Scots English: The Dialect with Its Own Literature

A Language or a Dialect?

The question of whether Scots is a language or a dialect of English has generated more heat than light for centuries. The linguistic answer is simple: there is no objective line between a language and a dialect. The distinction is political, not scientific. As the old saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

What is not debatable is that Scots has a continuous literary tradition from the fourteenth century, a distinct grammar and phonology, and a vocabulary that includes thousands of words not found in standard English. It was the language of the Scottish court, the Scottish parliament, and the Scottish church before the Union of the Crowns in 1603 began the long process of anglicization. It has its own Bible translation, its own poetry tradition, and its own prose literature.

Scots descends from the Northumbrian dialect of Old English, brought to southeastern Scotland by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the seventh century. It developed independently from the dialects that became standard English, accumulating Norse loanwords from Viking settlement, Gaelic influences from the Highland border, French borrowings from the Auld Alliance with France, and Dutch and Flemish vocabulary from centuries of North Sea trade.

By the fifteenth century, the language was called "Scottis" by its own speakers, distinguishing it from the "Inglis" spoken south of the border. It was a court language, an administrative language, and a literary language of considerable sophistication.

The Golden Age and the Decline

The golden age of Scots literature runs from roughly 1370 to 1560. John Barbour's The Brus (1375) is a verse chronicle of Robert the Bruce's wars of independence, written in a Scots that is distinct from the contemporary English of Chaucer. Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas produced poetry in Scots that stands comparison with anything written in English in the same period. Douglas's translation of Virgil's Aeneid into Scots (1513) was the first complete translation of a major classical work into any form of English.

The decline began with the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England and moved his court to London. The Scottish court had been the primary patron of Scots literature. With the court gone, the prestige language shifted to English. The Scottish Reformation reinforced the shift: the Geneva Bible, printed in English, became the standard text of the Scottish kirk, and English became the language of religion and education.

By the eighteenth century, Scots was increasingly confined to speech, while English dominated writing. The Scottish Enlightenment was conducted almost entirely in English. David Hume, Adam Smith, and the other luminaries of Edinburgh wrote standard English, sometimes anxiously checking their work for "Scotticisms" that might betray their origins.

Burns and the Literary Revival

Robert Burns changed the equation. His poetry, published from 1786 onward, demonstrated that Scots could be a vehicle for literature of the highest order. "Tam o' Shanter," "To a Mouse," "A Man's a Man for A' That" -- these are not dialect curiosities. They are masterpieces of world literature, written in a language that Burns knew from the fields and kitchens of Ayrshire.

Burns did not write in pure Scots. His language is a continuum, shifting between broad Scots and standard English within a single poem, sometimes within a single line. This code-switching is itself a Scots literary technique -- the ability to modulate register, to draw humor or pathos from the gap between the two varieties.

After Burns, the tradition continued through the nineteenth century in the work of writers like James Hogg and the "Kailyard" school, and was revived in the twentieth century by Hugh MacDiarmid, whose Scots poetry deliberately drew on archaic and dialectal vocabulary to create a literary language capable of addressing modern subjects. MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) is arguably the most ambitious long poem written in any variety of English in the twentieth century.

Scots Today

Modern Scots exists on a spectrum. At one end is broad Scots -- the traditional dialect of rural Aberdeenshire, the Borders, or Ayrshire -- which can be genuinely difficult for speakers of standard English to understand. At the other end is Scottish Standard English, which differs from English English mainly in accent and a scattering of vocabulary items. Most Scottish speakers occupy a position somewhere along this continuum, shifting toward Scots in informal contexts and toward standard English in formal ones.

The 2011 Scottish Census found that 1.5 million people in Scotland reported speaking Scots -- roughly 30 percent of the population. The number is contentious. Some argue it undercounts speakers who do not recognize their speech as "Scots." Others argue it overcounts by including speakers of Scottish Standard English who are not really speaking Scots in any meaningful sense. That Scots vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar continue to shape the English spoken in Scotland. Words like wee (small), braw (fine, handsome), dreich (wet and cold), ken (know), aye (yes, always), blether (talk), and scunner (annoy, disgust) are used daily by millions of people who may or may not think of themselves as Scots speakers.

The literary tradition continues too. Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993) is written in a phonetic Edinburgh Scots that brought the language to a global audience. James Kelman, Tom Leonard, and Kathleen Jamie have all written significant work in or influenced by Scots.

Scots is not a relic. It is not a failed version of English. It is a parallel development from the same Germanic root, shaped by different contacts, different histories, and a different national experience. It has its own past, its own literature, and its own future -- however that future unfolds.