This appears to be a “Scots” version of the Scottish Parliament website - but is it for real? Call me uneducated, but this doesn’t look like a separate language, just a bad phonetic rendering of a stereotypical Scotsman:
Yep, it’s real. Scots has been recognised by the Scottish Parliament alongside English and Gaelic. It’s true that it’s on the border between dialect and language, but given that the national poet (Burns) wrote in Scots, and his poems are inpenetrable to the average English-speaker, it seems valid to me.
The Scots language is a Germanic language descended from Anglo-Saxon and very closely related to English. (It is perhaps debatable whether it constitutes a separate language or a dialect of English.)
It is not the same as Scottish Gaelic, which is a Celtic language and very different from English.
OK, so a second question - do Scots speakers really write that way? Although I have heard of Scots, I always thought it was just a spoken dialect these days, rather than a written language.
The Wikipedia link half-answers that: “When written, local loyalties usually prevail and the written form is usually Standard English adopted to represent the local pronunciation.”
Basically, it’s a language which had no written tradition. Which is unusual in Europe, but far from uncommon in a wider perspective - most Pacific island languages, for example, have no written form. So when attempts are made to transcribe them, the results understandably end up influenced by the transcriber and his/her inherent linguistic leanings, which in the case of Scots are often English-oriented.
Check out my link. There is no "official’ literary form, but obviously if it is one of the languages of the Scottish Parliament it has some standardization as a written form.
It’s comparable in some ways, and very different in others. It’s not that Scots information will make it more accessible to people for whom English or Gaelic is not their first language (which seems to have been the misguided original intention of the botched Creole you mention). It’s about nationalistic politics, and the recognition of diversity of languages as being something worth preserving, not only as museum artifacts but as a part of everyday life.
Scots is a semi-independent development from Anglo-Saxon, rather than being a derivative of English like Jamaican Creole.
Scots is of much greater antiquity than Jamaican Creole
Scots has a significant body of literature written in it
That said, there is a good chance that a written form of Jamaican Creole would have developed if Jamaica had been independent as long as Haiti has. Haitian Creole, which bears roughly the same relationship to French as Jamaican Creole does to English, has a standard, largely phonetic written form. There is nothing inherently ridiculous about a written form of Jamaican Creole existing, given its extensive differences from Standard English.
Arguably the most commendable thing about a Scots language govt site is that any real-life Sir Humphrey would have great difficulty turning it into mealy-mouthed doublespeak.
The gulf between
“[it] tells ye aboot the different weys that you can let the Pairlament and the Memmers o the Scottish Pairlament (MSPs) ken whit ye think”
and
“the traditional allocation of executive responsibilities has always been so determined as to liberate the ministerial incumbent from the administrative minutiae by devolving the managerial functions to those whose experience and qualifications have better formed them for the performance of such humble offices”
is quite large, let’s face it.