Russian, "Ukrainian is a dialect", can you understand it well? "Not really." Spanish, "Portuagese is a language", can you understand it well? "A fair bit." Chinese, "Cantonese is just a dialect of Mandarin:", can you understand it spoken? "Not at all." Danish, "Swedish is another language", can you understand it? "Almost completely.". Language has a lot to do with identify.
No one says cantonese is a dialect of mandarin. Cantonese is a chinese dialect and mandarin is another chinese dialect. There are also many dozens if not hundreds of other chinese dialects that are just as distinct from one another and most of them are not mutually intelligible with one another. And if this is supposed to be a political issue with hong kong, reminder that there are 82 million native cantonese speakers in the world, and hong kong's total population is only 7 million.
As a native speaker of the Scots language, I think the biggest problem with the numbers of speakers is that many simply do not know about it, at school, we’re taught that it’s slang and rude to speak Scots, which is completely wrong, and speaking Scots to an employer can lower your chances of getting the job since it ‘makes you look unprofessional.’ I’d estimate that there are at least four million speakers of Scots, but many simply do not know about it, so when the census happens and they fill out the form, they don’t know what the language is and therefore do not tick it. I’m in S2 (S2 is 13-14 years old) and we only just started learning that it’s a language, but only the very rarely used words or the ones you’d find in old Scots poems, not the words we use on a daily basis and don’t know is a language. When I was in Primary (5-12 years old) we were actually given into trouble for speaking Scots. I don’t know if it’s the same for schools across Scotland, but from the part of Glasgow I come from, that’s what they taught us. It’s ridiculous that it’s a recognised language of the country but at the same time, we’re taught that it’s slang and that it’s wrong to speak it.
It's kind of sad that it's just considered improper English when there's clearly a whole different way of speaking/differences in vocabulary. I'm glad the attitude is changing around it so that it can be embraced as a part of your heritage. I guess the only question now is whether school should be conducted in English or Scots. Certainly education in English would make your life easier, but I think it's definitely a mistake not to offer classes in Scots/Scots immersion schools as well.
The same is taught in Finland about Finnish dialects and colloquial language, which Finns speak rather than the standard Finnish language. This has led to the situation that there are two Finnish languages; the standard language which is the official language and the dialects/spoken language which is the folk language. And it also makes learning Finnish more difficult for foreigners, who want to learn Finnish, but they are taught a standard language that Finns themselves don't usually speak.
@@rei_cirith I don’t think we even need to teach Scots, everyone I know already speaks it, all we need to do is make people more aware that it is a language and not just slang, I think that all classes other than English (and of course the modern languages classes) should be in Scots, that way students will get more used to the idea of it being a proper language since they see professionals speaking it.
Thank you so much for sharing, @spacedog. It’s so important to honor the culture we have at home. Disparaging native languages is something colonizers often do, and there are movements globally to reclaim our language and culture (Ireland, Native Americans in the US, indigenous peoples of South America) but it can be tough. Even more complex when the languages are more closely related
My father tells me about how when he was around 20, having only been exposed to american English up to that point, went to Scotland and couldn't understand a word of what people said, and that he would insist that they weren't speaking english but something else, but they would say that they were in fact speaking English.
PhD in linguistics here. The problem with using intelligibility as a criterion is that some languages (such as Portuguese, Galician and Spanish, or Swedish and Norwegian) are mutually intelligible (at least to a certain degree), while speakers of different varieties of the same language often have trouble understanding each other (as a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, I know many fellow Brazilians can barely understand some varieties from Portugal). It all boils down to a) dialect not being a scientifically accurate term, and b) telling a dialect from a language is a political question, not a linguistic one. 😉
Intelligibility makes the whole thing confounded by pronunciation/accents. I think the more important and easier to measure metric would be differences in vocabulary (including words that are spelled different because of the way letter combinations are pronounced in said language).
BS. I'm tired of people saying that defining what is a language or a dialect is not a linguistic question. Of course it is! Non-linguists can say whatever they want about it, but that doesn't make it so.
@@sharonminsuk Maybe I wasn't clear. I did NOT mean that "linguists" should decide. I meant that the question should be decided based upon linguistic considerations only, and have nothing whatsoever to do with political concerns.
@@artugert Well then, it sounds like you're claiming that it's a real distinction based on linguistic considerations, while linguists disagree with you, saying that it actually is not. I'm not clear why it's BS for linguists to come to that conclusion. They are not saying that *_they_* use politics to decide whether something is a language or a dialect; they are saying that the very concept arises out of politics and not out of linguistics (i.e. non-linguists decide to spin something as a language or a dialect, based on their political motivations, even if they aren't conscious of doing so), and therefore they are not real linguistic categories. I'm not sure what sets you off about that claim. Or where your "Of course it is!" comes from, as if there's nothing to discuss about that. Since "deciding based upon linguistic considerations" would be a job for linguists to do, sounds like you are telling them they have to see it your way?
A lot of the confusion comes from the fact that when we talk about Scots, a lot of people think we are talking about Scottish English. Which is indeed a dialect of English and most of us speak it. but Scots is not. There are even a disappointing amount of Scottish people who are confused by this and think that Scots is not a language.
Exactly! I don’t think that the language is in any way dying, I think the biggest problem is that people just aren’t aware of it. We wouldn’t even need to teach it in schools, just teach people that they are indeed speaking a different language.
This isnt helped with school either, all through primary and secondary any time we spoke to one another in scots or especially directly to the teacher wed get corrected to standard scottish english while saying weve not to use "slang" although a positive to this is that we mostly gained the ability to codeswitch reserved mostly for job interviews and chatting with foreigners, which i guess is a similar situation with the "dialecti" in Italy. rant over i just think we collectivly needty huv a wee bit ae a attitude adjustment
I love that video of the guy explaining Scots in Scots. There are some parts that are completely understandable and then others that are completely unintelligible with completely different vocabulary
@@tomrogue13 Maybe the one on the "Kat MacLeod Scotland" channel called "The Scots Language" or the one on the "LetThemTalkTV" channel called "A Scotsman Explains ...".
When you visit pub in Scotland, you'll notice they just speak in a dialect while ordering a beer. Once that old drunk comes to have a conversation with you, you'll find out it's a different language all of a sudden - the Old Drunk Scots.
I have a BA in linguistics. To linguists, every dialect is considered (equal to) a language (in its worthyness of research). The difference between a language and a dualect is cultural and political. As you mentioned: if it's acknowledged by (a) government(s) as a language, then it's a language; if not, it's a dialect.
I think you mean linguistics. Linguism refers to discrimination based on languages and their speaker communities. Is it not possible that there is a difference between what is legally considered a language and what is linguistically considered a language?
Idk what linguidm is but I am getting my BA in linguistics right now and the agreed definition of a language we are taught is that it is a group of dialects which are mutually intelligible; although of course what you describe is a good definition for what lay people refer to as languages
@@arjaygee, I do mean lingiustics, thanks. Liguistically, there is no difference between what is a dialect and what is a language. The divide is completely cultural/political.
@@pdmayton, an accent is more about pronunciation, a dialect has its own vocabulary and often even grammar, so it depends on which category they fall under
The word 'bairn' also appears in many dialects in North England, along with other similarities with Scots. One might even say that North England dialects have more in common with Scotland than with South England.
This is definitely the case. It's a very similar dialect, and helps me understand much much more of scots including lots of vocabulary nonexistent in standard English. Unfortunately I didn't get enough exposure to my local dialect to speak it broadly, but spoken in full dialect it sounds very similar to scots, almost as if with just a different accent.
Bairn comes from Scandinavia. And just because a word trickles down over the border doesnt mean its not a Scots word. If it comes from Scotland then it is a Scots word.
The thing with "intelligible" = "dialect" and "unintelligible" = "language" is flawed because it a continuum. In the past, each village in Northern Germany had its own version of German. They could understand the speaking of those from the villages around very well. But when there is one from a few villages apart, they couldn't understand him. Did he speak another language? When you take the chain of villages with this on one end and the village, he came from on the other end, then each one could understand the people of the next village. So, it is a dialect? As another example, there is to say, that in Austria you speak German. But Vienna, the capital of Austria, has its own dialect. I (from Northern Germany) have spoken with someone from Vienna. I understood next to nothing.
Perhaps Scots is a language that happens to be mutually intelligible with English, rather than a proper dialect, as both evolved from Old English, just as Spanish and Italian both evolved from Vulgar Latin, and have some degree of mutual intelligibility.
I think it's probably more akin to the Scandinavian languages (Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic), being almost completely mutually intelligible to each other (if you're used to hearing the different accent at least) but still considered different languages. Edit: not Finnish, forgot about that
The claim that Scots is just English with an accent is hilarious because there was a kid at my primary school who moved here from South Africa and learned to speak Scots but still kept his South African accent. My dad told me about French exchange students at his high school speaking Scots with a French accent as well, (unfortunately they were supposed to be here to learn better English, and probably thought they had learned to communicate perfectly with English speakers because most people here use both languages simultaneously)
Scots is literally a group of northern Anglic isolects, whilst English is a group of southern Anglic isolects. It's better to use "isolect" from now on to avoid the confusion whether one is a language or a dialect.
Great video! It's nice to have people outside the country and native speaking groups acknowledge and represent Scots Language. Because its really really shit when people who don't live here or speak the language think they get to have an uninformed opinion over the language I speak and write in every day. You may remember when you launched your book with a fan art competition, I wrote a mandolin tune called "Muckle Pat". Which is Scots for "Big Pat"...so to think some people would have us believe that the word "muckle" is just the word "big" with *An AcCeNt* is kinda hilarious
That's like Finnish and Kven that is spoken in northern Norway. A native Finnish speaker understands Kven language without a problem and it is quite similar to the dialects of Finnish that are spoken in the northern parts of Finland. Kven has quite many loan words from Norwegian, but because it's mandatory to study Swedish at school in Finland and Norwegian and Swedish have so many (quite) similar words, those words are usually easy to understand or guess their meanings. Kven is officially defined as a different language, not a dialect of Finnish.
Estonian also reminds me of something like medieval Finnish to a certain extent. Swedish and Norwegian sound more like two dialects of the same language and not different languages.
Old English DOES have another name, Anglo-Saxon. As a Swede i can easily follow a news broadcast in Norwiegian or Danish. I think most people would call those three different languages.
Another thing to remember is Scots maybe be more understandable to UK English speakers but less do to American or South African or Australian English speakers. So maybe UK speakers might see Scots as a dialect, because of mutual understanding, but not the others
I am USAmerican, born and raised, and I have no trouble understanding Scots. There are dialects of British English that are WAAAY more difficult for me to understand. Scots feels about as "difficult" to understand as Australian or New Zealand English. Sure... A few words are different than what I'm used to but in context it's generally not a problem to follow. I will say that Scots is much easier for me to understand when listening vs when reading. I sometimes have to "vocalize" the sounds in my head when reading to follow properly.
I’m from the US and can understand Scots without a problem; you just remember that bairn are kids and kenn is know (I speak German and kennen is one of the 2 forms of “to know” in German so it wasn’t hard for me to pick up that kenn meant “know”). I have had a much harder time understanding some English accents than ever understanding someone speaking Scots. Haha the written form is spelt how a person with a thick Scottish accent would sound speaking English. I don’t think there actually even is a set orthography for Scots, though.
I love the fact that I'm from a country where most people don't realise that they're speaking another language. My favourite right now is 'aye am ur'. Which is sort of like yes I am but not really.
'Paddock' or 'Puddock' for toad was still to some extent in use in Early Modern English. One of the witches in Macbeth has a familiar called Paddock. (The other witch had a familar called Greymalkin another archaic word for an animal, a cat in this case.)
Only if you view language relations as a tree, which is frankly somewhat inaccurate. If we're to look at a language or dialect splitting off (in a top down view), once the split occurs, it doesn't have just a line point down vertically, but it also has parallel (horizontal and diagonal) lines connecting it to its source and parallel lects. It is once those horizontal lines connecting it to the others get too þink or completely disappear ðat we can definitively call something a language. Is that the case for Scots? There's no definitive answer here. But from what I can tell, probably not (yet). Scots is a good example of ðat point at which the connecting is starting to get thin, and may soon break off. Frankly, definitively calling Scots a language OR a dialect can neither be certainly true nor wrong. It is just about at a point somewhere in the middle now. Now, if you want an example of something ðat has DEFINITELY split off from English (and is in the same archipelago), I'd recommend looking up the Yola language on RUclips. Once you listen to it, I think you'll have a good grasp of what Scots *would* be, had it definitely become a language.
4:36 I personally think that a language is a summary of dialects. However, dialects often develop out of a former form of a language. They develop idiosyncracies themselves while the "synthesized" parent (the language, the dialects belong to) can develop by itself in form of a Standardization and the application of this standardization in practice. So I would argue for a bidirectional arrows, as both dialects affect the "synthesized" parent language and the standardization of this parent language does influence the dialect. However, the side of the arrow pointing from the dialects to language I would sketch a little bit stronger as they are the base of a standardized language.
Id like to mention the concept of dialect levelling as well. This happens when two dialects, or languages for that matter, spend enough time in close proximity and/or interaction with each other, they will start to converge.
Heck, even languages that aren't closely related at all will still share and swap words -- and even some grammar concepts -- if they're spoken near each other and their speakers interact enough. Linguists have defined a number of "language areas" where this has happened, where the major languages there have all influenced each other.
Thanks for a great explanation of language and dialect. I think Scots split from English during the period of Middle English, with Early Scots being a dialect of Middle English. The number of French words in Scots shows the Norman influence that characterized Middle English was already part of English when Scots split. My favorite Scots word of French origin is gardyloo. I've shared on another channel my thoughts on the parallel between Scots and Ukrainian and how dominant cultures (English and Russian) want to view them as dialects while the speakers of Scots and Ukrainian see them as languages. Scots has survived in part because of its literature and I compared Robert Burns and Taras Schevchenko (who is considered the father of Modern Ukrainian).
If people say it's a language, the people who speak it especially, then it's a language There is NO actual definition of language, or ethnicity, or nationality that actually works. It is all decided upon through mutual agreement. Denial of language or community is only ever used to try and keep a minority community down, see the current debate around Ukrainian and Belrussian
It is definitely towing the line between langhage and dialect, i think someone who speaks Scottish English or is closer to that area would understand it more but as an American wow its very difficult to translate lol. As someone whos a bit familiar with old english though I can definitely tell the strong influence it had, its almost like seeing an alternate timeline of how old english mightve turned out
As a fun addendum, there is also debate as to whether Gaelic is a distinct language related to Irish, or if it's a dialect of Irish. When I was in Scotland last year, I was perfectly able to read the signs in Gaelic because I happen to speak Irish. The orthography is rather different, but the sounds and words are almost identical. The languages themselves outright refer to each other as dialects. In Irish, Irish is called Gaeilge and Gaelic is called Gaeilge na hAlbainn - literally Scottish Irish. In Gaelic, meanwhile, Gaelic is called Gàidhlig and Irish is Gàidhlig na hÈireann, or Irish Gaelic.
It's like how the common perception is that humans evolved from chimps but in truth we have a common ancestor and chimps are as modern as we are in their own way.
When I was young and stayed in England for six months as a child, we went up to visit Scotland. I was amazed that the accent in Scotland was so thick that I could not understand them. Now I understand...they weren't speaking English...just a language close enough to think they were!
The question is actually the same problem as whether Karelian is an independent language or a dialect of Finnish. This is because the transition and line between language and dialect is very vague and unclear. And it has not been made any easier by the fact that the local dialect spoken in the city of Rauma differs more from the rest of the Finnish language than the Karelian language differs from Finnish. And sometimes the question touches on whether Finland is independent enough to be a language or whether the dialects of Finland should be seen as the northern dialects of Estonia, but that has been a much rarer topic and has not sparked futher debate.
I personally don’t understand how people can say Scot’s is a language but maghrebi isn’t or Cantonese a language with little mutual intelligibility to mandarin is just a dialect of mandarin
The description of dialects and languages honestly does not work, I know a couple dialects in my parents languages that are not mutually intelligible; shit you just covered it again but yeah it’s very hard to determine
Here you are just postponing the topic. Before saying that, it's important to acknowledge what is meant by Dialect and the linguistic history behind these.
Nobody is saying that English is a dialect. The English language itself has numerous dialects. The question being asked here is whether or not modern Scots is one of the numerous dialects of modern English. The video briefly posited that both English and Scots are dialects of Old English. From the perspective of English, this doesn't make sense to me. Middle English may have started out as a dialect of Old English, but eventually evolved into a discrete language. In turn, Middle English evolved into modern English, another discrete language. Saying that modern English is a dialect of Old English is a little like saying that modern English and modern Hindi are both dialects of Proto-Indo-European. The posit that Scots started out as dialect of Old English seems more reasonable. If we accept this, the question seems to me to be whether there would be mutual intelligibility between a speaker of Old English and a speaker of modern Scots. My gut reaction, based on absolutely no research whatsoever, is that Scots will have continued to develop between c. 1150 (when Old English fell into disuse) and the present day, making them mutually unintelligible, and making Scots a discrete language.
As a native Spanish speaker who can understand Portuguese to a 98% in its formal form and to a 80% in a normal conversation, Scots is a language because if it weren't I'd have to say that Portuguese is not a language. There is a huge difference between Yucatec Spanish dialect, Center Chilean Spanish Dialect and Cubans Spanish Dialect to the point that sometimes it is easier to understand a person speaking in formal Portugues than someone speaking in one of those informal forms (dialects) of Spanish.
Lowland Scots is definitely not a dialect of English, but an isolect of Anglic. Therefore, you and Englanders are actually speaking in Anglic language.
@@modmaker7617 This is perhaps somewhat true in their written forms, but certainly not spoken. As a Dane, I have a hard time understanding Norwegian and Swedish. I certainly need to concentrate a lot when hearing it to have a chance of understanding the whole meaning. It might just be me though. Reading Norwegian and Swedish is a lot easier however.
@@koppadasao Det er ikke specielt let for mig at forstå talt Norsk eller Svensk. Jeg kan dog naturligvis ikke tale for alle danskere. Har hørt at Svenskere og Nordmænd har lettere ved at forstå hinanden end Danskere og Nordmænd, hvilket giver mening, da udtalen er tættere på hinanden. Jeg kan sagtens læse Svensk og Norsk, men det er svært at forstå tale.
Consider Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. Written Norwegian and Danish are extremely similar, Swedes can understand spoken Norwegian. There's a degree of mutual mutual intelligibility between the 3. All 3 can understand each other to an extend, depending on the regional dialect. Yet all 3 are different languages. So for Scots... it's no different. "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy"
but the distinction _is_ *very* blurry all variations of arabic, from morocco to iraq, are many times considered a single language, even if they are not mutually intelligible croatian, bosnian, serbian and montenegrin are usually considered different languages, even though they are mostly mutually intelligible
There's another problem with the "mutual intelligibility" definition; there's inherent prejudice in what gets called a 'language' and what gets called a 'dialect.' All Nordic language speakers can understand each other pretty well to very well, but they speak different languages; but people speaking one "dialect" of Arabic might be almost entirely unable to understand someone speaking another unless they happen to be able to communicate in Quranic Arabic the way Liturgical Latin was used in Christendom and, pre-revival, Classical Hebrew was used in among the Jewish diaspora.
I say we need more than language & dialect so I created media lingua which is Latin for middle language do to it being in between being a language & a dialect
So someone from Hamburg could argue that when Im speaking with a fanconian dialect Im speaking a different language just because they don't understand it? Swiss German would be it's own lamguage as well as anything other than Standard Austrian German. Hell I don't understand much of Dutch, but people from North Western Germany do, even though we both speak German not Dutch. Still Dutch is it's own language. It's way to complicated but Id say as it's more of a sister language for me personally but as there are no fixed boundaries it's a matter of personal opinion I guess.
As said Scots is indeed officially recognised as a Language now. Kids in Scotland are even allowed to write using Scots in schools if they wish. Something that's worth mentioning is how most Scottish people are able to very easily switch between broad Scots and perfect English depending on the situation and who they're speaking to.
To be fair, in my view, it is typically a dialect evolving towards being a language with the differenciation process halted right at the brink of lingal speciation by modern tech & politics.
I consider it a language rather than a dialect when the original language has no more native speakers. ie Italian would be a dialect of Latin until Latin became a dead language. so as soon as Old English ran out of Native speakers, Scots became a language ( like children inheriting titles.
Ulster Scots is a pretty interesting one, I’m from Glasgow so my dialect of Scots is west central, but I can understand Ulster Scots much easier than some Scottish dialects (particularly Stranraer is a hard one to decipher). I’m surprised Ulster Scots wasn’t mentioned in the video, but if a lot of Scottish people aren’t aware that we’re speaking a different language, even less of them will know that Ulster speak a dialect of Scots too, and a lot of people in Ulster I’d imagine don’t realise it’s a language either.
@@SpaceDogGlobalEntertainment I'm from Derry (North west Ulster. It's spoken more in mid/east Ulster) and you're right we all speak at least a little Ulster Scott's here even if we are unaware but there is more political connotations with the language/dialect as it is sometimes used as a loyalist thing (The Catholics have their Irish culture and language we must have ours) so it can be used that way which is a shame because Ulster Scots is great and it's sad to see it boiled down and misused that way
It's so interesting cause like. If you hear someone speak proper scots. You'd say "that's not English that's another language" even as a person who knows a lot of scots and uses it in my everyday speech, some times I've got no clue what they are saying
We need to make an Entirely New Language for America. How do you say “Hello” in American (not even the same as English, but Different from ALL Languages)?
Gascon is language that many say is a dialect of Occitan, despite Old Gascon being older than Old Occitan. Linguists really need to figure out a way to define what makes a language and what makes a dialect.
How do you measure “Old Gascon” being older than “Old Occitan”? Old Occitan refers to the group of languages that evolved together after its divergence to Latin and so its differenciation with the other relative Romance languages. At this moment, all languages were self-called “Romance” and there was very little differences, that are elements of Basque substrate. Otherwise they were exactly the same. Today, Occitan is just a language group.
That explanation of I you can understand it’s a dialect isn’t true because Norwegian, Swedish and danish are all very similar and speakers can some what understand each other but they are considered different languages.
Good point. People who think mutual intelligibility means it must be a dialect are just idiots lol. It's worth mentioning as well that some dialects within languages are not even intelligible to natives. For instance in Arabic this is the case. Mandarin speakers can barely understand Cantonese speakers even though they are just speaking dialects of the same language (Chinese). I speak English natively and I've heard dialects of English that are unintelligible to me.
Or maybe it’s actually a creole combining features of the “regular” English language (particularly the varieties from Northern England) and those of the Scottish Gaelic language (pronounced Gallic, FYI; “Gaylick” is the Irish pronunciation)?
I recently had AI speaking to me in Scots, with an English accent. Paul Kavanagh (languages expert) once wrote that this was theoretically possible. He was right.
I mean...as others have said language vs dialect is really more sociopolitical than anything else. However, I also think that linguistics should be able to accommodate this kind of situation. Two dialects of a dead language which arose and developed independently, went on to survive the death of the standard form their parent language, changing from it in the process. However, through sheer coincidence remain largely the same as one another.
I think one of the main reasons a lot of people assume Scots isn't a language is because essentially every single Scots speaker can speak, read and write in English at a native level. So much so that Scots speakers can switch effortlessly between Scots and English even more efficiently than English people can switch between their own local dialect and the more "standard" universal English (whatever that should be called, I guess some people call it BBC style English) One important thing to note though is that Scots itself has multiple dialects that differ greatly from one another, not just by sound but by different words used. You've got speakers in the west who say wean instead of bairn and vice versa in the east and north for example. Then you've got the Doric dialect which is just a whole other kettle of fish. Yet they're all speaking Scots and can all equally switch to English in the blink of an eye when needed, but can't necessarily switch to a different Scots dialect they didn't grow up with as easily or sometimes at all. Cool video, I like the simple graphics
Unfortunately the answer to these questions inevitably involve politics rather than "can I understand what that drunk Glaswegian is saying or not?". Maybe we need more descriptive layers to add to just the two 'language or dialect'. In certain situations and a bit of patience of coaxing, Italian and Spanish are mutually comprehensible, but I wouldn't call them dialects of the same language. More like dialects of dialects of a dialect of a language. :S
To further argue against the notion it just being a dialect- just look to Scandinavia as an example. Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are their own languages. A Norwegian could very well understand written Danish, spoken Swedish and still have issues understanding Norwegian spoken in a regional dialect he’s not too familiar with. To me, it comes down to the cultural significance of the tongue in question, and whether it’s distinguishing nationalities or counties.
Scots is definitely a different language when it is used in it purest sense. But you dont really hear people speaking in pure Scots, very often these days. People in the lowlands tend to use a mixture of Scottish English, and some words in Scots. Well thats my personal observation. Other people may have different experiences. But I m sure its very rare to hear folk blethering using 100% auld Scots, the auld Lallan's Leid, at all. I wish we did.
Ngl I feel like it's the same thing as dutch and Flemish. Both are made from each other and can be argued as a lialect but at the end of the day they are different languages
I think a dialect becomes a language when native speakers of one dialect cannot recognize speakers of another dialect as an attempt to speak the same language. I have great difficulty understanding louisiana bayou dialect, but I would comprehend enough of it to perceive it as someone attempting to speak english.
Intellectually, I accept Scots as its own separate language. I might think differently if it had branched off from Modern English, but instead it branched off from Middle English before Modern English was a thing. So they are sibling languages, not a parent-child relationship. That said, my ears find it hard to call it a separate language, because of the high degree of mutual intelligibility.
As both the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Arbroath, the Scots and English Charters were both written in Latin as the origin of the language. Scots is only a different pronunciation. The English like to own everything, from the Bank of England, formed by a Scotsman to even bacon and eggs as an English breakfast so, the issue is not the language, it's the English need to posses anything they can.
The Greek government considers Tsakonian a divergent dialect even though it's not mutually intelligible with Modern Greek and is descended from Doric Greek not Attic Greek.
Lowland Scots is alternatively called _Northern Anglic dialect,_ whilst English is alternatively called _Southern Anglic dialect._ There are definitely logical reasons on why English speakers are known as "Anglophones" and why "Anglicanism" exists. From now on, I'll just say that I speak in, write in, or listen to "Anglic language".
This is funny because that's the same relationship Cantonese has with Mandarin, and it's been a huge debate whether Cantonese is considered a dialect or it's own language as well.
I was about the say the same thing. I think in the western world, people tend to think of Cantonese and Mandarin as two different languages. Growing up Chinese (but not natively speaking Cantonese), I believe most Chinese people don’t think of Cantonese as a different language, as opposed to minority languages such as Tibetan, Mongolian etc that are obviously different.
I would think that, from a purely linguistic perspective, Cantonese and other Chinese "dialects" like Hokkien, Hakka, and Wu are indeed different languages. They are not mutually intelligible with Mandarin or each other, perhaps even less so than, say, distinct romance languages are from each other. They also have extensive vocabulary differences the further they stray from "Standard Chinese" and into their own unencumbered native way of speaking. They are mainly viewed as dialects rather than distinct languages for cultural and political reasons, the cultural one being because Chinese has historically used Written Chinese to unify the dialects, regardless of how the spoken forms diverged.
Cantonese and Mandarin are very different and not mutually intelligible. They're their own languages. Just because they use the same writing system does not mean they are mutually intelligible.
@@jeffkardosjr.3825 Cantonese isnt exclusive in that its not mutually intelligible with mandarin. In fact the vast majority of the hundreds of chinese dialects (mandarin included) are not mutually intelligible with each other.
@@OminousLuminous "Anglish" I've mainly heard used to mean the word game of using only Germanic words to speak Modern English. "Anglo-Saxon" seems like a good pick for this.
Old English DOES have another name: Anglo-Saxon. By your definition of dialect, Modern English is not a dialect of Old English, since they are mutually unintelligible. 5:48 "If it's different and you can understand it, it's a dialect. If you can't understand it at all, it's a language." What about strong accents? There are native English speakers who can read something that you understand perfectly in print, but you wouldn't understand a word, because of their accent.
It's not like I like you or anything, eegit. Have you ever done a video on why the language spoken by Anglo-Saxons is named after just the Angles even though it was ultimately a Saxon kingdom who unified them?
I assume it's because "Anglo" is like the adjective, "Anglo-Saxons" being the "English Saxons" as opposed to the Saxons who lived on the continent. Much like "Anglo-Norman" is referring to the Normans and their language that were in England after the Norman conquest rather than those in Normandy.
From my perspective, the argument that Scots is a language despite the average native English speaker understanding it with little difficulty doesn't make sense given that there's regional dialects of English within England that sound as dissimilar to "standard English" as Scots does. The idea that scots is a language rather than a dialect of English feels like it's born of subjective nationalism.
The problem is that scotland is full of dialects which are wildly different from each other in every city and town. People confuse these dialects with Scots, which is its own entity and many dialects use Scots words seamlessly within Scottish English. Add in that we code switch depending on who we're talking to, and you have a country of people who don't know what language they're speaking. We're taught not to use Scots from a young age as it isnt "polite" or proper English. Some people are fluent in Scots while others are passable and don't even realise. Scots is 100% a language but the diffusion makes it difficult to measure speakers. And it is incredibly insulting when people dismiss our language as English with an accent. Try chatting to someone from Fraserburgh and see if you catch more than a couple of English words you understand.
As one meme says: (Scottish) gay-lick. We had here the funny argumemt whether Ukrainian is a dialect of Polish or russian. It itself got born from a fusion of Galych-Podillean and Polissean dialects of the proto-slavic language and its interpretation from Kharkiv and Poltava. And, funnily enough, we all understand russian by default, russians, in return, don't :)
I question anyone who thinks most English speakers can understand Scots, seeing as how I've literally used Scots as a secret language in front of multiple English speakers. The written form is arguably easier to understand.
Maybe you have a heavier accent then others but to me Scots seems like a harder dialect than it is if you just read it. The second you hear Scots allowed, it just sounds like an English dialect. I've met Northerners that speak their respective dialects that are harder to understand than the average Scots I hear.
Do you think Scots is a language or dialect?
Language
Looks like the relationship between Gallego and Spanish (Castillian) in Spain
Looks very similar but there's differences in writing and pronunciation
As a Scot, I think Scots is a language, because of how it’s spelled
They can communicate with each other so they are dialects because there is a high mutual intelligibility between them.
@@papazataklaattiranimam So are Czech and Slovak just dialects?
Russian, "Ukrainian is a dialect", can you understand it well? "Not really." Spanish, "Portuagese is a language", can you understand it well? "A fair bit." Chinese, "Cantonese is just a dialect of Mandarin:", can you understand it spoken? "Not at all." Danish, "Swedish is another language", can you understand it? "Almost completely.". Language has a lot to do with identify.
Russian is closer to Бългаский than to Украïiнский.
@@HippieVeganJewslim that's what I've heard.
@@HippieVeganJewslim The closest languages to Ukrainian are Belarussian, Slovak and Polish. And then it's Russian
No one says cantonese is a dialect of mandarin. Cantonese is a chinese dialect and mandarin is another chinese dialect. There are also many dozens if not hundreds of other chinese dialects that are just as distinct from one another and most of them are not mutually intelligible with one another.
And if this is supposed to be a political issue with hong kong, reminder that there are 82 million native cantonese speakers in the world, and hong kong's total population is only 7 million.
yeah I misspoke I meant what you said about dialect, but in Taiwan it is clearly used as a political issue @@REIDAE
As a native speaker of the Scots language, I think the biggest problem with the numbers of speakers is that many simply do not know about it, at school, we’re taught that it’s slang and rude to speak Scots, which is completely wrong, and speaking Scots to an employer can lower your chances of getting the job since it ‘makes you look unprofessional.’ I’d estimate that there are at least four million speakers of Scots, but many simply do not know about it, so when the census happens and they fill out the form, they don’t know what the language is and therefore do not tick it. I’m in S2 (S2 is 13-14 years old) and we only just started learning that it’s a language, but only the very rarely used words or the ones you’d find in old Scots poems, not the words we use on a daily basis and don’t know is a language. When I was in Primary (5-12 years old) we were actually given into trouble for speaking Scots. I don’t know if it’s the same for schools across Scotland, but from the part of Glasgow I come from, that’s what they taught us. It’s ridiculous that it’s a recognised language of the country but at the same time, we’re taught that it’s slang and that it’s wrong to speak it.
It's kind of sad that it's just considered improper English when there's clearly a whole different way of speaking/differences in vocabulary. I'm glad the attitude is changing around it so that it can be embraced as a part of your heritage.
I guess the only question now is whether school should be conducted in English or Scots. Certainly education in English would make your life easier, but I think it's definitely a mistake not to offer classes in Scots/Scots immersion schools as well.
The same is taught in Finland about Finnish dialects and colloquial language, which Finns speak rather than the standard Finnish language. This has led to the situation that there are two Finnish languages; the standard language which is the official language and the dialects/spoken language which is the folk language. And it also makes learning Finnish more difficult for foreigners, who want to learn Finnish, but they are taught a standard language that Finns themselves don't usually speak.
@@rei_cirith I don’t think we even need to teach Scots, everyone I know already speaks it, all we need to do is make people more aware that it is a language and not just slang, I think that all classes other than English (and of course the modern languages classes) should be in Scots, that way students will get more used to the idea of it being a proper language since they see professionals speaking it.
Thank you so much for sharing, @spacedog. It’s so important to honor the culture we have at home. Disparaging native languages is something colonizers often do, and there are movements globally to reclaim our language and culture (Ireland, Native Americans in the US, indigenous peoples of South America) but it can be tough. Even more complex when the languages are more closely related
The people who claim that Scots is slang, how do they explain that it's a recognised language?
My father tells me about how when he was around 20, having only been exposed to american English up to that point, went to Scotland and couldn't understand a word of what people said, and that he would insist that they weren't speaking english but something else, but they would say that they were in fact speaking English.
How did he know they were saying that they were speaking English if he didn't understand them?
@@forthrightgambitia1032 They probably adjusted their speech when speaking directly to him.
"Yes, the English speaking nations can be said to include the United States. With generosity of spirit." - Yes Minister
1:06 When referring to Scottish Gaelic, it's pronounced Gah-lick. Gay-lick is the Irish pronunciation.
THANK YOU so many people get it wrong lol and it just annoys me so much
Gay-lick 💀
Gay-lick is the English pronunciation. It's gah-lick in Scots and Scots Gaelic
When speaking English, we normally use the English pronunciation of words.
Gay-lick is the standard English pronunciation. Gah-lick is the Irish and Scottish pronunciation.
PhD in linguistics here. The problem with using intelligibility as a criterion is that some languages (such as Portuguese, Galician and Spanish, or Swedish and Norwegian) are mutually intelligible (at least to a certain degree), while speakers of different varieties of the same language often have trouble understanding each other (as a Brazilian Portuguese speaker, I know many fellow Brazilians can barely understand some varieties from Portugal). It all boils down to a) dialect not being a scientifically accurate term, and b) telling a dialect from a language is a political question, not a linguistic one. 😉
Intelligibility makes the whole thing confounded by pronunciation/accents. I think the more important and easier to measure metric would be differences in vocabulary (including words that are spelled different because of the way letter combinations are pronounced in said language).
BS. I'm tired of people saying that defining what is a language or a dialect is not a linguistic question. Of course it is! Non-linguists can say whatever they want about it, but that doesn't make it so.
@@artugert But the OP is a linguist! Sounds like you're cherry picking which linguists you think "count".
@@sharonminsuk Maybe I wasn't clear. I did NOT mean that "linguists" should decide. I meant that the question should be decided based upon linguistic considerations only, and have nothing whatsoever to do with political concerns.
@@artugert Well then, it sounds like you're claiming that it's a real distinction based on linguistic considerations, while linguists disagree with you, saying that it actually is not. I'm not clear why it's BS for linguists to come to that conclusion. They are not saying that *_they_* use politics to decide whether something is a language or a dialect; they are saying that the very concept arises out of politics and not out of linguistics (i.e. non-linguists decide to spin something as a language or a dialect, based on their political motivations, even if they aren't conscious of doing so), and therefore they are not real linguistic categories. I'm not sure what sets you off about that claim. Or where your "Of course it is!" comes from, as if there's nothing to discuss about that. Since "deciding based upon linguistic considerations" would be a job for linguists to do, sounds like you are telling them they have to see it your way?
A lot of the confusion comes from the fact that when we talk about Scots, a lot of people think we are talking about Scottish English. Which is indeed a dialect of English and most of us speak it. but Scots is not. There are even a disappointing amount of Scottish people who are confused by this and think that Scots is not a language.
Exactly! I don’t think that the language is in any way dying, I think the biggest problem is that people just aren’t aware of it. We wouldn’t even need to teach it in schools, just teach people that they are indeed speaking a different language.
Would that be the Lowland Scots, which adds a lilt/burr to "normally" written english words ?
This isnt helped with school either, all through primary and secondary any time we spoke to one another in scots or especially directly to the teacher wed get corrected to standard scottish english while saying weve not to use "slang" although a positive to this is that we mostly gained the ability to codeswitch reserved mostly for job interviews and chatting with foreigners, which i guess is a similar situation with the "dialecti" in Italy. rant over i just think we collectivly needty huv a wee bit ae a attitude adjustment
@@lewiitoons4227 As an english speaker both seeing that written down and heard makes my brain hurt, sorry. ( I speak fluent cockney though)
@@highpath4776 Naw. Ers aye abdy ettlin tae ding wir leid doon as kinnae.
I love that video of the guy explaining Scots in Scots. There are some parts that are completely understandable and then others that are completely unintelligible with completely different vocabulary
What's it called?
@@tomrogue13 "cawed"
@@tomrogue13 Maybe the one on the "Kat MacLeod Scotland" channel called "The Scots Language" or the one on the "LetThemTalkTV" channel called "A Scotsman Explains ...".
When you visit pub in Scotland, you'll notice they just speak in a dialect while ordering a beer. Once that old drunk comes to have a conversation with you, you'll find out it's a different language all of a sudden - the Old Drunk Scots.
@@mikitz Yeah, people who are bilingual often switch to their native language when drunk.
I have a BA in linguistics. To linguists, every dialect is considered (equal to) a language (in its worthyness of research). The difference between a language and a dualect is cultural and political. As you mentioned: if it's acknowledged by (a) government(s) as a language, then it's a language; if not, it's a dialect.
I think you mean linguistics. Linguism refers to discrimination based on languages and their speaker communities.
Is it not possible that there is a difference between what is legally considered a language and what is linguistically considered a language?
Idk what linguidm is but I am getting my BA in linguistics right now and the agreed definition of a language we are taught is that it is a group of dialects which are mutually intelligible; although of course what you describe is a good definition for what lay people refer to as languages
@@arjaygee, I do mean lingiustics, thanks.
Liguistically, there is no difference between what is a dialect and what is a language. The divide is completely cultural/political.
Curious how you would define 'Hillbilly' or 'Appalachian English'. Accent or dialect?
@@pdmayton, an accent is more about pronunciation, a dialect has its own vocabulary and often even grammar, so it depends on which category they fall under
The word 'bairn' also appears in many dialects in North England, along with other similarities with Scots. One might even say that North England dialects have more in common with Scotland than with South England.
This is definitely the case. It's a very similar dialect, and helps me understand much much more of scots including lots of vocabulary nonexistent in standard English.
Unfortunately I didn't get enough exposure to my local dialect to speak it broadly, but spoken in full dialect it sounds very similar to scots, almost as if with just a different accent.
Bairn comes from Scandinavia. And just because a word trickles down over the border doesnt mean its not a Scots word. If it comes from Scotland then it is a Scots word.
The thing with "intelligible" = "dialect" and "unintelligible" = "language" is flawed because it a continuum.
In the past, each village in Northern Germany had its own version of German. They could understand the speaking of those from the villages around very well. But when there is one from a few villages apart, they couldn't understand him. Did he speak another language? When you take the chain of villages with this on one end and the village, he came from on the other end, then each one could understand the people of the next village. So, it is a dialect?
As another example, there is to say, that in Austria you speak German. But Vienna, the capital of Austria, has its own dialect. I (from Northern Germany) have spoken with someone from Vienna. I understood next to nothing.
Perhaps Scots is a language that happens to be mutually intelligible with English, rather than a proper dialect, as both evolved from Old English, just as Spanish and Italian both evolved from Vulgar Latin, and have some degree of mutual intelligibility.
I think it's probably more akin to the Scandinavian languages (Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic), being almost completely mutually intelligible to each other (if you're used to hearing the different accent at least) but still considered different languages.
Edit: not Finnish, forgot about that
No because English and Scots have had not enough diversion
@@Tan12 finnish isnt a nordic language and isnt mutually intelligble with any european language
@@taggymcshaggy6383 Whoops u right
@@taggymcshaggy6383 finland L. read in another comment too that spoken finnish is also completely different from official written finnish lol
English People: Scots is not a language - it's a dialect.
Swedish People: Danish is not a language - it's a throat condition.
Both Englanders and Lowland Scots speak Anglic ❤👍
The claim that Scots is just English with an accent is hilarious because there was a kid at my primary school who moved here from South Africa and learned to speak Scots but still kept his South African accent.
My dad told me about French exchange students at his high school speaking Scots with a French accent as well, (unfortunately they were supposed to be here to learn better English, and probably thought they had learned to communicate perfectly with English speakers because most people here use both languages simultaneously)
Scots is literally a group of northern Anglic isolects, whilst English is a group of southern Anglic isolects. It's better to use "isolect" from now on to avoid the confusion whether one is a language or a dialect.
Great video! It's nice to have people outside the country and native speaking groups acknowledge and represent Scots Language.
Because its really really shit when people who don't live here or speak the language think they get to have an uninformed opinion over the language I speak and write in every day.
You may remember when you launched your book with a fan art competition, I wrote a mandolin tune called "Muckle Pat". Which is Scots for "Big Pat"...so to think some people would have us believe that the word "muckle" is just the word "big" with *An AcCeNt* is kinda hilarious
That's like Finnish and Kven that is spoken in northern Norway. A native Finnish speaker understands Kven language without a problem and it is quite similar to the dialects of Finnish that are spoken in the northern parts of Finland. Kven has quite many loan words from Norwegian, but because it's mandatory to study Swedish at school in Finland and Norwegian and Swedish have so many (quite) similar words, those words are usually easy to understand or guess their meanings. Kven is officially defined as a different language, not a dialect of Finnish.
Estonian also reminds me of something like medieval Finnish to a certain extent. Swedish and Norwegian sound more like two dialects of the same language and not different languages.
Old English DOES have another name, Anglo-Saxon.
As a Swede i can easily follow a news broadcast in Norwiegian or Danish. I think most people would call those three different languages.
Another thing to remember is Scots maybe be more understandable to UK English speakers but less do to American or South African or Australian English speakers. So maybe UK speakers might see Scots as a dialect, because of mutual understanding, but not the others
I am USAmerican, born and raised, and I have no trouble understanding Scots. There are dialects of British English that are WAAAY more difficult for me to understand. Scots feels about as "difficult" to understand as Australian or New Zealand English. Sure... A few words are different than what I'm used to but in context it's generally not a problem to follow. I will say that Scots is much easier for me to understand when listening vs when reading. I sometimes have to "vocalize" the sounds in my head when reading to follow properly.
I’m from the US and can understand Scots without a problem; you just remember that bairn are kids and kenn is know (I speak German and kennen is one of the 2 forms of “to know” in German so it wasn’t hard for me to pick up that kenn meant “know”). I have had a much harder time understanding some English accents than ever understanding someone speaking Scots. Haha the written form is spelt how a person with a thick Scottish accent would sound speaking English. I don’t think there actually even is a set orthography for Scots, though.
Some English dialects in England are more difficult for me to understand than the Scots language, perhaps because I'm from the Southern USA.
I love the fact that I'm from a country where most people don't realise that they're speaking another language. My favourite right now is 'aye am ur'. Which is sort of like yes I am but not really.
'Paddock' or 'Puddock' for toad was still to some extent in use in Early Modern English. One of the witches in Macbeth has a familiar called Paddock. (The other witch had a familar called Greymalkin another archaic word for an animal, a cat in this case.)
Scots cannot be a dialect of "modern" English. They both come from the same source. They are sibling languages IMO.
Only if you view language relations as a tree, which is frankly somewhat inaccurate. If we're to look at a language or dialect splitting off (in a top down view), once the split occurs, it doesn't have just a line point down vertically, but it also has parallel (horizontal and diagonal) lines connecting it to its source and parallel lects. It is once those horizontal lines connecting it to the others get too þink or completely disappear ðat we can definitively call something a language.
Is that the case for Scots? There's no definitive answer here. But from what I can tell, probably not (yet). Scots is a good example of ðat point at which the connecting is starting to get thin, and may soon break off. Frankly, definitively calling Scots a language OR a dialect can neither be certainly true nor wrong. It is just about at a point somewhere in the middle now.
Now, if you want an example of something ðat has DEFINITELY split off from English (and is in the same archipelago), I'd recommend looking up the Yola language on RUclips. Once you listen to it, I think you'll have a good grasp of what Scots *would* be, had it definitely become a language.
4:36 I personally think that a language is a summary of dialects.
However, dialects often develop out of a former form of a language.
They develop idiosyncracies themselves while the "synthesized" parent (the language, the dialects belong to) can develop by itself in form of a Standardization and the application of this standardization in practice.
So I would argue for a bidirectional arrows, as both dialects affect the "synthesized" parent language and the standardization of this parent language does influence the dialect. However, the side of the arrow pointing from the dialects to language I would sketch a little bit stronger as they are the base of a standardized language.
Id like to mention the concept of dialect levelling as well. This happens when two dialects, or languages for that matter, spend enough time in close proximity and/or interaction with each other, they will start to converge.
Heck, even languages that aren't closely related at all will still share and swap words -- and even some grammar concepts -- if they're spoken near each other and their speakers interact enough. Linguists have defined a number of "language areas" where this has happened, where the major languages there have all influenced each other.
Thanks for a great explanation of language and dialect. I think Scots split from English during the period of Middle English, with Early Scots being a dialect of Middle English. The number of French words in Scots shows the Norman influence that characterized Middle English was already part of English when Scots split. My favorite Scots word of French origin is gardyloo.
I've shared on another channel my thoughts on the parallel between Scots and Ukrainian and how dominant cultures (English and Russian) want to view them as dialects while the speakers of Scots and Ukrainian see them as languages. Scots has survived in part because of its literature and I compared Robert Burns and Taras Schevchenko (who is considered the father of Modern Ukrainian).
If people say it's a language, the people who speak it especially, then it's a language
There is NO actual definition of language, or ethnicity, or nationality that actually works. It is all decided upon through mutual agreement. Denial of language or community is only ever used to try and keep a minority community down, see the current debate around Ukrainian and Belrussian
Was the census question written in Scots to prove it could be understood ?
It is definitely towing the line between langhage and dialect, i think someone who speaks Scottish English or is closer to that area would understand it more but as an American wow its very difficult to translate lol. As someone whos a bit familiar with old english though I can definitely tell the strong influence it had, its almost like seeing an alternate timeline of how old english mightve turned out
As a Scottish person, thank you
You and Englanders speak Anglic.
As a fun addendum, there is also debate as to whether Gaelic is a distinct language related to Irish, or if it's a dialect of Irish.
When I was in Scotland last year, I was perfectly able to read the signs in Gaelic because I happen to speak Irish. The orthography is rather different, but the sounds and words are almost identical.
The languages themselves outright refer to each other as dialects. In Irish, Irish is called Gaeilge and Gaelic is called Gaeilge na hAlbainn - literally Scottish Irish. In Gaelic, meanwhile, Gaelic is called Gàidhlig and Irish is Gàidhlig na hÈireann, or Irish Gaelic.
It's like how the common perception is that humans evolved from chimps but in truth we have a common ancestor and chimps are as modern as we are in their own way.
A basic concept that evolution deniers cannot understand, that's for sure!
When I was young and stayed in England for six months as a child, we went up to visit Scotland. I was amazed that the accent in Scotland was so thick that I could not understand them. Now I understand...they weren't speaking English...just a language close enough to think they were!
The problem with your definition --- most Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French speakers understand each other on the basic levels.
Well, I'm roundly convinced! Scots is a language, and a fine one at that.
The question is actually the same problem as whether Karelian is an independent language or a dialect of Finnish. This is because the transition and line between language and dialect is very vague and unclear. And it has not been made any easier by the fact that the local dialect spoken in the city of Rauma differs more from the rest of the Finnish language than the Karelian language differs from Finnish. And sometimes the question touches on whether Finland is independent enough to be a language or whether the dialects of Finland should be seen as the northern dialects of Estonia, but that has been a much rarer topic and has not sparked futher debate.
I personally don’t understand how people can say Scot’s is a language but maghrebi isn’t or Cantonese a language with little mutual intelligibility to mandarin is just a dialect of mandarin
The term "language" is inevitably affected by culturo-political factors.
The description of dialects and languages honestly does not work, I know a couple dialects in my parents languages that are not mutually intelligible; shit you just covered it again but yeah it’s very hard to determine
"If it's different but you can understand it then it's a dialect"
Swedish and Danish: Wha..
If English and Scots are dialects then Turkish and Azerbaijani, Bulgarian and Macedonian, Serbian and Bosniak etc. are also dialects👀
They are dialects.
Serbian and bosniak are dialects of serbo-croat
Here you are just postponing the topic. Before saying that, it's important to acknowledge what is meant by Dialect and the linguistic history behind these.
@@jackyex English is not a dialect. It is a language.
Nobody is saying that English is a dialect. The English language itself has numerous dialects. The question being asked here is whether or not modern Scots is one of the numerous dialects of modern English.
The video briefly posited that both English and Scots are dialects of Old English. From the perspective of English, this doesn't make sense to me. Middle English may have started out as a dialect of Old English, but eventually evolved into a discrete language. In turn, Middle English evolved into modern English, another discrete language. Saying that modern English is a dialect of Old English is a little like saying that modern English and modern Hindi are both dialects of Proto-Indo-European.
The posit that Scots started out as dialect of Old English seems more reasonable. If we accept this, the question seems to me to be whether there would be mutual intelligibility between a speaker of Old English and a speaker of modern Scots. My gut reaction, based on absolutely no research whatsoever, is that Scots will have continued to develop between c. 1150 (when Old English fell into disuse) and the present day, making them mutually unintelligible, and making Scots a discrete language.
As a native Spanish speaker who can understand Portuguese to a 98% in its formal form and to a 80% in a normal conversation, Scots is a language because if it weren't I'd have to say that Portuguese is not a language. There is a huge difference between Yucatec Spanish dialect, Center Chilean Spanish Dialect and Cubans Spanish Dialect to the point that sometimes it is easier to understand a person speaking in formal Portugues than someone speaking in one of those informal forms (dialects) of Spanish.
Tbf saying Scots is just a dialect is like saying Portuguese is just a dialect of spanish
Lowland Scots is definitely not a dialect of English, but an isolect of Anglic.
Therefore, you and Englanders are actually speaking in Anglic language.
@@hanggaraaryagunarencagutuh7072 am not English 😭 am from the lowlands of Scotland
@@scottishmapping2750 You're not an English, but you and Englanders are Angles or Anglians imo ❤❤👍
@@hanggaraaryagunarencagutuh7072 aye
Both Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic all came from the same language too: Old Norse.
Icelandic is very distinct from the rest.
Norwegian, Swedish and Danish could just be 1 Scandinavian language.
(Not sure how Faroese fits into this.)
@@modmaker7617 This is perhaps somewhat true in their written forms, but certainly not spoken. As a Dane, I have a hard time understanding Norwegian and Swedish. I certainly need to concentrate a lot when hearing it to have a chance of understanding the whole meaning. It might just be me though. Reading Norwegian and Swedish is a lot easier however.
@@modmaker7617 Faroese, Icelandic, and Northumberland English could be considered to be the same language. They're basically mutually understandable
@@Zilas0053 Hvad? Fatter ikke en danske hvad en nordmann taler? Norsk er en dialekt af dansk!
@@koppadasao Det er ikke specielt let for mig at forstå talt Norsk eller Svensk. Jeg kan dog naturligvis ikke tale for alle danskere.
Har hørt at Svenskere og Nordmænd har lettere ved at forstå hinanden end Danskere og Nordmænd, hvilket giver mening, da udtalen er tættere på hinanden.
Jeg kan sagtens læse Svensk og Norsk, men det er svært at forstå tale.
Written down, Spanish and Portuguese are also very similar.
Consider Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. Written Norwegian and Danish are extremely similar, Swedes can understand spoken Norwegian. There's a degree of mutual mutual intelligibility between the 3. All 3 can understand each other to an extend, depending on the regional dialect. Yet all 3 are different languages. So for Scots... it's no different. "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy"
'a language is a dialect with an army and a navy'
but the distinction _is_ *very* blurry
all variations of arabic, from morocco to iraq, are many times considered a single language, even if they are not mutually intelligible
croatian, bosnian, serbian and montenegrin are usually considered different languages, even though they are mostly mutually intelligible
As a linguist, I 200% agreed with that statement.
Great video, I'm Scottish and I do consider Scots a language.
There's another problem with the "mutual intelligibility" definition; there's inherent prejudice in what gets called a 'language' and what gets called a 'dialect.' All Nordic language speakers can understand each other pretty well to very well, but they speak different languages; but people speaking one "dialect" of Arabic might be almost entirely unable to understand someone speaking another unless they happen to be able to communicate in Quranic Arabic the way Liturgical Latin was used in Christendom and, pre-revival, Classical Hebrew was used in among the Jewish diaspora.
I say we need more than language & dialect so I created media lingua which is Latin for middle language do to it being in between being a language & a dialect
If scots isn't a language, then swedish and norwegian are the same language, and chilean isn't spanish.
So someone from Hamburg could argue that when Im speaking with a fanconian dialect Im speaking a different language just because they don't understand it? Swiss German would be it's own lamguage as well as anything other than Standard Austrian German. Hell I don't understand much of Dutch, but people from North Western Germany do, even though we both speak German not Dutch. Still Dutch is it's own language. It's way to complicated but Id say as it's more of a sister language for me personally but as there are no fixed boundaries it's a matter of personal opinion I guess.
As said Scots is indeed officially recognised as a Language now. Kids in Scotland are even allowed to write using Scots in schools if they wish. Something that's worth mentioning is how most Scottish people are able to very easily switch between broad Scots and perfect English depending on the situation and who they're speaking to.
To be fair, in my view, it is typically a dialect evolving towards being a language with the differenciation process halted right at the brink of lingal speciation by modern tech & politics.
7:44 You know that Old English is also called Anglo-Saxon, right?
I consider it a language rather than a dialect when the original language has no more native speakers. ie Italian would be a dialect of Latin until Latin became a dead language. so as soon as Old English ran out of Native speakers, Scots became a language ( like children inheriting titles.
But this would make Afrikaans still a dialect of dutch
7:44 you could call Old English Anglo-Saxon
What about Ulster Scott's? Could you do a video on that?
Ulster Scots is a pretty interesting one, I’m from Glasgow so my dialect of Scots is west central, but I can understand Ulster Scots much easier than some Scottish dialects (particularly Stranraer is a hard one to decipher). I’m surprised Ulster Scots wasn’t mentioned in the video, but if a lot of Scottish people aren’t aware that we’re speaking a different language, even less of them will know that Ulster speak a dialect of Scots too, and a lot of people in Ulster I’d imagine don’t realise it’s a language either.
@@SpaceDogGlobalEntertainment I'm from Derry (North west Ulster. It's spoken more in mid/east Ulster) and you're right we all speak at least a little Ulster Scott's here even if we are unaware but there is more political connotations with the language/dialect as it is sometimes used as a loyalist thing (The Catholics have their Irish culture and language we must have ours) so it can be used that way which is a shame because Ulster Scots is great and it's sad to see it boiled down and misused that way
It’s typically considered a dialect of Scots by people who classify Scots as a language and a dialect of English by people who don’t
It's so interesting cause like. If you hear someone speak proper scots. You'd say "that's not English that's another language" even as a person who knows a lot of scots and uses it in my everyday speech, some times I've got no clue what they are saying
It’s a language the spelling, gramma, pronunciations and most importantly lexicon are just too different to be a dialect in my opinion.
We need to make an Entirely New Language for America. How do you say “Hello” in American (not even the same as English, but Different from ALL Languages)?
Also doesnt Old English have another name? Couldnt it also be referred to as Anglo Saxon as well?
Gascon is language that many say is a dialect of Occitan, despite Old Gascon being older than Old Occitan. Linguists really need to figure out a way to define what makes a language and what makes a dialect.
It seems it’s politics, not the language features, that definite the difference
How do you measure “Old Gascon” being older than “Old Occitan”? Old Occitan refers to the group of languages that evolved together after its divergence to Latin and so its differenciation with the other relative Romance languages. At this moment, all languages were self-called “Romance” and there was very little differences, that are elements of Basque substrate. Otherwise they were exactly the same. Today, Occitan is just a language group.
That explanation of I you can understand it’s a dialect isn’t true because Norwegian, Swedish and danish are all very similar and speakers can some what understand each other but they are considered different languages.
Good point. People who think mutual intelligibility means it must be a dialect are just idiots lol. It's worth mentioning as well that some dialects within languages are not even intelligible to natives. For instance in Arabic this is the case. Mandarin speakers can barely understand Cantonese speakers even though they are just speaking dialects of the same language (Chinese). I speak English natively and I've heard dialects of English that are unintelligible to me.
Or maybe it’s actually a creole combining features of the “regular” English language (particularly the varieties from Northern England) and those of the Scottish Gaelic language (pronounced Gallic, FYI; “Gaylick” is the Irish pronunciation)?
I recently had AI speaking to me in Scots, with an English accent. Paul Kavanagh (languages expert) once wrote that this was theoretically possible.
He was right.
I mean...as others have said language vs dialect is really more sociopolitical than anything else. However, I also think that linguistics should be able to accommodate this kind of situation. Two dialects of a dead language which arose and developed independently, went on to survive the death of the standard form their parent language, changing from it in the process. However, through sheer coincidence remain largely the same as one another.
Can you do low saxon?
I think one of the main reasons a lot of people assume Scots isn't a language is because essentially every single Scots speaker can speak, read and write in English at a native level. So much so that Scots speakers can switch effortlessly between Scots and English even more efficiently than English people can switch between their own local dialect and the more "standard" universal English (whatever that should be called, I guess some people call it BBC style English)
One important thing to note though is that Scots itself has multiple dialects that differ greatly from one another, not just by sound but by different words used. You've got speakers in the west who say wean instead of bairn and vice versa in the east and north for example. Then you've got the Doric dialect which is just a whole other kettle of fish. Yet they're all speaking Scots and can all equally switch to English in the blink of an eye when needed, but can't necessarily switch to a different Scots dialect they didn't grow up with as easily or sometimes at all.
Cool video, I like the simple graphics
Unfortunately the answer to these questions inevitably involve politics rather than "can I understand what that drunk Glaswegian is saying or not?". Maybe we need more descriptive layers to add to just the two 'language or dialect'. In certain situations and a bit of patience of coaxing, Italian and Spanish are mutually comprehensible, but I wouldn't call them dialects of the same language. More like dialects of dialects of a dialect of a language. :S
To further argue against the notion it just being a dialect- just look to Scandinavia as an example. Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are their own languages. A Norwegian could very well understand written Danish, spoken Swedish and still have issues understanding Norwegian spoken in a regional dialect he’s not too familiar with.
To me, it comes down to the cultural significance of the tongue in question, and whether it’s distinguishing nationalities or counties.
And an added problem with Norwegian is the Bokmal/Nynorsk question, which adds yet another layer of internal incomprehension.
Also add the fact that there are dialects within languages that are not mutually intelligible
Scots is definitely a different language when it is used in it purest sense. But you dont really hear people speaking in pure Scots, very often these days. People in the lowlands tend to use a mixture of Scottish English, and some words in Scots. Well thats my personal observation. Other people may have different experiences. But I m sure its very rare to hear folk blethering using 100% auld Scots, the auld Lallan's Leid, at all. I wish we did.
I could hardly understand that writing as an american english speaker. Scotts seems like another language to me.
Ngl I feel like it's the same thing as dutch and Flemish. Both are made from each other and can be argued as a lialect but at the end of the day they are different languages
If you say that if you understand it it is a dialect but if you don’t it is a language, what about Norwegian, Swedish and danish?
I think a dialect becomes a language when native speakers of one dialect cannot recognize speakers of another dialect as an attempt to speak the same language. I have great difficulty understanding louisiana bayou dialect, but I would comprehend enough of it to perceive it as someone attempting to speak english.
Intellectually, I accept Scots as its own separate language. I might think differently if it had branched off from Modern English, but instead it branched off from Middle English before Modern English was a thing. So they are sibling languages, not a parent-child relationship. That said, my ears find it hard to call it a separate language, because of the high degree of mutual intelligibility.
Cockney isn't a dialect it's an atrocity
Scots is a language.
Just like not every Langue d'Oil is French and not every Langue d'Oc is Catalan.
So is the narrator's pronunciation of "language" as "language-uh" part of a dialect?
As both the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Arbroath, the Scots and English Charters were both written in Latin as the origin of the language. Scots is only a different pronunciation. The English like to own everything, from the Bank of England, formed by a Scotsman to even bacon and eggs as an English breakfast so, the issue is not the language, it's the English need to posses anything they can.
The Greek government considers Tsakonian a divergent dialect even though it's not mutually intelligible with Modern Greek and is descended from Doric Greek not Attic Greek.
Puddock is a Frog. I don't need to learn anything more today, I'm stuffed.
It's not a dialect nor a separate language. It's a third in between category.
Lowland Scots is alternatively called _Northern Anglic dialect,_ whilst English is alternatively called _Southern Anglic dialect._ There are definitely logical reasons on why English speakers are known as "Anglophones" and why "Anglicanism" exists.
From now on, I'll just say that I speak in, write in, or listen to "Anglic language".
Oh boy, Scots Wikipedia shenanigans… what a rabbit hole that is
This is funny because that's the same relationship Cantonese has with Mandarin, and it's been a huge debate whether Cantonese is considered a dialect or it's own language as well.
I was about the say the same thing. I think in the western world, people tend to think of Cantonese and Mandarin as two different languages. Growing up Chinese (but not natively speaking Cantonese), I believe most Chinese people don’t think of Cantonese as a different language, as opposed to minority languages such as Tibetan, Mongolian etc that are obviously different.
I would think that, from a purely linguistic perspective, Cantonese and other Chinese "dialects" like Hokkien, Hakka, and Wu are indeed different languages. They are not mutually intelligible with Mandarin or each other, perhaps even less so than, say, distinct romance languages are from each other. They also have extensive vocabulary differences the further they stray from "Standard Chinese" and into their own unencumbered native way of speaking. They are mainly viewed as dialects rather than distinct languages for cultural and political reasons, the cultural one being because Chinese has historically used Written Chinese to unify the dialects, regardless of how the spoken forms diverged.
Cantonese and Mandarin are very different and not mutually intelligible.
They're their own languages.
Just because they use the same writing system does not mean they are mutually intelligible.
@@jeffkardosjr.3825 Cantonese isnt exclusive in that its not mutually intelligible with mandarin. In fact the vast majority of the hundreds of chinese dialects (mandarin included) are not mutually intelligible with each other.
Then Norwegian is a dialect of Danish, or Swedish...
It’s a dialect to my ears. No different than the German dialects of Bavarian and Swiss German compared to high (standard) German.
Let’s see what Groundskeeper Willie has to say about this
We could use Anglo-Saxon as a name for Old English.
or anglish; that’s one i’ve seen a few times
@@OminousLuminous "Anglish" I've mainly heard used to mean the word game of using only Germanic words to speak Modern English. "Anglo-Saxon" seems like a good pick for this.
Old English DOES have another name: Anglo-Saxon.
By your definition of dialect, Modern English is not a dialect of Old English, since they are mutually unintelligible.
5:48 "If it's different and you can understand it, it's a dialect. If you can't understand it at all, it's a language."
What about strong accents? There are native English speakers who can read something that you understand perfectly in print, but you wouldn't understand a word, because of their accent.
It's not like I like you or anything, eegit.
Have you ever done a video on why the language spoken by Anglo-Saxons is named after just the Angles even though it was ultimately a Saxon kingdom who unified them?
I assume it's because "Anglo" is like the adjective, "Anglo-Saxons" being the "English Saxons" as opposed to the Saxons who lived on the continent. Much like "Anglo-Norman" is referring to the Normans and their language that were in England after the Norman conquest rather than those in Normandy.
@@TomRNZ anglos and saxons are both nouns referring to the anglo and saxon tribes from modern day germany/netherlands/denmark
So does Ulster Scots count as a dialect of Scots?
If you consider Scots a language, yes
The mutually understandable argument is kinda bad as it would mean that Portuguese and Spanish are the same languange
Isn't Portugal just a rebellious province of Spain anyway?
From my perspective, the argument that Scots is a language despite the average native English speaker understanding it with little difficulty doesn't make sense given that there's regional dialects of English within England that sound as dissimilar to "standard English" as Scots does. The idea that scots is a language rather than a dialect of English feels like it's born of subjective nationalism.
I live in Newfoundland, in Canada...our people's history is strongly tied to Ireland and Scotland...as yes, we call people eejit's lol
"Ah" sound in scottish Gaelic not "ay" sound
The problem is that scotland is full of dialects which are wildly different from each other in every city and town. People confuse these dialects with Scots, which is its own entity and many dialects use Scots words seamlessly within Scottish English.
Add in that we code switch depending on who we're talking to, and you have a country of people who don't know what language they're speaking. We're taught not to use Scots from a young age as it isnt "polite" or proper English. Some people are fluent in Scots while others are passable and don't even realise.
Scots is 100% a language but the diffusion makes it difficult to measure speakers. And it is incredibly insulting when people dismiss our language as English with an accent. Try chatting to someone from Fraserburgh and see if you catch more than a couple of English words you understand.
Old English is also called Anglo-Saxon. Of course neither name was actually used by the people who spoke the language.
As one meme says: (Scottish) gay-lick.
We had here the funny argumemt whether Ukrainian is a dialect of Polish or russian. It itself got born from a fusion of Galych-Podillean and Polissean dialects of the proto-slavic language and its interpretation from Kharkiv and Poltava. And, funnily enough, we all understand russian by default, russians, in return, don't :)
It seems that Ukrainian is closer to Polish than to Russian.
I think we are still waiting for the spelling of modern Scots to be standardised, right?
Damn, no more Hiku?
I question anyone who thinks most English speakers can understand Scots, seeing as how I've literally used Scots as a secret language in front of multiple English speakers.
The written form is arguably easier to understand.
Maybe you have a heavier accent then others but to me Scots seems like a harder dialect than it is if you just read it. The second you hear Scots allowed, it just sounds like an English dialect. I've met Northerners that speak their respective dialects that are harder to understand than the average Scots I hear.