These are words from Norse, you will find often closer cognates in Norwegian, Swedish or Danish.
Ken, kirke, (Loch), røg, mere.
But also barn (child), hus (House), flytte (move, flit), and no doubt mour if I actually knew any Scots.
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.
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.
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.
Many Geordies would disagree it's not its own language. Me, being one...