SCOTS LANGUAGE

also called Lowland Scottish, or Lallans the historic language of the people of Lowland Scotland, and one closely related to English, of which it can now be regarded as a dialect. Scots is directly descended from Northern English, which displaced Scottish Gaelic in most of Scotland in the 11th14th century as a consequence of Anglo-Norman rule there. By the early 14th century Northern English had become the spoken tongue of all Scottish people east and south of the Highlands (with Scottish Gaelic continuing to be used in the latter). After Scotland gained its independence in 1328, its spoken language became known as Scottis, or Scots (as opposed to Inglis), and over the next two centuries the former diverged from Northern English in pronunciation and to a lesser extent in vocabulary. The earliest written records in Scots date from the late 14th century, and by the 16th century it had supplanted Latin as the principal literary and record-keeping language in the kingdom. Scots was steadily Anglicized from the mid-16th century onward as a result of the cultural, economic, and political dominance of England, and by the 20th century it could be regarded as merely a regional dialect of English. The Scottish dialect is distinguished by the use of trilled r's, shortened vowels, and simplified diphthongs. See also Scottish literature.