Summary
A northern variety of Old English developed in Scotland into what has become known 
as Scots. is language of the Scottish court and literature prior to the Acts of Union was 
abandoned by both king and poets after the Union with England. English replaced Scots in 
public institutions, to schools and literature. e most fatal development was the change of 
attitude of the Scottish themselves, who came to regard Scots as an inferior variety of English. 
ere have been repeated attempts by Scottish writers, to revive Scots as a national language 
of Scotland. Since the 1970s a number of projects have been launched to study the present 
state of Scots with the aim of initiating a language policy which would reintroduce Scots into 
public life as one of the national languages of Scotland. A number of Scottish authors have 
used Scots in their works. is paper will examine the language of some contemporary prose 
texts seeking to establish the density of Scots elements and estimate their place on the scale 
between Standard Scottish English and Scots, which may be one of the means of establishing 
an acceptable standard variety.
Key words: Scots, Scottish English, literature, standard Scots
 Povzetek
Severna oblika stare angleščine se je razvila na Škotskem v škotščino (Scots). Po združitvi z 
Anglijo so kralj in pesniki zavrgli jezik, ki se je pred tem govoril na škotskem dvoru in rabil v 
književnosti. Angleščina je tako zamenjala škotščino v vseh javnih institucijah in književnosti. 
Največ škode pa je povzročil spremenjen odnos samih Škotov do škotščine, ki so ta jezik imeli 
za manjvredno varianto angleščine. Ves ta čas so se škotski književniki trudili, da bi škotščina 
spet postala nacionalni jezik Škotske. Od leta 1970 dalje je nastalo več projektov za preučevanje 
sodobne škotščine, vsi z namenom razviti jezikovno politiko, ki bi ponovno uvedla škotščino 
v javno življenje kot enega od nacionalnih jezikov Škotske. Številni škotski avtorji, so v svojih 
delih začeli uporabljati škotščino. Namen članka je s pomočjo analize nekaterih sodobnih 
proznih besedil ugotoviti pogostost škotskih jezikovnih elementov in določiti njihovo mesto 
na lestvici med standardno škotsko angleščino in škotščino. Na ta način bi se lahko vzpostavila 
sprejemljiva standardna varianta.
Ključne besede: škotščina, škotska angleščina, književnost, standardna škotščina
 DOI: 10.4312/elope.2.1-2.45-56

e language of literature has always naturally drawn on various forms such as vernaculars or 
other languages. In this fashion it both preserved less “literary” language forms and enriched 
the currently used standard variety. It could do so because literature, especially poetry, is 
regarded as a type of text where considerable freedom and experimentation with the language 
is allowed. Literary texts that deviate from a strict linguistic and socio-linguistic norm are at 
least tolerated if not actually admired. Literary texts in turn, could serve as a source for the 
development of the standard.
I shall first shortly review the causes of the discontinuation of Scots as a national standard in 
literary and public use in general. Next, I will mention its appearance in literature after the 
Union with England and then analyse several prose texts by contemporary Scottish authors 
of the latest Scottish Renaissance. I shall use the general idea of a model devised by McClure 
(1979) for the evaluation of Scottish poetry.
 e establishment of the Union between England and Scotland in the 17
th
 and 18
th 
centuries 
coincided with the process of linguistic standardisation in England. e unifying role of the 
language and requirements of perfection and permanence favoured as a linguistic standard the 
usage that was near the centres of power, both geographically and socially, that is, London. 
Moreover, this process entailed that only this standard language had a high social status and all 
other regional and social idioms were considered vulgar and lacking validity.
e two Acts of Union
1
 caused Scots, the language of the Scottish Court and administration 
as well as of literature, to suffer a serious demise. e King
2
 and his Court, the legislature, 
the aristocracy and politicians, together with a number of literary men, moved to London. In 
Scotland under such conditions “King’s English had displaced King’s Scots” (Muirison, 1977/4) 
as the language of administration, the courts, and education. In fact, King’s English only 
extended the functions it already had, since it had gained a foothold in the church in Scotland 
a century earlier.
3
 e doom of Scots was thus brought about by the Scottish themselves. 
Scots was largely reduced to a vernacular, and the attitude towards vernaculars was in the 
eighteenth century formed by “figures who commented frequently on language matters. One of 


them was Swift” who regarded Scots and Irish “as particularly low dialects” (Blake 1981;108ff). 
Pronunciation, spelling, and the use of words were particularly censured. Scots had both a 
specific orthography and a distinct vocabulary, which had developed through centuries in 
both literary and administrative usage, and it was based on northern Anglo-Saxon dialects (e.g. 
McArthur 2002, Murison 1977).
Access to advantageous positions in society also meant access to education and thus to the prestigious 
form of speech. is in turn created prejudice and stigma for other varieties.
4
 In the meantime, in 
Britain the Scots language lost some of the stigma because of the Scottish literary revival in the 18
th
 
and 19
th
 centuries, which was brought about by such widely popular authors as Robert Burns and 
Walter Scott (Blake, ibid. 136ff). ere was, however, no general follow up or development of a 
language standard and ironically enough, even after the recent devolution of Parliaments,
5
 Scots is 
by many, particularly in Scotland, thought to be an inferior type of English. ere is still “an abysm 
of ignorance on both popular and administrative levels” and its “status as a national language of 
Scotland” has not yet been secured (Submission by McClure to the Education, Culture and Sport 
Committee, 2003/11; also Corbett 2003; see Maček, 2002–2003).  
 Literature has in many cultures been an important repository of the language, which is, in the 
Humboldtian manner, considered to be one of the tokens of identity of a people (nation). 
is is very true of Scottish literature too. e golden age of literature in Scots, from the 
middle of the 14
th
 to the middle of the 16
th
 century, produced a number of important authors, 
particularly a poetry of “considerable bulk and distinction” (Muirison 1977, 4). From the 17
th
 
century on, Scottish authors, including the King himself, had abandoned Scots for English. 
But there were repeated revivals of Scottish literature in which Scots was an important aspect. 
us the Scots of Robert Burns became well established in poetry, and it emerged in the 
literary prose of Walter Scott and other authors. Here it was restricted to the dialogue of those 
social classes who normally spoke it. Narratives, however, continued to be written in English. 
Exceptions are lengthy monologues by some characters whose natural idiom is Scots, such as 
in Stevenson’s short story “rawn Janet” (Dunn 1995). e entire story is told by an older 
man in the “moorland parish of Balweary, in the vale o Dule”, except for a short introductory 
passage in English. As T ulloch (1985) points out, the Scots “voice” is often, as in this novel, an 
older and less educated speaker, sometimes a woman, who would, like Scots  be “associated in 
people’s minds with the home” (ibid., 170).
In its more recent history, Scottish literature, particularly its language, became a political 
statement (Macaffee 1985). us in the Scots Renaissance of the first half of the 20
th
 century, 
Hugh McDiarmid’s nationalist programme (Dunn 2000) was based on a Scots which had its 
roots in the Lowlands dialect, but was enriched with words from older Scots usage, and from 
other dialects. Hence it is often known as Synthetic Scots (McArthur 2002). McDiarmid wrote 


his most important poetry in it, and his example was followed by a number of authors. e 
experiment, which never actually succeeded, was not so much linked to a general Romantic 
sentiment that was common in the earlier centuries, but to a Scottish political nationalism, 
which found its expression in literature (Mcaffee 1985). In spite of the general failure, Scots, 
no matter whether synthetic or dialectal, was now well established in poetry. In prose the 
situation did not change much from the previous practices: narrative was written in Standard 
English, dialogue in Scots, or elements of Scots. But as T ulloch (1985) shows, the distinction 
between dialogue and narrative was broken down by the authors in various, often intricate ways. 
Notwithstanding the plans to create a Standard Scots, no non-literary prose had succeeded; 
there had been no break-through yet.
 In the second half of the 20
th
 century an interest in minority languages and vernaculars was 
encouraged by the renewal of sociolinguistic thought. Following these new developments 
Scottish scholars planned programmes for the study and affirmation of Scots as well as 
Gaelic (McIntosh 1979). At the same time the Scottish literature of the eighties and nineties 
experienced another Renaissance (Watson 1997), both in poetry and prose, and this time often 
in an urban setting. e Scots that emerged in this “urban demotic” literature is mostly the 
urban vernacular of Glasgow or Edinburgh, stigmatised among the middle classes in Scotland 
(Macaulay 1997, 45ff), as urban vernaculars generally tend to be. 
e linguistic situation in Scotland today is even more complex than in previous centuries. 
e reason is that apart from the indigenous languages (Scots, Gaelic and English) a number 
of immigrant languages (e.g. Urdu or Polish) are spoken by such large numbers of speakers 
that they have to be recognised as minority languages by the standards of the European 
Union. ese languages have begun to be integrated into the overall Scottish culture, and the 
literature written by authors with an immigrant background shows the same urban demotic 
characteristics found in Scottish writers (Corbett 2000).
 It has been pointed out (McClure 1979) that Scots and English are used by Scottish 
speakers in two ways. Speakers in the north-east switch between Scots and English, as 
bilingual speakers do, depending on the situation. In other areas however, there is usually 
a continuum between the two, where the focus can shift towards the English or Scots end 
respectively, depending not only on the situation, but also on the usage of each particular 
speaker or group of speakers. is makes it sometimes difficult to say whether English 
with Scots elements is used or Scots with English elements. In other words, the boundary 
between the two is blurred. As McClure maintains (1979), urban dialects are particularly 
difficult to define, since the distinctive Scots vocabulary has largely disappeared from 
these varieties, and sometimes even the Scots phonological features have been replaced 
by English ones. 

is situation is mirrored in the poetry of the latest Scottish literary revival as well (Watson 
1997). McClure (1979) discussed the problem on the basis of a number of contemporary poems. 
He devised a chart with two axes: one with a range of styles between literary and colloquial, 
and the other with a range between “dense” and “thin” Scots (McClure 1979, 29). He has thus 
shown that there is a continuum in literary expression rather than a form of language that could 
unambiguously be called Scots. is situation may be said to exist, in literary prose as well, as 
T ulloch (1985) has shown, using the same terminology, in 20
th
 century Scottish literary prose.
Prose fiction falls between the well established usage of Scots in poetry and the practically non-
existent non-literary prose with significant Scots elements. I shall look at some late twentieth 
century prose literary texts observing how Scots is used in them. Attention will be paid to the 
specific distribution and characteristics of Scots elements in the prose style in comparison with 
descriptions of earlier literary practices. 
 Whereas poems are usually compact texts with the same type of linguistic expression throughout, 
prose fiction, such as novels and short stories, frequently contains two kinds of discourse 
– narrative and dialogue. e general pattern has remained the same from the 19
th
 century 
onwards, as described in T ulloch (1985). It consists of a narrative in Standard English and 
dialogues in a range from Standard English to rural Scots. e narrative can compare with the 
“formal” style in poetry, whereas the dialogue is mostly informal. As in poetry there is in prose 
also a “more or less” relation along the range, where even the narrative can have Scots elements. 
e dialogues, on the other hand, display a much wider range of “thin” and “dense” Scots. is 
Scots is accordingly, colloquial. Monologues that have the function of a narrative, follow the 
linguistic mode of dialogues if the narrator is a speaker of the vernacular (as in “rawn Janet”, 
above and T ulloch 1985).
A corpus of short stories and two novels by the “third generation” of writers of the Scottish 
Renaissance (Watson 1997) has been chosen for the present analysis. e authors are the new 
“realists” (Watson 1997, 300ff), which is a qualification that determines their use of language 
amongst other features. As in the previous realistic prose the language of the dialogue aims at 
expressing the speaker’s idiom. T exts by several authors
6
 will be examined in order to establish 
the degree of density of Scots in contemporary literary prose without actually placing the texts 
on the two axes proposed by McClure.  
By studying the linguistic expression only, without considering other characteristics that mark 
the prose as contemporary “Scottish”, we see that 7 of the 12 short stories are written entirely 


in Standard (Scottish) English.
7
 Some of them are not particularly set in the Scottish scene, 
but others have an obvious, even explicit, Scottish setting (Kennedy, McCormack, Frame), 
and refer to typical Scottish groups of people, e.g. an upper middle class family in the west of 
Scotland or working class victims of a mining disaster. 
 In the “thinnest” Scots of the texts, even in some that are written entirely in Standard (Scottish) 
English, such stereotypical Scottish words as lad, lass and wee appear and thus add a grain of 
local flavour to the text. e pattern which is characteristic for the other texts consists, as 
already mentioned, of narrative parts in Standard (Scottish) English and dialogues in a more or 
less “dense” Scots.  e Scots elements are expressed by the following features or a combination 
of them, i.e. a) non-standard (English) or traditional Scots spelling, b) vocabulary, and c) 
occasionally grammar.
Examples of this pattern appear in Dilys Rose’s “Street of the ree T erraces”, a story from a 
working class area. e linguistic markers are only occasionally elided final consonants, e.g. 
wi his pals, the form of the pronoun ye the Scottish negation in I’m no saying he was an angel 
or nothing and that’s no the way it was, also with the modal verb “can” ye cannae help thinking. 
e only Scots word is bairn.  e text also has the historical but now vernacular non-standard 
double negation. is text would appear to have been written in thin Scots.
Rather thin is also Duncan McLean’s “Doubled Up With Pain” with an Edinburgh background. 
e dialogue in this short story contains some vocabulary and grammatical features, but not 
consistently, which can be said of most other texts too, e.g. laddie (but also boy), ken, wee, 
lassies, bevy, breeks, hytering about (stumbling about). is could perhaps also be attributed to 
the continuum mentioned earlier. Some examples are:
 And if I’d had a drink the night before as well, ken, that would bring it on…
 I was in a wee world of my own…
ere are also some discourse elements such as eh? ach, aye.
   
Scots grammar is represented by the following features: 
a) the continuous form with “stative verbs of inert perception and cognition” (Quirk et al. 
1972) also termed “state verbs of perceiving” (Leech & Svartvik 1975)  
 I wasn’t hearing the traffic
b) the definite article with the determiner both
 I saw the both of them looking over the shoulders at the Central, ken… 
c) the general English non-standard present tense marker -s
 and I thinks to myself 


d) the possessive prepositional phrase with on, a Gaelic element common also in Irish 
English 
 you had a sharp tongue on you that day
Pronunciation is reproduced in such spellings as ach [aχ].
 A range of intermediate texts with a greater variety and incidence of Scots forms are 
William McIlvanney’s “Performance”, where the speakers are petty criminals so their 
speech is characterised by common features of a colloquial pronunciation represented 
in spelling, for example with the apostrophe for a <g> that is omitted in pronunciation. 
is convention in English literature indicates the widespread colloquial (including RP) 
pronunciation [in] instead of [iη] - been doin’ a wee job, checkin’ out, ye kiddin’? (Maček & 
Stanojević 2002)  In the Scots Style Sheet of 1947 (Macafee 1985, 14) the apostrophe for 
omitted consonants was to be eliminated as “unnecessary concessions to the non-Scottish 
reader” but also “to the basic Standard English literacy of the Scots reader himself” (ibid.) 
e apostrophe also marks other elisions characteristic of colloquial (“allegro”) speech, 
such as [I] in where’s ma sunglasses. 
e other, also overall, characteristic of colloquial speech, but traditionally spelled in Scots as 
ye, yer, is the reduced pronunciation of you, your to [ I -  ],  
   Ye want a death on yer conscience?
More salient Scottish pronunciations represented in traditional Scots spellings can be seen in 
such examples as wi’, ma, Ah, Ah’d, whit, tae, intae, windae (for English with, my, I, I’d, what, 
what’s, to, into, window).
 Don’t waste ma time. 
 If Ah could, Ah’d cancel ma christenin’ retrospectively … 
 Whit’s a windae for …
But even here such spellings are not consistent and Standard English forms are used as well, 
e.g. it gets translated intae what they want ye tae see (i.e. what not whit).
James Kelman in “Home for a Couple of Days” and in the novel A Chancer (the first with a 
rural and second with an urban-Glasgow setting) uses a range of items, some of them generally 
urban vernacular (discourse elements such as ta “thank you”, like, or other vocabulary such as 
daft, skint).
More specifically Scots spellings that also represent the pronunciation are e.g. aw and naw [:],  
ya, auld, thet, polis, closeby, dont, wasnt, hadn’t.
 If thet’s what you’re thinking, John was saying:
ere are the same discourse elements as mentioned earlier: eh? aye, ach, aw, naw, and final but
 You were worried hen, no me. Eh? Just as well I never called in the     

 polis.
 You’re back, eh- , 
 Ach, nothing bad if that’s what your’re thinking     
 I’m no kidding but
Apart from the almost stereotypical aye, wee, lassie, the texts contain more Scots vocabulary, i.e. 
heavy beer (stout), ben (in), mind (remember), wee. 
 I just got a wee turn.
Grammatical features are 
a) the Scots negation:
  no bad, And why’ll no get it back either
  she’s no daft
  she’s no your mother 
 We’ve no seen you since Friday at tea-time
 No mind I was telling you before? (don’t you remember…?)
 I’ll no force you etc.
b) the use of the preposition out, where Standard English has out of in
 I’m out the habit 
 with Sweeney being out the game. 
 He stared out the window
c) article usage in the adverbial the night (Engl. tonight)
 Hey Shuggie, fucking freezing the night, eh?                                              
d) singular for English plural nouns (up the stairs):
 auld yin up the stair in case it got her out her bed
e) interrogative or relative pronoun
 what like    (what sort of)
f) forms of the second person personal pronoun
     ya, ye, yer, and particularly the plural: yous
 e following texts can be classified as “dense”:
Alan Spence in his short story “Its Colours ey Are Fine”, uses urban demotic Glaswegian as 
spoken by members of the Orange Order and supporters of the Glasgow Rangers. Besides the 
usual Ah, ye, ye forms of the pronouns
 Ah’m wrapping up yer things. 
there are also the more typically Scots pronunciation-spellings: kin, pit, oan, wrang, wid, ain, 
wumman, wu’v, tae, whit, ach (Engl. can, put, on, would, own, we’ve, to, what, oh). 
 Ye kin pit them oan when ye get tae Lorne School
 … whit wid he say… 
as well as such overall vernacular forms as  at’s the stuff.

Irvine Welsh in Jutland Bound and the novel Trainspotting employs a different approach, 
reminiscent of the narrative type as in Stevenson’s “rawn Janet”. e narrator in these two 
texts is a Scots speaker. In distinction to Stevenson’s it is a young urban speaker, whose Scots 
voice covers almost the entire text. e voices of other characters belong to the same type.
a) Pronunciation and spelling: 
polis, perr (poor), oaf (of), oafay, oan, shoap, kin (can), pit (put), wis, fir jist, gitting, jyikits 
(jackets), nivir, fitba (football) , another yin,  tryin, tae, mooth, doon, oot,  aboot, toon, broon, 
yir, ye, Ah, ma, masel (myself), hissel, thegither, auld, haud (on), cauld, ault, aw, awnight, 
baws,  heid (head), (they call) um,  eywis (always),  ower, wisnae, dinnae, fae (frae-from), 
windae, taewards,  maist (most), hame, nae mair, hair (here),  thair, sais, claithes (clothes), 
wee brar (brother),  shite (shit), went n scored, drizzlin, sittin, tryin, blazin, screamin, wi 
(with), yir gaunny be, bein, dug (dog), cahsies, eftir, glesses (glasses), brek (break)
 C’moan ault time’s sek
 Ah sees Davie Creed comin doon
 whae’d been standin thair
 Ah wis determined no tae, a hud pills tae shift 
 fae one minute tae the next
b) Grammar: 
 i. negation:
  no tae notice, wisnae, didnae, no feart
  naebody, havnae, nae wonder
  No seen you oot for a while, eh says tae me
 ii. regularisation of the present tense paradigm, which is typical of English vernaculars too: 
  Ah sais, ah sees Davie Creed comin doon
 iii. pronouns: second person personal pronoun, particularly the plural youse, yis   
 demonstrative pronouns yon, reflexive hissel, masel
 iv. interchangeability of the nominative and oblique cases in pronouns: us (for: I)
 v. past tense regularised: since ah’d went
  gie, gied, yis, gieing
  how ah would huv liked tae huv gied them a pill
c) Discourse elements: aye (yes)
d) Vocabulary: 
ay (always), ken, without (outside), swedgin (making a hole), deek at (look at), bairn, poxy 
(spoiled), plukey-faced (pimple-faced) wee, hing oot (hang out), radge (mad, furious), chuffed 
(rude), doss (stupid, silly), pish, ken, shan (shabby), gaff (babble, chatter), skag (/become/ rotten, 
wrinkled),  voddy (votka), dour (stubborn), pad (footpath; depart), gyp (gype: stare foolishly), 
todd (euphemistic exclamation for God), tak up the sticks (exert oneself, “enter the fray”) etc.
In the text of Trainspotting there is a relatively short section of a narrative in Standard English, 
where the voice of the main narrator is not heard. Since this is an exception to the narrator’s 
Scots the text classifies as very dense Scots. Interestingly, even so it is not entirely in Scots as 
the short narrative text shows. 

is simple analysis suggests that the Scots voice of contemporary Scottish prose is throughout 
a lower middle to working class one, which has its parallel in, for example, T om Leonard’s, 
poetry. For this reason it does not correspond to an ideal model for a national written standard 
because it is too obviously a (stigmatised) class variety. On the other hand, according to 
Corbett (2000, 6), Lallans has failed to substitute Standard English because of the English 
global dominance and because of the likelihood that it would come to be a marker of the same 
social exclusion that English represents.  Standard varieties, however, including English in 
England, characteristically are markers of social exclusion.
On the other hand, Corbett (2000) quotes a passage from Matthew Fitt’s science fiction 
novel But n Ben a Go Go (ibid.), which he uses to point out that there is room for an eclectic 
Scots of no particular regional or class groups. With such qualities it would be appropriate 
as a general Standard Scots. It seems to me that McClure deems it most important to 
have a distinct Scots vocabulary for the language to qualify as Scots. e quoted text Scots 
pronunciation and spelling such as  flair, alang, wis,  singil, oot, doon, drapped aff, itsel, gless  
heid, intae, bleeze (blaze), owre, awa, caur (car),  etc. and vocabulary such as stoor (dust), 
glower (stare), forenoon (morning), clatty (gossipy), intormittit (interfered), shoogle (wobble), 
jink (turn quickly) , dichtin up (dress up), clart (mud), wersh (unpalatable, dull), keek (peep), 
skellied (screamed), puggie (monkey), heelstergowdie (head-over-heels), skite (dart, slip, strike), 
cleuk (claw), skitter (slip), vennel (narrow alley), toomness (emptiness), bield (protection), 
oorie (dismal, gloomy, strange), eerie (ghostly, strange) etc. and such new formations as 
indie-pouered germsooker (rubber +powered – germ+sucker) or lacra-leggit. e grammar is 
entirely Standard English, except for the preterit and past participle in –it (intormittit).
   
 e language of contemporary literature certainly shows a continuum from Standard 
(Scottish) English to the vernacular Scots. It also shows a continuum in the application 
of the latter form in dialogue, ranging from thin to dense, with a dense monologue of 
the narrator at the far end of the vernacular. With such varying practices some traditional 
Scots spellings are retained (e.g. mair, dichtin, cauld), and some phonetic spellings preferred 
(e.g. oaf, polis, comin, without the apostrophe). ere is a scale of Scots vocabulary, some 
of it typical of urban colloquial styles outside Scotland as well, and a range of grammatical 
features. With a consensus on a standard spelling a standard Scots text would be clearly 
distinct from a non-standard Scots text, and a major distinction from English. e high 
number of English words in Scots is likely to diminish with the regular use of Scots words, 
and that goes for grammar as well. A problem with the influence of English vocabulary is 
not specific to Scotland, as it is flooding other languages, particularly in certain specific 
domains. e struggle against them is of varying success as can be witnessed from discussions 
of this problem.
8


But at present, as with earlier writers, Scots is not the voice of the third person narrator, 
and it is thus marked by the first person narrator’s group, class or regional membership. In 
this manner it follows the tradition of non-standard language use in (European) literature in 
general. It would appear then that Scots is trapped in the compartment allotted to vernaculars 
with no standard that would be distinct enough from English to warrant the name Scots and 
the national symbolism that would be attached to it. And yet, it seems that what is needed 
most is an increase in prestige of Scots words and forms.
e fact that the language in contemporary literature is socially and regionally marked 
reflects the focus of interest in the 1980s, in which typical urban social and cultural scenes are 
supported by specific linguistic elements. So much so that it has been embraced by writers of 
the new minorities as their linguistic expression; in this way it does express a consensus on a 
widely spoken language, which is characteristic of Scotland. is is corroborated by the many 
features that are shared on all linguistic levels by the above analysed texts.
Historical and social conditions have drastically changed since the 18
th
 or 19
th
 centuries 
when one (prestigious) variety could be imposed on practically all domains of usage. In an 
age where multiculturalism and multilingualism has become a recognised social fact, and 
literary expression in minority languages or dialects is being encouraged (e.g. Gröndahl 
2001), it is possible to imagine that two or various literary “languages” would develop. 
In fact a continuum, not unlike the one in contemporary Scottish literature, seems a 
likely development in a number of cultures, and it could become the norm rather than an 
exception. e middle of the continuum, in our analysis the “intermediary Scots”, could 
in that case be expected to dominate the scene. In Scottish literature this would be the 
Scots that is not English.