The Scots Language
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Edit: "reek" in Scots means "smoke" and is probably cognate with German "rauchen".
In modern usage, by speakers of Scottish English, it means "smelly". I'm not 100% sure, but I'm confident that "reek" in this context was borrowed from Scots and the meaning has just drifted over time.
Its etymology is interesting, and it consistently means "smoke" or "smoking": https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Reek
Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) and Irish Gaelic (Gaeilge, often just called "Irish") are both direct descendants of Middle Irish, which ultimately comes from a Celtic root. Gaidhlig gradually replaced Pictish, now extinct, about a thousand years ago.
Last time someone mentioned a possible connection from Egypt to Europe, it was quickly denounced. I'm not sure why.
There's more: 'rkh' - to burn; 'rh-nswt' - "acquaintance of the king" (nswt or nsw - king, god king; 'sw' - day, also 'hr' - day, if there's a connection from day to sun, sky, this could be analog to 'deus', 'divine', if I say so myself, otherwise 'swt' - sedge [a reed plant?] is considered as symbol of upper Egypt, giving king of the sedge; reeds, especially papyrus is related to writing and knowledge, so ... Ger. 'Gesetz' [law] is probably just from 'setzen' [set]; 'nswt' is not to be confused with German "Naseweiß" [cheeky, smart aleck]; 'rh' as ray is rather attractive, ie. rays of knowledge, rays of the sun figuratively as friends of the king, if connected to 'rkh' [to burn]); 'rht' - royal subjects, humanity [subjects of the king?]; 'rhs' - slaughter [from 'rkh' - to burn?]; 'rhn' - to depend on; 'rk' - time, age, era;
There's a discredited theory by Vennemann that linguistic evidence indicates Phonicians traveled from Spain to the north sea. There are actually finds of DNA that could corroborate something like this https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35179269 - incidentally 'bbr' means babylon, one could think that's related to bereber. 'fnhw' - means and is the root of the word phoenician, but I'm not going to make jokes about anyone's nose, because the theory is that 'fnh' means carpenter. 'fn' means something like misery, by the way, Egypt had problems with Lybian Berbers. They say Jesus was a carpenter. This is getting out of hand, I don't know when to stop.
Ken, kirke, (Loch), røg, mere.
But also barn (child), hus (House), flytte (move, flit), and no doubt mour if I actually knew any Scots.
If Scots is now considered a language, then Geordie surely must be. Here's a nice example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaydon_Races#Lyrics
Mutual intelligibility, however, is a continuum, with Scots verging towards the language end while Geordie being more on the dialect end of the spectrum.
There’s a limited degree of mutual intelligibility between some other Germanic languages, such as Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian and German, too.
However, for all practical intents and purposes those are still separate languages.
Someone once quipped that languages are dialects with an army, which could explain why Scots historically is considered a separate language while Geordie is not.
The problem with this criterion is that mutual intelligibility is not transitive, so it doesn't support an intuitive notion of sameness that one might expect. Consider some language with distinct dialects A, B, and C lying at different points on the dialect continuum. If A and B are mutually intelligible, and B and C are mutually intelligible, it is still possible that A and C are not mutually intelligible. However, this is a property we'd expect if this criterion were enough to say that A, B, and C were all dialects of the same language. In addition to being unintuitive, it also raises some tough questions, like: if they're all the same language today and the last speaker of B dies tomorrow, are A and C still dialects of the same language?
From a linguist's point of view, there's no useful distinction between a dialect and a language. It's more common to talk about "varieties", which is a more general term that includes dialects, regiolects, sociolects, idiolects, &c. Grouping of varieties is done contextually and for utility, often for the sake of convenience, and often according to some guiding principles (phylogeny in diachronic linguistics, for example, helps us to understand the historical relationships among groups).
There's some truth to the quip that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy, though: in practice, the distinction between the two is a sociopolitical one. Some people will be very upset if some outside group starts insisting that, in fact, no, you do not speak Arabic anymore, or, no, you do not speak Chinese anymore, or, no, Moldovan was never really a language. For many people, their native language is an integral part of their national identity, and it's not for outsiders to decide. It won't matter how precise and logical a definition someone comes up with, because it was never a scientific or philosophical issue to begin with. We allow social groups to self-actualize their own identities, or everyone is gonna have a bad time.
I think you mean, for edge cases, there’s no useful distinction. Mutual comprehensibility is a pretty useful concept, and no one makes “Arabic is a the same language as English” their Hill-to-die-on.
Both Scottish English and Scots descend from the same root Anglic, but there's been divergence since then -- in the same way Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are descended from the same root, are somewhat mutually intelligible, but are treated as two different languages. It's useful to make that distinction simply because there is a degree of unintelligibility.
Everyone on this website is speaking an Indo-European language, and I'd bet a majority of them have an Indo-European language as their first language. They're all from the same root, so are they all speaking dialects of Indo-European? Or are they speaking distinct languages? Where, exactly, you decide "this was a dialect, but now it's a language!" I can't say, but that point surely exists. It's obviously muddied by politics and national identity and a hundred other factors, but at some point, surely, a language ceases to be a dialect and becomes a language of its own.
I have no real authority, but to me, I see no reason why Scots shouldn't be a language. English and Scots would certainly not be the most similar languages to be considered distinct. Plenty of other varieties of the English continuum, for that matter.
Categorization is easy when a difference is so large as to be irrefutable. But thinking in terms of continuum is much more useful when looking at small differences.
Language is a social construct. We're colloquial beings, and 99% of the time we all agree on what's what. What irritates me are the folks that think that the remaining 1% can be decided in some kind of objective way. Is Scots its own language? Depends on who you ask, and in what context. There are valid arguments either way. Embrace the ambiguity.
Many Geordies would disagree it's not its own language. Me, being one...
At least Swiss German is described as a dialect of German, and it is unintelligible for people north of the Main river.
So if Scots is a dialect I would say Swiss German dialects might be their own language.
Yes. I'm not an expert, but it seems so. See this comment by me, for example, on a recent HN thread about German:
I've lived in Scotland my entire life and never come across anyone who speaks "Scots" as their main language. It's not taught as a course in any school that I'm aware of, so the idea that 1.5 million people "read, spoke or understood scots" seems like it required a bit of "flexible thinking" to be true.
What is true is that many scottish people understand words which come from scots as their used in vernacular speech.
Things like "Auld" == "old" or "Braw" == "good", but I wouldn't equate that with understanding a language.
Depending on the area and interaction, you'll find Scots. Formal encounters are most certainly conducted in English with the odd Scots word thrown in however in my experience, particularly when concerned with community work, Scots was more common than not. On a lighter note, I recall visiting a comic theatre production in Arbroath which to my surprise was mostly spoken in Doric, and found myself odd one out and missing many of the jokes.
Regarding education, in high school we had entire units where we read and wrote Scots, and the majority of classroom discourse took place in Scots. This was not a special language nor otherwise remarkable school in any sense, it just seemed to be par of the curriculum in Angus at the very least.
Out of curiousity, what rough timeframe was your schooling in? I have a feeling that it's been seeing more of a resurgance in recent years, my schooling experience was in the 70's and 80's for comparison.
I find Scots words in vernacular speech all the time, but I don't think I've ever heard someone speaking it as a distinct language.
I've heard weegies speak Glaswegian, and I've heard people from the kingdom speak with their accent and dialect, but not people speaking "Scots".
Outside of school you were almost certainly speaking Scottish Standard English, rather than actual Scots. Scottish English is a branch of English that's been influenced by Scots and borrowed vocabulary from Scots, but isn't actually Scots. Almost no-one in the 20th century speaks actual Scots; those who do are immediately identifiable and generally hard for a non-Scots speaker to understand. The last vestiges of Scots language speakers are parts of Aberdeenshire and the Borders.
Sources: Highlander born and raised, living in Aberdeen for >10 years. One parent is a Gael whose second language is English, the other parent is from the Borders whose first language is that variety of Modern Scots. Native speaker of Scottish Standard English, with a little time spent studying linguistics and an interest in the subject.
Pretty unsurprising, given that it's Glasgow. You're totally outwith the areas being discussed. It even says in the article that Scots is predominantly in the North of Scotland.
Also to quote the article
"Over the next few centuries, Scots, which was the language of the southern Scottish people, began to creep north"
So that doesn't really support your point
EDIT: so unless I miss my guess you're actually in Glasgow, so I'll ask, have you ever heard anyone speak "scots" as a distinct language, in real conversation? I'm genuinely curious about whether my experience of 40+ years not having heard it is unusual.
[1] http://www.scotlandscensus.gov.uk/documents/censusresults/re...
I live in Aberdeen, and I'm pretty sure if I was to leave my flat and ask people I met in the street whether they spoke Scots or English, I'd get a disproportionate number of Scottish English speakers tell me they speak Scots; I'd also probably get some of the Doric-speaking locals tell me they speak English, even though Doric is actually a descendant of Scots.
I think you're confusing dialect with language here. Scots and Scottish English are distinct from one another. The latter does borrow some from the former which leads to confusion. Scots is a language, historically equivalent and closely related to English but still distinct.
It's a stretch to argue that "many modern English speakers derive from Scots root". At this point in history, most Scots speak Scottish English with some borrowing from a Scots root -- not the other way around. This is evident in the fact that the vast majority of a modern Scottish person's vocabulary is from mainline English and intelligible by someone from London. That doesn't happen by Scots borrowing vocabulary from English -- it happens from English absorbing vocabulary from Scots.
This is the situation for the vast majority of Scottish people. Coming across those who don't fit into the English-with-Scots-influence only reinforces this. Doric is arguably a descendant of mainline Scots which has converged on English, rather than the other way around, and means it's sometimes difficult to parse even for other Scots. Quite a lot of the Borders also speak a dialect which derives from Scots which has converged on English, and is difficult for other Scots to parse. They sound very similar to each other to someone who speaks neither, but are actually quite distinct -- mistaking someone from Selkirk for an Aberdonian will cause offence!
The Wikipedia has a pretty good article on Modern Scots, though I think it overstates the pervasiveness of modern Scots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Scots It's also worth noting that most speakers of Modern Scots also speak Scottish English, and code-switching takes place frequently and fluidly.
Gaelic is spoken by ~57,500 people in Scotland. Some of them have English as a second language, having been raised with Gaelic as the language of the home. In some cases this does show their English usage. One common tell is slightly unusual phrasing -- one typical and quite common usage is "You will be having tea?" rather than the more common "Will you be having tea?" Even then, they're still speaking a variety Scottish English and not Scots.
tl;dr: Every Scottish person speaks at least one of the dialects of Scottish English. Some also speak a dialect of Modern Scots. An even smaller number speak Gaelic.
Sources: Highlander born and raised, living in Aberdeen for >10 years. One parent is a Gael whose second language is English, the other parent is from the Borders whose first language is that variety of Modern Scots. Native speaker of Scottish Standard English, with a little time spent studying linguistics and an interest in the subject.
The vocab is distinct from English, and that puts it beyond an accent to a full dialect and language of its own.
Also shite is northern English, Scots would call it a load a bawls pal
The trouble with finding equivalent meanings between words with similar spellings/pronunciation is that you’ll conclude English and Dutch are the same language (or Danish/Norwegian/Swedish)
These three languages are much more similar than Dutch and English.
I think you need a more telling example.
Well I'm in a fairly interesting position to judge this. I speak Danish, and I lived with a Norwegian guy for a long time. And my in-laws are lowland Scots.
There are indeed some old words like kerk that are Germanic. But I think it's unusual for people to be speaking something that you'd call its own language. At least the inlaws don't use it full-time. It's more that they have a number of phrases that they sometimes pull out, and then there's a load of Robbie Burns (Auld Lang Syne). They seem to be able to decipher his stuff in a way that I as a mainstream English speaker cannot. They'd know what the gas station sign meant, where I would have a reasonable guess but be unsure.
This is probably quite similar to a Dane picking up a Norwegian (or Swedish, which is maybe a step more difficult) newspaper. You'd get most of it, but there would be the odd word you don't get, or there would be an odd spelling, or a noun would fall in the wrong gender. But you'd get the gist of most everything. The problem is without some instruction you won't know what some crucial small words are. (I found when learning German after just a few lessons a whole lot of things fell into place and it went from unintelligible to newspaper standard. Same seems to be happening wrt Mandarin and Cantonese.)
One thing to keep in mind is my inlaws insist the resurgence of Gaelic and Scots are artificial; they didn't have any instruction in either. It's like the languages have been reborn from the ashes, rather than having had a continuous existence (which I guess they actually did). But the big rebirth happened after they grew up in the 60s and 70s. Something similar is happening in Wales. Welsh speakers I've met have tended to be young.
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Also, regarding Scots not being that different, people do tend to (not always consciously) modify their speech towards mutual intelligibility when talking to people of different languages. My parents recently visited Tangier, VA[1], and had a conversation with some kids on the ferry, noticing "oh, they speak a bit differently", then they turned to speak to each other and my mom couldn't understand a word.
People who claim Scots is "just an accent" don't know what they're talking about.
But I find it difficult to get to the idea that people "speak scots" in rural areas.
I've lived and worked in Scotland my entire life and in 40+ years, not once has someone start speaking in a language I didn't get in general conversation... not once, and I would not regard myself as multi-lingual.
There's local terms that are used for sure, "you ken"
But that's not a language, that's a variety of local dialects.
No they're not.
I've worked in factories in Cumbernauld, I've worked in universities in St Andrews, I've worked in banks in Edinburgh, I've worked in accountancy offices in Glasgow, I've worked in hospitals in Dumfries.
I've visited pretty much every part of the country, and no-one has ever "code switched to match my expected communications preference"
This idea that Scottish people are some generic blob who speak "Scots" just isn't true to the real diversity of the country.
Aberdonians, Glaswegians, Edinbuggers, residents of the Kingdom of Fife, Teuchters and all the rest have different accents and different dialects but they don't speak different languages.
Spend some time in places like the Shetlands Islands or the Orkney Islands and the dialect vs language distinction is much more debateable, given the number of distinct words borrowed from the Norn language.
Edinbuggers is a term for people from Edinburgh, usually used by Weegies (people from Glasgow), e.g. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Weegies-Edinbuggers-Edinburgh-Sligh...
There's no "but" at the end of my being a proud Scot. There is a debate about the validity of Scots as a unified language that's used in day to day life, and some romantic notions that we speak in some other language when "foreigners" aren't around.
The reality of Scotland is that in my opinion we're a diverse set of regions, not some unified mass that speaks a distinct language, that's not a lack of pride speaking that's a pride in exactly that diversity (also I don't want to be put in the same bucket as edinbuggers :)
Assuming from your profile that you're scottish, would You say that Edinburgh people spoke the same dialect as people from Glasgow. Would you say that we speak a different language to people in Carlisle or Newcastle?
Such definitions are largely political. "A language is a dialect with an army and navy"
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/di...
It made an interesting point about English:
"English tempts one with a tidy dialect-language distinction based on “intelligibility”...But because of quirks of its history, English happens to lack very close relatives, and the intelligibility standard doesn’t apply consistently beyond it. Worldwide, some mutually understandable ways of speaking, which one might think of as “dialects” of one language, are actually treated as separate languages. At the same time, some mutually incomprehensible tongues an outsider might view as separate “languages” are thought of locally as dialects."
This is spot on. The first thing I did after reading the article was go to Scots Wikipedia. I could read the articles pretty well after a minute, since there seems to be a nearly one-to-one mapping between the Scots words and English words, and so I thought "this isn't a language." The grammar was different than standard english, but similar to the way some southerners talk. But had I grown up speaking another language maybe I'd have a different instinct about whether that intelligibility made it a language. Moreover, says something I chose written language for deciding whether it's a language or not: all english speakers are used to not being able to understand spoken english from other places and classes.
In the end, I suppose the whole difference is socially constructed and involves politics mixed with what people regard as common sense.
Random sample ("featured article") from the scots wikipedia: "The testicle (frae Laitin testiculus, diminutive o testis, meanin "witness" o virility, plural testes) is the male gonad in ainimals. Lik the ovaries tae which they are homologous, testes are components o baith the reproductive seestem an the endocrine seestem."
It's interesting that you mention this, since there are a lot of Scottish-descent people in the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains in the southeast of the United States. I had some distant relatives there who still had a clan affiliation that I met once when I was a child.
History has done a good and subtle job of ensuring Scots is thought of as a dialect of the poor - a lesser form of English.
The interesting thing here is the fact that Scots is clearly Germanic - the resemblance is uncanny.
In the cities they have started putting Gaelic place names underneath the English place names on railway station signs etc. Maybe it would have been more appropriate to put Scots versions there, since Gaelic was (and still is) the language of the North and not the lowland cities?
Related processes happened all over western europe. Before radio & conscription, regional english dialects ranged from thick to "can't be understood one county over." There was a conscious effort to unify the language under the official dialect, king's english. Something similar was happening in Flanders, Netherlands right up until recently... Dialects were discouraged in schools and speaking in dialect became associated with a lack of schooling.
I find most intriguing that men call each other "mon", like, "Surry mon it's cowd", or "how bin'ee mon". However the equivalent English, "hey man, it's cold today" would be absurd in England. To the old folks "she" was normally replaced with "her", as in "her is cawd".
So those are all variant pronunciations or usages, but it goes further. My father is an upper-wommer (a yokel, but more effectionately meant. Literally someone whose house is high up in the hills). When he spoke to his father I used to struggle to follow say all. They would talk of "tumps" (small hill), "unts" (moles), and the lovely "unty-tumps" (yes mole-hills). Owls were "ulerts", gaps in hedges were "glats" bill-hooks were brummucks. There were bits of old-English thrown in, I was once told a brummuck needed "whetting" (as in whetstone, sharpening stone) and was confused enough as a child that I thought soaking it in oil to treat the rust should do-it.
By the definitions above, if I as a teenager couldn't understand my grandfather (who I saw regularly) talking to my father, surely they were speaking a different language?
Btw despite this being the Welsh borders, Welsh is very uncommon as a language, and whilst I don't speak Welsh, the vocab doesn't seem to come from there. Welsh has a number of sounds like "Ll" that were not used.
Post WW2 farming became very prosperous in the area, and lots of farmers became gentrified and sent their sons to the elite English private schools (confusingly known as the Public Schools, for historical reasons). I think this is largely responsible for reducing the usage of the local language. Know you can still find it on building sites, farm labourers, and in little remote pockets.
This reminds of the scene from Hot Fuzz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCiKYcbCL2g
Although I assume this is fake
London itself seemingly has different accents. I can out people from Barnet, and those from Leyton albeit in people who grew up in the seventies.
Is there anything like A Campaign For Real Accents? Perhaps Time Team's Phil Harding could preside, room temperature beer in hand
Speaking of Wales, if my Welsh roommates were talking amongst themselves, their own flavor of English (distinct from Welsh, which they also spoke) was almost completely unintelligible to me. Perhaps less from grammar and vocab as much as an entirely different cadence and very different vowels.
Pidgins are highly simplified proto-languages that emerge to smooth communication between people with no languages in common. Scots is not highly simplified - it's about as complex as English; they share most but not all of their grammar.
Creoles are full languages which arise _suddenly_, generally within a few generations, from a mixture of two or more parent languages. Pidgins often develop into creoles when children grow up speaking them. Scots and English certainly bear influences from many language families, but these influences occurred over many centuries, not a few generations.
Scots does vary geographically, having dialects of its own (just like English), but this isn't unusual.
The 'Scots language' is effectively a 20th century invention by early century poets like Hugh MacDiarmid.
They created a pan-Scottish 'Literary Scots' combining language and grammar from across the country. It's beautiful literary work but it is an artifice, not a reflection of a language actually spoken.
The language of the Scottish Borders is a very different thing from the language of the Highlands from the language of a Dundonian.
From my experience you're absolutely correct. This idea that Glasgwegians speak the same "language" as Dundonians or Aberdonians or (heaven help us) Edinbuggers, is just weird.
We don't. There's lots of local accents and phrases and words, but not some "scots language" that we start speaking when foreigners aren't around :)
There are some touches of these previous languages present in some dialects, like Shetland and Orkney using peedie/peerie (derived from Norn) where standard Scots uses wee.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7UG6vHXArlk&list=PL6D54D1C7DAE...
I know: "the difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a navy." (meaning: there is no difference)
But insisting Scots is a separate language feels like a nationalist thing. As the article mentions, it's not that Scotland doesn't have a real language all its own, Scottish Gaelic. But that would take time to study and master, and it's easier to really dive into your local pronunciation up to a point where no one understands it as English, write it down phonetically, and claim it's a language.
From the article:
"Ye may gang faur an fare waur" apparently meaning: "You may go further and do a lot worse",
or,
"you may go farther and fare worse", if you pronounce it in dialect and just write it down like that.
I'd say it's a dialect; with an accent vocabulary matches somewhat, but Scots differs considerably in word use and has grammatical differences. In fact I'd be prepared to say there may be a language hidden away there somewhere, but because in use people mix it with a more standard English it's akin to a creole, perhaps.
My in-laws introduced me to "Scotland the What", and for the first few watchings mutual comprehension with my native British English was on a par with understanding Afrikaans [exaggeration]. But I think that show itself is a dialect of Scots (Doric), which supports the higher claims to linguistic independence IMO.
"Bi foo, fit, far an fan,
Ye can tell a Farfar man" (traditional poem)
That said, there are lots of differences in the UK in vernacular language use: What you call your bread rolls (bread cakes, barms, baps, rolls, buns, muffin, batch, cob, etc.), or a lane (wynd [Scots], ginnel, snicket, alley, passage, jitty, etc.), for example. I imagine this is similar in other countries, certainly it seems that way in France to some extent.
If I tell you what locals called their lunch where I grew up it locates me to within about a 20 mile radius; 5 or 6 towns. But even with that Scots seems more broadly distinctive.
On the scots pronunciation thing, yeah that's usually how I work out what it is, just say the words out loud with a scottish accent and I can work out what they're getting at.
It's more political than that, there is a protestant/catholic aspect to it too, although that is more pronounces in Ulster.
> Scots never incorporated all that Norman stuff
So wouldn't that mean these 20 Norman words from your English-language comment above:
> enjoy, accent, difference, language, dialect, army, navy, insist, separate, nation, article, mention, real, study, master, local, pronounce, point, claim, apparent
wouldn't exist in Scots? That's a language, not a dialect.
- Scottish = English = Swedish
- bairn = child = barn
- flitting = move house = flytt
- greeting = cry = gråt
I come from the south west of England and flit was a perfectly ordinary word though not used in the RP register.