The King of Scots, Malcom Canmore was smitten with Margaret and soon made her the new Queen of Scots even though he was already married to Ingebjord Thorfinnsdotter. Margaret was unhappy with the ways of the Celtic court and church and worked tointroduce Saxon customs including the Saxon language as well as their Roman Catholic religion. But could one woman, albeit a much admired queen, change the language of a nation so completely that English had become the dominant language in less than 200 years later? Not by herself, of course. But just as she set the forces in motion that resulted in the rise of the Romish Church, so did she do the same for"Inglis' as English was first called in Scotland. The first of these forces was her several sons by Malcolm, particularly the youngest, David the First who ruled Scotland from 1124 to 1153 . It was he who paved for the Norman invasion of Scotland, as his guest nobles.
Those Who Built On Margaret's Legacy
The Normans who came to Scotland were French speakers although their speech was influenced by their Norse origins. As David Murison has told us in his little booklet The Guid Scots Tongue, "With them came their retinues of land-stewarts and bailiffs, their chaplains and major domos, cooks, bottle-washers and hangers-on, to help run their new estates." Most of the latter spoke the language of the Anglo-Saxons "which was increasingly Anglic in grammar but with a large and growing accretion of French vocabulary."
The Normans also brought the feudal system to Scotland and as they extended it throughout the fertile areas north and south, Gaelic retreated to the hills of Galloway and Ayrshire where it died out in the 17th century and to the Highlands where it persisted well into the 19th century and still lingers on in the Islands. Beyond the Highland line Gaelic was supreme until the Risings of 1715 and 1745 opened the region to military occupation but the clan leaders all spoke and wrote English long before that. English had become the official language of the entire United Kingdom, and when the average Highlander ultimately abandoned his Gaelic, he replaced it with Highland English. His ancestors had never spoken Scots.
Scots was the language of the Lowlands and became distinct from Northern English in the 15th century and was the official language of Scotland until the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 although it gradually became more anglicized from the middle of the 16th onward. Today it survives as a series of dialects and in a modified literary form called Lallans which came into use by the Scottish Renaissance Movement in the 1940s. The term 'Lallans' has also come to be a synonym for Scots. Dialectical Scots (as opposed to Lallans) is sometimes referred to as"braid (broad) Scots' which is also extended to mean 'plain speaking' in general regardless of its form.
Is All Scots the Same?
The Concise Scots Dictionary edited by Mairi Robinson (Aberdeen University Press: 1985) defines five distinct district dialects -- Insular (Shetland and Orkney), Northern (Caithness to Angus), Central (Perthshire to Galloway, Southern (The Borders) and Ulster (Northern Ireland). But variations are recognized within these districts such as the distinction between the Scots of Aberdeenshire and that of Kincardineshire or between that of Lothian and Clydeside. Of course, Glasgow has a language all of its own (the Patter) as does Aberdeen (the Doric). How these two dialects got their respective names I haven't been able to determine but textbooks are available to teach one their intricacies.
Murison points out that Scots has a vocabulary that is much more extensive than might be supposed if all words recorded over the last six centuries are counted whether obsolete or not. He estimates that The Scottish National Dictionary and The Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue amounts to over 50,000 words between them. Because Scots and English both derived from Anglo-Saxon, they share a large vocabulary even though they may be pronounced and spelled differently as in the case of the following italicized words -- man, wife, daughter, cat, dog, horse, fire, house, wood, food, drink, bread, come, go, say, think, do, in, out, down, red, white, green, good, etc. [Test 1 -- how many of the italicized words can you translate from English to their Scots equivalents? The answers can be found at the end of this page.
Some words that have survived in Scots have disappeared from standard English -- beild (shelter), blate (shy), dwine (decay), gloaming (twilight), greet (weep), sweir (unwilling), and speir (ask). [Test 2 -- what is the past tense of greet?]
Other Sources For Scots Words
But there are two other major sources for Scots words -- Gaelic and Norse. Murison tells us that Gaelic came into direct contact with Anglo-Saxon in the 10th century and ever since Gaelic words have trickled into Scots. The earliest were topological terms such as these Anglicized versions of Gaelic words -- bog, cairn, craig, loch, glen and strath. Others crept in later such as caber (a roof beam used as a projectile in Highland games), airt (compass point), partan (crab), sonsie (jolly), clarsach (harp), tocher (dowry), slogan (war cry). After the Rising of the '45, words such as filibeg (little kilt), sporran (purse), skean dhu (small knife), claymore (broad sword), usquebae (whisky), gillie (servant), pibroch (classical pipe tune), and ceilidh (impromptu entertainment during a visit). Only the italicized words have the true Gaelic spelling.
Norse was even more influential on the evolution of Scots, and for that matter Northern English. Murison tells us that Norse has close affinities with the Anglo-Saxon tongue as well as differences; the following Scots words all come from the Norse rather than Anglo- Saxon -- bairn (child), kirk (church), kist (chest), breeks (breeches), whilk (which), blae (blue), brae (brow of a hill), frae (from), gate (road such as in Canongate and Trongate), kilt (from the Norse 'to tuck up'), lug (ear), and neive (fist).
Of course, the French of the Normans and the later Parisians and French provincials who came as royal brides or servants to royalty also had and influence; such words as ashet (meat plate), douce (sweet, pleasant), houlet (owl), jigot (leg of mutton), tassie (cup), succar (sugar), caddie (messenger) and crune (to sing) are a few examples. There is much more to be said on the subject but I've run out of space.You'll find a list of available books that will meet most needs by clicking HERE.