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Scots - A Language of Scotland

© Sharma Krauskopf

In the next few weeks we will be discussing two of the three languages of Scotland. The one we will not discuss is English, which, of course, came across the border when the English invaded Scotland. The other two that we will discuss are Scots and Gaelic. This week we begin with Scots. The first thing to remember is that Scots and Gaelic are two completely separate languages. Scots is a the Germanic language of the Scottish Lowlands. It has some similarity to Scots English.

The history of the language is very well told in on Wir Ain Leid pages. This is a very informative site with many resources to help learn more about Scots.

The battle to keep the language alive in Scotland has been a difficult one but one group which is at the forefront of the battle is Scots Language Resource Center.

The language has various regional dialects. You can find about the dialect of Northeast Scotland with pronunciation tips at Doric Net.

If you would like to hear the language the best resource is this page with Robert Burns Poetry but the audio is in wav format and takes a long time to download. We have put another sound clip of Scots on Realaudio so you can hear it without a long download. This is the Fisher Quine from moray.org. Moray Cooncil has another good audio clip along with some great sayings and a dictionary.

The WWW has a great deal of Scots including articles from newspapers written in Scots, a fabulous list of books in Scots, and even a crossword puzzle.

A fun site I found with some Glaswegian sayings is Scot -Tex.

Thats all until next week when we look at Gaelic the other language of Scotland.

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