Further Research

To learn more about the history of the Scots language, explore these two documents produced by the Scots Language Centre with timelines that help you understand how Scots evolved, how it was Anglicised and how it was accepted as a language in its own right again in the 21st century:

• Timeline of the Scots Language AD 500-1700 [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]
• Timeline of the Scots Language since 1700

To find out more about the use of Scots in online contexts today, read this article by two young academics from Glasgow University: Jamieson, E. and Ryan, S. (2019), How Twitter is helping the Scots language thrive in the 21st century, published in The Conversation.

You might want to follow Michael Dempster, the author of this unit, on Twitter (@DrMDempster), where he posts as Cyberscot . Michael Dempster is currently the Scots Scriever at the National Library of Scotland and posts on Twitter in this role @ScotsScriever .

Irene Watt published an article in The Conversation about how the series Outlander is helping Scots thrive today: Outlander is boosting a renaissance of the Scots language – here’s how.

If you want to find out more about the 2011 census results in relation to the use of Scots language, explore the Scots Language Centre website which features an analysis and commentary of the census data.

You may also want to look ahead at the plans for the 2021 census and explore the relevant sections of the Scotland Census website.

Robert Millar published an instructive paper on the democracy of language use in Scotland, with a specific focus on Scots, which he labels as a ‘dislocated language’. He explores the elements that are necessary for the revitalisation of the Scots language in Scotland. Yet, Millar here also claims that these elements are misunderstood by both practitioners and end-users of the Scots language – one of these elements is the standardisation of Scots.

In this unit, you learned that elocution that was supposed to help speakers of English in Scotland to ‘eradicate’ their Scottish accents. Here is an example of a chapbook printed for young readers, which was designed to help them learn to speak ‘properly’. It is The Elocutionist, a selection of popular poems for recitation in the archives of the National Library of Scotland.

Watch the BBC video Inside the Scottish Twitter Exhibition to learn how this exhibition ‘worked’.

Find out about the background story to Robert Burns’ song ‘The Deil's Awa Wi the Exciseman’ on the Scots Language Centre website.

Discover more about Burns’ own career as an excise man on this website.

To explore in more depth the discussions around advantages and disadvantages of standardising the Scots language, read: Costa, J. (2017) ‘On the Pros and Cons of Standardizing Scots’ in Pia Lane, James Costa, Haley De Korne (eds) Standardizing Minority Languages .

To find out more about the language policy in Northern Ireland regarding the three indigenous languages, Irish, Ulster Scots and English, read: Núñez, G. G. (2013), Translating for linguistic minorities in Northern Ireland: A look at translation policy in the judiciary, healthcare and local government, in Language Planning.