
The Scots Language - pshaw
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/scots-language
======
sleavey
I'm Scottish, but I work with a lot of Germans and every so often I try to
learn some. I have found that Scots has a lot of similar works to German,
sometimes more so than English. I guess this must be because it comes from
Middle English which is related to High German. A few examples: "ken" (to
know; "kenn" in German), "kirk" (church; "kirch" in German), "loch" (lake;
literally "hole" in German), "reek" (smell; "riech" in German), "mair" (more;
"mehr" in German). It's interesting to me because the other language I
sometimes hear in Scotland other than English is Gaelic, which at least to my
ear sounds nothing like any other language I've heard.

~~~
DonaldFisk
"Loch" in Scots isn't cognate with German "Loch" meaning hole, it's from
Scottish Gaelic "loch" meaning lake, and cognate with Latin "lacus", English
"lake", and German "Lache". Scottish Gaelic is a close relative of Irish and
sounds quite similar to it.

Edit: "reek" in Scots means "smoke" and is probably cognate with German
"rauchen".

~~~
koralatov
You're right: "reek" does mean "smoke" in Scots.

In modern usage, by speakers of Scottish English, it means "smelly". I'm not
100% sure, but I'm confident that "reek" in this context was borrowed from
Scots and the meaning has just drifted over time.

Its etymology is interesting, and it consistently means "smoke" or "smoking":
[https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Reek](https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=Reek)

Scottish Gaelic ( _Gàidhlig_ ) and Irish Gaelic ( _Gaeilge_ , often just
called "Irish") are both direct descendants of Middle Irish, which ultimately
comes from a Celtic root. Gaidhlig gradually replaced Pictish, now extinct,
about a thousand years ago.

~~~
FireForce
In English, reek is either a verb or a noun, not an adjective.

~~~
koralatov
Common Scottish English usage I encounter daily: "that bin reeks", "my dog
rolled in fox poo and she reeks", "I was reeking of sweat", "that place
reeked".

~~~
SyneRyder
For what it's worth - I'm from Perth, Australia (presumably named after Perth,
Scotland), and we use the word the same way here. "Oh my god, that absolutely
reeks" would be a common usage.

------
raesene9
I generally like Atlas Obscura's articles, but this one has, to use a local
phrase, a load of shite in it.

I've lived in Scotland my entire life and never come across anyone who speaks
"Scots" as their main language. It's not taught as a course in any school that
I'm aware of, so the idea that 1.5 million people "read, spoke or understood
scots" seems like it required a bit of "flexible thinking" to be true.

What is true is that many scottish people understand words which come from
scots as their used in vernacular speech.

Things like "Auld" == "old" or "Braw" == "good", but I wouldn't equate that
with understanding a language.

~~~
falsedan
One doesn’t have to go far in Embra to hear about the dreich days nor the harr
coming off the firth, and it’s the least Scottish city in the country.

The vocab is distinct from English, and that puts it beyond an accent to a
full dialect and language of its own.

Also shite is northern English, Scots would call it a load a bawls pal

~~~
ppod
"a load of balls" and "pal" are pretty well understood anywhere in Britain.
Scouse and Geordie accents have lots of difficult pronunciation and unusual
vocabulary like this, and I don't think that they are languages.

~~~
falsedan
I don’t understand your distinction, mutual intelligibility does not discount
a tongue from being a language, and discounting dialects from the accent <->
language continuum seems overly logocentric. I agree that dialects like
Scouse, Strine, Geordie are not distinct languages; I also think that a rest-
of-The-world English speaker would struggle to understand a speaker going
full-on with the vernacular.

The trouble with finding equivalent meanings between words with similar
spellings/pronunciation is that you’ll conclude English and Dutch are the same
language (or Danish/Norwegian/Swedish)

~~~
kwhitefoot
I've lived in Norway for the last 32 years and from my English vantage point
Norwegian and Danish are definitely dialects of the same language. Swedish is
the one that has made the most progress to becoming a separate language
because of the large amount of vocabulary that is not shared with the other
two but it is still not really distinct. All three have essentially the same
grammar and syntax. I can converse with educated, well spoken, Swedes because
the pronunciation is very similar to Norwegian even though spelling,
vocabulary, and usage often differ. On the other hand I struggle with
Trøndersk which no one claims is a separate language from Norwegian, and
Danish is almost impossible in conversation because the pronunciation is so
different from Norwegian but reading it is very easy.

These three languages are much more similar than Dutch and English.

I think you need a more telling example.

------
lordnacho
> The two languages are about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese, or
> Norwegian and Danish.

Well I'm in a fairly interesting position to judge this. I speak Danish, and I
lived with a Norwegian guy for a long time. And my in-laws are lowland Scots.

There are indeed some old words like kerk that are Germanic. But I think it's
unusual for people to be speaking something that you'd call its own language.
At least the inlaws don't use it full-time. It's more that they have a number
of phrases that they sometimes pull out, and then there's a load of Robbie
Burns (Auld Lang Syne). They seem to be able to decipher his stuff in a way
that I as a mainstream English speaker cannot. They'd know what the gas
station sign meant, where I would have a reasonable guess but be unsure.

This is probably quite similar to a Dane picking up a Norwegian (or Swedish,
which is maybe a step more difficult) newspaper. You'd get most of it, but
there would be the odd word you don't get, or there would be an odd spelling,
or a noun would fall in the wrong gender. But you'd get the gist of most
everything. The problem is without some instruction you won't know what some
crucial small words are. (I found when learning German after just a few
lessons a whole lot of things fell into place and it went from unintelligible
to newspaper standard. Same seems to be happening wrt Mandarin and Cantonese.)

One thing to keep in mind is my inlaws insist the resurgence of Gaelic and
Scots are artificial; they didn't have any instruction in either. It's like
the languages have been reborn from the ashes, rather than having had a
continuous existence (which I guess they actually did). But the big rebirth
happened after they grew up in the 60s and 70s. Something similar is happening
in Wales. Welsh speakers I've met have tended to be young.

~~~
unhammer
See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Not](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_Not)
. Similar things have happened and are happening to many other minority
languages (e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegianization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegianization)
).

\-----

Also, regarding Scots not being that different, people do tend to (not always
consciously) modify their speech towards mutual intelligibility when talking
to people of different languages. My parents recently visited Tangier, VA[1],
and had a conversation with some kids on the ferry, noticing "oh, they speak a
bit differently", then they turned to speak to each other and my mom couldn't
understand a word.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIZgw09CG9E)

------
s0l1dsnak3123
I really enjoyed this article. Scots is certainly a language of its own - to
hear it in the wild you must venture out of the more populous areas (Inverness
and Aberdeen are exceptions) of Scotland and into the highlands and rural
areas. It is also used much more by older, poorer or more isolated
demographics within Scotland: as a farmers' son, I met many Scots-speaking
people when I went to the market with my father.

People who claim Scots is "just an accent" don't know what they're talking
about.

~~~
raesene9
I'd say it's a dialect, not a language. It's more than an accent for sure, for
starters scotland has a load of different accents not just one, as I'm sure
many teuchters going to Glasgow have found out the hard way.

But I find it difficult to get to the idea that people "speak scots" in rural
areas.

I've lived and worked in Scotland my entire life and in 40+ years, not once
has someone start speaking in a language I didn't get in general
conversation... not once, and I would not regard myself as multi-lingual.

There's local terms that are used for sure, "you ken"

But that's not a language, that's a variety of local dialects.

~~~
falsedan
I expect they’re code switching to match your expected communication
preferences based on the normal class/environmental signals.

~~~
raesene9
I do hope you're joking/trolling at this point.

No they're not.

I've worked in factories in Cumbernauld, I've worked in universities in St
Andrews, I've worked in banks in Edinburgh, I've worked in accountancy offices
in Glasgow, I've worked in hospitals in Dumfries.

I've visited pretty much every part of the country, and no-one has ever "code
switched to match my expected communications preference"

This idea that Scottish people are some generic blob who speak "Scots" just
isn't true to the real diversity of the country.

Aberdonians, Glaswegians, Edinbuggers, residents of the Kingdom of Fife,
Teuchters and all the rest have different accents and different dialects but
they don't speak different languages.

~~~
Tycho
The workplaces you listed aren't a very diverse set though.

~~~
raesene9
If you feel that, I'd suggest you've not been to many factories in Cumbernauld
:P

~~~
fatfox
Aye!

------
lewis500
I was real interested in this article since my ancestors were about 80% scots
or welsh. Welsh is undeniably a language, but Scots makes you wonder about the
difference between a language and a dialect. I found this article by a famous
linguist:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/di...](https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/difference-
between-language-dialect/424704/)

It made an interesting point about English:

"English tempts one with a tidy dialect-language distinction based on
“intelligibility”...But because of quirks of its history, English happens to
lack very close relatives, and the intelligibility standard doesn’t apply
consistently beyond it. Worldwide, some mutually understandable ways of
speaking, which one might think of as “dialects” of one language, are actually
treated as separate languages. At the same time, some mutually
incomprehensible tongues an outsider might view as separate “languages” are
thought of locally as dialects."

This is spot on. The first thing I did after reading the article was go to
Scots Wikipedia. I could read the articles pretty well after a minute, since
there seems to be a nearly one-to-one mapping between the Scots words and
English words, and so I thought "this isn't a language." The grammar was
different than standard english, but similar to the way some southerners talk.
But had I grown up speaking another language maybe I'd have a different
instinct about whether that intelligibility made it a language. Moreover, says
something I chose written language for deciding whether it's a language or
not: all english speakers are used to not being able to understand spoken
english from other places and classes.

In the end, I suppose the whole difference is socially constructed and
involves politics mixed with what people regard as common sense.

Random sample ("featured article") from the scots wikipedia: "The testicle
(frae Laitin testiculus, diminutive o testis, meanin "witness" o virility,
plural testes) is the male gonad in ainimals. Lik the ovaries tae which they
are homologous, testes are components o baith the reproductive seestem an the
endocrine seestem."

~~~
jschwartzi
> The grammar was different than standard english, but similar to the way some
> southerners talk.

It's interesting that you mention this, since there are a lot of Scottish-
descent people in the Blue Ridge and Smokey Mountains in the southeast of the
United States. I had some distant relatives there who still had a clan
affiliation that I met once when I was a child.

~~~
lewis500
Yeah that’s who my mom is descended from and I’m from Alabama. What happened
is There was a migration of scots Presbyterians to Northern Ireland, and then
from Northern Ireland to Appalachia. In the south they call that ethnicity
scots-Irish but over there I think they call it Ulster Irish. For a while
there were a series of books about the scots Irish (eg “born fighting” by
senator jim Webb and the chapter in outliers by Malcolm gladwell about why
scots Irish are so violent—-for some reason all the books were about
violence...I suppose because the people who buy the books want to thing if
themselves as brave and dangerous).

~~~
ploika
Minor nitpick: it would be called Ulster Scots rather than Ulster Irish.

------
binbag
I'm Scottish. There is a resurgence of Scots in the cities (I'm in Glasgow)
but it's a bit hipster. Even most central belt (Glasgow or Edinburgh) Scots
think it's a little bit of a joke language. So this is article is interesting
even for us.

History has done a good and subtle job of ensuring Scots is thought of as a
dialect of the poor - a lesser form of English.

The interesting thing here is the fact that Scots is clearly Germanic - the
resemblance is uncanny.

In the cities they have started putting Gaelic place names underneath the
English place names on railway station signs etc. Maybe it would have been
more appropriate to put Scots versions there, since Gaelic was (and still is)
the language of the North and not the lowland cities?

~~~
netcan
_" History has done a good and subtle job of ensuring Scots is thought of as a
dialect of the poor - a lesser form of English._"

Related processes happened all over western europe. Before radio &
conscription, regional english dialects ranged from thick to "can't be
understood one county over." There was a conscious effort to unify the
language under the official dialect, king's english. Something similar was
happening in Flanders, Netherlands right up until recently... Dialects were
discouraged in schools and speaking in dialect became associated with a lack
of schooling.

~~~
binbag
And kids in Glasgow schools were thwacked across the head if they spoke in
Scots.

------
jimnotgym
This strong dialect, almost a language type thing is pretty common in the UK
in general. I grew up in the Welsh border counties of England, and it was
pretty common amongst remote rural people to speak a dialect that would have
been impossible to understand by people in the towns 50 miles away. Bits of it
survive, in Shropshire it is relatively common to hear locals say the weather
is "cowd", and to pronounce words like "sheep" as "ship" (the old phrase
"spoiling the ship for hap'orth of tar", meaning ruining something of value
for the want of a cheap bit of maintenance, is apparently not about boats).

I find most intriguing that men call each other "mon", like, "Surry mon it's
cowd", or "how bin'ee mon". However the equivalent English, "hey man, it's
cold today" would be absurd in England. To the old folks "she" was normally
replaced with "her", as in "her is cawd".

So those are all variant pronunciations or usages, but it goes further. My
father is an upper-wommer (a yokel, but more effectionately meant. Literally
someone whose house is high up in the hills). When he spoke to his father I
used to struggle to follow say all. They would talk of "tumps" (small hill),
"unts" (moles), and the lovely "unty-tumps" (yes mole-hills). Owls were
"ulerts", gaps in hedges were "glats" bill-hooks were brummucks. There were
bits of old-English thrown in, I was once told a brummuck needed "whetting"
(as in whetstone, sharpening stone) and was confused enough as a child that I
thought soaking it in oil to treat the rust should do-it.

By the definitions above, if I as a teenager couldn't understand my
grandfather (who I saw regularly) talking to my father, surely they were
speaking a different language?

Btw despite this being the Welsh borders, Welsh is very uncommon as a
language, and whilst I don't speak Welsh, the vocab doesn't seem to come from
there. Welsh has a number of sounds like "Ll" that were not used.

Post WW2 farming became very prosperous in the area, and lots of farmers
became gentrified and sent their sons to the elite English private schools
(confusingly known as the Public Schools, for historical reasons). I think
this is largely responsible for reducing the usage of the local language. Know
you can still find it on building sites, farm labourers, and in little remote
pockets.

~~~
eudora
One of the points of the article is that Scots is definitely not a dialect,
and is definitely a separate language, to the point that the author stopped
answering the question of which it is because it was so common a
misconception.

~~~
jimnotgym
That was the point I was answering. Is this border-speak also not a language,
if I couldn't understand my own father taking it to my grandfather, as a
native English speaker with a shared accent?

------
acjohnson55
I'm surprised to read this whole thread and not see any mention of Irving
Welsh. When I studied abroad in Wales, I read Trainspotting, which is written
in the Edinburgh flavor of Scots. To an American, it was almost as much effort
as reading Spanish.

Speaking of Wales, if my Welsh roommates were talking amongst themselves,
their own flavor of English (distinct from Welsh, which they also spoke) was
almost completely unintelligible to me. Perhaps less from grammar and vocab as
much as an entirely different cadence and very different vowels.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Friend I met in my travels turned me on to the movie, loved it but first few
times had to watch with subtitles. :D

------
roywiggins
The Allusionist podcast did a good episode about Scots recently.

[https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/scots](https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/scots)

[https://www.theallusionist.org/transcripts/scots](https://www.theallusionist.org/transcripts/scots)

~~~
bgmeister
I think the Allusionist is a really interesting podcast, and this episode was
a great one. It brought back some early childhood memories of my time in
Scotland (where I first learnt to speak), and also of the responses to my
accent and vocabulary when we returned to Australia.

------
randcraw
I'm not a linguist, but Scots sounds less like a language than a creole (a mix
of languages which span essential terms), or even a pidgin dialect (an
incomplete mix, requiring phrases or a third language to replace missing
concepts). The article doesn't say explicitly, but I imagine Scots varies
geographically, with the mix reflecting contribution from local tongues
(English, Gaelic, French, Pict, etc).

~~~
Marazan
Yes, there isn't (in my view) such a thing as a singular 'Scots'.

The 'Scots language' is effectively a 20th century invention by early century
poets like Hugh MacDiarmid.

They created a pan-Scottish 'Literary Scots' combining language and grammar
from across the country. It's beautiful literary work but it is an artifice,
not a reflection of a language actually spoken.

The language of the Scottish Borders is a very different thing from the
language of the Highlands from the language of a Dundonian.

~~~
raesene9
+1

From my experience you're absolutely correct. This idea that Glasgwegians
speak the same "language" as Dundonians or Aberdonians or (heaven help us)
Edinbuggers, is just weird.

We don't. There's lots of local accents and phrases and words, but not some
"scots language" that we start speaking when foreigners aren't around :)

~~~
GordonS
Aberdonian here. Yep, doric is very different from dialects elsewhere. I
married a girl from Edinburgh, and after more than 10 years we're _still_
discovering new words from each others areas!

------
prestonbriggs
Check the books from [http://www.itchy-coo.com/](http://www.itchy-coo.com/)
"Harry Potter" in Scots is the way it ought to be read.

~~~
prestonbriggs
Also, consider [https://www.luath.co.uk/scots-language/luath-scots-
language-...](https://www.luath.co.uk/scots-language/luath-scots-language-
learner-an-introduction-to-contemporary-spoken-scots)

------
eaguyhn
There was a very good documentary about the history of English. Episode 4
covers the "Guid Scots Tongue"

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7UG6vHXArlk&list=PL6D54D1C7DAE...](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7UG6vHXArlk&list=PL6D54D1C7DAE31B36)

------
tdeck
Here's a great lecture about the Scots language and it's history - in Scots. I
found I could understand it if I focus, perhaps given my exposure to British
comedy. [https://youtu.be/cENbkHS3mnY](https://youtu.be/cENbkHS3mnY)

------
craigsmansion
Much as I enjoy the Scots accent, it's just that: an accent.

I know: "the difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a
navy." (meaning: there is no difference)

But insisting Scots is a separate language feels like a nationalist thing. As
the article mentions, it's not that Scotland doesn't have a real language all
its own, Scottish Gaelic. But that would take time to study and master, and
it's easier to really dive into your local pronunciation up to a point where
no one understands it as English, write it down phonetically, and claim it's a
language.

From the article:

"Ye may gang faur an fare waur" apparently meaning: "You may go further and do
a lot worse",

or,

"you may go farther and fare worse", if you pronounce it in dialect and just
write it down like that.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
_Fit ye bletherin on aboot_ ... I'd disagree.

I'd say it's a dialect; with an accent vocabulary matches somewhat, but Scots
differs considerably in word use and has grammatical differences. In fact I'd
be prepared to say there may be a language hidden away there somewhere, but
because in use people mix it with a more standard English it's akin to a
creole, perhaps.

My in-laws introduced me to "Scotland the What", and for the first few
watchings mutual comprehension with my native British English was on a par
with understanding Afrikaans [exaggeration]. But I think that show itself is a
dialect of Scots (Doric), which supports the higher claims to linguistic
independence IMO.

    
    
        "Bi foo, fit, far an fan,
        Ye can tell a Farfar man" (traditional poem)
    

Which of you _loons_ and _quines_ recognises that top line as "by who, what,
where and when,"?

That said, there are lots of differences in the UK in vernacular language use:
What you call your bread rolls (bread cakes, barms, baps, rolls, buns, muffin,
batch, cob, etc.), or a lane (wynd [Scots], ginnel, snicket, alley, passage,
jitty, etc.), for example. I imagine this is similar in other countries,
certainly it seems that way in France to some extent.

If I tell you what locals called their lunch where I grew up it locates me to
within about a 20 mile radius; 5 or 6 towns. But even with that Scots seems
more broadly distinctive.

------
krallja
For some Scots internet tourism, visit
[https://www.reddit.com/r/ScottishPeopleTwitter](https://www.reddit.com/r/ScottishPeopleTwitter)

------
barking
There's the closely related Ullans, practically unheard of pre-1998.

------
billfruit
Is it the dialect in which many characters speak in Walter Scott novels like
Rob Roy and Old Mortality, if so it is very intelligible to an English reader.

------
willmacdonald
There are several Scottish words I grew up using which are easily traceable to
Swedish:

\- Scottish = English = Swedish

\- bairn = child = barn

\- flitting = move house = flytt

\- greeting = cry = gråt

~~~
Symbiote
"To flit" is also standard English, although more specific than the Scots use.
It suggests a very small thing moving or fluttering, like a bird or insect.

~~~
kwhitefoot
It also means to escape and to leave suddenly, perhaps to avoid paying a bill
or to avoid arrest, as in "He's done a flit".

I come from the south west of England and flit was a perfectly ordinary word
though not used in the RP register.

------
emayljames
Ah ken wit yir talkin aboot. Scots isnae English, English 'an Scots developed
at the same time, fae the same source.

------
etatoby
I just checked on the keyboard app that I use, Google GBoard, and it supports
both Scots and Gaelic.

