Introduction

This is where Scotland stands sociolinguistically in the early decades of the twenty-first century. (Scottish) Standard English is dominant in terms of speaker numbers (as far as we can tell); it is certainly the variety that is most used both across the various linguistic communities in the country and beyond it. Scots remains a major variety within the country (the Census of 2011, the first to ask a question about the language, told us that at least 1.5 million people resident in the country self-identified as Scots speakers; most of these speakers did not appear to see Scots as entirely distinct from English, however (for discussion, see Macafee (2017) and Sebba (2019)). Its discrete nature appears to be being worn down: as a close relative of the hegemonic language, convergence and even merger is entirely possible. Gaelic continues to lose speakers (although at a far slower rate than was the case even thirty years ago). But due to increased immigration from elsewhere in the world, linguistic diversity has recently become significantly greater than was previously the case. Polish in particular has become omnipresent in densely populated parts of the country, with the number of people born in Poland only a few thousand less than reported speakers of Gaelic in the 2011 Scottish Census. The future does not look bright for the Scottish autochthonous vernaculars; conversely, however, the political status of Gaelic has never been higher. Reasons for this conundrum will be suggested in the following. This will primarily relate to the period after 1999; an occasional reference back a few decades will be necessary, however, since the ‘new age’ was not without presage.

Globalisation

Before focusing on specifically Scottish phenomena, we must consider the global economic and political ecology in which the people of Scotland find themselves. In particular, we must define and analyse globalisation and its consequences to the spread of English; this spread, as a sole code, is a feature of Scottish life, despite, in theory, the country's position in the ‘inner circle’ of Kachru's famous model of the internationalisation of English (Kachru 2017: in particular, chapter 4). Scotland is apparently anomalous: both at the centre and on the periphery.