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Comment by bennysomething | Hacker News Reader

Lived in Scotland for 20 years, really doubt 1.3m people even know what Scots is let alone speak it.

It's a self-reported stat (census answers), so that many of people at the very least believe they know what Scots is (as they responded that they do speak it).

I did find it striking that the same stat for Gaelic was just over 50k in contrast: while I know the level of Gaelic spoken in Scotland is extremely low, it's at least a better known language internationally than Scots is, so I would've expected it to be the more spoken of the two.

Most people know a little bit. That's the thing with Scots, it's highly miscible with English so it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Because it's basically a dialect OF English.

In fact, literally the only reason it's called "Scots" and not "Inglis", as it originally was, is as the Lowlander Scots gradually developed a sense of national identity separate from the English, they decided that they wanted a national label of their own. But of course, they still didn't want to share a national label or identity with the hated native Celtic-speaking population.

And so "Inglis" became "Scots", while "Scottis" - the native Goidelic language - became "Erse", or Irish.

The whole thing is insidious.

It is not unique to this case that how we divide and understand langauges is tied up with politics of nationalism. Have been since the start of modern nationalism. What we call "Italian" could be called "Florentine", it wasn't spoken in all of "Italy" until it became a political project to make it so...

And...

> Until about 1800, Standard German was almost entirely a written language. People in Northern Germany who spoke mainly Low Saxon languages very different from Standard German then learned it more or less as a foreign language. However, later the Northern pronunciation (of Standard German) was considered standard[4][5] and spread southward; in some regions (such as around Hanover), the local dialect has completely died out with the exception of small communities of Low German speakers.

> It is thus the spread of Standard German as a language taught at school that defines the German Sprachraum, which was thus a political decision rather than a direct consequence of dialect geography. That allowed areas with dialects with very little mutual comprehensibility to participate in the same cultural sphere. Currently, local dialects are used mainly in informal situations or at home and also in dialect literature, but more recently, a resurgence of German dialects has appeared in mass media

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_German

Perhaps this could be resolved in a similar way, by calling the standard language "British".

As a Scots speaker I would object vehemently to my language being classified as a dialect of ‘British’, or any other language for that matter.

What is the thing you think needs to be "resolved"? If it's dispute over the names of languages, I'm not sure that was the nature of any dispute in these 19th century examples, or if it did, if it was ever "resolved" by anything except power to impose it.

"Because it's basically a dialect OF English."

I'd suggest not, it is a peer / sibling of Modern English, and descended in parallel. Northumbrian Old English eventually became Scots, due to the 'English of the Lothians' using it (and eventually 'Inglis').

Go read some older Scots from around 1600, you'll probably have a harder time of it than the same age English because they were and are distinct. Modern media, a lack of formalised spelling, and simple economics post union has probably been the major factor in its slow decline towards death.

So Scots (in its various dialects) and Geordie/Mackem/Northumbrian are I'd suggest dialects of the same language, not being English. Speakers code switch between them.

You've also missed out the other language, which was spoken in the 'Old North' and the Kingdom of Strathclyde - i.e. the Brythonic speakers.

Making hard and fast statements about a topic even lifelong experts don't feel comfortable making a conclusion about is unwise.

There is no meaningful line between a language and a dialect, and it mostly comes down to politics.

I lot of people speak many Scots words day to day, but won't necessarily consider themselves to "speak Scots", or even realise that the dialect they speak has an official name.

To test this theory, I just asked my mother in law (who is from the central belt) about Scots, and she replied, quite seriously: "Whits that? I dinnae ken whit that is, I spik proper!"

(I'm Scottish, from the North East)

Oops, sorry I meant to double check that and forgot. It's apparently 1.9m people.

To be fair, that number is self-reported and combines "speak, read, write or understand Scots".

I'm not Scottish myself, but even I could claim to somewhat understand Scots. I wouldn't say so on a census, but I'm sure there are plenty that would. Especially when there's some national pride at stake.

I assume this is the same as the figures of how many people speak Catalan.

Not at all Catalan is the first language for a large part of the population. In Scotland, even for most native Scots speakers English is in fact the first language.

That is simply incorrect. I personally know people whose first language is Scots. It was the first language they learned and they use it every day.

Well, this example is quite curious. Catalan is understood and used by most of the people who live in Catalan speaking regions, but it isn't the first language of most of the people who live there. Pretty much the 95% are bilingual (Catalan and Spanish). In fact, more people speak Spanish as their mother tongue than Catalan but they switch between them when required.

Maybe the Scots situation is similar, people learn and use both languages and change to the one they feel most comfortable with.

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