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Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 6th February 2008

Dot Wordsworth on why Scots is no more than a dialect

See if you can understand this: ‘We want tae mak siccar that as mony folk as can is able tae find oot aboot whit the Scottish Pairlament dis and whit wey it warks.’ It looks at first like one of those annoying novels that represent dialect phonetically. In fact it is a product of the Scottish Parliament.

The Parliament lists ‘Scottish citizen languages’ as ‘Arabic, Bengali, British Sign Language, Chinese, Gaelic, Punjabi, Scots and Urdu’. Polish does not get a look-in. The delusion under which the Parliament labours is that Scots is a different language from English. In reality it is a dialect, no more different from standard English than the dialects of Northumberland or Devon. It has sometimes been called Lallans (Lowland Scots) because people in the Highlands used to speak Gaelic, as some still do.

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