Language - The Rough Guide to Scottish Highlands and Islands - page 418

Language
Language is a thorny, complex and often highly political issue in Scotland.
If you're not from Scotland yourself, you're most likely to be addressed in a
variety of English, spoken in a Scottish accent. Even then, you're likely to hear
phrases and words that are part of what is known as Lowland Scottish or
Scots, which is now o cially recognized as a distinct language in its own
right. To a lesser extent, Gaelic, too, remains a living language, particularly in
the Gàidhealtachd or Gaelic-speaking areas of the northwest Highlands, the
Western Isles, parts of Skye and a few scattered Hebridean islands. In Orkney
and Shetland, the local dialect of Scots contains many words carried over
from Norn, the Old Norse language spoken in the Northern Isles from the
time of the Vikings until the eighteenth century.
Scots
Scots began life as a northern branch of Anglo-Saxon, emerging as a distinct language
in the Middle Ages. From the 1370s until the Union in 1707, it was the country's main
literary and documentary language. Since the eighteenth century, however, it has been
systematically suppressed to give preference to English.
Robbie Burns is the most obvious literary exponent of the Scots language, which he
referred to as “Lallans”, as did Robert Louis Stevenson, but there was a revival in the
last century led by poets such as Hugh MacDiarmid. Only recently has Scots enjoyed
something of a renaissance, getting itself on the Scottish school curriculum in 1996,
and achieving official recognition as a distinct language in 1998. Despite these
enormous political achievements, many people (rightly or wrongly) still regard Scots as
a dialect of English. For more on the Scots language, visit W sco.wikipedia.org.
Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic ( Gàidhlig , pronounced like “garlic”) is one of only four Celtic languages
to survive into the modern age (Welsh, Breton and Irish are the other three). Manx, the
old language of the Isle of Man, died out early last century, while Cornish was finished
as a community language way back in the eighteenth century. Scottish Gaelic is most
closely related to Irish and Manx - hardly surprising, since Gaelic was introduced to
Scotland from Ireland around the third century BC. Some folk still argue that Scottish
Gaelic is merely a dialect of its parent language, Irish, and indeed the two languages
remain more or less mutually intelligible. From the fifth to the twelfth centuries, Gaelic
enjoyed an expansionist phase, gradually becoming the national language, thanks partly
to the backing of the Celtic Church in Iona.
Since then Gaelic has been in steady decline. Even before Union with England,
power, religious ideology and wealth gradually passed into non-Gaelic hands. The royal
court was transferred to Edinburgh and an Anglo-Norman legal system was put in
place. The Celtic Church was Romanized by the introduction of foreign clergy and,
most importantly of all, English and Flemish merchants colonized the new trading
towns of the east coast. In addition, the pro-English attitudes held by the Covenanters
led to strong anti-Gaelic feeling within the Church of Scotland from its inception.
The two abortive Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 furthered the language's
decline, as did the Clearances that took place in the Gaelic-speaking Highlands from