Scots language

Scots is a West Germanic language variety descended from Early Middle English. As a result, Modern Scots is a sister language of Modern English. Scots is classified as an official language of Scotland, a regional or minority language of Europe, and a vulnerable language by UNESCO. In a Scottish census from 2022, over 1.5 million people in Scotland (of its total population of 5.4 million people) reported being able to speak Scots.

Most commonly spoken in the Scottish Lowlands, the Northern Isles of Scotland, and northern Ulster in Ireland (where the local dialect is known as Ulster Scots), it is sometimes called Lowland Scots, to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Celtic language that was historically restricted to most of the Scottish Highlands, the Hebrides, and Galloway after the sixteenth century; or Broad Scots, to distinguish it from Scottish Standard English. Many Scottish people's speech exists on a dialect continuum ranging between Broad Scots and Standard English.

Given that there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing a language from a dialect, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about whether Scots is a dialect of English or a separate language.

Native speakers sometimes refer to their vernacular as braid Scots (or "broad Scots" in English) or use a dialect name such as the "Doric" or the "Buchan Claik". The old-fashioned Scotch, an English loan, occurs occasionally, especially in Ulster. The term Lallans, a variant of the Modern Scots word lawlands [ˈlo̜ːlən(d)z, ˈlɑːlənz], is also used, though this is more often taken to mean the Lallans literary form. Scots in Ireland is known in official circles as Ulster-Scots (Ulstèr-Scotch in revivalist Ulster-Scots) or "Ullans", a recent neologism merging Ulster and Lallans.

Scots is a contraction of Scottis, the Older Scots and northern version of late Old English: Scottisc (modern English "Scottish"), which replaced the earlier i-mutated version Scyttisc. Before the end of the fifteenth century, English speech in Scotland was known as "English" (written Ynglis or Inglis at the time), whereas "Scottish" (Scottis) referred to Gaelic. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the English language used in Scotland had arguably become a distinct language, albeit one lacking a name which clearly distinguished it from all the other English variants and dialects spoken in Britain. From 1495, the term Scottis was increasingly used to refer to the Lowland vernacular and Erse, meaning "Irish", was used as a name for Gaelic. For example, towards the end of the fifteenth century, William Dunbar was using Erse to refer to Gaelic and, in the early sixteenth century, Gavin Douglas was using Scottis as a name for the Lowland vernacular. The Gaelic of Scotland is now usually called Scottish Gaelic.

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.^{[full citation needed]} In the core areas of Scots settlement, Scots outnumbered English settlers by five or six to one.^{[full citation needed]}