Introduction

Although Scottish Gaelic from the Highlands and a plenitude of immigrant languages exist, the language ecology of Lowland Scotland has been dominated by the relationship between two closely related daughters of Old and Early Middle English, Scots and Scottish Standard English (SSE). This is one of the most interesting multi-varietal situations in Western Europe, and reveals how the attribution of ‘languagehood’ is as much of a socio-political judgement as a linguistic one.

Scots

Scots is, more or less, the direct descendant of the Northumbrian form of Old English, planted in south-eastern Scotland between 525 and 633, which eventually spread over the whole Lowland Zone up to Morayshire by the 1200s (Duncan 1975, Nicolaisen 1977, Johnston 1997a:61–2). Later expansion brought it further to Caithness, Orkney and Shetland, where it replaced the Insular Norse language, Norn, and to Galloway and a number of Celtic-speaking areas along the Highland Line, as well as Ulster, where Scots-speaking communities live today in several places settled by Presbyterians. While it functions as the localised dialect of Lowland Scotland, it enjoys a special status due to an important aspect of its history: it is the only Germanic variety in Britain besides Standard English ever to have functioned as a full language within an independent state (the Kingdom of Scotland) and to have been used for all domains that implies, including a good-sized and sometimes brilliant corpus of literature from the early fourteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, exhibiting a range of genres, styles and registers comparable to any Western European national language.