Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Any examination of English in Scotland must take account, from the outset, of the fact that the term English has two distinct applications. The Insular West Germanic dialect referred to as Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, had extended its range north of the Tweed by the seventh century: that is, it had become established in what is now Scotland. Long before the Kingdom of Scots had taken its present form, and long before a Kingdom of England had come into existence at all, the ancestor of the language universally known as English was spoken within the bounds of present-day Scotland. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the domain of the Kings of Scots expanded to include this Germanic-speaking territory; and continuously since then, the presence of this speech-form has been an integral part of the social, cultural, political, and linguistic history of Scotland – or to shift the emphasis, the history of the language in Scotland is an integral part of the general history of English. That is non-controversial; yet at the time of this writing, a speech-form called Scots , which stands as clearly as does international standard English in a direct line of descent from Anglo-Saxon, is officially recognized as a language by the European Bureau of Lesser-used Languages; and both the government of the United Kingdom and the Scottish government are under legal obligation to give it the recognition ... log in or subscribe to read full text