Status

Whether the varieties of Scots are dialects of Scottish English or constitute a separate language in their own right is often disputed. Before the Treaty of Union 1707, when Scotland and England joined to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, there is ample evidence that Scots was widely held to be a language other than English [1].

The British 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, in independent—if somewhat fluid—orthographic conventions and in its former use as the official language of the original Scottish Parliament. Since Scotland retained distinct political, legal, and religious systems after the Union, many Scots terms passed into Scottish English. For instance, libel and slander, separate in English law, are bundled together as defamation in Scots law.

Since the Union, perceptional and language change (see below) have resulted in Scots being regarded as a group of English dialects or at best a group of dialects closely related to English. There is no institutionalised standard literary form. During the second half of the 20th century, enthusiasts developed regularised cross-dialect forms following on some historical orthographic conventions, but these have had little impact. In the written Scots language, local loyalties usually prevail, and the written form is usually Standard English adapted to represent the local pronunciation.

No education takes place through the medium of Scots, though English lessons may cover it superficially. This is often not much more than reading some Scots literature and observing local dialect. Much of the material used is often little more than Standard English disguised as Scots, which has upset both 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.)" [2], whereas guidelines for English require teaching pupils to be "writing fluently and legibly with accurate spelling and punctuation." [3]. On the one hand, this can be seen as revealing the institutionalised disregard for the idea of treating Scots as a language on a par with English. On the other hand, it can be seen as a teaching method to get around the fact that the pupils, the teachers, and the teachers' parents alike have been taught in school that Scots is 'bad spelling', and thus that pupils will self-censor any Scots that they do know. Scots can also be studied at university level. Nowhere in the education system is the objective to produce people able to read, write, and speak Scots as an autonomous alternative to English, thus confirming its de facto status as a series of local dialects of English.

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 offers some information in it. Attitudes towards Scots in the media vary widely, as may be seen by contrasting this sober official BBC Ulster article with this patronising and anachronistic H2G2 entry.

It is often held that, had Scotland remained independent, Scots would have remained and been regarded as a separate language from English. This has happened in Spain and Portugal, where two independent countries developed standardised languages, Portuguese originating from a common Galician-Portuguese language, which itself originated from a common Ibero-Romance language shared with Castilian Spanish. On the other hand a situation similar to that of Swiss German and standard German might have occurred. Equally, the present situation might have occurred, where the social elites and the upwardly mobile adopted Standard English, causing institutional language shift. A model of language revival to which many enthusiasts aspire is that of the Catalan language in areas spanning parts of Spain, France, Andorra and Italy, particularly as regards the situation of Catalan in Catalonia.

Language change

After the Union of Scotland and England, the issue of language became topical, and foremost was the question of whether Scottish people should speak English or Scots. Gaelic was never considered an option; at the time, it was mostly relegated to the Highlands and Islands. Scots became considered to have a substratal relationship to English, as opposed to an adstratal relationship.

On one hand, well-off Scots took to learning English through such activities as those of the Irishman Thomas Sheridan (father of Richard Sheridan), who in 1761 gave a series of lectures on English elocution. Charging a guinea at a time (about £65 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 Society for the Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland. This was not universally welcomed, as was illustrated by the summary by F. Pottle, James Boswell's 20th century biographer, concerning James' view of his father Alexander Boswell's speech habits: 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.

On the other hand, the education system also became increasingly geared to teaching English, though this was initially impaired by the teachers' and students' lack of knowledge of English pronunciation through lack of contact with English speakers. Aspects of English grammar and lexis could be accessed through printed texts. By the 1840s 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 English. This process has accelerated rapidly since wide-spread 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. These processes are often erroneously referred to as language change, convergence or merger.

A rather more positive take on this is that, rather than reject English culture, the Scots mastered and conquered it, becoming bilingual and writing some of the greatest works of the time, such as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, in what was still a foreign language. However, most younger Scots today see a Scottish accent, that is, Scottish English, as a sufficient marker of their Scottishness, and are generally not interested in retaining bilingualism in a language they consider old-fashioned, parochial, or simply uncool. Residual features of Scots (often regarded as slang) in the speech of the young urban working class are often derogatorily referred to as Ned speak.