Introduction

This chapter provides an outline description of Scots, with some comments on Scottish Standard English (SSE), and directs the reader to the main sources. SSE is itself a contact variety, and Scots a language with a range of dialects: both are inputs to colonial Englishes.

In the period of most interest to us, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ruling and professional classes shifted to Standard English. The process is usually referred to as anglicisation, or sometimes restandardisation. A characteristic of anglicisation was the very strong motivation to acquire ‘correct’ English, so that nonstandard features from England did not play a part in the formation of SSE.

It should not be thought that Scots sank to the level of nonstandard dialects in England. Scots remained a vehicle for literature, and indeed continued to be written by exiles (see for instance Newlin 1928; Cardell and Cumming 1992/3; Tulloch 1997a, b; Montgomery 2000), but, for practical purposes, vernacular literacy was now essentially in English, insofar as such literacy was formally obtained. There was no continuity with the orthographic system of Older Scots.

By the late eighteenth century, the ability to speak English (in a scotticised fashion constrained by lack of contact with native models) was apparently widespread amongst the gentry.