https://slate.com/technology/2020/09/scots-wikipedia-languag...

Reminds me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke

Mah afore company worked oan th' translation 'n' thay tellt me thay hud fin trying tae come up wi' suitable equivalents fur tekky wurds sic as 'minimise' 'n' 'maximise'.

See how much of that series you can get through. :)

I believe the CSS equivalent of a pixel in browser rendering here is a "baw hair".

Does that also mean you never learned about Rabbie Burns in school?

I like to think I'm a man of the world. I watch a lot of Scottish TV (Burnistoun etc.), have done the NC500 and have plenty of Scottish friends. Of course there is dialect there, but I didn't realise this was a "thing".

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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)

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.

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

(Scottish Firefox developer)

Still, I think it's silly to go all kayfabe here and treat the languages as completely distinct. I have similar thoughts on Slovenian and Slovakian and Flemish.

"Where on this continuum English-influenced Scots becomes Scots-influenced English is difficult to determine."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language#Decline_in_stat...

The overlap between political commentators who both insist that Scots is "just a dialect" and that Gaelic is a dying language that we should discourage is also very apparent.

The subtext is pro indy people are generally pro Scots and Gaelic, and unionists are against both of course.

Scots being a language has nothing to do with suppressing Gaelic. Generally people who hate Gaelic hate Scots equally.

The Irish and Scottish varieties of the Goidelic language family have far less mutual intelligibility than the English and Scottish varieties of English. Scottish English forms a pretty smooth continuum between "English with a Scottish accent", and what you'd call "Scots" or "Lallans".

But Scottish Gaelic is the tongue that gets the downgrade to "Gaelic", despite it being simply called Scottish for the vast majority of Scotland's history. Despite it literally being the reason for the country's name.

Scottish English was literally only called "Scottis" instead of "Inglis" as the Lowlanders gained a greater sense of national identity and distinctiveness from the English further south. At that point, funnily enough, the Goidelic spoken in Scotland ceased to be called "Scottis", and became "Erse" instead.

It is quite impossible to separate this insistence on distinguishing "Scots" from English, from suppressive efforts towards the indigenous Gaelic language of Scotland. You can see the exact same dynamic in Northern Ireland, where unionists play up the supposed variety of "Scots" spoken by the Ulster planters and their descendants as a fully distinctive language equal to Irish, as a means to delegitimize Irish as the primary indigenous language of the land.

I don't say all of this from a place of antipathy towards the speakers of "Scots". One need only read some Burns to see that the variety of English spoken in Scotland diverged heavily from the varieties spoken further south, and that diversity is beautiful. But the label is politically charged, and fundamentally it is a weapon - and always has been - pointed in the direction of Gaelic-speakers.

It actually helps them to make the language seem as ridiculous as possible, since the real goal isn't to promote their language but to mock another.

It's up to the linguistic community to decide that, if their variety should be considered a "dialect" of something else or a "language" on its own. Linguists already gave up that question, it's more useful to talk about varieties anyway.

And it's the same deal with Galician versus Portuguese, with a difference - "Scots is a dialect of English" threatens Scots, but "Portuguese is a dialect of Galician" doesn't threaten Portuguese (it threatens Galician instead).

Depending on how you define "dialect" or "language", they may or may not be.

To quote the obligatory quip: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy".

I recently watched the Swedish production "Blue Eyes" (with English subtitles), and was amused at the amount of speech which struck me as being 'English with an odd regional dialect'. Usually these were simple 'core language' statements and / or imperatives.

I guess that is more the lasting Viking and Dane Law impact upon the English, than English feeding in modern Swedish.

It might be the result of common Germanic grounds, not necessarily lateral influence. I got the same when learning German - sentences like "das Haus ist rot" or "ich trinke Wein" are surprisingly easy to catch up from English. And after some time you start noticing patterns, that help you further.

The evolution of languages is fascinating. Circling somewhat back to the topic above: the difference between "dialect" and "language" is a complex subject just as most "speciation" debates in other evolutionary fields have a lot of hidden complexity. "Language" versus "dialect" versus "creole" doesn't have a lot of simple answers though historically that joke that "a language is a dialect with an army" tracks more than it doesn't which is why it is a good joke.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law

(What I find really funny is that some people show some sort of intuitive awareness of those regular sound correspondences, when dealing with closely related languages. I don't recall this among EN/DE speakers, but it's all the time among PT/ES ones: either joking "swap O with UE and you get Spanish" or "drop random consonants and you get Portuguese". Cue to "quiero una cueca cuela y un sorviete" pseudo-Spanish.)

Among the three you mentioned (language, dialect, creole), at least creole is well defined - it's the resulting evolution of a pidgin becoming a full-fledged language. At least in theory, because in practice we get partial creolisation and decreolisation of varieties.

A creole is by definition the descendant of a pidgin, a patchwork of words "glued" with some ad hoc grammar, that looks nothing like the grammar of the parent languages. A good example of that would be the Jamaican Patwa basilect:

* Dem a kuuk akara fi im (lit. "them are cook akara for him"; "they're cooking akara for him/her")

* Im a kuuk akara fi dem (lit. "him are cook akara for them"; "he/she's cooking akara for them")

Even if most words are clearly English (except akara - a fritter), the grammar looks nothing alike. It was rebuilt from the scratch. We can't really say the same about EME vs. LME, where there's a clear transition from one to another.

>from "it was never a 'true' creole because England still had an army on paper during the Norman Conquest" to "it stops being a creole when you have an empire and colonies are building their own creoles of your language" and all sorts of other ideas

The presence of an army or "metacreoles" is irrelevant. Kreyol for example would still be a creole, even if the Haitians built a thassalocracy.

What matters is the presence of a linguistic community, that kept speaking their language as they always did. Normans only replaced the local nobility, but the Germanic speakers were still there - speaking among themselves in their Germanic varieties, even if they had to butcher a "pig" or a "cow" because of some fancy noble wanting "porc" or "beof".

There's definitely some similarity between the two Germanic languages, but the North and West Germanic languages had started to diverge by the point of Danelaw, though the Battle of Maldon does record the languages as being mutually comprehensible at that point.

And more importantly: I don't think there were a lot of sound changes triggered by Norse influence, and those are the most relevant factor behind mutual intelligibility. Some odd non-core vocab here and there is easy to skip, and still get the "rough" meaning of a sentence, and speakerers cannen sentencen still understanden, eben mit somes oddes endinges.

Beware fighting words

> Modern Scots is a sister language of Modern English, as the two diverged independently from the same source: Early Middle English (1150–1300)

> As there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing a language from a dialect, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots, particularly its relationship to English. Although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects exist, they often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English at the other. Scots is sometimes regarded as a variety of English, though it has its own distinct dialects; other scholars treat Scots as a distinct Germanic language, in the way that Norwegian is closely linked to but distinct from Danish.

You are probably thinking of Scottish English or Scots English, which is essentially English of some words and phrases from Scots and a very strong accent.

Scots proper is as much a language of its own as English is.

Scots and what we now think of as English arguably have a similar age and a lot of shared heritage, though obviously given how much separation, invading and other reasons for variation & remixing of languages has gone on over time, it is tricky to tie down completely what came from where when.

Ahh whisht man.

:-)

That said, I find I often have to mentally pronounce the various written forms in order to be able to understand them.