Home Forums Blogs Articles Photos Videos Contact FAQ

Scots language - Literature

Scots language - Literature: Encyclopedia II - Scots language - Literature

Among the earliest Scots literature is Barbour's Brus (fourteenth century). Whyntoun's Kronykil and Blind Harry's Wallace (fifteenth century) From the fifteenth century much literature based around the Royal Court in Edinburgh and the University of St Andrews was produced by writers such as Henryson, Dunbar, Douglas and David Lyndsay. The Complaynt of Scotland was an early printed work in Scots. After the seventeenth century, anglicisation increased, though Scots was still spoken by the vast majority of the ...

Scots language, Scots language - Adverbs, Scots language - Consonants, Scots language - Dialects, Scots language - Diminutives, Scots language - Language change, Scots language - Literature, Scots language - Modal verbs, Scots language - Negation, Scots language - Nouns, Scots language - Ordinal numbers, Scots language - Origin of the term Scots, Scots language - Origins, Scots language - Past tense of verbs, Scots language - Present tense of verbs, Scots language - Pronunciation, Scots language - Relative pronoun, Scots language - Silent letters, Scots language - Some grammar features, Scots language - Status, Scots language - Subordinate clauses, Scots language - Suffixes, Scots language - The definite article, Scots language - Vowels, Scots language - Word order, Scottish literature, Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech, Languages in the United Kingdom, Scottish English

Scots language: Encyclopedia II - Scots language - Literature

Scots language - Literature

Among the earliest Scots literature is Barbour's Brus (fourteenth century). Whyntoun's Kronykil and Blind Harry's Wallace (fifteenth century) From the fifteenth century much literature based around the Royal Court in Edinburgh and the University of St Andrews was produced by writers such as Henryson, Dunbar, Douglas and David Lyndsay. The Complaynt of Scotland was an early printed work in Scots.

After the seventeenth century, anglicisation increased, though Scots was still spoken by the vast majority of the population. At the time, many of the oral ballads from the borders and the North East were written down. Writers of the period were Robert Sempill, Robert Sempill the younger, Francis Sempill, Lady Wardlaw and Lady Grizel Baillie.

In the eighteenth century, writers such as Ramsay, Fergusson, Burns and Scott continued to use Scots. Scott introduced vernacular dialogue to his novels.

Following their example, such well-known authors as Robert Louis Stevenson, William Alexander, George MacDonald and J.M. Barrie also wrote in Scots or used it in dialogue.

In the early twentieth century, a renaissance in the use of Scots occurred, its most vocal figure being Hugh MacDiarmid. Other contemporaries were Douglas Young, Sidney Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch and Robert McLellan. However, the revival was largely limited to verse and other literature.

In 1983 W.L. Lorimer's magnificent translation of the New Testament from the original Greek was published.

Highly anglicised Scots is often used in contemporary fiction, for example, the Edinburgh dialect of Scots in Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh (later made into a motion picture of the same name, though with language allegedly anglicised even more to make it suitable for an international audience).

But'n'Ben A-Go-Go by Matthew Fitt is a cyberpunk novel written entirely in what Wir Ain Leid (Our Own Language) calls "General Scots". Like all cyberpunk work, it contains imaginative neologisms.