The whole dialect business

I thought long and hard about this, and concede that the Scots dialect,
if spoken in its entirety, is a language.

But it hardly is. Sometimes Dutch is more similar to Standard English
that Robert Burns, but although that sort of vocab' lives on, it is not
as dense nor prolific as once it was.

In demographics, the odd person who says "wee" or "ken" is counted as
speaking the Scots dialect.

I would say rhyming slang is a language if it was applied to every
second noun, but it is only ever spoken piecemeal.

Ye ken? Even the prepositions and common words perfectly twin Standard
English words in their usage. Scots' only real grammatical difference
in terms of validity rather than idiomacy is probably "for to", as in
Middle English.

~Iain

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