Ak&c:
…or in other words, as far as you know, it cd be any one of a thousand other things. If you have to resort at this point to “likely” and “might be”, then I don’t think you know enough about the subject to have an opinion worth offering. It is many years since I lived in Hanover/Hannover, but what they spoke then, in the city itself, was either Hochdeutsch or Plattdeutsch
As for Scotland, I think the point is that you - or your encyclopaedia - are/is blurring the distinction between a language and a dialect.
If you look at the evidence, the linguistic division (as opposed to the political division) between England and Scotland lay along the boundary between the Highlands and the Lowlands - Lowland Scots was the northernmost dialect of English linked, most closely, as you say, to Northumbrian.
The “Scots” you are talking about has been in practice extinct for precisely as long as all the other dialects of English, and for the same reason - standardisation, which has been extremely effective in Gt Britain, I suppose firstly, because it is physically a fairly small and separated area; and secondly because of the cultural dominance of London.
If it will make you happy, I will concede however that Glaswegian is a separate language, comprehensible to no-one outside Glasgow. It’s fun to learn, because it can’t be spoken unless you’re completely rat-arsed first.
Coldfire: yes, I wd probably be able to tell if you were Dutch. It’s because the Dutch tend to swallow their vowels in a peculiar way - it’s more in the throat than English English. Having said that, the Dutch generally speak with a less noticeably “foreign” accent than others, and quite often all it’s possible to tell is that the speaker isn’t native, and then by a process of deduction, because the difference is so slight, to arrive at the conclusion “Dutch”
