According to the 2021 census data, in present-day Scotland at least ten languages are in use beside English: they are immigrant languages (such as varieties of Chinese, Punjabi and Urdu, but also Polish, French and Italian) and native languages, such as British Sign Language, Scots Gaelic and Scots.
While Gaelic is a Celtic language and is in use in the North-West and in cities where it is studied like other languages, Scots is mostly a Germanic language, like English, and it is not a dialect of the latter.
This is a unique case in the current linguistic landscape of the world, because this variety does not derive from the expansion of English outside England, like in the case of Ireland, the USA, Canada, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and all the countries that were part of the British Empire, or in the case of those countries where English has become the language of international business, like in Italy or in Japan.
Scots, like English, derives from the dialects that originated at the fall of the Roman Empire, when different Germanic peoples moved from the Continent to settle in England (notably, Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) and their languages gradually ousted Latin and (almost completely) native Celtic languages.
Like English, over time Scots has also developed different dialects and has acquired vocabulary of French, Dutch and Scandinavian origin, thanks to the numerous contacts that the Scottish kingdom has always had with Continental Europe.
Moreover, like English, also Scots has a very long literary tradition, the echoes of which span the world: for instance, everybody knows Auld Lang Syne, the poem by Robert Burns which in many parts of the world is sung on New Year’s Eve. In Italy we are familiar with the Scottish settings of novels by Robert Louis Stevenson (such as The Master of Ballantrae and Kidnapped) and by Diana Gabaldon (the Outlander series), but already in the nineteenth century the popularity of Walter Scott was such that a novel of his (The Bride of Lammermoor) underpinned Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor.
As far as research is concerned, Scots has elicited great interest for decades: over the years, dictionaries have been compiled and are now available as open-access resources; materials for schools with interactive games have been published and an app can be downloaded free of charge.
Scots is a parallel variety of English which could not continue on its path to becoming an independent language because the country in which it was (and still is) in use lost its own independence: first in 1603, when James VI, King of Scots, became also King of England as a result of Elizabeth I having died without descendants, and therefore moved his court from Edinburgh to London; and then in 1707, when the Scottish Parliament was adjourned as a result of another dynastic change and therefore the only Parliament that continued to function was the Westminster one until 1999. If it had not been for these historical turning points, today we might perhaps have two similar yet separate languages, just like Italian and Spanish are, in two independent countries.
Marina Dossena – Europe for Scotland ambassador in Italy
