Word of caution

As Iain WD Forde says, the Scots language "has had a robust written canon" (Letters, 5 January), and in pre-Union days it was used for all kinds of record-keeping as well as for sophisticated literary purposes. The uniformity of the language in written records all over Scotland, with little or no trace of local dialect, is one of the reasons we talk of a Scots "language" rather than dialect before about 1700.

However, the absorption of Scotland into Great Britain, with England as the dominant partner, led to the adoption of standard English for writing purposes, leaving Scots as a cluster of local spoken vernaculars with marked dialectal features. This is why so many 21st-century Scots find it so hard to regard what's left of the "auld leid" as any more than a dialect, with all the pejorative implications that word carries .

As for Dr David Purves's point that "language status is related to political power", he was probably thinking of the old clich that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy". Like all clichs, it contains a large measure of truth.

HARRY D WATSON

Braehead Grove

Edinburgh

Robert Pate is correct that the word "Inglis" was used to identify the lowland Scottish tongue until well into the medieval period: ardently patriotic writers such as Barbour and Blind Harry were not in the least worried by the fact that the language in which they wrote their heroic epics of Bruce and Wallace was "Inglis". However, the first recorded reference to "Scottis" occurs not at the beginning of the 17th century but in 1494.

Mr Pate is also mistaken in believing the word "Scottis" was ever used to designate Gaelic, which was referred to in the lowland vernacular of the Stewart period (and beyond) as "Irisch" or "Ersche".

Colin Wilson, for his part, should know that the Scots vocabulary includes words borrowed from Gaelic, French, Dutch, Scandinavian and Latin as well as Anglo-Saxon; that Scots is distinct from standard literary English not only in its vocabulary but in its grammar and sound-system; and that as none of the English speech-forms he mentions has ever been the tongue of an independent nation, or is the medium of a literature even remotely comparable in scope, antiquity and quality to that of Scots, any attempt to bracket Scots with them is absurd.

DERRICK McCLURE

Rosehill Terrace

Aberdeen