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Hae a guid crack: Scots

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"Have a good chat," Scots-Online.org invites Scots-speaking visitors. They're apparently queuing up to do just that; when I started this column three years ago, a Web search copped but a single site dedicated to Scots, and soon thereafter even it went 404. Last month, however, I repeated the experiment and was buried under an avalanche of virtual Scots. Clearly, something has changed.

What's changed

What a difference hame raing makes. Since the reconstitution of the Scottish Parliament, which was still evolving when this column launched, Scots speakers have made themselves heard, literally and figuratively. Last year they reminded government rather forcefully of their existence, and this year were counted for the first time. With results running to 30% of the Scottish people, many scotophones are demanding that their native language recover official status.

They've a tough row to hoe. For at least three hundred years, Scots has been misidentified and denigrated as "bad English." Absent from schools, its orthography lost, Scots has become the stuff of folklore and comedy. North Americans often laugh when I describe a poem or song as written in Scots. They take this for a witticism, as Canadians talk of "Newfie" and Americans of "Southern." It is not. Scots is a language, one fully as old, as modern, and as distinct as English.

The Auld Tung

In fact, both Scots and modern English evolved independently from Old English. Born in the 600's CE, the Scottish tradition followed a dramatically different path from the English. Chief among its influences were Gaelic, Norse, French, and Latin, language of Scotland's Roman-based judiciary. (Note that Scots integrated these influences during its development, transforming for example the French fâcher into the Scots fash (to anger). This process is not to be confused with words borrowed later, such as café, which remain outside the base vocabulary. Compare the Norman boeuf, ancestor of the modern English word beef.)

By the 1500s, Scots had become Scotland's de facto national language. The Court spoke it, Parliament debated in it, and epic poets such as Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gavin Douglas wrote in it. But the uprooting of the Scottish throne to London in 1603 delivered a crushing blow to Scots autonomy. So did the Protestant Reformation, which pushed the Scottish people away from their auld fere, France, and toward England and English. By the Union of 1707, Scots had largely been deposed by its sister dialect in all formal environments.

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