The "Scottish" Language

[DavidWW]

Ohhh dear - what have my Victorian ancestors done !!????

They created this myth that the _national_ language of Scotland was/is The Gaelic (notice the important definate article <g>). It's not and never has been.

Scottish Gaelic, closely related to the Irish version, was only ever spoken by the Gaels who moved from Ireland to Scotland. Just to get very confusing here, the reason why I'm called Scots is that the name of that tribe was the Scottii - they came from Scotia Major - an old name for the island of Ireland and moved to Scotia Minor - an old name for Scotland.

Various other population movements left them mainly in the Scottish Highlands and the Isles, and The Gaelic itself was not widely a native language outside that area, except perhaps for the very southwest - i.e. Wigtownshire - there were still some native Gaelic speakers there in the time of Robert Burns.

In today's Scotland less than 1% of the population are native Gaelic speakers.

Scotland's main language has been Scots, or Scottis, our form of English.

I read an article by a top line philologist some years ago that summed up things rather well. He maintained that the Scottish and English versions of English were sufficiently different in the 1500's and 1600's and they were continuing to move apart, that had it not been for the Union of Crowns in 1603 and the Union of Parliaments in 1707, i.e. had the countries remained separate, then Scottish English today would have the same relationship to English English as Norwegian to Swedish - closely related but distinctly different.

Finally, there are several names for the Scottish form of English, among them Lallans and The Doric.

I lived in Sweden for 6 years and one of my biggest difficulties derived from the fact that when I learnt how to pronounce Swedish I would very often react that a certain word had an exact or near exact equivalent in Scots but that the overlap of meanings remaining was minimal.

That written there are still many words in the Scandinavian languages that retain almost direct equivalents in Scots, never mind some interesting grammatical constructions that were hammered out of us at school with a "Lochgelly", but may well be the correct old Scots way to say things.

Davie

[Alcluith]

I know we are not supposed to advertise but this is a great little book by L Colin Wilson published by Luath Press and there is also a CD to accompany it.
Their site is http://www.luath.co.uk

A'm shuir Big Wullie and Moonwatcher wunna mind me tellin ye aboot this Buik.