| Scots language |
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| History |
| Dialects |
The history of the Scots language refers to how Anglic varieties spoken in parts of Scotland developed into modern Scots.
Speakers of Northumbrian Old English settled in south eastern Scotland in the 7th century, at which time Cumbric was spoken in the south of Scotland up to the Forth-Clyde isthmus, and the possibly related Pictish was spoken further north. At the same time Gaelic speakers began to spread from the Western Coast of Scotland north of the Clyde into the east. Over the next five hundred years with the founding of Scotland and spread of Christianity across the north of Britain by the Columban Church the Gaelic language slowly moved eastwards and southwards across the lowlands. When Northumbrian lands were incorporated into Scotland in the 11th century Gaelic became the prestige language there and had some influence, but the south east remained largely English speaking. In the far north, Viking incursions brought Old Norse speakers into Caithness, Orkney and Shetland.
Scholars of the language generally use the following chronology: [1]
The nature of early forms of the language are obscure due to Viking plundering and destruction, Edward I of England's removal of the national records and their subsequent loss, the destruction of the monasteries in border warfare, and vandalism during the Reformation. It is difficult to assess whether Scots descends largely from the Northumbrian Old English of Lothian or the Anglo-Danish of Yorkshire introduced some four hundred years later, which would explain the Norse elements in Early Scots which are lacking in Northumbrian Old English. [2] According to linguist Paul Johnston, Scots descends "from a radically restructured, Norse-influence Northumbrian going back to the Danelaw proper as much as from the original dialects of the Bernician settlers." [3] Further Scandinavian influence could have come about through Scotland's trade contacts with Norway. Current insights into pre-literary Scots stem largely from place-names, archaeology and a few words in Latin documents.
Northumbrian Old English had been established in south-eastern Scotland as far as the River Forth by the 7th century. It remained largely confined to this area until the 13th century, continuing in common use while Scottish Gaelic was the court language until displaced by Norman French in the early 12th century. English then spread further into Scotland via the burgh.
After the 12th century early northern Middle English began to spread north and eastwards. It was from this dialect that Early Scots, known to its speakers as "English" (Inglis), began to develop, which is why in the late 12th century Adam of Dryburgh described his locality as "in the land of the English in the Kingdom of the Scots" [4] and why the early 13th century author of de Situ Albanie thought that the Firth of Forth "divides the kingdoms of the Scots and of the English". [5]
Most of the evidence suggests that English spread further into Scotland via the burghs, [6] proto-urban institutions which were first established by King David I. Incoming burghers were mainly English (especially from Northumbria and the Earldom of Huntingdon), Flemish and French. Although the military aristocracy employed French and Gaelic, these small urban communities appear to have been using English as something more than a lingua franca by the end of the 13th century. The growth in prestige of English in the 14th century, and the complementary decline of French in Scotland's Royal Court, made English the prestige language of most of eastern Scotland.
Divergence from Northumbrian Middle English was influenced by the Norse of Scandinavian-influenced Middle English-speaking immigrants from the North and Midlands of England during the 12th and 13th centuries, Dutch and Middle Low German through trade and immigration from the low countries, and Romance via ecclesiastical and legal Latin, Norman and later Parisian French due to the Auld Alliance. Some loan words entered the language resulting from contact with Scottish Gaelic, often for geographical features such as ben , glen , crag , loch and strath ; however, there are several others like bog from bog (moist or damp), twig (catch on) from tuig (understand), galore (lots of) from gu leòr (plenty), boose or buss from bus (mouth), and whisky from uisge-beatha (water of life).
Eventually the royal court and barons all spoke Inglis. Further spreading of the language eventually led to Scottish Gaelic being confined mostly to the highlands and islands by the end of the Middle Ages, although some lowland areas, notably in Galloway and Carrick, retained the language until the 17th or 18th century. From the late 14th century even Latin was replaced by Inglis as the language of officialdom and literature.
By the early 16th century what was then called Inglis had become the language of government, and its speakers started to refer to it as Scottis and to Scottish Gaelic, which had previously been titled Scottis, as Erse (Irish). The first known instance of this was by Adam Loutfut c. 1494. In 1559 William Nudrye was granted a monopoly by the court to produce school textbooks, two of which were Ane Schort Introduction: Elementary Digestit into Sevin Breve Tables for the Commodius Expeditioun of Thame That are Desirous to Read and Write the Scottis Toung and Ane Intructioun for Bairnis to be Learnit in Scottis and Latin. In 1560 an English herald spoke to Mary of Guise and her councillors, at first they talked in the "Scottish tongue" but because he could not understand they continued in French. [7]
By this time Scots had diverged significantly from its neighbour south of the border and had become the vehicle for an extensive and diverse national literature. Free variation was a prominent and important feature of the Middle Scots spelling system, however, all writers displayed some greater or lesser degree of consistency in their spelling habits. [8] A literary standard applied but it was less than uniform. [9] From the middle of the 16th century Scots began to become increasingly Anglicized. At the time of King James I, the King James version of the Bible and other editions of the Scripture printed in English became popular. By the late 16th century almost all writing was composed in a mixture of Scots and English spellings, the English forms slowly becoming more common so that by the end of the 17th century Scots spellings had almost disappeared completely. This process took slightly longer in unpublished vernacular literature and official records. After the Union of the Crowns in 1603 the Scots speaking gentry had increasing contact with English speakers and began to remodel their speech on that of their English peers. It was this remodelling that eventually led to the formation of Scottish English.
From 1610 to the 1690s during the Plantation of Ulster some 200,000 Scots settled in the north of Ireland taking what were to become Ulster Scots dialects with them. Most of these Scots came from counties in the west of Scotland, such as Ayrshire, Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, and Galloway, but others came from the Borders. The Ulster-Scots language has been greatly influenced in pronunciation by Hiberno-English. Additionally, it has loan-words from Irish.
In the 18th century 'polite society' now considered Scots as 'provincial and unrefined' and much of the gentry endeavoured to rid itself of the former national tongue. Elocutionists such as Thomas Sheridan and John Walker were employed to teach Scots, both in London and Scotland, the formalities of proper English. However, this status was not universally accepted by all educated Scots of the period and a new literary Scots came into being. Unlike Middle Scots, it was usually based on contemporary colloquial speech. Its orthography was generally an adaptation of the imported standard, though some orthographic features from Middle Scots continued to be used. This modern literary Scots was exemplified by Allan Ramsay and his followers, and their successors such as Robert Burns. Many writers and publishers found it advantageous to use English forms and copious apostrophes to secure a larger English readership unfamiliar with Scots. The pronunciation undoubtedly remained Scots as the rhymes reveal. Early in the 19th century the publication of John Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scots Language was accompanied by a renewed interest in Scots among the middle and upper classes. In this period the absence of an official standard or socially acceptable norm led to further dialect divergence.
The Goidelic or Gaelic languages form one of the two groups of Insular Celtic languages, the other being the related Brittonic languages.
Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, by Anglo-Norman as the language of the upper classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during this period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English in England and Early Scots in Scotland.
Scottish Gaelic, also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well as both Irish and Manx, developed out of Old Irish. It became a distinct spoken language sometime in the 13th century in the Middle Irish period, although a common literary language was shared by the Gaels of both Ireland and Scotland until well into the 17th century. Most of modern Scotland was once Gaelic-speaking, as evidenced especially by Gaelic-language place names.
Scoti or Scotti is a Latin name for the Gaels, first attested in the late 3rd century. At first it referred to all Gaels, whether in Ireland or Great Britain, but later it came to refer only to Gaels in northern Britain. The kingdom to which their culture spread became known as Scotia or Scotland, and eventually all its inhabitants came to be known as Scots.
Middle English was a form of the English language spoken after the Norman conquest (1066) until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period. Scholarly opinion varies, but the Oxford English Dictionary specifies the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500. This stage of the development of the English language roughly followed the High to the Late Middle Ages.
Scots is an Anglic language variety in the West Germanic language family, spoken in Scotland and parts of Ulster in the north of Ireland. Most commonly spoken in the Scottish Lowlands, Northern Isles and northern Ulster, it is sometimes called Lowland Scots or Broad Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Goidelic Celtic language that was historically restricted to most of the Scottish Highlands, the Hebrides and Galloway after the 16th century. Modern Scots is a sister language of Modern English, as the two diverged independently from the same source: Early Middle English (1150–1300).
Lothian is a region of the Scottish Lowlands, lying between the southern shore of the Firth of Forth and the Lammermuir Hills and the Moorfoot Hills. The principal settlement is the Scottish capital, Edinburgh, while other significant towns include Livingston, Linlithgow, Bathgate, Queensferry, Dalkeith, Bonnyrigg, Penicuik, Musselburgh, Prestonpans, North Berwick, Dunbar, Whitburn and Haddington.
Scottish English is the set of varieties of the English language spoken in Scotland. The transregional, standardised variety is called Scottish Standard English or Standard Scottish English (SSE). Scottish Standard English may be defined as "the characteristic speech of the professional class [in Scotland] and the accepted norm in schools". IETF language tag for "Scottish Standard English" is en-scotland.
Northumbrian was a dialect of Old English spoken in the Anglian Kingdom of Northumbria. Together with Mercian, Kentish and West Saxon, it forms one of the sub-categories of Old English devised and employed by modern scholars.
Galwegian Gaelic is an extinct dialect of Scottish Gaelic formerly spoken in southwest Scotland. It was spoken by the people of Galloway and Carrick until the early modern period. Little has survived of the dialect, so that its exact relationship with other Gaelic language is uncertain.
The origins of the Kingdom of Alba pertain to the origins of the Kingdom of Alba, or the Gaelic Kingdom of Scotland, either as a mythological event or a historical process, during the Early Middle Ages.
The High Middle Ages of Scotland encompass Scotland in the era between the death of Domnall II in 900 AD and the death of King Alexander III in 1286, which was an indirect cause of the Wars of Scottish Independence.
Early Scots was the emerging literary language of the Northern Middle English speaking parts of Scotland in the period before 1450. The northern forms of Middle English descended from Northumbrian Old English. During this period, speakers referred to the language as "English".
Middle Scots was the Anglic language of Lowland Scotland in the period from 1450 to 1700. By the end of the 15th century, its phonology, orthography, accidence, syntax and vocabulary had diverged markedly from Early Scots, which was virtually indistinguishable from early Northumbrian Middle English. Subsequently, the orthography of Middle Scots differed from that of the emerging Early Modern English standard. Middle Scots was fairly uniform throughout its many texts, albeit with some variation due to the use of Romance forms in translations from Latin or French, turns of phrases and grammar in recensions of southern texts influenced by southern forms, misunderstandings and mistakes made by foreign printers.
The 'apologetic' or parochial apostrophe is the distinctive use of apostrophes in Modern Scots orthography. Apologetic apostrophes generally occurred where a consonant exists in the Standard English cognate, as in a' (all), gi'e (give) and wi' (with).
The languages of Scotland are the languages spoken or once spoken in Scotland. Each of the numerous languages spoken in Scotland during its recorded linguistic history falls into either the Germanic or Celtic language families. The classification of the Pictish language was once controversial, but it is now generally considered a Celtic language. Today, the main language spoken in Scotland is English, while Scots and Scottish Gaelic are minority languages. The dialect of English spoken in Scotland is referred to as Scottish English.
The modern names of Scottish islands stem from two main influences. There are many names that derive from the Scottish Gaelic language in the Hebrides and Firth of Clyde. In the Northern Isles most place names have a Norse origin. There are also some island place names that originate from three other influences, including a limited number that are essentially English language names, a few that are of Brittonic origin and some of an unknown origin that may represent a pre-Celtic language. These islands have all been occupied by the speakers of at least three and in many cases four or more languages since the Iron Age, and many of the names of these islands have more than one possible meaning as a result.
The Scots are a nation and ethnic group native to Scotland. Historically, they emerged in the early Middle Ages from an amalgamation of two Celtic-speaking peoples, the Picts and Gaels, who founded the Kingdom of Scotland in the 9th century. In the following two centuries, the Celtic-speaking Cumbrians of Strathclyde and the Germanic-speaking Angles of north Northumbria became part of Scotland. In the High Middle Ages, during the 12th-century Davidian Revolution, small numbers of Norman nobles migrated to the Lowlands. In the 13th century, the Norse-Gaels of the Western Isles became part of Scotland, followed by the Norse of the Northern Isles in the 15th century.
Scottish literature in the Middle Ages is literature written in Scotland, or by Scottish writers, between the departure of the Romans from Britain in the fifth century, until the establishment of the Renaissance in the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth century. It includes literature written in Brythonic, Scottish Gaelic, Scots, French and Latin.
Scottish Gaelic, is a Celtic language native to Scotland. A member of the Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages, Scottish Gaelic, like Modern Irish and Manx, developed out of Middle Irish. Most of modern Scotland was once Gaelic-speaking, as evidenced especially by Gaelic-language placenames.