Literature

Among the earliest Scots literature is Barbour's Brus (fourteenth century). Whyntoun's Kronykil and Blind Harry's Wallace (fifteenth century). From the fifteenth century, much literature based around the Royal Court in Edinburgh and the University of St Andrews was produced by writers such as Henryson, Dunbar, Douglas and David Lyndsay. The Complaynt of Scotland was an early printed work in Scots.

After the seventeenth century, anglicisation increased, though Scots was still spoken by the vast majority of the population. At the time, many of the oral ballads from the borders and the North East were written down. Writers of the period were Robert Sempill, Robert Sempill the younger, Francis Sempill, Lady Wardlaw and Lady Grizel Baillie.

In the eighteenth century, writers such as Ramsay, Fergusson, Burns and Scott continued to use Scots. Scott introduced vernacular dialogue to his novels.

Following their example, such well-known authors as Robert Louis Stevenson, William Alexander, George MacDonald and J.M. Barrie also wrote in Scots or used it in dialogue.

In the early twentieth century, a renaissance in the use of Scots occurred, its most vocal figure being Hugh MacDiarmid. Other contemporaries were Douglas Young, Sidney Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch and Robert McLellan. However, the revival was largely limited to verse and other literature.

In 1983 W.L. Lorimer's magnificent translation of the New Testament from the original Greek was published.

Highly anglicised Scots is often used in contemporary fiction, for example, the Edinburgh dialect of Scots in Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh (later made into a motion picture of the same name, though with language allegedly anglicised even more to make it suitable for an international audience).

But'n'Ben A-Go-Go by Matthew Fitt is a cyberpunk novel written entirely in what Wir Ain Leid (Our Own Language) calls "General Scots". Like all cyberpunk work, it contains imaginative neologisms.

Dialects

There are at least five Scots dialects:

• Northern Scots, spoken north of Dundee, often split into North Northern, Mid Northern—also known as North East Scots and referred to as "the Doric"—and South Northern.
• Central Scots, spoken from Fife and Perthshire to the Lothians and Wigtownshire, often split into North East and South East Central, West Central and South West Central Scots.
• South Scots or simply "Border Tongue" or "Borders' Dialect" spoken in the Border areas.
• Insular Scots, spoken in the Orkney Islands and Shetland Islands.
• Ulster Scots, spoken by the descendants of Scottish settlers as well as those of Irish descent in Northern Ireland and County Donegal in the Irish Republic, and sometimes described by the neologism "Ullans", a conflation of Ulster and Lallans. However, in a recent article, Caroline Macafee, editor of The Concise Ulster Dictionary, stated that Ulster Scots was "clearly a dialect of Central Scots".

As well as the main dialects, Edinburgh, Dundee and Glasgow (see Glasgow patter) have local variations on an anglicised form of Central Scots. In Aberdeen, Mid Northern Scots is spoken.