish English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Scotland. It may or may not be considered distinct from the Scots language. It is always considered distinct from Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language....
. 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
Literary language
A literary language is a register of a language that is used in literary writing. This may also include liturgical writing. The difference between literary and non-literary forms is more marked in some languages than in others...
was revived by several prominent Scotsmen such as Robert Burns
Robert Burns
Robert Burns was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide...
. Such writers established a new cross-dialect literary norm.
During the first half of the twentieth century, knowledge of eighteenth and nineteenth century literary norms waned, and currently there is no institutionalised standard literary form. By the 1940s the Scottish Education Department's language policy
Language policy
Many countries have a language policy designed to favour or discourage the use of a particular language or set of languages. Although nations historically have used language policies most often to promote one official language at the expense of others, many countries now have policies designed to...
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, of course, 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
Language attrition
Language attrition is the loss of a first or second language or a portion of that language by individuals. Speakers who routinely use more than one language may not use either of their languages in ways which are exactly like that of a monolingual speaker...
, whereby successive generations have adopted more and more features from Standard English. This process has accelerated rapidly since widespread access to mass media
Mass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
in English, and increased population mobility, became available after the Second World War. It has recently taken on the nature of wholesale language shift
Language shift
Language shift, sometimes referred to as language transfer or language replacement or assimilation, is the progressive process whereby a speech community of a language shifts to speaking another language. The rate of assimilation is the percentage of individuals with a given mother tongue who speak...
, sometimes also termed language change
Language change
Language change is the phenomenon whereby phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of language vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as diachronic change. Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern themselves with studying language change:...
, convergence
Language convergence
Language convergence is a type of contact-induced change whereby languages with many bilingual speakers mutually borrow morphological and syntactic features, making their typology more similar....
or merger. By the end of the twentieth century Scots was at an advanced stage of language death
Language death
In linguistics, language death is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language variety is decreased, eventually resulting in no native and/or fluent speakers of the variety...
over much of Lowland Scotland. Residual features of Scots are often regarded as slang
Slang
Slang is the use of informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's language or dialect but are considered more acceptable when used socially. Slang is often to be found in areas of the lexicon that refer to things considered taboo...
. A Scottish Government study in 2010 found that 64% of respondents (being a representative sample of Scotland's adult population) "don't really think of Scots as a language", however, "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%)".
Language revitalisation
Recently, attitudes have somewhat changed, although no education takes place through the mediumMedium of instruction
Medium of instruction is a language used in teaching. It may or may not be the official language of the country or territory. Where the first language of students is different from the official language, it may be used as the medium of instruction for part or all of schooling. Bilingual or...
of Scots. Scots may be covered superficially in English lessons, which usually entails reading some Scots literature and observing the local dialect. Much of the material used is often Standard English disguised as Scots, which has upset proponents of Standard English and proponents of Scots alike. One example of the educational establishment's approach to Scots is "Write a poem in Scots. (It is important not to be worried about spelling in this – write as you hear the sounds in your head.)", whereas guidelines for English require teaching pupils to be "writing fluently and legibly with accurate spelling and punctuation." Scots can also be studied at university level.
The use of Scots in the media is scant and is usually reserved for niches where local dialect is deemed acceptable, e.g. comedy, Burns Night
Burns supper
A Burns supper is a celebration of the life and poetry of the poet Robert Burns, author of many Scots poems. The suppers are normally held on or near the poet's birthday, 25 January, sometimes also known as Robert Burns Day or Burns Night , although they may in principle be held at any time of the...
, or representations of traditions and times gone by. Serious use for news, encyclopaedias, documentaries, etc. rarely occurs in Scots, although the Scottish Parliament
Scottish Parliament
The Scottish Parliament is the devolved national, unicameral legislature of Scotland, located in the Holyrood area of the capital, Edinburgh. The Parliament, informally referred to as "Holyrood", is a democratically elected body comprising 129 members known as Members of the Scottish Parliament...
website offered some information in it.
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 U.K. National CensusUnited Kingdom Census 2001
A nationwide census, known as Census 2001, was conducted in the United Kingdom on Sunday, 29 April 2001. This was the 20th UK Census and recorded a resident population of 58,789,194....
. The results from a 1996 trial before the Census, by the General Register Office for Scotland
General Register Office for Scotland
The General Register Office for Scotland was a non-ministerial directorate of the Scottish Government that administered the registration of births, deaths, marriages, divorces and adoptions in Scotland. It was also responsible for the statutes relating to the formalities of marriage and conduct...
, 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
University of Aberdeen
The University of Aberdeen, an ancient university founded in 1495, in Aberdeen, Scotland, is a British university. It is the third oldest university in Scotland, and the fifth oldest in the United Kingdom and wider English-speaking world...
Scots Leid Quorum performed its own research in 1995, suggesting that there were 2.7 million speakers.
The GRO questions, as freely acknowledged by those who set them, were not as detailed and as systematic as the Aberdeen University ones, and only included reared speakers, not those who had learned the language. Part of the difference resulted from the central question posed by surveys: "Do you speak Scots?". In the Aberdeen University study, the question was augmented with the further clause "… or a dialect of Scots such as Border etc", which resulted in greater recognition from respondents. The GRO concluded that there simply wasn't enough linguistic self-awareness amongst the Scottish populace, with people still thinking of themselves as speaking badly pronounced, grammatically inferior English rather than Scots, for an accurate census to be taken. The GRO research concluded that "[a] more precise estimate of genuine Scots language ability would require a more in-depth interview survey and may involve asking various questions about the language used in different situations. Such an approach would be inappropriate for a Census
Census
A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common...
." Thus, although it was acknowledged that the "inclusion of such a Census question would undoubtedly raise the profile of Scots", no question about Scots was, in the end, included in the 2001 Census. The Scottish Government's Pupils in Scotland Census 2008 found that 306 pupils spoke Scots as their main home language. A Scottish Government study in 2010 found that 85% of respondents (being a representative sample of Scotland's adult population) claim to speak Scots to varying degrees.
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.
Literature
Among the earliest Scots literature is John Barbour's Brus (fourteenth century), Wyntoun's Cronykil and Blind HarryBlind Harry
Blind Harry , also known as Harry, Hary or Henry the Minstrel, is renowned as the author of The Actes and Deidis of the Illustre and Vallyeant Campioun Schir William Wallace, also known as The Wallace...
's The Wallace
The Actes and Deidis of the Illustre and Vallyeant Campioun Schir William Wallace
The Actes and Deidis of the Illustre and Vallyeant Campioun Schir William Wallace, also known as The Wallace, is a long "romantic biographical" poem by the fifteenth century Scottish makar of the name Blind Harry probably at some time in the decade before 1488...
(fifteenth century). From the fifteenth century, much literature based on the Royal Court in Edinburgh and the University of St Andrews
University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews, informally referred to as "St Andrews", is the oldest university in Scotland and the third oldest in the English-speaking world after Oxford and Cambridge. The university is situated in the town of St Andrews, Fife, on the east coast of Scotland. It was founded between...
was produced by writers such as Robert Henryson
Robert Henryson
Robert Henryson was a poet who flourished in Scotland in the period c. 1460–1500. Counted among the Scots makars, he lived in the royal burgh of Dunfermline and is a distinctive voice in the Northern Renaissance at a time when the culture was on a cusp between medieval and renaissance sensibilities...
, William Dunbar
William Dunbar
William Dunbar was a Scottish poet. He was probably a native of East Lothian, as assumed from a satirical reference in the Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie , where, too, it is hinted that he was a member of the noble house of Dunbar....
, Gavin Douglas
Gavin Douglas
Gavin Douglas was a Scottish bishop, makar and translator. Although he had an important political career, it is for his poetry that he is now chiefly remembered. His principal pioneering achievement was the Eneados, a full and faithful vernacular translation of the Aeneid of Virgil and the first...
and David Lyndsay
David Lyndsay
Sir David Lyndsay of the Mount, was a Scottish Lord Lyon and poet of the 16th century, whose works reflect the spirit of the Renaissance.-Biography:...
. The Complaynt of Scotland
The Complaynt of Scotland
The Complaynt of Scotland is a book printed in 1549 and is an important work of the Scots language.The book is a continuation of the war of words between Scotland and England in the sixteenth century...
was an early printed work in Scots. The Eneados
Eneados
The Eneados is a Middle Scots translation of Virgil's Aeneid, completed by Gavin Douglas in 1513. It is the first complete translation of any major work of classical antiquity into an Anglic language...
is a Middle Scots
Middle Scots
Middle Scots was the Anglic language of Lowland Scotland in the period from 1450 to 1700. By the end of the 13th century its phonology, orthography, accidence, syntax and vocabulary had diverged markedly from Early Scots, which was virtually indistinguishable from early Northumbrian Middle English...
translation of Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
's Aeneid
Aeneid
The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of roughly 10,000 lines in dactylic hexameter...
, completed by Gavin Douglas in 1513.
After the seventeenth century, anglicisation increased. At the time, many of the oral ballads from the borders and the North East were written down. Writers of the period were Robert Sempill
Robert Sempill
Robert Sempill , Scottish ballad-writer, was in all probability a cadet of illegitimate birth of the noble house of Sempill or Semple.Very little is known of Sempill's life. He appears to have spent some time in Paris...
, Robert Sempill the younger
Robert Sempill the younger
Robert Sempill, the younger , Scottish poet, son of James Sempill, was educated at the University of Glasgow, having matriculated in March 1613....
, Francis Sempill
Francis Sempill
Francis Sempill was a son of Robert Sempill the younger.No details of his education are known. His fidelity to the Stuarts involved him in money difficulties, tomeet which he alienated portions of his estates to his son. Before 1677 he was appointed sheriff-depute of Renfrewshire...
, Lady Wardlaw and Lady Grizel Baillie
Grizel Baillie
Lady Grisell Baillie was a Scottish songwriter.- Biography :The eldest daughter of Sir Patrick Hume of Polwarth, afterwards earl of Marchmont, Lady Grisell Baillie was born at Redbraes Castle, Berwickshire. When she was twelve years old, she carried letters from her father to Scottish patriot...
.
In the eighteenth century, writers such as Allan Ramsay
Allan Ramsay (poet)
Allan Ramsay was a Scottish poet , playwright, publisher, librarian and wig-maker.-Life and career:...
, Robert Burns
Robert Burns
Robert Burns was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide...
, Robert Fergusson
Robert Fergusson
Robert Fergusson was a Scottish poet. After formal education at the University of St Andrews, Fergusson followed an essentially bohemian life course in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, then at the height of intellectual and cultural ferment as part of the Scottish enlightenment...
and Walter Scott
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet, popular throughout much of the world during his time....
continued to use Scots – Burns's "Auld Lang Syne
Auld Lang Syne
"Auld Lang Syne" is a Scots poem written by Robert Burns in 1788 and set to the tune of a traditional folk song . It is well known in many countries, especially in the English-speaking world; its traditional use being to celebrate the start of the New Year at the stroke of midnight...
" is in Scots, for example. Scott introduced vernacular dialogue to his novels. Other well-known authors like Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde....
, William Alexander, George MacDonald
George MacDonald
George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister.Known particularly for his poignant fairy tales and fantasy novels, George MacDonald inspired many authors, such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, E. Nesbit and Madeleine L'Engle. It was C.S...
, J. M. Barrie
J. M. Barrie
Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM was a Scottish author and dramatist, best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan. The child of a family of small-town weavers, he was educated in Scotland. He moved to London, where he developed a career as a novelist and playwright...
and other members of the Kailyard school
Kailyard school
The Kailyard school of Scottish fiction was developed about the 1890s as a reaction against what was seen as increasingly coarse writing representing Scottish life complete with all its blemishes. It has been considered as being an overly sentimental representation of rural life, cleansed of real...
like Ian Maclaren
Ian Maclaren
Ian Maclaren was a Scottish author and theologian.He was the son of John Watson, a civil servant...
also wrote in Scots or used it in dialogue.
In the Victorian era
Victorian era
The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria's reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence...
popular Scottish newspapers regularly included articles and commentary in the vernacular, often of unprecedented proportions.
In the early twentieth century, a renaissance
Scottish Renaissance
The Scottish Renaissance was a mainly literary movement of the early to mid 20th century that can be seen as the Scottish version of modernism. It is sometimes referred to as the Scottish literary renaissance, although its influence went beyond literature into music, visual arts, and politics...
in the use of Scots occurred, its most vocal figure being Hugh MacDiarmid
Hugh MacDiarmid
Hugh MacDiarmid is the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve , a significant Scottish poet of the 20th century. He was instrumental in creating a Scottish version of modernism and was a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 20th century...
whose benchmark poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is a long poem by Hugh MacDiarmid written in Scots and published in 1926. It is composed as a form of monologue with influences from stream of consciousness genres of writing...
(1926) did much to demonstrate the power of Scots as a modern idiom. Other contemporaries were Douglas Young
Douglas Young (classicist)
Professor Douglas Young ; June 5, 1913 – October 23, 1973) was a Scottish poet, scholar, and translator. He was the leader of the Scottish National Party from 1942 to 1945.Young was born in Tayport, Fife...
, John Buchan
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir was a Scottish novelist, historian and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation....
, Sidney Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch
Robert Garioch
Robert Garioch Sutherland, , was a Scottish poet and translator. His poetry was written almost exclusively in the Scots language, he was a key member in the literary revival of the language in the mid-20th century...
and Robert McLellan
Robert McLellan
Robert McLellan OBE was a Scottish dramatist and poet, mainly writing in the Scots language.-Early life and education:McLellan was born in 1907 at Linmill, a fruit farm in Kirkfieldbank in the Clyde valley, the home of his maternal grandparents. He was educated at Bearsden Academy in Glasgow...
. The revival extended to verse and other literature.
In 1955 three Ayrshire
Ayrshire
Ayrshire is a registration county, and former administrative county in south-west Scotland, United Kingdom, located on the shores of the Firth of Clyde. Its principal towns include Ayr, Kilmarnock and Irvine. The town of Troon on the coast has hosted the British Open Golf Championship twice in the...
men, 'Sandy' MacMillan, an English teacher at Ayr Academy
Ayr Academy
Ayr Academy is a non-denominational secondary school situated in the centre of the town of Ayr in South Ayrshire. It is a comprehensive school for children from the ages of 11 to 18 from Ayr. Ayr Academy's catchment area covers Newton-on-Ayr, Whitletts and the outlying villages of Coylton, Annbank,...
, Thomas Limond, noted town Chamberlain of Ayr
Ayr
Ayr is a town and port situated on the Firth of Clyde in south-west Scotland. With a population of around 46,000, Ayr is the largest settlement in Ayrshire, of which it is the county town, and has held royal burgh status since 1205...
, and A.L. (Ross) Taylor, Rector of Cumnock Academy collaborated to write Bairnsangs (Child Songs), a collection of children's nursery rhyme
Nursery rhyme
The term nursery rhyme is used for "traditional" poems for young children in Britain and many other countries, but usage only dates from the 19th century and in North America the older ‘Mother Goose Rhymes’ is still often used.-Lullabies:...
s and poems in Scots. The book contains a five page glossary of contemporary Scots words and their pronunciations.
Alexander Gray
Alexander Gray (poet)
Professor Sir Alexander Gray CBE, FRSE was a Scottish civil servant, economist, academic, translator writer and poet.-Life and work:...
's translations into Scots constitute the greater part of his work, and are the main basis for his reputation.
In 1983 William Laughton Lorimer
William Laughton Lorimer
William Laughton Lorimer was born at Strathmartine on the outskirts of Dundee, Scotland. He was educated at the High School of Dundee, Fettes College, and Trinity College, Oxford. He is best known for the translation of the New Testament into Lowland Scots...
's translation of the New Testament
New Testament
The New Testament is the second major division of the Christian biblical canon, the first such division being the much longer Old Testament....
from the original Greek was published.
Highly anglicised Scots is sometimes used in contemporary fiction, for example, the Edinburgh dialect of Scots in Trainspotting
Trainspotting (novel)
Trainspotting is the first novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh. It is written in the form of short chapters narrated in the first person by various residents of Leith, Edinburgh, who either use heroin, are friends of the core group of heroin users, or engage in destructive activities that are...
by Irvine Welsh
Irvine Welsh
Irvine Welsh is a contemporary Scottish novelist, best known for his novel Trainspotting. His work is characterised by raw Scottish dialect, and brutal depiction of the realities of Edinburgh life...
(later made into a motion picture of the same name).
But'n'Ben A-Go-Go
But'n'Ben A-Go-Go
But n Ben A-Go-Go is a science fiction work by Scots writer Matthew Fitt, notable for being entirely in the Scots language. The novel was first published in 2000....
by Matthew Fitt
Matthew Fitt
Matthew Fitt is a Lowland Scots/Lallans poet and novelist. He was born in 1968 in Dundee, Scotland. Previously writer-in-residence at Greater Pollok in Glasgow, he is currently National Scots Language Development Officer....
is a cyberpunk
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life." The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk, and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk," published in 1983...
novel written entirely in what Wir Ain Leid (Our Own Language) calls "General Scots". Like all cyberpunk work, it contains imaginative neologisms.
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and of which there are about a thousand, attributed to Omar Khayyám , a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer...
has been translated into Scots by Rab Wilson (published in 2004). Alexander Hutchison has translated the poetry of Catullus
Catullus
Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Latin poet of the Republican period. His surviving works are still read widely, and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art.-Biography:...
into Scots, and in the 1980s, Liz Lochhead
Liz Lochhead
Liz Lochhead is a Scottish poet and dramatist, originally from Newarthill in North Lanarkshire.-Background:After attending Glasgow School of Art, Lochhead lectured in fine art for eight years before becoming a professional writer....
produced a Scots translation of Tartuffe
Tartuffe
Tartuffe is a comedy by Molière. It is one of his most famous plays.-History:Molière wrote Tartuffe in 1664...
by Molière
Molière
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature...
. J. K. Annand
J. K. Annand
James King Annand MBE was a Scottish poet best known for his children's poems.Born at Edinburgh to plumber William Annand and his wife Maggie Gold, educated at Broughton Secondary School, he graduated from Edinburgh University in 1930 and later taught at schools in Edinburgh and Whithorn...
translated poetry and fiction from German and medieval Latin into Scots.
The strip cartoons Oor Wullie
Oor Wullie
Oor Wullie is a Scottish comic strip published in the D.C. Thomson newspaper, The Sunday Post. It features a boy named William, known as Wullie . His trademarks are spiky hair, dungarees and an upturned bucket, which he often uses as a seat...
and The Broons
The Broons
The Broons is a comic strip in Scots published in the weekly Scottish newspaper, The Sunday Post. It features the Broon family, who live in a tenement flat at 10 Glebe Street, in the fictional Scottish town of Auchentogle or Auchenshoogle . They are also shown as living on Glebe Street...
in the Sunday Post use some Scots.
Orthography
The orthographyOrthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
of Older Scots
Older Scots
Older Scots refers to the following periods in the History of the Scots language* Pre-literary Scots to 1375* Early Scots to 1450* Middle Scots to 1700...
had become more or less standardised by the middle to late sixteenth century. After the Union of the Crowns
Union of the Crowns
The Union of the Crowns was the accession of James VI, King of Scots, to the throne of England, and the consequential unification of Scotland and England under one monarch. The Union of Crowns followed the death of James' unmarried and childless first cousin twice removed, Queen Elizabeth I of...
in 1603 the Standard English
Standard English
Standard English refers to whatever form of the English language is accepted as a national norm in an Anglophone country...
of England came to have an increasing influence on the spelling of Scots through the increasing influence and availability of books printed in England. After the Acts of Union
Acts of Union 1707
The Acts of Union were two Parliamentary Acts - the Union with Scotland Act passed in 1706 by the Parliament of England, and the Union with England Act passed in 1707 by the Parliament of Scotland - which put into effect the terms of the Treaty of Union that had been agreed on 22 July 1706,...
in 1707 the emerging Scottish form of Standard English
Scottish English
Scottish English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Scotland. It may or may not be considered distinct from the Scots language. It is always considered distinct from Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language....
replaced Scots for most formal writing in Scotland.
The eighteenth-century Scots revival saw the introduction of a new literary language
Literary language
A literary language is a register of a language that is used in literary writing. This may also include liturgical writing. The difference between literary and non-literary forms is more marked in some languages than in others...
descended from the old court Scots, but with an orthography that had abandoned some of the more distinctive old Scots spellings and adopted many standard English spellings. Despite the updated spelling, however, the rhymes make it clear that a Scots pronunciation was intended. These writings also introduced what came to be known as the apologetic apostrophe
Apologetic apostrophe
The apologetic or parochial apostrophe is the distinctive use of apostrophes in Modern Scots orthography. Apologetic apostrophes generally occurred where a consonant exists in the Standard English cognate, as in a , gi'e and wi .The practice, unknown in Older Scots, was introduced in the 18th...
, generally occurring where a consonant
Consonant
In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
exists in the Standard English cognate
Cognate
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...
. This Written Scots drew not only on the vernacular but also on the King James Bible and was also heavily influenced by the norms and conventions of Augustan English poetry
Augustan literature
Augustan literature is a style of English literature produced during the reigns of Queen Anne, King George I, and George II on the 1740s with the deaths of Pope and Swift...
. Consequently this written Scots looked very similar to contemporary Standard English, suggesting a somewhat modified version of that, rather than a distinct speech form with a phonological system which had been developing independently for many centuries. This modern literary dialect, ‘Scots of the book’ or Standard Scots once again gave Scots an orthography of its own, lacking neither “authority nor author.” This literary language used throughout Lowland Scotland and Ulster, embodied by writers such as Allan Ramsay
Allan Ramsay
Allan Ramsay may refer to:*Allan Ramsay , also known as Allan Ramsay the Elder, Scottish poet*Allan Ramsay , also known as Allan Ramsay the Younger, Scottish portrait painter...
, Robert Fergusson
Robert Fergusson
Robert Fergusson was a Scottish poet. After formal education at the University of St Andrews, Fergusson followed an essentially bohemian life course in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, then at the height of intellectual and cultural ferment as part of the Scottish enlightenment...
, Robert Burns
Robert Burns
Robert Burns was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide...
, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Murray
Charles Murray
Charles Murray is the name of:*Charles Murray, 1st Earl of Dunmore *Charles Augustus Murray , British author diplomat*Charles Murray, 7th Earl of Dunmore *Charles James Murray , British politician...
, David Herbison, James Orr
James Orr
James Orr may refer to:* J. Edwin Orr , Baptist minister, lecturer and author* James Lawrence Orr , American politician* James Orr , poet from Ulster...
, James Hogg
James Hogg
James Hogg was a Scottish poet and novelist who wrote in both Scots and English.-Early life:James Hogg was born in a small farm near Ettrick, Scotland in 1770 and was baptized there on 9 December, his actual date of birth having never been recorded...
and William Laidlaw
William Laidlaw
William Laidlaw , poet, son of a border farmer, becamesteward and amanuensis to Sir Walter Scott, and was the author of thebeautiful and well-known ballad, Lucy's Flittin....
among others, is well described in the 1921 Manual of Modern Scots.
Other authors developed dialect writing, preferring to represent their own speech in a more phonological manner rather than following the pan-dialect conventions of modern literary Scots, especially for the northern and insular dialects of Scots.
During the twentieth century a number of proposals for spelling reform were presented. Commenting on this, John Corbett (2003: 260) writes that "devising a normative orthography for Scots has been one of the greatest linguistic hobbies of the past century." Most proposals entailed regularising the use of established eighteenth and nineteenth century conventions, in particular the avoidance of the apologetic apostrophe
Apologetic apostrophe
The apologetic or parochial apostrophe is the distinctive use of apostrophes in Modern Scots orthography. Apologetic apostrophes generally occurred where a consonant exists in the Standard English cognate, as in a , gi'e and wi .The practice, unknown in Older Scots, was introduced in the 18th...
which supposedly represented "missing" English letters. Such letters were never actually missing in Scots. For example, in the fourteenth century, Barbour spelt the Scots cognate
Cognate
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...
of 'taken' as tane. Since there has been no k in the word for over 700 years, representing its omission with an apostrophe seems pointless. The current spelling is usually taen.
Through the twentieth century, with the decline of spoken Scots and knowledge of the literary tradition, phonetic (often humorous) representations became more common.
See also
- Billy KayBilly KayBilly Kay is a writer, broadcaster and language activist. Born in Galston, East Ayrshire, Scotland in 1951, he studied English Literature at the University of Edinburgh...
- Dictionary of the Scots LanguageDictionary of the Scots LanguageThe Dictionary of the Scots Language is an online Scots-English dictionary, now run by Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd, a charity and limited company...
- Doric dialect (Scotland)Doric dialect (Scotland)Doric, the popular name for Mid Northern Scots or Northeast Scots, refers to the dialects of Scots spoken in the northeast of Scotland.-Nomenclature:...
- Glasgow patterGlasgow patterGlaswegian or The Glasgow Patter is a dialect spoken in and around Glasgow, Scotland. In addition to local West Mid Scots, the dialect has Highland English and Hiberno-English influences, owing to the speech of Highlanders and Irish people, who migrated in large numbers to the Glasgow area in the...
- LallansLallansLallans , a variant of the Modern Scots word lawlands meaning the lowlands of Scotland, was also traditionally used to refer to the Scots language as a whole...
- Languages of the United Kingdom
- Modern ScotsModern ScotsModern Scots describes the varieties of Scots traditionally spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster from 1700.Throughout its history, Modern Scots has been undergoing a process of language attrition, whereby successive generations of speakers have adopted more and more features from...
- Phonological history of Scots
- Report and Recommendations of the Scots Spelling CommitteeReport and Recommendations of the Scots Spelling CommitteeThe Report and Recommendations of the Scots Spelling Committee or RRSSC is a document put forward by the Scots Spelling Committee to try to establish a more standard spelling system for the Scots language....
- ScotticismScotticismA Scotticism is a phrase or word which is characteristic of dialects of Scots. An archetypal example is "Och aye the noo", which translates as, "Oh yes, just now". This phrase is often used in parody by non-Scots and although the phrases "Och aye" and "the noo" are in common use by Scots...
- Scottish Corpus of Texts and SpeechScottish Corpus of Texts and SpeechThe Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech is an ongoing project to build a corpus of modern-day written and spoken texts in Scottish English and varieties of Scots. SCOTS has been available online since November 2004, and can be freely searched and browsed...
- Scottish EnglishScottish EnglishScottish English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Scotland. It may or may not be considered distinct from the Scots language. It is always considered distinct from Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language....
- Scottish literatureScottish literatureScottish literature is literature written in Scotland or by Scottish writers. It includes literature written in English, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, Brythonic, French, Latin and any other language in which a piece of literature was ever written within the boundaries of modern Scotland.The earliest...
- Bungi creole of the Canadian Metis people of Scottish/British descent
External links
- Scots-online
- The Scots Language Society
- Scots Language Centre
- The Linguist List, Eastern Michigan UniversityEastern Michigan UniversityEastern Michigan University is a comprehensive, co-educational public university located in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Ypsilanti is west of Detroit and eight miles east of Ann Arbor. The university was founded in 1849 as Michigan State Normal School...
and Wayne State UniversityWayne State UniversityWayne State University is a public research university located in Detroit, Michigan, United States, in the city's Midtown Cultural Center Historic District. Founded in 1868, WSU consists of 13 schools and colleges offering more than 400 major subject areas to over 32,000 graduate and... - Scots at Omniglot
- Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online
- Dictionary of the Scottish Language – Phonetic Description of Scottish Language and Dialects
- Words Without Borders Peter Constantine: Scots: The Auld an Nobill Tung
- Scots in Schools
- Emily SJE Kilborn (2007), The Politics of Language in Europe Case Studies in Scots, Occitan, Moldovan, & Serbo‐Croatian
Dictionaries and linguistic information
- The Dictionary of the Scots Language
- Scottish Language Dictionaries Ltd.
- Dialect Map
- SAMPA for Scots
- Scottish words – illustrated
- Abstract: Vowel height harmony and blocking in Buchan Scots, Mary Paster, University of CaliforniaUniversity of CaliforniaThe University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
, Phonology Vol. 21, Issue 3 - Scots Language Recordings
Collections of texts
- ScotsteXt – books, poems and texts in Scots
- A Tait Wanchancie – a collection of texts
- Scottish Corpus of Texts & Speech – MultimediaMultimediaMultimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...
corpusText corpusIn linguistics, a corpus or text corpus is a large and structured set of texts...
of Scots and Scottish EnglishScottish EnglishScottish English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Scotland. It may or may not be considered distinct from the Scots language. It is always considered distinct from Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language.... - BBC Voices, Scots section – The BBC Voices Project is a major though informal look at UK language and speech