Northumbrian Old English had been established in what is now southeastern Scotland as far as the
River Forth by the seventh century, as the region was part of the
Anglo-Saxon kingdom of
Northumbria. Some historians have traditionally argued that the regions later known as
Lothian and the
Scottish Borders became attached to the
Kingdom of Scotland in the tenth and early eleventh centuries, but this is no longer accepted and the takeover that does take place is not fully evident until the twelfth century and probably incomplete until at least the thirteenth century. The common use of English remained largely confined to Lothian and the Borders until the thirteenth century, where the local varieties were reshaped in response to migration from the
Scandinavian-influenced North and
Midlands of England that came with the foundation of the first
burghs in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Scots language scholar
Robert McColl Millar framed Early Scots as a
koine of the varieties of English spoken in
Bernicia and the
Danelaw that had been brought to the new burghs. Later influences on the development of Scots came from the
Romance languages via
ecclesiastical and legal
Latin,
Norman French, and later
Parisian French, due to the
Auld Alliance. Additionally, there were
Dutch and
Middle Low German influences due to trade with and immigration from the
Low Countries. Scots also includes loan words in the legal and administrative fields resulting from contact with
Middle Irish, and reflected in early medieval legal documents. Contemporary
Scottish Gaelic loans are mainly for geographical and cultural features, such as
cèilidh,
loch,
whisky,
glen and
clan.
Cumbric and
Pictish, the medieval
Brittonic languages of Northern England and Scotland, are the suspected source of a small number of Scots words, such as
lum (derived from Cumbric) meaning "chimney". From the thirteenth century, the
Early Scots language spread further into Scotland via the
burghs, which were proto-urban institutions first established by King
David I. In fourteenth-century Scotland, the growth in prestige of Early Scots and the complementary decline of French made Scots the
prestige dialect of most of eastern Scotland. By the sixteenth century,
Middle Scots had established orthographic and literary norms largely independent of those developing in England. From 1610 to the 1690s during the
Plantation of Ulster, some 200,000 Scots-speaking Lowlanders settled as colonists in Ulster in Ireland. In the core areas of Scots settlement, Scots outnumbered English settlers by five or six to one. The name
Modern Scots is used to describe the Scots language after 1700. A seminal study of Scots was undertaken by
JAH Murray and published as
Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland. Murray's results were given further publicity by being included in
Alexander John Ellis's book
On Early English Pronunciation, Part V alongside results from Orkney and Shetland, as well as the whole of England. Murray and Ellis differed slightly on the border between English and Scots dialects. Scots was studied alongside English and Scots Gaelic in the
Linguistic Survey of Scotland at the
University of Edinburgh, which began in 1949 and began to publish results in the 1970s. Also beginning in the 1970s, the
Atlas Linguarum Europae studied the Scots language used at 15 sites in Scotland, each with its own dialect. As of November 2022, Scots is represented on the Scientific Committee of the Atlas Linguarum Europae by David Clement of the
University of Glasgow.
Language shift From the mid-sixteenth century, written Scots was increasingly influenced by the developing
Standard English of Southern England due to developments in royal and political interactions with England. When
William Flower, an
English herald, spoke with
Mary of Guise and her councillors in 1560, they first used the . As he found this hard to understand, they switched into her native French. King
James VI, who in 1603 became
James I of England, observed in his work
Some Reulis and Cautelis to Be Observit and Eschewit in Scottis Poesie that (
For though several have written of (the subject)
in English, which is the language most similar to ours...). However, with the increasing influence and availability of books printed in England, most writing in Scotland came to be done in the English fashion. In his first speech to the
English Parliament in March 1603, King James VI and I declared, . Following James VI's move to London, the
Protestant Church of Scotland adopted the 1611
Authorized King James Version of the Bible; subsequently, the
Acts of Union 1707 led to Scotland joining England to form the
Kingdom of Great Britain, having a single
Parliament of Great Britain based in London. After the Union and the shift of political power to England, the use of Scots was discouraged by many in authority and education, as was the notion of "Scottishness" itself. Many leading Scots of the period, such as
David Hume, defined themselves as
Northern British rather than Scottish. They attempted to rid themselves of their Scots in a bid to establish standard English as the official language of the newly formed union. Nevertheless, Scots was still spoken across a wide range of domains until the end of the eighteenth century.
Frederick Pottle, the twentieth-century biographer of
James Boswell (1740–1795), described James's view of the use of Scots by his father
Alexander Boswell (1706–1782) in the eighteenth century while serving as a judge of the
Supreme Courts of Scotland: However, others did scorn Scots, such as
Scottish Enlightenment intellectuals David Hume and
Adam Smith, who went to great lengths to get rid of every Scotticism from their writings. Following such examples, many well-off Scots took to learning English through the activities of those such as
Thomas Sheridan, who in 1761 gave a series of lectures on English
elocution. Charging a
guinea at a time (about £ in today's money), they were attended by over 300 men, and he was made a
freeman of the City of
Edinburgh. Following this, some of the city's intellectuals formed the Select Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland. These eighteenth-century activities would lead to the creation of
Scottish Standard English. Scots remained the vernacular of many rural communities and the growing number of urban working-class Scots. in
Canberra, Australia In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the use of Scots as a
literary language was revived by several prominent Scotsmen such as
Robert Burns. Such writers established a new cross-dialect literary norm. Scots terms were included in the
English Dialect Dictionary, edited by
Joseph Wright. Wright had great difficulty in recruiting volunteers from Scotland, as many refused to cooperate with a venture that regarded Scots as a dialect of English, and he obtained enough help only through the assistance from a Professor Shearer in Scotland. Wright himself rejected the argument that Scots was a separate language, saying that this was a "quite modern mistake". By the 1940s, the
Scottish Education Department's
language policy was that Scots had no value: "it is not the language of 'educated' people anywhere, and could not be described as a suitable medium of education or culture". Students reverted to Scots outside the classroom, but the reversion was not complete. What occurred, and has been occurring ever since, is a process of
language attrition, whereby successive generations have adopted more and more features from Standard English. This process has accelerated rapidly since widespread access to mass media in English and increased population mobility became available after the
Second World War. It has recently taken on the nature of wholesale
language shift, sometimes also termed language
change,
convergence or
merger. By the end of the twentieth century, Scots was at an advanced stage of
language death over much of
Lowland Scotland. Residual features of Scots are often regarded as slang. A 2010
Scottish Government study of "public attitudes towards the Scots language" found that 64% of respondents (around 1,000 individuals in a
representative sample of Scotland's adult population) "don't really think of Scots as a language", also finding "the most frequent speakers are least likely to agree that it is not a language (58%) and those never speaking Scots most likely to do so (72%)".
Decline in status , on
John Knox House, Edinburgh Before the
Treaty of Union 1707, when Scotland and England joined to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, there is ample evidence that Scots was widely held to be an independent
sister language forming a
pluricentric diasystem with English. German linguist considered Modern Scots a ('half language') in terms of an
and languages framework, although today in Scotland most people's speech is somewhere on a continuum ranging from traditional broad Scots to
Scottish Standard English. Many speakers are
diglossic and may be able to
code-switch along the continuum depending on the situation. Where on this continuum English-influenced Scots becomes Scots-influenced English is difficult to determine. Because standard English now generally has the role of a ('roofing language'), disputes often arise as to whether the varieties of Scots are dialects of Scottish English or constitute a separate language in their own right. The UK government now accepts Scots as a
regional language and has recognised it as such under the
European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Evidence for its existence as a separate language lies in the extensive body of Scots literature, its independent – if somewhat fluid –
orthographic conventions, and in its former use as the language of the original
Parliament of Scotland. Because Scotland retained distinct political, legal, and religious systems after the Union, many Scots terms passed into Scottish English. == Language revitalisation ==