tae finWalcome til the Scottish Pairlament wabsite

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

Just read it out aloud..

Scots descends from a northern form of Anglo-Saxon brought to the British isles by settlers from the area around Denmark between the 4th and 6th centuries AD. This language is first directly attested in Scotland in the runes carved on the 8th century Ruthwell Cross near Dumfries. Over the centuries the forms in southern and northern Britain drifted apart because of social and political differences. By the 14th century people in Scotland and England were aware that they spoke different versions of what had originally been the same tongue. Now two sister languages, English and Scots, began to emerge. The Language in Scotland, was, by the 1490s, increasingly also known as Scots and was the lingua franca of all social classes. From the 1370s until the political union with England in 1707 Scots was the language of state and education. Closer political ties with England during the 17th century led first to the emergence of an anglicised from of Scots and by the end of the 18th century to a distinction between an English-speaking nobility and a Scots-speaking population. The English of the new British state was now the de facto official language while Scots was denigrated as peasant speech. Slowly Scots was excluded from schools. By the 1940s the Education Department thought that Scots had no value "...it is not the language of 'educated' people anywhere, and could not be described as a suitable medium of education or culture". The 1872 Education Act insisted on the use of English in the class.