Modern Scots

Not to be confused with Scottish people.

Sign reading "The Ayrshire Coastal Path/Be ye man or Bairn or Wumman,/Be ye gaun or be ye comin,/For Scotland's Pride – no Scotland's shame,/Gather yer litter – an tak it Hame!"
Anti-littering sign in Modern Scots on the Ayrshire Coastal Path.
Scots language
History
Dialects

Modern Scots comprises the varieties of Scots traditionally spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster, from 1700.

Throughout its history, Modern Scots has been undergoing a process of language attrition, whereby successive generations of speakers have adopted more and more features from English, largely from the colloquial register.[1] This process of language contact or dialectisation under English[2] has accelerated rapidly since widespread access to mass media in English, and increased population mobility became available after the Second World War.[3] It has recently taken on the nature of wholesale language shift towards Scottish English, sometimes also termed language change, convergence or merger.

By the end of the twentieth century, Scots was at an advanced stage of language death over much of Lowland Scotland.[4] Residual features of Scots are often simply regarded today as slang, especially by people from outwith Scotland, but even by many Scots.

  1. ^ Robert McColl Millar (2018), Modern Scots: An Analytical Survey, Edinburgh University Press, p.135
  2. ^ Robert McColl Millar (2018), Modern Scots: An Analytical Survey, Edinburgh University Press, p.1
  3. ^ "A Brief History of Scots in Corbett, John; McClure, Derrick; Stuart-Smith, Jane (Editors)(2003) The Edinburgh Companion to Scots. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 0-7486-1596-2. p. 15
  4. ^ Macafee C. "Studying Scots Vocabulary in Corbett, John; McClure, Derrick; Stuart-Smith, Jane (Editors)(2003) The Edinburgh Companion to Scots. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 0-7486-1596-2. p. 51