Scots arrived in what is now Scotland sometime around the sixth century. Before then, Scotland wasn’t called Scotland, and wasn’t unified in any real way, least of all linguistically. It was less a kingdom than an area encompassing several different kingdoms, each of which would have thought itself sovereign—the Picts, the Gaels, the Britons, even some Norsemen. In the northern reaches, including the island chains of the Orkneys and the Shetlands, a version of Norwegian was spoken. In the west, it was a Gaelic language, related to Irish Gaelic. In the southwest, the people spoke a Brythonic language, in the same family as Welsh. The northeasterners spoke Pictish, which is one of the great mysterious extinct languages of Europe; nobody really knows anything about what it was.
The Anglian people, who were Germanic, started moving northward through England from the end of the Roman Empire’s influence in England in the fourth century. By the sixth, they started moving up through the northern reaches of England and into the southern parts of Scotland. Scotland and England always had a pretty firm border, with some forbidding hills and land separating the two parts of the island. But the Anglians came through, and as they had in England, began to spread a version of their own Germanic language throughout southern Scotland.There was no differentiation between the language spoken in Scotland and England at the time; the Scots called their language “Inglis” for almost a thousand years. But the first major break between what is now Scots and what is now English came with the Norman Conquest in the mid-11th century, when the Norman French invaded England....Norman French began to change English in England, altering spellings and pronunciations and tenses. But the Normans never bothered to cross the border and formally invade Scotland, so Scots never incorporated all that Norman stuff. It would have been a pretty tough trip over land, and the Normans may not have viewed Scotland as a valuable enough prize. Scotland was always poorer than England, which had a robust taxation system and thus an awful lot of money for the taking.“When the languages started to diverge, Scots preserved a lot of old English sounds and words that died out in standard English,” says Kay.
Now if that were true, Scots would be nearly as incomprehensible to Modern English speakers as Old English and significantly moreso than Middle English. Middle English is the form of English that resulted after the Norman Conquest changed the language of the English court to French, so that the common people began of necessity to adapt to a lot of French sounds, words, and concepts. In fact the bulk of Modern English's words are Romance words that came into the language through the Anglo-French lords who followed the Norman conquest, though the most common used words are old Germanic words from the original language.
In fact, Scots is at least as easy to comprehend as a modern English speaker as is Middle English -- probably rather moreso. There are two reasons why this is true.
First, the account omits the English conquest of Scotland by Edward I "Longshanks," and second, it omits that the nobility of Scotland was even prior to that Anglo-Scottish and intermarried with the Anglo-Normans. Thus, even in the north the Scots language was being influenced by French in parallel with the southern English. As a result, Scots is more like Middle English than Old English both in vocabulary and in difficulty of cross-comprehension with Modern English.
Scotland benefitted from this familiarity with French in several respects over the centuries. It gave outlaw Scottish lords a place to go during the long War of Independence, and a place to which they could appeal for support. After the Scottish victory under Robert the Bruce, Scotland and France developed warm ties and trade relations. In the Hundred Years War, they were frequently allied against the English.
The English did later try to suppress Scottish culture, as the article goes on to suggest; and yet the French ties remained. The Jacobites who supported the kings who went south to rule over England were eventually to appeal to the French much as their ancestors had done in Robert the Bruce's day, and after their final defeat at Culloden it was to France that Bonnie Prince Charlie fled.
In any case Scots is a good language to learn, as it helps the mind to be able to stretch into allied languages. Here is an introduction.
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