How is Scots its own language and not just a dialect?
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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.
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