The Status of Scots: Dialect, language, or semi-language?

The people of Scotland occupy a unique historical and cultural position in the English-speaking world. They use the Standard language (with distinctive phonological, grammatical, lexical, and idiomatic features) in administration, law, education, the media, all national institutions, and by and large in their dealings with Anglophones elsewhere, but in their everyday lives a majority of them mix ‘the King's English’ with what in an earlier age was called ‘the King's Scots'.

Gaelic, the Celtic language shared with Ireland and once used throughout the Highlands and the Western Isles (the Hebrides), is now largely limited to those islands. At one time, most Speakers of Gaelic learned their mother tongue at home and Standard English at school, and in later life mixed it with the vernacular of the Lowlands. During much of the twentieth Century, Speakers of Gaelic have generally been bilingual from childhood; they now number some 80,000 in a population of about five million who in the main have little acquaintance with the language and its traditions, although everybody knows about it, and many have a feeling of loss because no one in their families speaks it any more. On the other hand, although the population at large also knows little about the traditions of Scots (the Germanic vernacular of the Lowlands), they use it widely as a matter of course and those who do not use it much or at all usually understand it well enough.

On the languagehood of Gaelic there can be no argument. On its Status, however, there is much discussion but little action, official or otherwise, and it continues the decline shared with the Celtic languages of Wales, Ireland, France, Man, and Cornwall. On the Status of Scots there is also much discussion, almost all of it ineffectual in official terms, and within that debate three broad points of view can be distinguished: