Crowdsourcing the Scots language in the 21st Century

Step out onto the streets of Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen and you can hear some version of Scots – but what exactly is Scots, where is it spoken, and by whom?

Present-day Scots is characterised by the Scots Linguistic Continuum as having Standard Scottish English (SSE) at one end and Broad Scots at the other. SSE is close to Standard English but with an overlay of distinctly Scottish sounds, while Broad Scots is much further from Standard English with its own words, sounds, and sentence construction.

In terms of the social profiles, SSE is spoken by middle-class speakers and in more formal situations such as in schools, while Broad Scots is spoken by working-class speakers and in informal situations such as with family and friends. Speakers may style-shift up and down the continuum according to, among others, interlocutor and context.

In terms of the geographic picture, so-called Lowland Scots is typically spoken in the south, east, the north-east, and Northern Isles, while Highland English is typically spoken in the Highlands and Outer Hebrides. This is explained by the historical record: while Scots spread eastwards and northwards over a number of centuries, developing its own norms of use, Gaelic continued to be used in the north-west, resulting in the so-called Linguistic Highland Line.

Two key points arise from this description of Scots:

1. in the Scots Linguistic Continuum, speakers at the Broad Scots end of the continuum use many Scots forms, while SSE speakers use very few.
2. Scots is not spoken in the Highlands and Islands

How true is this characterisation of who speaks Scots and where? Speak for Yersel sets out to answer this question by asking people across Scotland to tell us about the words, sounds, and sentence structures they use. To do this, crowdsourced participants answered a series of questions on Scots terms they do or do not use. The snapshot of Scots gleaned from thousands of speakers who participated in the survey can provide a rich picture of the Scots language in the 21st century

The questionnaire contains 90 questions but here we hone in on two specific groups within those. The first is an iconic feature of Scots – the different vowel sounds (or phonetic alternations) used in different sets of words, including:

(1)

a. house/hoose; out/oot; down/doon;

b.  lie/lee; die/dee; fly/flee

c.  stone/stane; home/hame; more/mare

d.  make/mak; take/tak; break/brak

These are known as Overt Scotticisms: they are above the level of consciousness, noticed by speakers and commented on as being Scots. In contrast, our second set of Scots forms (2-5) which involve different sentence structures (morphosyntactic alternations) are Covert Scotticisms: they fly below the radar, going largely unnoticed in speech:

(2)

a. Are you wanting to come with me? (Scots)

b. Do you want to come with me? (Standard English)

(3)

a. I’m going to my bed. (Scots)

b. I’m going to bed. (Standard English)

(4)

a. When are you back at the school? (Scots)

b. When are you back at school? (Standard English)

(5)

a. The cat needs fed. (Scots)

b. The cat needs to be fed ~ The cat needs feeding. (Standard English)

Figures 1 and 2 map the responses that people gave to the question of whether they would use these forms or not. Figure 1 shows the results for the phonetic forms and Figure 2 for the morphosyntactic forms.

These two maps show very distinct uses of these overt and covert Scotticisms. For the morphosyntactic forms (Figure 2), 75% and above of speakers across the whole of Scotland report that they would use these forms. In sharp contrast, the phonetic forms (Figure 1) are geographically distinguished: some areas such as the north-east and southwest report relatively high rates of use, while the Highlands and Outer Hebrides report significantly less use. In other words, the morphosyntactic forms are used throughout Scotland, while the phonetic forms are used in Lowland Scots only.

These results suggest that the Linguistic Highland Line holds for pronunciations of words such as oot and heid, but not for sentence structures such as Are you wanting to come with me?. When we took a deeper dive into the data, we found something else: participants who had gone to university generally reported that they didn’t say hoose and stane but they did say I’m going to my bed and Are you wanting to come with me?. This shows that SSE may not use Scots pronunciations but the speech is likely full of Scots sentence structures.

So what exactly is Scots, where is it spoken, and by whom? Speak for Yersel reveals the complexities of this question, and will continue to do so in future years: the website remains open for speakers across Scotland to tell us whether they say doon, mak, my hair needs washed or a myriad other Scots forms we hear around us every day.

Professor Jennifer Smith FRSE, Professor of Sociolinguistics at University of Glasgow

This article originally appeared in ReSourcE ReSourcE Autumn/Winter 2025.

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