Have you ever listened to, or read, Scots? True Scots is not comprehensible to this native English speaker. Are you sure you’re not confusing it with Scottish English? Because there’s a Scottish dialect of English, and then there’s Lallans - which no linguist I’m aware of classifies as a dialect of English. The words used, the morphology - it’s quite different in a lot of ways.
I’m not a Brit, and admittedly the range of dialects spoken in the U.S. is nowhere near as broad as that of Britain, but I have a hard time believing it’s no more different than a lot of other accents.
I suspect you’re still mistaking the discussion of Scots for Scottish (Gaelic). Using terms like “Scottish English” will certainly not earn you brownie points.
Exaclty the point I’ve made endless times on this board, that Scots is acquiring a status due to political events to which it is unconnected.
Actually, what you separate as two entities (a Scottish dialect of English, and Lallans) are just two ways of saying the same thing, depending on your politics. (Being half Scottish, I don’t really care.)
What you call Scottish English - the term generally used by linguists is Standard Scottish English - is the form of the English language used widely in Scotland. The spelling and grammar are generally the same as British English, although there are some unique grammatical and lexical characteristics, the best known of which is ‘wee’ for ‘small’.
Lallans (or Lowland Scots) is generally viewed as a kind of English with some Germanic and other influences. It should be noted that the borderline between what are northern varieties of English and Scots does not correspond neatly to the political border, but is best seen as a dialect continuum.
Not quite fair, I think. They’re not “thoroughly and completely different” and, although they’re not mutually comprehensible, they’re certainly much more closely related to one another than either of them is to English.
As an Irish speaker, I can take a list of Welsh words and, applying a few orthographical rules, convert them into words which are recognisably similar to Irish words with the same meaning. For example, I can often work out the meaning of a Welsh place-name by this method. There’s no way that could be done as between English and Irish, or English and Welsh.
Here’s an example of Scots/Lallans. Personally, I find it intelligible. (I also did live and work in Scotland for a spell, so I suppose that helps with some of the odd vocabulary.) To me, it’s not much more difficult than reading some of Mark Twains dialectical prose, and certainly much easier than something like Middle English.
Well, they don’t really sound like one another. They are separate languages…pretty much. Danish, for example, has more vowels, fewer consonants, and happens a lot in the back of the throat–it’s got more Germanic influence, while Swedish does that sing-songy thing and has some different vocabulary, and Norwegian is in the middle. Even so, Danish TV will play children’s programs in Swedish without dubbing or subtitles.
That wasn’t really how it went. It was “In search of ancient Ireland,” if you want to go find it, and had sections on pre-Christian Ireland, the spread of the church, and wars with the Vikings. At one point it briefly mentioned Wales and said that the languages were “closely related,” but didn’t say that they were practically the same language or anything. It could have been taken to say that they’re both Celtic languages (as opposed to Germanic or Latin tongues), or that they’re dialects of the same language–which is why I had the question. It was ambiguous, but not a major part of the show, which didn’t really discuss language much.
Hi, wrong. Maybe I wasn’t clear enough in my previous post. There are three languages spoken in the area. One is Scottish Gaelic (or whatever it’s conventionally called in the area). That is an insular Celtic language utterly dissimilar from English. There is Scots, a.k.a. Lallans, a Germanic language and immediate sister to English (closer in, even, than Frisian. But still with limited mutual comprehensibility. I’d imagine it’s about the same as Portuguese and Spanish; my knowledge of Spanish enabled me to be conversant with the Portuguese, but doubtess far less than eloquent - it’s enough to permit mutual stumbling, not easy conversation.) Than their is the English spoken in many parts of Scotland (though I don’t know the areas precisely.) It’s no doubt inherited a lot of bits of Lallans, and fair amounts of Celtic through Lallans. But it’s the result of historical English settlement and contact that this language is present - it’s not the same as Lallans. And it’s written differently.
It’s not to say that everything spoken in Scotland is separate from English. Just the “dialectual English” or whatever we may call it, spoken in remoter areas. Much like the relationship between, say, Asturian and Castilian in Spain. There’s a separate language that’s very, very close to Castilian in one part, but it’s now considered a separate language among thinking folks, and then there’s the local variety of Castilian, which is influenced by but still a separate language from, the local Asturianu. This would have developed within the last thousand years, as well, so it’s over similar time periods. There’s still linguistically unaware folks in Spain that consider Asturianu a dialect of Castellano rather than a separate language. I hope that was reasonably clear; I’m mildly drunk at the moment. Asturian-style Castilian is like Scottish English; Asturian is like Lallans. One of each pair the local dialect of the common language, the other a truly local language.
The Scots-is-a-language people are very insistent that there is a difference between Scots and Scottish English. I’m not sure exactly where they draw the line, but apparently there is a (probably fuzzy) line somewhere. There’s a very thorough guide to Scots here.
BTW:
It’s called “Gaelic” in English. In the language itself, it’s called “Gàidhlig”. Both of these words are pronounced to rhyme (more or less) with “phallic”.
Perhaps an even better example would be the speech forms of Southern France. There is a thousand-year-old language which linguists reference as Occitan, which is also known as Languedoc or Provencal. It has a literature nearly as extensive as French, was until the end of the Middle Ages the language of a separate nation, is barely mutually intelligible with Ile-de-Paris French. Definitely a distinct language.
Most people in the area speak standard French with a strong Provencal, Savoyard, Gascon, or Aquitainian accent. Many of them also speak the traditional language described in the last paragraph – making a clear distinction between “speaking French” (albeit with an accent) and speaking their own national language.
In a couple of departements on the Atlantic-Spanish border, Basque is also spoken, and is a completely different language, with no linguistic similarities to either Occitan or French. (Note also that Breton, a Celtic language related to Welsh, is spoken in Bretagne – and likewise has no close relationship to French in any dialect, despite the French government claim that it’s “a dialect of French.”
My impression is that most Scots are quite capable in and familiar with English, with a Glaswegian, Lothian, or Highlands accent. Many also speak Scots, and are clear on the distinction between them. That Scots is reasonably intelligible to English-speakers does not make it “merely” a dialect.
Finally, there is the Scots Gaelic language, which is closely allied to, but a separate language from, Irish, from which it was derived in the period from 500 to 1600 AD, only becoming recognized as a separate tongue in “modern times.” And its relationship to English and Scots (Lallans) is no closer than, say, Rumanian.
Thanks, Poly, you’re summing up my thoughts pretty well. The existence of related but separate languages alongside local accents/dialects of the national language is probably the norm in Europe - certainly, in much of Spain, most of France, just about all of Italy, and as far as I know most of Germany, there are local languages that have been mistakenly cast as regional dialects due to their varying degrees of mutual comprehensibility.
Lallans diverged from English (whose modern forms derive from southern dialects of Old English) sometime during the Old English period, according to most of what I’ve read. Thus, it shouldn’t come as a shock that it would be pretty different - Old English is incomprehensible to Modern English speakers.
Again, though, while it’s easy to see the similarities between Lallans and English, I’m surprised so many of you report that you can understand it. Even in its written forms, it appears to me that many, many basic words don’t have obvious cognates in English. I’m sure I could learn Scots in a few months, but I certainly can’t read it and understand more than a basic notion of what they’re saying.
I’d suggest a few reasons for this. Firstly, there’s the average Brit having great familiarity with the wide variety of Scottish accents and dialects, some of which can themselves involve some ‘interpretation’. Secondly, the examples being given are fairly easy ones to work out, due to their context - we could pretty much guess what’s going to be said on the ‘welcome’ page to the Scottish parliament without looking at it. Thirdly, as a result of all this, the gaps in vocabulary can be pretty much worked out, in the same way as we can understand unfamiliar slang in English.