Languages of Scotland
Languages of Scotland | |
---|---|
Minority | Scots (30.1%), Scottish Gaelic (1.1%)[2] |
Foreign | Polish (1.1%), Urdu (0.5%), Chinese (0.5%), Punjabi (0.5%)[3] |
Signed | British Sign Language (official) |
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The languages of Scotland belong predominantly to the
Celtic languages
The Celtic languages of Scotland can be divided into two groups: Goidelic (or Gaelic) and Brittonic (or Brythonic). Pictish is usually seen as a Brittonic language but this is not universally accepted. They are known collectively as the Insular Celtic languages.
Goidelic languages
The Goidelic language currently spoken in Scotland is
Scottish Gaelic, along with modern Manx and Irish, is descended from Middle Irish, a derivative of Old Irish, which is descended in turn from Primitive Irish, the oldest known form of the Goidelic languages. Primitive Irish is known only from fragments, mostly personal names, inscribed on stone in the Ogham alphabet in Ireland and western Britain up to about the 6th century AD.
Goidelic languages were once the most prominent by far among the Scottish population, but are now mainly restricted to the West. The
The majority of the vocabulary of modern Scottish Gaelic is native
In common with other
The influence of Scottish Gaelic can be seen particularly in surnames (notably Mac- names, where the mac means "Son of...") and toponymy. The surname influence is not restricted to Mac- names: several colours give rise to common Scottish surnames: bàn (Bain – white), ruadh (Roy – red), dubh (Dow – black), donn (Dunn – brown), buidhe (Bowie – yellow), and Gille- (meaning lad or servant) gives rise to names such as Gilmour and Gillies. Common place name elements from Gaelic in Scotland include baile (Bal-, a town) e.g. Balerno, cille (Kil-, an old church) e.g. Kilmarnock, inbhir (Inver-, Inner-, meaning a confluence) e.g. Inverness, Innerleithen, ceann (Kin-, meaning a head or top of something) e.g. Kintyre, Kinross, and dun (meaning a fort) e.g. Dundee and Dunfermline.
Brittonic languages
None of the Brittonic languages of Scotland survive to the modern day, though they have been reconstructed to a degree.
The ancestral Common Brittonic language was probably spoken in southern Scotland in Roman times and earlier.[5] It was certainly spoken there by the early medieval era, and Brittonic-speaking kingdoms such as Strathclyde, Rheged, and Gododdin, part of the Hen Ogledd ("Old North"), emerged in what is now Scotland. Eventually Brittonic evolved into a variety known as Cumbric, which survived in southwestern Scotland until around the 11th century.
The main legacy of these languages has been Scotland's toponymy, e.g. names such as Aberdeen, Tranent and Ochiltree.
There are also many Brittonic influences on Scottish Gaelic. Scottish Gaelic contains a number of apparently
Pictish language
The Pictish language is an
Germanic languages
Two
The
Scots language
Scots has its origins in the variety of early northern
From the 13th century Early Scots spread further into Scotland via the
There is no institutionalised standard variety, but during the 18th century a new
Spoken Scots comprises many dialects, none of which may be said to be more "true" Scots than any other. This diversity is often seen as a mark of local pride among Scots. There are four dialect groupings:
Scottish English
Scottish (Standard) English is the result of language contact between Scots and the Standard English of England after the 17th century. The resulting shift towards Standard English by Scots-speakers resulted in many phonological compromises and lexical transfers, often mistaken for mergers by linguists unfamiliar with the history of Scottish English.[15]: 60–61 Furthermore, the process was also influenced by interdialectal forms, hypercorrections and spelling pronunciations.[15]: 61 Highland English has been influenced by Gaelic. The most Gaelic influenced variety being Hebridean English, spoken in the Western Isles.
Distinct vocabulary, often from Latin and Lowland Scots, is still used in Scottish legal terminology.
Norn language
Norn is an extinct North Germanic,
As late as 1894, there were people in Foula who could repeat sentences in Norn, as I myself had the opportunity of hearing. The last man in Unst who is said to have been able to speak Norn, Walter Sutherland from Skaw, died about 1850. In Foula, on the other hand, men who were living very much later than the middle of the present [19th] century are said to have been able to speak Norn[16]
Most of the use of Norn/Norse in modern-day Shetland and Orkney is purely ceremonial, and mostly in Old Norse, for example the Shetland motto, which is Með lögum skal land byggja ("with law shall land be built"), which is the same motto used by the Icelandic police force and inspired by the Danish Codex Holmiensis.
There are some enthusiasts who are engaged in developing and disseminating a modern form called
Norman French, Ancient Greek and Latin
Latin is also used to a limited degree in certain official mottos, for example
Norman French was historically used in Scotland, and appears in some mottos as well. Some works of medieval literature from Scotland were composed in this language. After the twelfth-century reign of
The use of Ancient Greek is almost entirely gone in Scotland, but one example would be the motto of
Sign languages
Scotland's deaf community tends to use British Sign Language. There are a few signs used in Scotland which are unique to the country, as well as variations in some signs from Dundee to Glasgow (similar to accents). Most deaf people in Scotland are educated in mainstream schools.
Other sign languages in use in Scotland include
Controversies
Language vs dialect
There are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing languages from dialects, although a number of paradigms exist, which render sometimes contradictory results. The exact distinction is therefore a subjective one, dependent on the user's frame of reference. (See Dialect)
Since there is a very high level of mutual intelligibility between contemporary speakers of Scots in Scotland and in Ulster (
Hostility
Some resent Scottish Gaelic being promoted in the Lowlands, although it was once spoken everywhere in mainland Scotland including, to an extent, the extreme south-east[23][24] (that part of Scotland which was originally Northumbria) and the extreme north-east (Caithness).
Two areas with mostly Norse-derived placenames (and some Pictish), the Northern Isles (Shetland and Orkney) were ceded to Scotland in lieu of an unpaid dowry in 1472, and never spoke Gaelic; its traditional vernacular Norn, a derivative of Old Norse mutually intelligible with Icelandic and Faroese, died out in the 18th century after large-scale immigration by Lowland Scots speakers. To this day, many Shetlanders and Orcadians maintain a separate identity, albeit through the Shetland and Orcadian dialects of Lowland Scots, rather than their former national tongue. Norn was also spoken at one point in Caithness, apparently dying out much earlier than Shetland and Orkney. However, the Norse speaking population were entirely assimilated by the Gaelic speaking population in the Western Isles; to what degree this happened in Caithness is a matter of controversy, although Gaelic was spoken in parts of the county until the 20th century.
Overview
Diagrammatic representation of the development of the historic Indo-European languages of Scotland:
Proto-Celtic
|
Old English | Old Norse | |||
Common Brittonic | Primitive Irish | Early Middle English
|
Old West Norse
| ||
Cumbric | Pictish
|
Old Irish | Early Scots | Middle English | Norn |
Middle Irish | Middle Scots | Early Modern English | |||
Scottish Gaelic | Modern Scots | Scottish English |
Statistics
According to the 2001 census
In a 2010 Scottish Government study, 85% of respondents noted they speak Scots.[27] According to the 2011 census, 1,541,693 people can speak Scots in Scotland, approximately 30% of the population.[2]
The 2011 census asked people to specify the language that they used at home.[28] This found that the language used by majority of people aged 3 and over (92.6%) was English.[3]
Mother tongue | Count of all people aged 3 or over | Percentage |
---|---|---|
English | 4,740,547 | 94.5% |
Scots | 55,817 | 1.1% |
Polish | 54,186 | 1.1% |
Chinese (Cantonese, Mandarin, Min Nan, etc.) |
27,381 | 0.6% |
Gaelic (Scottish and others) | 24,974 | 0.5% |
Urdu | 23,394 | 0.5% |
Punjabi | 23,150 | 0.5% |
French | 14,623 | 0.3% |
British Sign Language | 12,533 | 0.3% |
German | 11,317 | 0.2% |
Other
- The Romani language (Indo-Aryan) has also been spoken in Scotland, but became more or less extinct in the country during the 20th century. It has lent Scotland's other languages a number of loanwords, and has also had an effect on the Gaelic of the travelling community. Since the beginning of the 21st century increasing numbers of Romani migrants from Eastern Europe has seen the Romani language return to Scotland. The Govanhill area in Glasgow has become home to many Romani people and the Romani language can be heard being spoken in the area.
- Beurla Reagaird, a Scottish analogy to Shelta, being a form of Gaelic or semi-Gaelicised English spoken by some travellers.
- During the 20th and 21st centuries immigrants from a wide variety of countries have created a complex mosaic of spoken languages amongst the resident population.
See also
References
- ^ "Fact: Scotland's official languages". scotland.org. 2011. Retrieved 3 November 2022.
- ^ a b c United Kingdom census (2011). "Table KS206SC - Language" (PDF). National Records of Scotland. Retrieved 13 April 2021.
- ^ a b c United Kingdom census (2011). "Table AT_002_2011 - Language used at home other than English (detailed), Scotland". National Records of Scotland. Retrieved 13 April 2021.
- ^ Neat, Timothy (2002) The Summer Walkers. Edinburgh. Birlinn. pp.225–29.
- ^ Jackson, Kenneth Hurlstone (1953). Language and History in Early Britain. University Press.
- ^ Jackson K; The Pictish Language in F T Wainright "The Problem of the Picts" (1955).
- ^ a b c d Macafee, Caroline; Aitken, A. J. (2002). "A history of Scots to 1700". A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue. Vol. 12.
- ISBN 0-7486-1596-2.
- ^ Tulloch, Graham (1980). The Language of Walter Scott: A Study of his Scottish and Period Language. London: Deutsch. p. 249.
- ^ a b Grant and, William; Murison, David D., eds. (1929–1976). Scottish National Dictionary. Vol. I. Edinburgh: The Scottish National Dictionary Association.
- ^ McClure, J. D. (1992). The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford University Press. p. 168.
- ^ J. Derrick, McClure (1985). "The debate on Scots orthography". In Görlach, Manfred (ed.). Focus on: Scotland. Amsterdam: Benjamins. p. 204.
- ^ Mackie, Albert D. (1952). "Fergusson's Language: Braid Scots Then and Now". In Smith, Syndney Goodsir (ed.). Robert Fergusson 1750–1774. Edinburgh: Nelson. pp. 123–124, 129.
- ^ Stevenson, R. L. (1905). "Underwoods". The Works of R. L. Stevenson. Vol. 8. London: Heinemann. p. 152.
- ^ a b Macafee, C. (2004). Hikey, R. (ed.). Legacies of Colonial English: Studies in Transported Dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- ISBN 978-0-9566549-1-5.
- ^ "Norn". Retrieved 10 June 2011.
- ^ "Welcome". Shetlopedia.
- ^ Bryn Mawr Classical Review 98.6.16. Ccat.sas.upenn.edu. Retrieved 17 March 2011.
- ^ "University Coat of Arms; University of St Andrews". Archived from the original on 5 June 2011. Retrieved 28 May 2012.
- ^ List of declarations made with respect to treaty No. 148, European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Status as of: 17 March 2011
- ^ European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (archived from the original on 14 May 2005), Council of Europe.
- ISBN 0080284914.
by the tenth and eleventh centuries the Gaelic language was in use throughout the whole of Scotland, including the English-speaking south-east, though no doubt the longer-established Northern English continued to be the dominant language there
- ^ Aitken, A. (1985). "A history of Scots" (PDF). media.scotslanguage.com.
- ^ "News Release – Scotland's Census 2001 – Gaelic Report" Archived 22 May 2013 at the Wayback Machine from General Registrar for Scotland website, 10 October 2005. Retrieved 27 December 2007
- ^ "Census 2001 Scotland: Gaelic speakers by council area" Comunn na Gàidhlig. Retrieved 28 May 2010.
- ^ The Scottish Government. "Public Attitudes Towards the Scots Language". Retrieved 22 November 2010.
- ^ "Language used at home".
Further reading
- Lauchlan, Fraser; Parisi, Marinella; Fadda, Roberta (2013). "Bilingualism in Sardinia and Scotland: Exploring the cognitive benefits of speaking a 'minority' language". Gale Academic Onefile