Jan 29 2009
Shock! A Linguistics Post!
Freeborn John points to an argument between two other British bloggers about, well, it’s really about whether Scots should be taught in the schools, but that gets tangled with Scots v. Scots (or Scottish) English, and language v. lect.
I trained as a Germanicist, concentrating on the North Germanic (Scandinavian) and Invgaeonic sub-families of West Germanic, with a specific focus on Anglo-Frisian (English and all of its closest relatives). So I do know something about the topic.
Most English speakers world-wide are sadly ignorant of their own native language, so it’s hardly surprising that the two bloggers are confused. Scots and Scots English (and, for that matter, Scots Gaelic, although that doesn’t apply here) are wholly different. Scots English, like say, Standard American English, is uncontroversially a dialect of English.
I say uncontroversially because there isn’t a clear definitive distinction between language and lect, and often, the boundary is blurred, so that the distinction boils down to politics. Germans will therefore ridiculously refer to Low German as a dialect of High German, even though they’re not even particularly closely related (Low German is Ingvaeonic, and more closely related to English than it is High German).
But it would be difficult, at best, to make the case that Scots English is its own language, and not a dialect of English. Actually, it would be more silly than difficult, although not as silly as claiming that Low German is a dialect of High German.
Scots, as I said, is wholly different. Scots is not Scots English, no more than Scots Gaelic is Scots English. Scots is the usually overlooked closest living relative to English (Frisian is second closest after Scots), but it is emphatically not English, by two crucial standards: History and mutual intelligibility.
English began as Anglo-Saxon (Old English, the language Beowulf was written in), and like all Germanic languages at the time, it was a highly inflected case language. Two things changed English: The settlement of Vikings in the Danelaw, and the Norman Conquest. The Vikings spoke a related, North Germanic language, and while the roots were similar enough to their Anglo-Saxon counterparts to be easily understood, the case endings were entirely different. This resulted in a reduction of the case system, well underway by 1066. The Norman Conquest resulted in a huge vocabulary shift, as Norman French loans were adopted, sometimes excluding the native Anglo-Saxon words. It also hastened the death of case in English, since Norman French at the time had only a vestigal case system, much as English does today.
Scots began the same way, with an Anglo-Saxon base, but in the Danelaw. While English developed largely from the West Saxon dialect, Scots developed from Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon, two significantly different dialects. Additionally, Scots borrowed far more North Germanic vocabulary, and far fewer Norman French vocabulary; Old Norse had the same impact on Scots that Norman French did on English, and Norman French had comparatively little effect. Scots retained a number of features from Anglo-Saxon that English lost, and a number of features from Old Norse that English never adopted. Scots was then further affected by the spread of Middle English into the north, but what Scots and English have in common they mostly owe to being closely related and having similar, but largely independent, historical developments.
English and Scots have related origins, and related historical developments, but those developments were largely independent of each other, and resulted in two closely related, but very different languages.
Scots English, on the other hand, is merely the dialect of English spoken in Scotland. Scots English is a result of the spread of English into the north, and the development of a regional pronunciation and a handful of regional vocabulary items, as well as idiomatic uses of vocabulary. Scots English is English; it is not Scots, and Scots is not English.
The two are different enough that they are not mutually intelligible, not because of pronunciation or idiom, which would not qualify them as separate languages, but linguistic features, such as vocabulary, morphological markers, and so forth. By mutually intelligible, I obviously mean to an outside English speaker; obviously, somebody who has grown up hearing both will find them both intelligible.
There, that’s straightened out. And I’m not going anywhere near the “Should Scots be taught in schools” debate.
6 responses so far
When I lived in Scotland 40 years ago, the only Scots I heard was old folks talking in small villages of Kirkcudbrightshire where I was living with a friend and his family. Of course many place names are Scots. But, in those days (it’s probably changed now) even the working classes in cities mixed a few Scots words in with Scots English - i.e. kirk instead of church.
When I first arrived in Scotland I had a hard time understanding the working class folks. I had travelled from Switzerland by train through Germany and France so was used to people yakking away in languages I could not understand. Then by ferry to Dover and train to London. The train from London to Scotland was filled with Scottish soccer fans returning from a match. By now I was exhausted and kept dozing off. When I’d awake, I sometimes thought that I was back in Germany or France because I could not understand what the Scots were saying. When my friend met me at the station in Dumfries, I was very relieved to be able to understand his family. They were highly educated and spoke the most beautiful English. To me the educated Scots pronounce English perfectly.
The language that Robert Burns used- wee cowrin’ timrous beastie- is that Scots or Scots English?
“To me the educated Scots pronounce English perfectly.” Indeed we do; handsome of you to say so. But we may well have spoken Scots in the playground when we were bairns.
Burns wrote in the patois spoken in the southwest (Dumfriesshire to Ayreshire) - Scots English with some Scots words thrown in. It just looks different from English because his spelling was phonetic.
Dearieme, the educated Scots pronounce “r”s and diphthongs perfectly unlike their neighbors to the south.
Thank you for making the proper distinction for the proper reason. The definitions are indeed subject to politics, and mutual intelligibility is a more objective standard.
Of course, that would make Scandinavian a single language, which none of them could bear…
I’m assuming you’re talking about continental Scandinavian (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian), and although if you can read one, you can read them all (Swedish is a bit different, and probably would require a dictionary, if Danish or Norwegian were your strong language), the pronunciation is wildly different. It would take a Norwegian some exposure before he could understand the Danes.