How is Scots its own language and not just a dialect?
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The short answer is basically because people who speak it want it to be.
There is no established and agreed upon framework or criteria for distinguishing between a dialect and a language.
Scots is old, it was recognised as the national language of Scotland in the 1700s. There are plenty of other examples of different languages that are functionally very similar and could be considered dialects but are considered different languages. Most of these occur in places where they are spoken in different countries and people have a nationalistic motivation for maintaining their separation.
What is considered a “language” is largely determined by politics. For instance, Spanish and Portuguese are very similar, and native speakers can usually understand each other (with some slowing down and repeating). However, they’re separate countries with separate national identities, so they’re considered different languages. You could consider Scots a language in order to emphasize Scottish national identity.
Defining languages are hard. People have tried things like “if two people can communicate they speak the same language” but there are just too many cases where this does not work. So instead we have kind of given up and instead define languages similar to nations, and often very related. Basically go around and ask people what nations they belong to and what languages they speak and you have your list of both nations and languages. So you end up with a Scotland with its own language and nation separate from the other languages and nations on the British Isles.
It is a matter of debate.
However many think Scots and Modern English both derive from common “ancestor” languages — i.e.,. Germanic languages that predate even Old English.
So in this very simplified view, Scots is more like a “cousin” language to English rather than being derived from (and a dialect of) English, although of course English has had a large influence on Scots.
There’s no hard and fast rule about what is a language vs. what is a dialect. A linguistics joke is that a language is a dialect with an army. That is, if a group has enough power to declare that what they speak is a language not a dialect, then they might declare it so if they care about that. And if a group is powerful enough, they can declare that something that is extremely different from a given language, is but a dialect and thus an incorrect variant of the dominant language, if they want to.
For example, Serbian and Croatian are very similar and many would say they are one language, Serbo-Croatian. But there is a lot of animosity between the speakers of those two languages so each claims theirs is an independent language and I’ve talked to people who have been to lectures in the one language and there has been a translator for the other language but they’re mutually intelligible easily so a translator wasn’t necessary.
So Scots is its own language because the speakers of it want it to be its own language and it is spoken in a country that’s not going to violently suppress the people who want it to be its own language. The situation would have been different during another time period, like when England suppressed any language but English in Ireland.
An initial point is Scots is not the same as Scottish English. What you usually hear people speak in Scottland is Scottish English and it is a dialect of English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language is spoken by some where between 1.5 million and 100,000 depending on how you ask the question. This is out of 5.4 million people living in Scotland
You can hear example and see how it differs from English at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X5zX3yVoiQ
There is a saying that “A language is a dialect with an army and navy”. It shows that was is language or a dialect is quite arbitrary and is in large part a result of politics.
Scottland was an independent country. It merge with England with Acts of Union of 1707. So if people back then consider it a separate language it can continue to this day.
Because when you hear a Scottish person talk, half the problem is that accent. Can’t understand anything. So it behaves as a separate language. I have a chance at understanding something if I read it. But even still that’s a challenge.
All languages are dialects. The difference between a language and dialect is not based in linguistics but in politics and culture. Something becomes a language when enough influential people decide they want to call it a language and they get the rest of the people to generally agree.
Written and spoken Tamil are so different that from the outside, you’d think they are different languages, but the speakers and writers of Tamil agree, strangely, that they are one and the same. There are many more speakers than writers of Tamil. That’s why most Tamil speakers you meet, even those whose first language was Tamil, will tell you they don’t know the language very well.
Also, you might eventually have to tell a Scot to their face it’s not a language… and you’ll decide it’s better not to for the time being.
Scots is a form of Old Angle (aka germanic language) that was influenced to grow more akin to Modern English only after the 17th century. Rather than a Dialect that diverged from English separately.
During shakespears time, English would already have been recognizably similar to modern English, while Scotish would still have been much much more.. distinct.
Here is a line in Middle Scots (late 1500’s):
>Thair be tua kynd of prayeris in the kirk, the ane is priuat, quhilk euerie man sayis be him self, the vthir is publik, quhilk the preistis sayis in the name of the hail kirk.
And here is some original text of shakespear:
>Well, good night. If you do meet Horatio and Marcellus, The rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.
You can kind of make out what the scots is saying, but it uses some odd words and very different spellings, while shakspear seems like modern English with some subtle variations.
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